Culture
The EU has an ambition of being climate neutral in 2050. It is hoped that this can be achieved through a green transition in the energy sector and CO2-intensive industries, as well as through altered consumer behavior such as food habits and travel demands among the EU population.
Menthol cigarettes will be removed from shelves in the UK this Wednesday (20 May 2020), yet new research has found that tobacco companies failed to use the four-year phasing-in period (from 2016) to prepare for this week's ban. Instead they continued to sell and promote menthol products and to develop new products which circumvent the ban.
A new paper in The Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press, finds that people who use a coin toss to decide on an important change are more likely to follow through with that decision, are more satisfied with that decision, and report a higher overall happiness after a six month period.
Commercially important seafood species are at greater risk of microplastic contamination depending how they clump together in the marine environment, new research suggests.
In the first study of its kind, scientists from the University of Plymouth used a series of experiments to assess whether the reefs formed by blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) affected their exposure and consumption of tiny microplastic particles.
DALLAS, May 15, 2020 -- When health care providers enrolled in a federal program that provides financial payments for monitoring and reducing cardiovascular risk in high-risk patients, they assessed patient risk and prescribed cholesterol-lowering and blood pressure-lowering medication more often, according to research presented today at the American Heart Association's Quality of Care & Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2020.
The global reach of COVID-19 is unquestionable. Every day, news reports highlight the disease's increasing toll on countries and major cities around the world.
However, little attention is paid to indigenous populations worldwide who may be especially vulnerable to COVID-19 but are largely excluded from most national or regional efforts to curb the spread of the disease. Even in high-income countries, indigenous groups like the Navajo have been hit hard by COVID-19, with per capita infection rates rivaling those of New York and New Jersey.
Orange, Calif. - A team of anthropologists, physicians, tribal leaders and local government authorities developed and implemented a multi-phase COVID-19 prevention and containment plan among the Tsimane, an indigenous group of forager-horticulturists in the Bolivian Amazon.
Moisture is the main environmental factor that triggers the degradation of the masterpiece The Scream (1910?) by Edvard Munch, according to the finding of an international team of scientists led by the CNR (Italy), using a combination of in situ non-invasive spectroscopic methods and synchrotron X-ray techniques.
New research by Rutgers scientists reaffirms that modern sea-level rise is linked to human activities and not to changes in Earth's orbit.
Surprisingly, the Earth had nearly ice-free conditions with carbon dioxide levels not much higher than today and had glacial periods in times previously believed to be ice-free over the last 66 million years, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
(Boston)--Even among individuals free of heart failure and myocardial infarction, there appears to be evidence of an association between calcium buildup in the coronary arteries (atherosclerosis) and changes in the structure and function of the heart.
Coronary artery calcium buildup or atherosclerosis is a strong predictor of future coronary heart disease. To date, the evidence suggests that coronary disease interacts and progresses along with the incipient development of myocardial disease, even in the absence of symptoms.
While many of us use social media to be tickled silly by cat videos or wowed by delectable cakes, others use them to discover new species. Included in the latter group are researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark. Indeed, they just found a new type of parasitic fungus via Twitter.
In Germany, growth of COVID-19 cases declined after a series of three social distancing interventions, detectable at a two-week delay following each intervention, but only after the third- a far-reaching contact ban - did cases decline significantly. These results - from a modeling study designed to better estimate the impact of various levels of social distancing on virus spread - indicate that the full extent of social distancing interventions was necessary to stop exponential growth in Germany, the authors say.
Mergers between black holes and neutron stars in dense star clusters are quite unlike those that form in isolated regions where stars are few. Their associated features could be crucial to the study of gravitational waves and their source. Dr Manuel Arca Sedda of the Institute for Astronomical Computing at Heidelberg University came to this conclusion in a study that used computer simulations. The research may offer critical insights into the fusion of two massive stellar objects that astronomers observed in 2019.
The discovery of a huge number of long non-protein coding RNAs, aka lncRNAs, in the mammalian genome was a major surprise of the recent large-scale genomics projects. An international team including a bioinformatician from the Research Center of Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology has developed a reliable method for assessing the role of such RNAs.
A major global cooling event that occurred 4,200 years ago may have led to the evolution of new rice varieties and the spread of rice into both northern and southern Asia, an international team of researchers has found.
Their study, published in Nature Plants and led by the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, uses a multidisciplinary approach to reconstruct the history of rice and trace its migration throughout Asia.