Culture
Our knowledge of Alzheimer's disease has grown rapidly in the past few decades but it has proven difficult to translate fundamental discoveries about the disease into new treatments. Now researchers at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis, have developed a model of the early stages of Alzheimer's disease in rhesus macaques. The macaque model, published March 18 in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association could allow better testing of new treatments.
Researchers from the University of Helsinki's Finnish Museum of Natural History Luomus and the National Museums of Kenya have discovered four lichen species new to science in the rainforests of the Taita Hills in southeast Kenya.
Micarea pumila, M. stellaris, M. taitensis and M. versicolor are small lichens that grow on bark of trees and on decaying wood. The species were described based on morphological features and DNA-characters.
Researchers from Arizona State University, New York University, and Northwestern University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines how marketers can fuel positive WOM without using explicit incentives.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "How Marketing Perks Influence Word of Mouth" and is authored by Monika Lisjak, Andrea Bonezzi, and Derek Rucker.
(MARCH 17, 2021) - The current outbreak of COVID-19 has raised many questions about the value of consideration of standardized testing through the admissions process. One of the many Coronavirus cancellations included a growing number of universities to waive SAT and ACT scores as an admissions requirement for 2022 applicants.
A new study by Novateur Ventures provides a comparative analysis of twelve COVID-19 Vaccines that had initiated or announced the Phase III clinical trial stage by early November 2020. The study highlights the early successes, as well as the hurdles and barriers yet to be overcome for ending the global COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 vaccines analyzed for the study
messenger RNA - Moderna and Pfizer/BioNtech
If you reach for water when a muscle cramp strikes, you might want to think again. New research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has revealed drinking electrolytes instead of pure water can help prevent muscle cramps.
The study, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, found that people who drank electrolyte enhanced water during and after exercise were less susceptible to muscle cramps than those who drank pure water.
Scientists are learning that a lesser-studied region on the pandemic coronavirus is recognized by COVID-19 infection-fighting antibodies. These antibodies were identified in blood samples from previously infected patients, and were found to potently prevent the virus from infecting cells.
Malting, the processing of cereal grains into malt, generates rootlets as a side-stream product, which is currently mostly utilised as animal feed. However, this leftover material has not only a high protein content, but also high amounts of phytochemicals, which makes it a highly potential source of development for the food industry, according to a recent study from the University of Eastern Finland, published in npj Science of Food.
Germination increased the amount of phytochemicals
The immense diversity in the living world and how it came into being has always been a subject of human enquiry. After centuries of playing detective in search of the basis of the parities and disparities that we see among living beings around us, the past century stood witness to some marvellous discoveries in biology and today the Central Dogma of life has been disclosed to us: DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein (a facile view of a much more complex sequence of events).
Prior infection with COVID-19 protects most people against reinfection, with 0.65% of patients returning a positive PCR test twice during Denmark's first and second waves, compared with 3.27% of people who tested positive after initially being negative.
People over the age of 65 are at greater risk of catching COVID-19 again, with only 47% protection against repeat infection compared with 80% for younger people.
Protection against reinfection remained stable for more than six months.
When it comes to adapting to new situations, goats are a step ahead. Compared to sheep, they can more quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions. These are the findings of a new study by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) which were published in Royal Society Open Science. The study investigated how well the animals were able to navigate around obstacles to reach food.
When it comes to the use of driverless vehicles, an individual's support for their adoption hinges on how safe they are, rather than their economic impact or privacy concerns stemming from the data they might collect, a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) study of 1,006 Singaporeans has found.
The collaborative work is published online in the journal Communications Biology on March 8th, 2021.
The power of photosynthesis
An international study led by the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) proposed new computational image processing methods that improve the analysis and three-dimensional reconstruction of biological macromolecules.
Powerful and squat stegosaurs are now one of the most recognisable dinosaurs: they are easily identified by the spines on the tail and the bony plates on the back - osteoderms. The representatives of this group lived about 165-125 million years ago, during the Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods. They were five to seven metres long and had a disproportionately small head. Their teeth were therefore quite small - about a centimetre in height and about the same in width.