Culture
You've heard of Old Faithful, the Yellowstone National Park geyser that erupts every hour or two, a geological phenomenon on a nearly predictable schedule.
Now, an international group of scientists who study space have discovered an astronomical "Old Faithful" - an eruption of light flashing about once every 114 days on a nearly predictable schedule. The researchers believe it is a tidal disruption event, a phenomenon that happens when a star gets so close to a black hole that the black hole "rips" away pieces of the star, causing the flare.
Researchers have found a simple way to eliminate almost all sequencing errors produced by a widely used portable DNA sequencer, potentially enabling scientists working outside the lab to study and track microorganisms like the SARS-CoV-2 virus more efficiently.
Using special molecular tags, the team was able to reduce the five-to-15 per cent error rate of Oxford Nanopore Technologies' MinION device to less than 0.005 per cent -- even when sequencing many long stretches of DNA at a time.
Scientists have used gene-editing advances to achieve a tenfold increase in the production of super-bug targeting formicamycin antibiotics.
The John Innes Centre researchers used the technology to create a new strain of Streptomyces formicae bacteria which over-produces the medically promising molecules.
Discovered within the last ten years, formicamycins have great potential because, under laboratory conditions, superbugs like MRSA do not become resistant to them.
ITHACA, NY - Invasive round goby fish have impacted fisheries in the Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes by competing with native species and eating the eggs of some species of game fish.
But the camouflaged bottom dwellers can be difficult to find and collect - especially when they first enter a new body of water and their numbers are low and they might be easier to remove.
In a large population-based family study, family history of kidney disease was strongly associated with increased risk of chronic kidney disease.
Acknowledging that COVID-19 may be here to stay, Oregon Health & Science University has laid out a series of steps to prepare patients for elective surgery following their illness.
The evaluation, outlined in a commentary published in the journal Perioperative Medicine, is believed to be the first published protocol laying out a COVID-era path forward in American medicine.
Study published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases (AJKD) projects that prevalence of patients receiving dialysis in China will increase from 384.4 patients per million (PPM) in 2017 to 629.7 PMP in 2025 with a predicted 874,373 patients receiving dialysis in 2025.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in collaboration with Dutch scientists, have found that certain metabolites -- small molecules produced by the process of metabolism -- may be predictive indicators for persons at risk for recurrent major depressive disorder.
The findings were published in the January 11, 2021 online issue of Translational Psychiatry.
The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, observed just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers with insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The result was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants' curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, such as asking questions, playing trivia games, and gossiping. However, such methods focus on quantifying a person's curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed.
Crowdsourced Responses from Dermatologists on Twitter Found to be as Effective as Formal Telemedicine
A recent statewide survey of Californians uncovered that 30% of Black adults and 13% of Hispanic adults felt that they have been judged or treated differently by a health care provider because of their race/ethnicity or language. One out of six Black and Latino Californians were more likely to report strong mistrust of their health care providers. Researchers at the Charles R.
Traditional gendered patterns of child care persisted during the COVID-19 shutdown, with more than a third of couples relying on women to provide most or all of it, according to a study from University of Georgia researcher Kristen Shockley.
Some previous research has found that typical familial patterns may get upended during crises, but that's not what Shockley and her colleagues found in the early months of the COVID-19 shutdown.
A rapid, evidence-based review summarizes the effectiveness of cloth masks in protecting health care clinicians from respiratory viral infections, such as COVID-19. Nine studies were included in the review, and all but one were conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The only randomized trial of cloth face masks published at the time of this review compared the infection rates of influenza-like illness among groups of health care professionals who wore cloth masks, medical masks, or inconsistent mask use in the hospital setting.
Despite having some of the densest living spaces and the highest number of international visitors, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing have utilized their respective primary health care systems to keep their COVID-19 cases and deaths relatively low. Researchers studied the primary health care systems in the three cities to identify features of each system that other cities can use as examples to prepare for and prevent deaths in future health crises.