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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…
Trinity’s quantum physicists in collaboration with IBM Dublin have successfully simulated super diffusion in a system of interacting quantum particles on a quantum computer. This is the first step in doing highly challenging quantum transport calculations on quantum hardware and, as the hardware improves over time, such work promises to…
Materials are often considered to be one phase, but many engineering materials contain two or more phases, improving their properties and performance. These two-phase materials have inclusions, called precipitates, embedded in the microstructure. Alloys, a combination of two or more types of metals, are used in many applications, like turbines…
Thanks to continuous advances in human stem cell research, studies that make use of embryo models are progressing quickly. This research offers both a scientific and ethical alternative to the use of embryos resulting from fertilized human eggs, and the appropriate ethical guidelines have been developed in parallel with the…
When we use our working memory, we temporarily retain information in our brain. For instance, you are able to comprehend this sentence because you are briefly storing in working memory each of the words you are reading until you put them together to form the meaning of the sentence. The…
The largest ever study of the genetics of the brain — encompassing some 36,000 brain scans — has identified more than 4,000 genetic variants linked to brain structure. The results of the study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, are published in Nature Genetics today. Our brains are…
Obesity leads to altered energy metabolism and reduced insulin sensitivity of cells. The so-called “anti-obesity drugs” are increasingly used to treat obesity and have caused tremendous interest, especially in the USA. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne, Germany, have now shown in people with obesity…
To continue reducing the costs of solar energy and other clean energy technologies, scientists and engineers will likely need to focus, at least in part, on improving technology features that are not based on hardware, according to MIT researchers. They describe this finding and the mechanisms behind it in Nature…
In the intricate realm of wave turbulence, where predictability falters and chaos reigns, a groundbreaking study has emerged. The new research explores the heart of wave turbulence using an ultracold quantum gas, revealing new insights that could advance our understanding of non-equilibrium physics and have significant implications for various fields.…
