Reporting world updates to you
According to new research in the journal Immunity, T cells have a nuclear receptor doing something very odd — but very important — to help them fight pathogens and destroy cancer cells. This receptor, called retinoic acid receptor alpha (RARα), is known to control gene expression programs in the nucleus,…
CNN — Russian dissident journalist Elena Kostyuchenko has revealed how she was traveling to Berlin by train last autumn when she was abruptly taken ill, in a case that has led German authorities to investigate a suspected poisoning attempt. Kostyuchenko was living in exile at the time in the German…
CNN — Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been charged with giving false testimony, Austria’s Economic and Corruption Prosecutor’s Office announced on Friday. The prosecutors in Vienna allege that Kurz gave false evidence to a committee of the Austrian parliament that was investigating whether his government was open to bribes…
CNN — Russia temporarily shuttered all four major Moscow airports early on Friday morning following an alleged drone strike on the capital city, its civil aviation authority said. Seven flights were diverted because of the closures of Moscow’s Vnukovo, Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Zhukovsky airports, according to Rosaviatsiya, the aviation authority.…
CNN — Belarus would be willing to use the nuclear weapons given by close ally Russia in the face of foreign “aggression,” President Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday, as tensions rise around the country’s borders with NATO nations. Minsk has played a key role in Russia’s war in Ukraine, with Moscow…
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg stressed Thursday that it is up to Ukraine to decide when to come to the negotiating table, following controversial remarks made by the director of his office earlier this week. On Tuesday, Stian Jenssen, director of the Private Office of the NATO Secretary General, said during an event in Norway that ceding territory to Russia could be a way for Ukraine to achieve…
In 1956, theoretical physicist David Pines predicted that electrons in a solid can do something strange. While they normally have a mass and an electric charge, Pines asserted that they can combine to form a composite particle that is massless, neutral, and does not interact with light. He called this…
In an experiment on how turbulent boundary layers respond to acceleration in the flow around them, aerospace engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign observed an unexpected internal boundary layer. “Not only were we able to identify a new internal boundary layer, but we were able to systematically track its…
The end of the last Ice Age also marked the end for more than three dozen genera of large mammals in North America, from mammoths and mastodons to bison and saber-toothed cats. Details concerning the precise timing and circumstances, however, have remained murky ever since. A team of scientists that…
Our movements are controlled by multiple neural pathways that connect the brain and spinal cord. In particular, neurons in the cerebral cortex send commands to the motor neurons in the spinal cord and then to the muscles, thus eliciting the required movement. However, this flow of neural information is compromised…
CNN — More than 3,000 people have been evacuated since Wednesday as wildfires continue to tear through the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife, a popular tourist destination, the region’s authorities said Thursday in a statement. The blaze has burned some 2,600 hectares (around 6,424 acres) so far and the region’s…
CNN — A Moscow court has charged an imprisoned Russian-born US citizen with espionage, Russian state news agency TASS reported Thursday quoting the court’s press service. The individual, named Gene Spector, is currently serving a prison sentence after pleading guilty to bribery charges, according to TASS. Spector was born and…
Scientists at City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, have identified how low levels of the TET2 gene fuel the rapid growth of acute myeloid leukemia in animal models. Cell Stem Cell recently published the study. A team led by Jianjun…
Environmental regulators and other organizations should do more scientific experimentation to inform natural resource policy, according to an international group of economists that includes University of Wyoming researchers. In a new paper in the journal Science, the economists say more frequent use of up-front experiments would result in more effective…
Some women with early-stage, low-risk breast cancer may not need radiotherapy after breast conserving surgery according to new research led by McMaster University, BC Cancer, Hamilton Heath Sciences, and the University of British Columbia. The research, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Aug. 17, shows women 55…
Pre-clinical trials by University of Queensland researchers have found an injection of a specific blood factor can replicate the benefits of exercise in the brain. Dr Odette Leiter and Dr Tara Walker from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led a team which discovered platelets, the tiny blood cells critical for blood…
As urban areas expand, animals increasingly find themselves living in towns and cities. While some animals may benefit from milder temperatures and fewer natural predators in urban settings, they also have to cope with pollutants and changes in their diet. Previous research has shown that animals in cities are “duller”…
Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have developed an AI model that accurately estimates a patient’s age, using chest radiographs of healthy individuals collected from multiple facilities. Furthermore, they found a positive relationship between differences in the AI-estimated and chronological ages and a variety of chronic diseases, such as hypertension, hyperuricemia, and…
An extremely rare collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France are closely related to living species, unlike older fossils of their kind. These fossils are very important to understand the evolution of sea spiders. They show that the diversity of sea spiders that still exist today had already…
A single injection of a novel CRISPR gene-editing treatment safely and efficiently removes SIV — a virus related to the AIDS-causing agent HIV — from the genomes of non-human primates, scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University now report. The groundbreaking work complements previous experiments as…
Conventional wisdom among ecologists holds that the more species there are inhabiting an ecosystem, the less vulnerable any one species will be to a threat like a parasite. A new study of tadpoles at the University of Wisconsin-Madison illustrates how overlapping biological and environmental factors can complicate how we value…
Researchers are using mathematical models to better understand the effects of disruptions like daylight savings time, working night shifts, jet lag or even late-night phone scrolling on the body’s circadian rhythms. The University of Waterloo and the University of Oxford researchers have developed a new model to help scientists better…
Reasoning skills are crucial skills in learning, academic performance, and everyday problem-solving. According to a recent study conducted at the University of Eastern Finland, improved overall diet quality and reduced consumption of red meat, as well as increased time spent in reading and organised sports enhanced reasoning skills among children…
When choosing their behaviour in socially difficult situations, anxious people use a less suitable section of the forebrain than people who are not anxious. This can be seen in brain scans, as shown by the research of Bob Bramson and Sjoerd Meijer at the Donders Institute of Radboud University. For…
A new study from Lund University in Sweden raises questions about the efficacy of bariatric operations involving gastric bypass. The results show that the biggest metabolic changes happened directly after surgery. Just a year after the operation, the concentration of metabolites and fats had returned to almost the same levels…
Earth’s rapidly changing climate is taking an increasingly heavy toll on landscapes around the world in the form of floods, rising sea levels, extreme weather, drought and wildfire. Also at growing risk are the values of property where these hazards are projected to worsen, according to a new study by…
Though cars are the biggest threat to coyotes taking up residence in U.S. cities, a new study suggests urban living poses a different kind of hazard to coyote health — in the form of chronic stress. Researchers from The Ohio State University examined the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol…
New animal research suggests that little-studied brain cells known as astrocytes are major players in controlling sleep need and may someday help humans go without sleep for longer without negative consequences such as mental fatigue and impaired physical health. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the study found that activating…
Somatostatin, a signaling molecule produced by many inhibitory neurons in the brain, broadly dampens communication among a variety of cell types in the prefrontal cortex and promotes exploratory and risk-taking-like behavior in mice, according a Penn State-led research team. Their new paper, published online today (August 17) in the journal…
Neuroscientists today report the first results from experimental tests designed to explore the idea that “forgetting” might not be a bad thing, and that it may represent a form of learning — and outline results that support their core idea. Last year the neuroscientists behind the new theory suggested that…
