Earth
For Dr. Fabian Dembski, who works at the intersection of architecture, city planning, and computational science, cities are more than just the places we live. They function like living organisms, growing and changing over time. From this perspective, decisions made in city planning can either improve or degrade the health of urban spaces.
Are today's children, who grew up with mobile technology from birth, worse at reading emotions and picking up cues from people's faces than children who didn't grow up with tablets and smartphones? A new UCLA psychology study suggests today's kids are all right.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Already known for their shape-shifting abilities, stem cells can now add "death-defying" to their list of remarkable qualities.
A new study shows how stem cells - which can contribute to creating many parts of the body, not just one organ or body part - are able to postpone their own death in order to respond to an injury that needs their attention. The study was done in planarians, which are tiny worms used as model organisms to study regeneration because of their ability to recover from any injury using stem cells.
Why did the gecko climb the skyscraper? Because it could; its toes stick to about anything. For a few years, engineers have known the secrets of gecko stickiness and emulated it in strips of rubbery materials useful for picking up and releasing objects, but simple mass production for everyday use has been out of reach until now.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- If life feels more stressful now than it did a few decades ago, you're not alone. Even before the novel coronavirus started sweeping the globe, a new study found that life may be more stressful now than it was in the 1990s.
A team of researchers led by Penn State found that across all ages, there was a slight increase in daily stress in the 2010s compared to the 1990s. But when researchers restricted the sample to people between the ages of 45 and 64, there was a sharp increase in daily stress.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- To just solve a puzzle or play a game, artificial intelligence can require software running on thousands of computers. That could be the energy that three nuclear plants produce in one hour.
Mutations in white blood cells can contribute to abnormal immune profile after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.
A new data analysis funded by the National Institutes of Health finds patients who visited the emergency department for an opioid overdose are 100 times more likely to die by drug overdose in the year after being discharged and 18 times more likely to die by suicide relative to the general population. Additionally, in the year after emergency department discharge, patients who visited for a sedative/hypnotic overdose had overdose death rates 24 times higher, and suicide rates 9 times higher, than the general population.
A world-first study led by Monash University has demonstrated significant benefits to a premature baby's heart and brain function when held by the parent in skin-to-skin contact.
Parent-infant skin-to-skin care (SSC) or kangaroo care, started in the late 1970s in Columbia when incubators to keep babies warm were not available. It is now widely recognised as a beneficial component of holistic care provided for pre-term infants.
CINCINNATI - After 20 years of trying, modern medicine remains unable to lower the roughly 40 percent mortality rate for the severe childhood immune disease called HLH (hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), which damages vital organs and tissues.
Now, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine treating patients with a new drug that saved kid's lives with less toxicity and fewer side effects. Although the 34-patient study wasn't large enough to show whether the drug, emapalumab, can dent HLH's high mortality rate, doctors say their data are promising.
Treefrogs become easy targets for predators and parasites when they send mating calls, but they're finding a way to fool their enemies with a little help from a wingman.
A new computational method for assigning the donor in single cell RNA sequencing experiments provides an accurate way to unravel data from a mixture of people. The Souporcell method, created by Wellcome Sanger Institute researchers and their collaborators could help study how genetic variants in different people affect which genes are expressed during infection or response to drugs.
Published this week in Nature Methods, the software could increase efficiency of single-cell experiments, assisting research into transplants, personalised medicine and malaria.
Cancer is deadly, but available cancer treatment methods are quite limited. The use of therapeutic gas molecules such as H2, NO, CO and H2S for cancer treatment is promising owing to their unique properties for selectively killing cancer cells and protecting normal cells from damage from other traditional therapies. However, these gases and most of their prodrugs lack the abilities of active intratumoral accumulation and controlled gas release, causing limited therapeutic efficacy and potential side effects.
Climate and marine scientists are observing pervasive warming of the ocean and the land surfaces across the globe. Since the middle of the 19th century, the average global temperature recorded on the land surface has risen by around one degree centigrade, and by 0.6 degrees across the ocean surface. Global warming has been most pronounced in the alpine regions and the Arctic.
In mice, rats, and nonhuman primates, a newly developed SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine candidate induced antibodies that neutralized several different SARS-CoV-2 strains. Critically, it did so without leading to a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), which previous reports have raised as a concern. Based on the authors' observations, they propose that their vaccine candidate, "PiCoVacc," is safe in macaques and should be explored in clinical trials in humans. Rapid development of effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 is urgently needed.