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Loneliness and social isolation, which can have negative effects on health and longevity, are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of surveyed adults with cancer have been experiencing loneliness in recent months, according to a study published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.

A study by the UPV/EHU's CBET research group and the University of Bordeaux has shown that graphene oxide nanomaterials, alone and combined with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pose a potential source of toxicity to fish, but at concentrations that are above the currently expected environmental levels. Under the conditions used in the research, high toxicity has not been detected, although the alteration of certain biomarkers has been observed.

A new, high-quality bonobo genome assembly has been constructed. It is allowing scientists to more accurately compare the bonobo genome to that of other great apes - the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee - and to the modern human. This analysis is revealing new information about hominid evolution, distinctions between chimps and bonobos and genetic relations among present-day hominids, and predicts a greater fraction of the human genome is genetically closer to chimps and bonobos.

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL (University College London) have found that mice can sense extremely fast and subtle changes in the structure of odours and use this to guide their behaviour. The findings, published in Nature today (Wednesday), alter the current view on how odours are detected and processed in the mammalian brain.

New observations and simulations show that jets of high-energy particles emitted from the central massive black hole in the brightest galaxy in galaxy clusters can be used to map the structure of invisible inter-cluster magnetic fields. These findings provide astronomers with a new tool for investigating previously unexplored aspects of clusters of galaxies.

Stem cells have the ability to turn into different types of cell. Now, in research published in Cell Stem Cell and funded by the Medical Research Council, scientists at the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute, working with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, have developed a method to organise lab-grown stem cells into an accurate model of the first stage of human embryo development.

What The Study Did: This study analyzed changes in Medicaid enrollment for all 50 states and the District of Columbia during the first nine months of last year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

MIT biologists find cell extrusion, a process that helps organisms eliminated unneeded cells, is triggered when cells can't replicate their DNA during cell division. In humans, extrusion may serve as a way for the body to eliminate cancerous or precancerous cells.

Surgeons have historically been overwhelmingly white and male, and although there have been some diversity gains among junior positions, a JAMA Surgery study shows that representation of Black and Latinx surgeons at leadership levels has not improved over the past six years. And Black and Latina women, who are grappling with the intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender, have it even worse.

The discovery of the earliest human burial site yet found in Africa, by an international team including several CNRS researchers1, has just been announced in the journal Nature. At Panga ya Saidi, in Kenya, north of Mombasa, the body of a three-year-old, dubbed Mtoto (Swahili for 'child') by the researchers, was deposited and buried in an excavated pit approximately 78,000 years ago

With the help of their custom-built super-resolution microscope, EPFL biophysicists have discovered where and why mitochondria divide, putting to rest controversy about the underlying molecular machinery of mitochondrial fission. Mitochondria either split in half or cut off their ends to self-regulate. The results are published in Nature.

The Antarctic ice sheet is much less likely to become unstable and cause dramatic sea-level rise in upcoming centuries if the world follows policies that keep global warming below a key 2015 Paris climate agreement target, according to a Rutgers coauthored study.

To improve diagnosis for patients with complex metastatic cancers, especially those in low-resource settings, researchers from the Mahmood Lab at the Brigham and Women's Hospital developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that uses routinely acquired histology slides to accurately find the origins of metastatic tumors while generating a "differential diagnosis," for cancer of unknown primary patients.

The world is currently on track to exceed three degrees Celsius of global warming, and new research led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Rob DeConto, co-director of the School of Earth & Sustainability, shows that such a scenario would drastically accelerate the pace of sea-level rise by 2100. If the rate of global warming continues on its current trajectory, we will reach a tipping point by 2060, past which these consequences would be "irreversible on multi-century timescales."

A new study featured on the 6 May cover of Nature by an international team of researchers details the earliest modern human burial in Africa. The remains of a 2.5 to 3 year-old child were found in a flexed position, deliberately buried in a shallow grave directly under the sheltered overhang of the cave. The interment at Panga ya Saidi joins increasing evidence of early complex social behaviours in Homo sapiens.

Clothing, from tank tops to parkas, helps people adapt to temperatures outdoors. But you can only put on or take off so much of it, and fluctuations in weather can render what you are wearing entirely inadequate. In a new study in ACS' Nano Letters, researchers describe a high-tech alternative: a reversible textile they designed to trap warmth in the cold and reflect it during hot weather, all while generating small amounts of electricity.

Reflexes protect our bodies - for example when we pull our hand back from a hot stove. These protective mechanisms could also be useful for robots. In this interview, Prof. Sami Haddadin and Johannes Kühn of the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) explain why giving test subjects a "slap on the hand" could lay the foundations for the robots of the future.

Marine scientists are calling on the EU to adopt a comprehensive plan to protect dolphins and porpoises from fisheries bycatch in European waters. To help address the bycatch issue, which is the primary global threat to dolphins and porpoises, the researchers put forward a framework to reduce bycatch levels.

Coded messages in invisible ink sound like something only found in espionage books, but in real life, they can have important security purposes. Yet, they can be cracked if their encryption is predictable. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have printed complexly encoded data with normal ink and a carbon nanoparticle-based invisible ink, requiring both UV light and a computer that has been taught the code to reveal the correct messages.

There is currently no consensus on what quality end-of-life care for children with cancer looks like, or how to measure and deliver it; however, investigators recently assembled an expert panel to help fill this void. In a study published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the panel endorsed 16 measures that cover different aspects of care that are important for children with cancer and their families.