Culture
Leuven, Belgium - Societies and schools are facing new, culturally diverse populations and how they respond to these changes can have lasting impacts for everyone involved. Examining middle school diversity policies, a team of researchers from the University of Leuven, Belgium and the Queen's University Belfast, UK, found that in schools with multicultural-based policies, ethnic minority students achieved just as well and felt that they belonged just as much as their majority peers.
In a recent study in mice, researchers found a way to deliver specific drugs to parts of the body that are exceptionally difficult to access. Their Y-shaped block catiomer (YBC) binds with certain therapeutic materials forming a package 18 nanometers wide. The package is less than one-fifth the size of those produced in previous studies, so can pass through much smaller gaps. This allows YBCs to slip through tight barriers in cancers of the brain or pancreas.
The precious chemistry of a plant used for 2000 years in traditional Chinese medicine has been unlocked in a project that raises the prospect of rapid access to a wide array of therapeutic drugs.
Carried out by CEPAMS - a partnership between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the John Innes Centre - the project has successfully delivered a high-quality reference genome of the mint-family member Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi.
(CINCINNATI) When a protein named "Merlin" fails to do its job, people can develop slow-growing, life-disrupting auditory nerve tumors that can disrupt their hearing and balance. This rare condition is called neurofibromatosis 2 (NF2).
MOSS LANDING, CA--MBARI researchers recently measured high concentrations of carbon dioxide in air blowing out to sea from cities and agricultural areas, including Silicon Valley. In a new paper in PLOS ONE, they calculate that this previously undocumented process could increase the amount of carbon dioxide dissolving into coastal ocean waters by about 20 percent.
A research team at Massachusetts Eye and Ear has shown that microglia, the primary immune cells of the central nervous system--including the retina of the eye--serve as "gatekeepers," or biosensors and facilitators, of neuroinflammation in a preclinical model of autoimmune uveitis. Uveitis is one of the leading causes of blindness, accounting for approximately 10% of significant visual impairment worldwide.
Physarum polycephalum is a complex single-cell organism that has no nervous system. It can learn and transfer its knowledge to its fellow slime moulds via fusion. How it did so was a mystery. Researchers at the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CNRS/UT3 Paul Sabatier)* have recently demonstrated that slime moulds learn to tolerate a substance by absorbing it.
Archaeological excavation has, historically, operated in a very hierarchical structure, according to archaeologist Allison Mickel. The history of the enterprise is deeply entangled with Western colonial and imperial pursuits, she says. Excavations have been, and often still are, according to Mickel, led by foreigners from the West, while dependent on the labor of scores of people from the local community to perform the manual labor of the dig.
Fasciola hepatica is a parasite that causes on average 3.2 million in losses in the agricultural sector every year worldwide. It is a two-centimeter-long worm at adult size that mainly affects ruminants by means of water or raw vegetables that act as vehicles of infection. Moveover, in developing countries with deficient sanitary control systems, more than five million people have been infected. Though it does not have high death rates, it causes liver damage and makes the host more prone to catching other diseases.
Fire ecologists and wildlife specialists at La Trobe University have made key discoveries in how wildlife restores itself after bushfires, and what Australian conservationists can do to assist the process.
The study, published this week in Wildlife Research journal, looks at various reserves in the Australian state of Victoria after bushfires had taken place. It finds that the surrounding area of any fire dictates what species survived and went onto thrive.
Key findings of the study included:
Researchers from HSE University and London Business School have carried out research into the dynamics of the prices for Russian companies' stocks and depositary receipts. The research indicates that, thanks to their price differences, there are opportunities for profitable trading with zero or, at least, minimum risk.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1540496X.2018.1564276?scroll=top&needAccess=true
As genome sequencing becomes cheaper and faster, resulting in an exponential increase in data, the need for efficiency in predicting gene function is growing, as is the need to train the next generation of scientists in bioinformatics. Researchers in the lab of Lukas Mueller, a faculty member of the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), have developed a strategy to fulfill both of these needs, benefiting students and researchers in the process.
Asian countries are in the early stages of a tobacco smoking epidemic with habits mirroring those of the United States from past decades, setting the stage for a spike in future deaths from smoking-related diseases.
That's the conclusion of researchers from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center after analyzing 20 prospective cohort studies from mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and India.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The work of a science writer, including this one, includes reading journal papers filled with specialized technical terminology, and figuring out how to explain their contents in language that readers without a scientific background can understand.
Now, a team of scientists at MIT and elsewhere has developed a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), that can do much the same thing, at least to a limited extent: It can read scientific papers and render a plain-English summary in a sentence or two.
When it comes to making moral decisions, we often think of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yet, why we make such decisions has been widely debated. Are we motivated by feelings of guilt, where we don't want to feel bad for letting the other person down? Or by fairness, where we want to avoid unequal outcomes? Some people may rely on principles of both guilt and fairness and may switch their moral rule depending on the circumstances, according to a Radboud University - Dartmouth College study on moral decision-making and cooperation.