Brain
At least 3.9 million early deaths are being averted worldwide every year by people being physically active, according to a new study published in The Lancet Global Health today by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh.
The team behind the study argue that too often we focus on the negative health consequences of poor levels of physical activity when we could be celebrating the achievements of physical activity.
As the body goes about its daily business, molecules called neurotransmitters control the level of electrical activity within the brain. Interacting with protein receptors nestled in the membrane that makes up the outer border of a neuron, neurotransmitters open and close portals that control the flow of ions in and out of the cell.
Quantum communication--where information is sent through particles, typically entangled photons--has the potential to become the ultimate secure communication channel. Not only is it nearly impossible to eavesdrop on quantum communication, those who try will also leave evidence of their indiscretions.
Human appetites have transformed the tomato - DNA and all. After centuries of breeding, what was once a South American berry roughly the size of a pea now takes all sorts of shapes and sizes, from cherry-like to hefty heirloom fruit.
Today, scientists are teasing out how these physical changes show up at the level of genes - work that could guide modern efforts to tweak the tomato, says Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Zachary Lippman.
UConn's Associate Dean for Research and Industrial Partnerships, S. Pamir Alpay, and Yomery Espinal '18 PhD (ENG) have published a paper on a novel portable pyroelectric technology in Cell Reports Physical Science with support from the Army Research Laboratory.
Pyroelectric energy research is focused on how to generate energy from heat that would otherwise be wasted in a catalytic chemical reaction.
A new study by the University of Leeds and University of Oxford has examined spatial biodiversity patterns across the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event. (c. 252 million years ago). The Permo-Triassic mass extinction represents the most catastrophic event in the last 500 million years of evolutionary history and caused the loss of up 95% of species because of a cocktail of volcanic effects including extreme greenhouse warming.
The Arctic Ocean will take up more CO2 over the 21st century than predicted by most climate models. This additional CO2 causes a distinctly stronger ocean acidification. These results were published in a study by climate scientists from the University of Bern and École normale supérieure in Paris. Ocean acidification threatens the life of calcifying organisms - such as mussels and "sea butterflies" - and can have serious consequences for the entire food chain.
We've all experienced turbulent air and water, but did you know light can be turbulent too?
Geoscientists at The University of Texas at Dallas recently used massive amounts of earthquake data and supercomputers to generate high-resolution, 3D images of the dynamic geological processes taking place far below the Earth's surface.
In a study published April 29 in Nature Communications, the UT Dallas research team described how it created images of mantle flows in a subduction region under Central America and the Caribbean Sea using a computationally intensive technique called a full waveform inversion (FWI).
A long-sought-after black phosphous-structured (BP) nitrogen was synthesized by an international team co-led by Dr. Ho-Kwang Mao and Dr. Huiyang Gou from the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR) and Prof. Yansun Yao from the University of Saskatchewan. This finding provides a firm base for exploring new type of high-energy-density nitrogen and a new direction of two-dimensional nitrogen.
A research team led by Dr Chaogu Zheng from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with a team led by Professor Martin Chalfie (2008 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) from the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, recently discovered an unexpected role of the heat shock proteins (HSPs), also known as the molecular chaperones, during neuronal differentiation, which refers to the process a neuron takes to acquire its shape and function. HSPs are mostly known to protect cells from various stresses, e.g.
By discovering a trick the hepatitis C virus uses to evade the immune system, scientists have identified a new antiviral defence system that could be used to treat many virus infections, according to new research published today in eLife.
While it's only about a 10-kilometer stretch, Juno Beach is home to one of the largest aggregations of nesting green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) in Florida and is one of the highest-density nesting beaches in the state. Although this high-profile turtle population has routinely been monitored for nest counts since 1989, an in-depth health assessment of these turtles has never been conducted.
Scientists at the University of Sydney have adapted techniques from autonomous vehicles and robotics to efficiently assess the performance of quantum devices, an important process to help stabilise the emerging technologies.
The innovative approach has been shown experimentally to outperform simplistic characterisation of these environments by a factor of three, with a much higher result for more complex simulated environments.
The bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) is a summer vegetable that graces the tables of many homes and restaurants in Asia. In Okinawa and Kyushu, the southern islands of Japan, the bitter gourds grow easily and have long been said to have many health benefits. The bitter gourds are packed with vitamin C, vitamin A, folate, minerals, carotenes and catechins. It is thought to ward off the feeling of sluggishness that can accompany the summer heat and humidity.