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Ancient pollen samples and a new statistical approach may shed light on the global rate of change of vegetation and eventually on how much climate change and humans have played a part in altering landscapes, according to an international team of researchers.

During the first phase of the COVID-19 epidemic, New York City experienced high prevalence compared to other U.S. cities, yet little is known about the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 within and among its boroughs. A study published in PLOS Pathogens by Simon Dellicour at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, Ralf Duerr and Adriana Heguy at New York University, USA, and colleagues describe the dispersal dynamics of COVID-19 viral lineages at the state and city levels.

If there's one take-home message for the general public about the coronavirus vaccines approved in the U.S., it's that they are remarkably effective. But Michigan State University's Morteza Mahmoudi is raising awareness about an important subtlety: The vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech appear to work slightly better for men than for women.

Latinx young adults who experience heart-focused anxiety could be at greater risk for mental health disorders. New research indicates that heart-focused anxiety among that group is a statistically significant predictor for general depression and overall anxiety.

USC Schaeffer Center researchers found Medicare has significant financial incentives to partner with Medicaid to treat the majority of hepatitis C cases.

Leave voters in Cornwall wanted to exit the EU to "take back control" and express concern about immigration - even though most said the movement of people across the continent had not caused issues for them, a new survey suggests.

A team of Spanish researchers have developed, at the laboratory level, a prototype of a new biosensor to help detect breast cancer in its earliest stages. It is an easy-to-use, low-cost prototype of a nanoporous device, and provides results in less than an hour.

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that functional impairments among adults aged 50 and older are associated with a higher risk of medical cannabis use; and prescription opioid and tranquilizer/sedative use and misuse.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have traced the locations of five brief, powerful radio blasts to the spiral arms of five distant galaxies.

Building more homes and buildings with wood has been on the radar for years as a way to offset carbon emissions, though construction companies have been hesitant to take the material in broader use. A study at Aalto University in Finland is now the first to show that building with wood can be a sound investment. The findings show that multi-storied buildings made out of wood sold for an average of 8.85% more than those made from other materials.

Comets that circle the Sun in very elongated orbits spread their debris so thin along their orbit or eject it out of the solar system altogether that their meteor showers are hard to detect. From a new meteor shower survey published in the journal Icarus, researchers now report that they can detect showers from the debris in the path of comets that pass close to Earth orbit and are known to return as infrequent as once every 4,000 years.

The work is the first global assessment of Earth's 92,033 debris-covered glaciers and shows that debris, taken as a whole, substantially reduces glacier mass loss.

A new iron catalyst helps preferentially reduce nitric oxide to hydroxylamine, opening doors to pollution control and clean energy.

Sarah Buchanan, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri's College of Education, is an archivist, a professional who assesses, collects and preserves various artifacts and archives them to better understand their origin and cultural heritage.

A team of researchers at the University of Ottawa has found a way to use visible light to transform carbon dioxide gas, or CO2, into solid carbon forms that emit light. This development creates a new, low-energy CO2 reduction pathway to solid carbon that will have implications across many fields.

New research from the University of Georgia has found a narrowing but persistent gender pay gap in one of the federal government's largest agencies.

Small chemical "epigenetic" modifications help plants control their genes. Baby plants erase these modifications to start with a fresh genome every generation. CSHL scientists discovered a gene responsible for reinstalling the beneficial modifications important for survival. Reinstalling these modifications on mobile genetic elements called transposons may explain the diversity of flowering plants.

Researchers have been able to prove for the first time that activation of distinct human endogenous retroviruses, which are part of our genome, impair brain development dramatically. This finding could help to advance research into therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. The study originated from an international collaboration led by Helmholtz Zentrum München.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, created a single-sided, co-planar optoelectrowetting device that allows for individualized and parallel droplet actuation and benefits from easier droplet accessibility from above for more input/output configuration schemes.

Today, proteins that can be controlled with light are a widely used tool in research to specifically switch certain functions on and off in living organisms. Channelrhodopsins are often used for the technique known as optogenetics: When exposed to light, these proteins open a pore in the cell membrane through which ions can flow in. A research team has now used spectroscopy to discover a universal functional mechanism of channelrhodopsins that determines their efficiency as a channel and thus as an optogenetic tool.