Culture
By late summer 2020, the resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States was largely driven by adults between the ages of 20 and 49, a new study finds. The results indicate that in locations where novel highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 lineages have not yet established, additional interventions among adults of these ages could bring resurgent COVID-19 epidemics under control and avert deaths.
Loess Plateau possesses a particular loess physiognomy with numerous ravines and slopes, and tableland is a typical landform in it. Together, the ununiform in both topographic undulation and land coverage compose the ununiform, complex underlying surface on Loess Plateau. This provides a special platform for research of turbulence above the complex underlying surface.
Residential gardens are a poor substitute for native bushland and increasing urbanisation is a growing threat when it comes to bees, Curtin University research has found.
Published in 'Urban Ecosystems', the research looked at bee visits to flowers, which form pollination networks across different native bushland and home garden habitats.
Researchers have shown how disposable face masks could be recycled to make roads, in a circular economy solution to pandemic-generated waste.
Their study shows that using the recycled face mask material to make just one kilometre of a two-lane road would use up about 3 million masks, preventing 93 tonnes of waste from going to landfill.
Developed by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the new road-making material is a mix of shredded single-use face masks and processed building rubble designed to meet civil engineering safety standards.
Optical waveguides suspended in air are capable to beat free-space laser beams in light-analyte interaction even without complex dispersion engineering. This phenomenon has been predicted more than 20 years ago, yet never observed in experiment.
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended many parts of daily life, one of them being our work life. Research carried out by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has studied the factors that help make efficient work teams. The explanation is multidimensional and multilevel.
"Inspiring leadership builds employees' resilience and willingness to undertake new challenges," said Pilar Ficapal Cusi, professor at the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business and one of the authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered the individual traits of fungi, and how their hyphae - that is, the fungal threads that grow in soil - behave very differently as they navigate through the earth's microscopic labyrinths.
A greater exposure to air pollution at the very start of life was associated with a detrimental effect on people's cognitive skills up to 60 years later, the research found.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh tested the general intelligence of more than 500 people aged approximately 70 years using a test they had all completed at the age of 11 years.
The participants then repeated the same test at the ages of 76 and 79 years.
To evaluate the chemical composition of food from a physiological point of view, it is important to know the functions of the receptors that interact with food ingredients. These include receptors for bitter compounds, which first evolved during evolution in bony fishes such as the coelacanth.
A process that releases iron in response to stress may contribute to heart failure, and blocking this process could be a way of protecting the heart, suggests a study in mice published today in eLife.
People with heart failure often have an iron deficiency, leading some scientists to suspect that problems with iron processing in the body may play a role in this condition. The study explains one way that iron processing may contribute to heart failure and suggests potential treatment approaches to protect the heart.
Trees are by far the tallest organisms on Earth. Height growth is made possible by a specialized vascular system that conducts water from the roots to the leaves with high efficiency, while simultaneously providing stability. The so-called xylem, also known as wood, is a network of hollow cells with extremely strong cell walls that reinforce the cells against the mechanical conflicts arising from growing tall. These walls wrap around the cells in filigree band and spiral patterns. So far, it is only partly known, how these patterns are created.
Scientists have identified a potential new treatment approach for Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS), a progressive genetic disorder that causes rapid and premature aging in children.
The findings in mice, published today in eLife, show that blocking a protein called ICMT can improve the condition of affected cells without reducing cell division and growth. ICMT is involved in modifying the structure of progerin, the mutant protein that causes HGPS.
Researchers have given new insights into why people would choose to donate Covid-19 plasma after recovering from the virus, which will be used to support the recruitment of convalescent plasma donors to help treat current Covid-19 patients and support ongoing trials.
The immune system can be a mixed blessing: Usually it is highly effective in protecting the human organism against bacteria, viruses and mycosis and even cancer. But these defense cells can also turn against the body's own tissues and trigger autoimmune diseases, including for example rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, an illness involving chronic dermatitis and inflammation of the joints, the nervous system and internal organs or even become cancer cells themselves and develop into leukemias or lymphomas. But what causes these destructive immune system attacks?
Raising kids can be tough, and sometimes you need all the help you can get. Biologists at the University of Bristol argue that some animals might be able to blackmail reluctant relatives into assisting with the rearing of young. The study is published today [2 February] in The American Naturalist.
In a Darwinian sense, family members are valuable as vehicles for shared genes. Whether helping evolves depends on a simple cost-benefit calculation known as 'Hamilton's rule': help if it will lead to a net increase in copies of your genes in the population.