Culture
WASHINGTON, May 19, 2020 -- As the infectious virus causing the COVID-19 disease began its devastating spread around the globe, an international team of scientists was alarmed by the lack of uniform approaches by various countries' epidemiologists to respond to it.
WASHINGTON, May 19, 2020 -- Airborne transmission of viruses, like the virus causing COVID-19, is not well understood, but a good baseline for study is a deeper understanding of how particles travel through the air when people cough.
In a paper published in Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, Talib Dbouk and Dimitris Drikakis discovered that with even a slight breeze of 4 kph, saliva travels 18 feet in 5 seconds.
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE and BOSTON, Mass. (May 19, 2020) - A team of researchers at Tufts University's School of Engineering and its School of Medicine, and physicians at Tufts Medical Center have developed a method using fluorescence to detect precancerous metabolic and physical changes in epithelial cells lining the cervix. According to the researchers, the new imaging method opens the door to a non-invasive, early-stage bedside diagnostic.
(Boston)--The same genes that greatly increase the risk of breast cancer in U.S. white women, including women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, also greatly increase breast cancer risk among African American women. These genes include the BRCA1, BRCA2 and PALB2 genes, each of which was associated with a more than seven-fold risk of breast cancer, as well as four other genes associated with a more moderate increase in risk. Previous studies of women of African ancestry were too small to assess genes other than BRCA1 and BRCA2.
Food production has always shaped the lives of humans and the surface of the Earth. Be it plough or refrigerator, time and again innovations have transformed the ways we grow, process, and consume food over the last millennia. Today, with almost 40 per cent of all land on Earth used for food production, the food system massively impacts climate and environment - from nitrogen flows to water use, from biodiversity to greenhouse gas emissions.
A new study shows that when specific human brain cells are transplanted into animal models of multiple sclerosis and other white matter diseases, the cells repair damage and restore function. The study provides one of the final pieces of scientific evidence necessary to advance this treatment strategy to clinical trials.
Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources reached a maximum daily decline of 17 per cent in April as a result of drastic decline in energy demand that have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The preliminary analysis, published today in Nature Climate Change, was conducted by researchers from the University of East Anglia, Stanford University, the CICERO Center for International Climate Research and CSIRO as part of the Global Carbon Project.
Shimoda, Japan -- For some, sea urchins are a pretty addition to an aquarium, while for others they are simply an ingredient in a common type of sushi. However, for developmental biologists, they represent more than 100 years of research and education. Because their eggs are transparent, embryonic development and even the act of fertilization were easily viewed with microscopes in the 1800s. Beyond the embryo, sea urchins have long lives--some species living up to 200 years--making them interesting for developmental biologists who study aging.
The life cycle of insects consists of specific developmental stages. But, in response to adverse conditions, such as harsh winters, some insects arrest their own development at a particular stage. This process of seasonal adaptation is called "overwintering," in which the growth rate of the insect is either reduced or halted. This mechanism helps the insect to cope with extreme conditions that are unsuitable for its growth and reproduction. Overwintering usually occurs at a species-specific developmental stage.
For our social life and our profession we must be able to deal with our environment and other people. Executive functions, meaning the basic intellectual abilities that control human thought and action, help us to do this. These include selective attention, otherwise known as the ability to concentrate on one stimulus and suppress others, or the working memory, with which we can retain and manipulate information. These functions also enable us to plan actions and to divide them into individual steps.
IBARAKI, Japan--Comprehensive implementation of COVID-19 infection prevention measures boosts their effectiveness, while partial implementation compromises it. These are the findings from a study led by Prof. Setsuya Kurahashi at the Faculty of Business Sciences, University of Tsukuba.
Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) have been widely used as substitutes for ozone-depleting substances--for example, hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Though HFCs have no impact on the ozone layer, they are also long-lived potent greenhouse gases with global warming potentials as high as CFCs, meaning HFCs are regulated by both the Montreal Protocol as well as the Kyoto Protocol. China is a major consumer of HFCs around the world.
COVID-19 is associated with a high incidence of venous thromboembolism, blood clots in the venous circulation, according to a study conducted by researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), UK. In a series of 274 consecutive cases of COVID-19 admitted to hospital, a significant percentage (7.7%) were diagnosed with venous thromboembolism. The most common type of venous thromboembolism, seen in 76.2% of these cases, was pulmonary embolism, a blood clot on the lungs.
Offering personalised ovarian cancer risk prediction to women shows that 98 per cent of participants felt less worried after finding out their ovarian cancer risk status, according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London.
More than 1600 kilometers east of the Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica lies the Atlantic island of South Georgia.
Here, king penguins live in huge colonies. Their days are spent chomping on krill, squid and fish, feeding their chicks and producing 'guano', which means poo in penguin. Nothing mind-boggling about that, you might say.