Brain
The end-Permian mass extinction (EPME), approximately 252 million years ago (Ma), caused a serious marine and terrestrial ecosystem crisis, and about 75% of terrestrial biological species disappeared. How long did it take for terrestrial ecosystems to recover?
A research team led by Prof. WANG Bo from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) found that both lake and peat-forming forest ecosystems probably took as long as 10 million years to recover after the EPME. Results were published in Geology on March 30.
Australian Scientists have shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours.
Scientists from Monash University in Melbourne showed that a single dose of the drug, Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture - effectively eradicating all genetic material of the virus within 48 hours.
The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage - ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in the test tube are safe levels for humans.
Using a machine learning algorithm to analyze mouse facial expressions, Nejc Dolensek and colleagues have uncovered the neurological origins of emotional states. Their work "provides an objective analysis tool that is essential to be able to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotions, to identify species-specific emotions, and to identify their variability across individuals," say Benoit Girard and Camilla Bellone in a related Perspective. The neurobiological origins of emotions remain mysterious to researchers.
In a study published this week in Science, Université de Montreal researchers report key structural and biochemical differences among a class of anti-cancer drugs known as PARP inhibitors. These distinguishing differences were linked to differing capacities of PARP inhibitors to kill cancer cells. The research resolves a long-standing and perplexing quandary over differences between the effectiveness of PARP inhibitors used in cancer clinics.
Recent years have brought unusually large and damaging wildfires to the Pacific Northwest - from the Carlton Complex Fire in 2014 that was the largest in Washington's history, to the 2017 fire season in Oregon, to the 2018 Maple Fire, when normally sodden rainforests on the Olympic Peninsula were ablaze. Many people have wondered what this means for the region's future.
Over the past few decades, the critically endangered whooping crane (Grus Americana) has experienced considerable recovery. However, in a report appearing April 2 in the journal Heliyon, researchers found that habitat loss and within-species attraction have led whooping cranes to gather in unusually large groups during migration. While larger groups are a positive sign of species recovery, the authors say that these large groups mean that a disease outbreak or extreme weather event could inadvertently impact a substantial portion of this still fragile population.
In California, a changing climate has made autumn feel more like summer, with hotter, drier weather that increases the risk of longer, more dangerous wildfire seasons, according to a new Stanford-led study.
The paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, provides insights that could inform more effective risk mitigation, land management and resource allocation.
It's not too late to rescue global marine life, according to a study outlining the steps needed for marine ecosystems to recover from damage by 2050.
University of Queensland scientist Professor Catherine Lovelock said the study found many components of marine ecosystems could be rebuilt if we try harder to address the causes of their decline.
"People depend on the oceans and coastal ecosystems as a source of food, livelihoods, carbon capture and, thanks to coral reefs, mangroves and other coastal ecosystems, for protection from storms," Professor Lovelock said.
Learning from nature, scientists from the Center for Sustainable Resource Science in Japan and the Korean Basic Science Institute (KBSI) have found a catalyst that efficiently transforms nitrate into nitrite--an environmentally important reaction--without requiring high temperature or acidity, and now have identified the mechanism that makes this efficiency possible.
WASHINGTON--Female eggs exposed to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, have an impaired ability to produce viable embryos, and are significantly less likely to result in a viable pregnancy, according to an animal study accepted for presentation at ENDO 2020, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting. The abstract will be published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society.
An international study recently published in the journal Nature that was led by KAUST Professors Carlos Duarte and Susana Agustí lays out the essential roadmap of actions required for the planet's marine life to recover to full abundance by 2050.
In synchrotron radiation sources such as BESSY II, electron bunches orbit the storage ring at almost the speed of light. They are forced to emit extremely bright light pulses with special properties by periodic magnetic structures (undulators).
Every picture tells a story... none more so than this detailed visualisation of a strain of the norovirus.
Created from 13,000 separate images taken by an electron microscope, it reveals in rich detail the structure of the virus. It shows bump-like protrusions on the outside of the virus capsid, the protein shell that holds the genome of the virus.
Tsukuba, Japan - Metamorphosis, or a dramatic change in physical appearance, is a normal part of the life cycle of many animals, carried out to take advantage of different ecological niches. Yet the process of metamorphosis--how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, or a tadpole transforms into a frog--is not well understood and has only been studied in a small number of species.
Understanding the brain's many functions requires knowing its architecture. Polarized light imaging is a powerful method for characterizing the architecture of nerve fibers in the brain. Researchers have used tissue scattering to improve this imaging method and recreate an accurate three-dimensional image of brain connectivity, in particular nerve fiber crossings. Menzel et al. used biophysical models and experimental tests on a variety of post-mortem brain tissue samples. They found specific differences in how light traveled through tissue regions with different nerve fiber organizations.