Brain
The damaging impact of poverty on children and their families and the growing problem of exploitation are revealed in a new report by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University of Warwick.
Most scorpions glow a blue-green color when illuminated by ultraviolet light or natural moonlight. Scientists aren't sure how this fluorescence benefits the creatures, but some have speculated that it acts as a sunscreen, or helps them find mates in the dark. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Natural Products have identified a new fluorescent compound from scorpion exoskeletons. The team says that the compound could protect these arachnids from parasites.
You may have heard of a 2016 study linking cognitive enhancement in babies with eating more fruit during pregnancy. But how strong is that link? That's the question scientists at the University of Alberta asked as they set out to verify the findings in a new study.
It's no secret that babies generally smell pleasant to their mothers - and teenagers not so much. A team of researchers investigating how body odors affect the mother-child relationship found that a mom's olfactory sense may be capable of detecting her child's developmental stage. The research was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook began putting warning tags on news stories fact-checkers judged to be false. But there's a catch: Tagging some stories as false makes readers more willing to believe other stories and share them with friends, even if those additional, untagged stories also turn out to be false.
Tasmania's ancient rainforest faces a grim future as a warming climate and the way people used the land have brought significant changes to the island state off mainland Australia's southeastern coast, according to a new Portland State University study.
The study holds lessons not only for Australia - whose wildfires have been dominating headlines in recent months - but for other areas of the world that are seeing drying conditions and increased risk of wildfires.
Scientists have been interested in superconductors - materials that transmit electricity without losing energy - for a long time because of their potential for advancing sustainable energy production. However, major advances have been limited because most materials that conduct electricity have to be very cold, anywhere from -425 to -171 degrees Fahrenheit, before they become superconductors.
Childhood malnutrition in India remains a major problem. A new study shows that the problem is concentrated in specific geographic areas, which could help policymakers working to address the issue.
Malnutrition is a huge problem in India, with one in five children underweight for their height and nearly two in five children suffering from stunting, which is caused by undernutrition. Although the country is working to address the issue, India lags behind other countries at similar levels of development.
In the past few decades, it was discovered that the rate at which we age is strongly influenced by biochemical processes that, at least in animal models, can be controlled in the laboratory. Telomere shortening is one of these processes; another one is the ability of cells to detect nutrients mediated by the mTOR protein. Researchers have been able to prolong life in many species by modifying either one of them. But what if we manipulate both? A team from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) now studied it for the first time, with unexpected results.
By studying the sick hearts removed from four patients undergoing heart transplants, researchers have identified a protein and a signaling pathway that may contribute to sudden death in an inherited form of heart disease.
Distributional semantics obtains representations of the meaning of words by processing thousands of texts and extracting generalizations using computational algorithms. Despite the popularity of distributional semantics in such fields as computational linguistics and cognitive science, its impact on theoretical linguistics has so far been very limited.
High blood pressure, inflammation, and the sensation of pain may rely in part on tiny holes on the surface of cells, called pores. Living cells react to the environment, often by allowing water and other molecules to pass through the cell's surface membrane. Protein-based pores control this flow.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 2, 2020--A new machine-learning computer model accurately predicts damaging radiation storms caused by the Van Allen belts two days prior to the storm, the most advanced notice to date, according to a new paper in the journal Space Weather.
Recent progress in theoretical mineral physics based on the ab initio quantum mechanical computation method has been dramatic in conjunction with the rapid advancement of computer technologies. It is now possible to predict stability, elasticity, and transport properties of complex minerals quantitatively with uncertainties that are comparable or even smaller than those attached in experimental data.
Chemical changes in the oceans more than 800 million years ago almost destroyed the oxygen-rich atmosphere that paved the way for complex life on Earth, new research suggests.
Then, as now, the planet had an "oxidizing" atmosphere, driven by phytoplankton - the "plants" of the ocean - releasing oxygen during photosynthesis.