Culture
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--June 28, 2021--While vaccines are doing a remarkable job of slowing the COVID-19 pandemic, infected people can still die from severe illness and new medications to treat them have been slow to arise. What kills these patients in the end doesn't seem to be the virus itself, but an over-reaction of their immune system that leads to massive inflammation and tissue damage.
The adult brain is more malleable than previously thought, according to researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. They trained a 50-year-old man, blind from birth, to "see" by ear, and found that neural circuits in his brain formed so-called topographic maps - a type of brain organization previously thought to emerge only in infancy.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In the late 1800s, scientists were stumped by the "yellow cells" they were observing within the tissues of certain temperate marine animals, including sea anemones, corals and jellyfish. Were these cells part of the animal or separate organisms? If separate, were they parasites or did they confer a benefit to the host?
Giving women in India's Madhya Pradesh state greater digital control over their wages encouraged them to enter the labor force and liberalized their beliefs about working women, concluded a new study co-authored by Yale economists Rohini Pande and Charity Troyer Moore.
Based on fossil finds, we know that the vast majority of species that once inhabited the earth have become extinct. For example, there are about 5,500 mammal species living on the planet today, but we know of at least 160,000 fossil species, so for every mammal species living today, there are at least 30 extinct ones. We therefore know with great certainty that the lineages of living things come and go along immense time scales. But what factors cause these lineages to come into being and disappear is still an unsolved question.
Boulder, Colo., USA: The Geological Society of America regularly publishes
articles online ahead of print. GSA Bulletin topics include
multiple articles about the dynamics of China and Tibet; the end-Permian
terrestrial extinction paradigm in South Africa; prehistoric lava flows
from the urban district of Catania (Etna volcano, Italy); the debated
origins of granite, and “a tale of two Tweefonteins.” You can find these
articles at
WILMINGTON, Del.
A study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators hints that people with COVID-19 may experience milder symptoms if certain cells of their immune systems "remember" previous encounters with seasonal coronaviruses -- the ones that cause about a quarter of the common colds kids get.
These immune cells are better equipped to mobilize quickly against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, if they've already met its gentler cousins, the scientists concluded.
In a new Editorial, Peter Heeger, Christian Larsen, and Dorry Segev discuss recent evidence - including a recent Science Immunology study by Hector Rincon-Arevalo and colleagues - that points to a diminished immune response to COVID-19 vaccines among organ transplant recipients and others on immunosuppressive drug regimens.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Research by investigators at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center suggests that physicians should screen patients with lung cancer for MET amplification/overexpression before determining a treatment strategy. Their findings are published Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
A key factor in America's prodigious agricultural output turns out to be something farmers can do little to control: clean air. A new Stanford-led study estimates pollution reductions between 1999 and 2019 contributed to about 20 percent of the increase in corn and soybean yield gains during that period - an amount worth about $5 billion per year.
The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades, up to nearly half a million people worldwide.
There are, however, far fewer “supercentenarians,” people who live to age 110 or even longer. The oldest living person, Jeanne Calment of France, was 122 when she died in 1997; currently, the world’s oldest person is 118-year-old Kane Tanaka of Japan.
In Canada, low-income hospital patients under palliative care are less likely to receive medical assistance in dying compared to those who are high income, according to a study published in British Medical Journal Open (BMJ Open).
Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is legal and free under Medicare, Canada's universal health care system. Patients with low socioeconomic status (SES), however, generally tend to experience less access to medical care compared to their high SES counterparts.
LA JOLLA, CA--Researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have found that T cells from people who have recovered from COVID-19 or received the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are still able to recognize several concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Minority-ethnic medical students must have more role-models in senior leadership positions if they are to engage with academia. This is one of the conclusions drawn by a group of medical students writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine about the drivers and barriers to engaging with academia.