Culture
Winter survival of honey bee colonies is strongly influenced by summer temperatures and precipitation in the prior year, according to Penn State researchers, who said their findings suggest that honey bees have a "goldilocks" preferred range of summer conditions outside of which their probability of surviving the winter falls.
Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are now known to negatively control plasmid replication, according to Thomas Wood, Biotechnology Endowed Chair and professor of chemical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering.
Plasmids, or extra-chromosomal bits of DNA, allow bacteria to evade antibiotics, making the antibiotics ineffective in halting a bacterial infection.
The presence or absence of plasmids impacts a bacterium's resistance to antibiotics and its ability to cause infection -- important points related to fighting bacterial infections, according to Wood.
Imagine a rubber band that was capable of snapping itself many times over, or a small robot that could jump up a set of stairs propelled by nothing more than its own energy. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. The discovery may prove useful for various industries that want to source movement sustainably, from toys to robotics, and is expected to further inform our understanding of how the natural world fuels some types of movement.
Obesity and its duration are significant risk factors for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular events, multiple cancers and decreased quality of life. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity affects 20.6% of adolescents ages 12-19 in the United States, meaning a potential lifetime of dealing with this condition. Complications from obesity can also result in a potentially decreased life expectancy of five to 20 years for these youth.
Risk for a severe form of retinopathy of prematurity, which can cause blindness in extremely premature babies, was halved when the newborns were given a new supplement combining various fatty acids. This was shown in a Swedish study led from the University of Gothenburg.
Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behaviour from a 'radio-loud' magnetar--a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the Universe.
Their new findings, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), suggest magnetars have more complex magnetic fields than previously thought - which may challenge theories of how they are born and evolve over time.
Oak Brook, IL - The February edition of SLAS Discovery is a Special Issue on Hit Discovery Methodologies edited by Mark Wigglesworth, Ph.D., (Medicines Discovery Catapult, Stockport, EN, UK) and Peter Hodder, Ph.D. (Amgen, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA).
The focus of this Special Issue is to highlight the use of hit discovery methodologies and technologies and their usage in both small molecule and large molecule drug discovery. The February issue exemplifies how technologies, both new and existing, have been applied successfully to find hits.
The complex mechanics determining how galaxies spin, grow, cluster and die have been revealed following the release of all the data gathered during a massive seven-year Australian-led astronomy research project.
The scientists observed 13 galaxies at a time, building to a total of 3068, using a custom-built instrument called the Sydney-AAO Multi-Object Integral-Field Spectrograph (SAMI), connected to the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. The telescope is operated by the Australian National University.
A combination of genetic mutations may explain the higher incidence of and poorer outcomes from pediatric leukemia in Hispanic and Latino children, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They said a novel therapeutic drug combination - as well as testing for these mutations - may help address the disparity.
Hormone therapy commonly is given as a targeted treatment for women whose cancer cells carry receptors for estrogen. But the therapy only works for about half of all patients. Until now, there hasn't been a good way to reliably predict who will benefit and who will not.
Temperature rise due to climate change has negatively affected labour productivity in the past decades and will keep damaging it, potentially at a higher extent than what has been estimated in the literature up to now. In South Africa, a future scenario with severe climate change will feature a reduction of per capita GDP of up to 20% by the end of the century, compared to an idealized future without the impacts of a changing climate.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored "digital characters" to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Barker hypothesis (Hales and Barker 1992) (also referred to as "small baby syndrome"), infants with too low body weight have an increased risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic kidney diseases in adulthood. According to this hypothesis, fetal protective mechanisms enable adaptation to unfavorable intrauterine conditions (chronic oxygen or nutrient deficiency) and allow for fetal survival. At the same time, however, they lead to permanent structural and functional strains and changes into adulthood.
Boston, Mass. - COVID-19 has caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide since the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Patients with severe COVID-19 frequently experience respiratory distress and require assistance breathing. For patients whose lungs are so injured that even a ventilator is unable to deliver enough oxygen, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) -- which does the work of the lungs by removing carbon dioxide and adding oxygen to blood outside the body -- may improve the odds of survival for certain patients with severe COVID-19.
Over the last three decades, the United States prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million. More than 1.1 million are African American men - the vast number of whom have returned within one to three years of their release. In fact, according to the World Prison Brief, America boasts the highest recidivism rate at more than 50 percent.