Culture
Shea yields are likely to benefit from a diversity of trees and shrubs in parkland habitats in West Africa, according to a new study led by scientists from Trinity College Dublin. The findings have important implications for managing a crop that is typically harvested and sold by women in rural areas, and which helps finance education for children.
A child's unique brain activity reveals how good their memories are, according to research recently published in JNeurosci.
When you scramble to remember a phone number as you enter it into your phone, you rely on your working memory to keep the number at the front of your mind. Briefly holding and manipulating information relies on the activity of the frontoparietal network, a group of brain regions coined the "cognition core." Working memory performance changes throughout development, but can an individual's memory facility be determined based on brain activity?
A team led by scientists from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS/Université de Paris)* have shown that French prehistory was punctuated by two waves of migration: the first during the Neolithic period, about 6,300 years ago, the second during the Bronze Age, about 4,200 years ago.
When University of Ottawa biologists Kim Mitchell and Vance Trudeau began studying the effects of gene mutations in zebrafish, they uncovered new functions that regulate how males and females interact while mating. We sat down with senior author Professor Trudeau, Research Chair in Neuroendocrinology at the Faculty of Science, to learn more.
Please tell us about this research project.
Patients with heart failure who experience low health literacy are at an increased risk of hospitalization and mortality. This finding has significant clinical and public health implications and suggests that assessing and intervening upon an individual's understanding of their own health could improve heart failure outcomes, according to research published in JACC: Heart Failure.
Researchers have found a way to design an antibody that can identify the toxic particles that destroy healthy brain cells - a potential advance in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.
Their method is able to recognise these toxic particles, known as amyloid-beta oligomers, which are the hallmark of the disease, leading to hope that new diagnostic methods can be developed for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.
Space is getting crowded. Aging satellites and space debris crowd low-Earth orbit, and launching new satellites adds to the collision risk. The most effective way to solve the space junk problem, according to a new study, is not to capture debris or deorbit old satellites: it's an international agreement to charge operators "orbital-use fees" for every satellite put into orbit.
We know a lot about the human brain, but very little about how it is formed. In particular, the stages from the second to the seventh week of embryonic development have so far been virtually unknown territory to brain researchers.
To learn more about this particular period, researchers from the Department of Neuroscience and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Biology at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences have now developed a model that mimics these early stages of the human brain in the laboratory.
Astronomers have captured an image of a super-rare type of galaxy - described as a "cosmic ring of fire" - as it existed 11 billion years ago.
The galaxy, which has roughly the mass of the Milky Way, is circular with a hole in the middle, rather like a titanic doughnut. Its discovery, announced in the journal Nature Astronomy, is set to shake up theories about the earliest formation of galactic structures and how they evolve.
A genome-wide analysis of more than 435,000 people has identified 29 genetic variants linked to problematic drinking, researchers at Yale University School of Medicine and colleagues report May 25 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
"The new data triple the number of known genetic risk loci associated with problematic alcohol use," said Yale's Joel Gelernter, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry and professor of genetics and of neuroscience, who is the senior author of the multi-institutional study.
Scientists have developed a new type of laser that can deliver high amounts of energy in very short bursts of time, with potential applications in eye and heart surgery or the engineering of delicate materials.
researchers at the University of California, Davis offers a significant advance in using magnetic resonance imaging to pick out even very small tumors from normal tissue. The work is published May 25 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Sometimes cancer stays put, but often it metastasizes, spreading to new locations in the body. It has long been suspected that genetic mutations arising inside tumor cells drive this potentially devastating turn of events.
Now researchers have shown for the first time that our own pre-existing genetics can promote metastasis.
(Vienna, Monday, 25 May, 2020) A new study presented today at the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) Virtual Congress shows the burden of potentially avoidable epilepsy-related deaths in young adults remains large, with those aged between 16 and 24 having a six-fold increased risk of epilepsy-related death.
(Vienna, Sunday, 24 May, 2020) The extent and risks associated with recreational abuse of laughing gas and psychostimulants by young people have today been revealed in two studies reported at the European Academy of Neurology Virtual Congress.