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In the case of boredom, we think of many situations in life but intuitively not of exams. However, an international team of academics led by Thomas Götz from the University of Vienna has now studied exactly this phenomenon of test boredom for the first time and found remarkable results. According…
A new study has revealed important associations between the gut microbiome and eczema in infancy and has established the basis for the potential prevention and treatment of eczema via modulation of the gut microbiota. The study was published in mSystems, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. “The problem…
The human immune system is adaptive, remembering past infections and training itself to guard against future similar infections. But what happens when people have compromised immune systems due to chronic conditions, aging, or medications that decrease immunity as a side effect? In such cases, people can get opportunistic infections, so…
Students with disabilities are often bullied and socially excluded in school at a far greater rate than their classmates. To help teachers recognize, respond to and prevent bullying toward these students, researchers at the University of Missouri collaborated to develop an evidence-based, online professional development curriculum. The curriculum highlights the…
Our immune system has an ingenious trick up its sleeve. It remembers past foes, stopping potential sickness in its tracks through a phenomenon known as immunological memory. This is thanks to specialized cells — tissue-resident memory T cells — which reside in vital organs like the small intestine, lungs and…
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified stem cells in the human thymus for the first time. These cells represent a potential new target to understand immune diseases and cancer and how to boost the immune system. The thymus is a gland located in the front part of the…
University of Oxford researchers have made a significant step towards realising miniature bio-integrated devices, capable of directly stimulating cells. The work has been published today in the journal Nature. Small bio-integrated devices that can interact with and stimulate cells could have important therapeutic applications, including the delivery of targeted drug…
While self-driving vehicles (SDVs) are being hailed as a solution for safer, more efficient roads, new research suggests British Columbians are not quite ready to embrace self-driving cars wholeheartedly — and will need a period of gradual transition before adoption. The study, conducted by the Research on Active Transportation Lab…
In a recent study, scientists at Leipzig University have revised previous assumptions about the influence of pollutant particles, known as aerosols, on global warming. Using satellite data, Dr Hailing Jia and Professor Johannes Quaas have shown that the relationship between water droplets in clouds and aerosol concentration is more non-linear…
The use of active mechanical circulatory support is growing rapidly around the world. The hope is that these systems will improve survival after the most severe form of acute heart failure, cardiogenic shock. A recent clinical trial led by heart specialist Professor Holger Thiele has shown that extracorporeal life support…
The Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 had a major impact on the forest ecosystem in Central Europe. After the accident, the consumption of mushrooms was discouraged because of the high radioactive contamination, and the meat of wild animals was also severely affected for several years. While the contamination of deer…
Quantum physics has allowed for the creation of sensors far surpassing the precision of classical devices. Now, several studies in Nature show that the precision of these quantum sensors can be significantly improved using entanglement produced by finite-range interactions. Innsbruck researchers led by Christian Roos were able to demonstrate this…
Modern medicine depends on antibiotics to treat infections by disabling targets inside bacterial cells. Once inside these cells, antibiotics bind to certain sites on specific enzyme targets to stop bacterial growth. Randomly occurring changes (mutations) in the genes for these targets occur naturally, in some cases making the target harder…
The same neurons that help bats navigate through space may also help them navigate collective social environments, finds a new study published today in the journal Nature. Many mammals — including bats and humans — are believed to navigate with the help of a brain structure called the hippocampus, which…
CNN — Russia has seen the biggest drone assault on its territory since it launched its war on Ukraine while Moscow killed two men in a near-simultaneous bombardment on Kyiv, as the aerial intensity of the conflict ratcheted up. Six Russian regions including Moscow came under attack early Wednesday, while…
Russia conducted a “massive” attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv on Tuesday night using drones and missiles, said Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv city military administration, on Wednesday. “Kyiv has not experienced such a powerful attack since spring,” Popko wrote on Telegram. Popko said several groups of drones traveled towards Kyiv “from…
CNN — Ukrainian officials have criticized Pope Francis’ recent address to Russian youth, calling his remarks “imperialist propaganda.” The pontiff made a video address to the 10th All-Russian Catholic Youth Assembly in St. Petersburg on Friday, during which he urged them to view themselves as descendants of the Russian empire.…
Astronomers have uncovered a link between Neptune’s shifting cloud abundance and the 11-year solar cycle, in which the waxing and waning of the Sun’s entangled magnetic fields drives solar activity. This discovery is based on three decades of Neptune observations captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M.…
Here’s a climate solution we can all get behind: don’t kill elephants. Or poach gorillas — or wipe out tapirs, hornbills, or other large-bodied wildlife that eat fruit and disperse large seeds. That’s because a new paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that overhunting of these species makes…
Researchers at the Babraham Institute are proposing an alternative link between diet and ageing based on studies in yeast. Dr Jon Houseley and his team have published their experiments, showing that healthy ageing is achievable through dietary change without restriction by potentially optimising diet, and that ill-health is not an…
CNN — A Russian network of internet trolls has begun to spread messages online blaming “enemies from the West” for the plane crash that killed Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin last week, according to two experts who monitor the activity of the trolls. Prigozhin had previously turbo-charged the use of trolls…
Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas have developed a fabric-based wearable device that “taps” a user’s wrist with pressurized air, silently helping them navigate to their destination. The study, published August 29 in the journal Device, demonstrated that users correctly interpreted which direction the device was telling them to…
We’ve long known that hosts malfunction without their microbiome — whether they are missing key microbial species or are completely microbe free. This malfunctioning is usually explained by the need for microbes to perform unique and beneficial functions, but evolutionary ecologist Tobin Hammer of the University of California, Irvine, is…
With their intricate arrangements and dynamic functionalities, proteins perform a plethora of biological tasks by employing unique arrangements of simple building blocks where geometry is key. Translating this nearly limitless library of arrangements into their respective functions could let researchers design custom proteins for specific uses. In Journal of Applied…
When infants are involved in agonistic conflicts, male crested macaques (Macaca nigra) are more likely to respond to screams from their own offspring. This is the conclusion of a recent study led by behavioural ecologist Professor Anja Widdig from Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in…
A team of researchers from Yale University and other institutions globally has developed an innovative patient triage platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that the researchers say is capable of predicting patient disease severity and length of hospitalization during a viral outbreak. The platform, which leverages machine learning and metabolomics…
Researchers have shown that dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs) can be used to create chip-based optical frequency combs with enough output power for use in optical atomic clocks and other practical applications. The advance could lead to chip-based instruments that can make precision measurements that were previously possible only in a…
Recently, a Korean company donated a wearable robot, designed to aid patients with limited mobility during their rehabilitation, to a hospital. These patients wear this robot to receive assistance for muscle and joint exercises while performing actions such as walking or sitting. Wearable devices including smartwatches or eyewear that people…
Modern blood-thinning drugs (known as NOACs) reduce the risk of serious bleeding by up to 45 percent compared to the traditional drug Waran in the treatment of blood clots in the legs and lungs, according to a comprehensive and long-term study conducted at the University of Gothenburg. Blood thinners are…
People in Asia are known to report worse sleep than their counterparts in Europe and North America. New research, using objective measures of sleep rather than subjective reports, has shown that not only do people in Asia go to sleep later and have shorter sleep, they also have lower sleep…
