Culture
HOUSTON – (March 25, 2021) – One of nature’s most prolific cannibals could be hiding in your pantry, and biologists have used it to show how social structure affects the evolution of selfish behavior.
Fish oil supplements are a billion-dollar industry built on a foundation of purported, but not proven, health benefits. Now, new research from a team led by a University of Georgia scientist indicates that taking fish oil only provides health benefits if you have the right genetic makeup.
The study, led by Kaixiong Ye and published in PLOS Genetics, focused on fish oil (and the omega-3 fatty acids it contains) and its effect on triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood and a biomarker for cardiovascular disease.
Influenza vaccines need to be evaluated every year to ensure they remain effective against new influenza viruses. Will the same apply to COVID-19 vaccines? In order to gauge whether and to what extent this may be necessary, a team of researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin compared the evolution of endemic 'common cold' coronaviruses with that of influenza viruses. The researchers predict that, while the pandemic is ongoing, vaccines will need to undergo regular updates. A few years into the post-pandemic period, however, vaccines are likely to remain effective for longer.
Alzheimer's disease seems to progress faster in women than in men. The protein tau accumulates at a higher rate in women, according to research from Lund University in Sweden. The study was recently published in Brain.
Over 30 million people suffer from Alzheimer's disease worldwide, making it the most common form of dementia. Tau and beta-amyloid are two proteins known to aggregate and accumulate in the brain in patients with Alzheimer's.
How different are men and women's brains? The question has been explored for decades, but a new study led by Rosalind Franklin University neuroscientist Lise Eliot is the first to coalesce this wide-ranging research into a single mega-synthesis. And the answer is: hardly at all.
TROY, N.Y. -- Outsourcing routine tasks, like payroll, customer service, and accounting, offers well-known benefits to businesses and contributes to an economy in which entrepreneurial vendors can support industry and expand employment. However, new research from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered that not all client-vendor relationships are beneficial for the vendors.
Researchers have developed experimental flu shots that protect animals from a wide variety of seasonal and pandemic influenza strains. The vaccine product is currently being advanced toward clinical testing. If proven safe and effective, these next-generation influenza vaccines may replace current seasonal options by providing protection against many more strains that current vaccines do not adequately cover.
Female adult sockeye from the Fraser River are dying at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts on the journey back to their spawning grounds, finds new UBC research. For every male salmon that doesn't make it to their natal stream, at least two, sometimes three female salmon die.
Three-dimensional or "volumetric" images are widely used in medical imaging. These images faithfully represent the 3D spatial relationships present in the body. Yet 3D images are typically displayed on a two-dimensional monitor, which creates a dimensionality mismatch that must be resolved in a clinical setting where practitioners must search a 2D or a 3D image to find a particular trait or target of interest.
The more nitrate there is in mothers' drinking water, the smaller the babies they give birth to. But alarmingly, the declining birth weight can also be registered when the women are exposed to nitrate levels below the EU's threshold of 50 milligrams of nitrate per litre.
Sickle cell disease is the most prevalent inherited blood disorder in the world, affecting 70,000 to 100,000 Americans. However, it is considered an orphan disease, meaning it impacts less than 200,000 people nationally, and is therefore underrepresented in therapeutic research.
A team led by Abhishek Jain from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University is working to address this disease.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, arrived one year ago and turned our lives upside-down.
While worldwide vaccination programs are currently ongoing, we do not yet know for how long the vaccine will provide immune protection against infection, and if the currently approved vaccines can provide protection against the emerging virus variants.
In addition, it appears that vaccines cannot prevent illness for people who have already been infected. In contrast to vaccines, there are currently no effective drugs that act against the virus SARS-CoV-2.
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, a multinational team of over 300 scientists including two astrophysicists from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University), has revealed today a new view of the massive object at the centre of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarised light.
AMHERST, Mass. - An international team of astronomers, including University of Massachusetts Amherst professors Gopal Narayanan and Peter Schloerb, has just revealed a new view of the massive black hole at the center of a galaxy located 55 million light-years away, known as the M87 galaxy. This new image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, shows how M87 looks in polarized light, and is published today in two papers appearing in The Astrophysical Journal (links here and here).
Rich false memories of autobiographical events can be planted - and then reversed, a new paper has found.
The study highlights - for the first time - techniques that can correct false recollections without damaging true memories. It is published by researchers from the University of Portsmouth, UK, and the Universities of Hagen and Mainz, Germany.