Culture
The UK variant of SARS-CoV-2 spread rapidly in care homes in England in November and December last year, broadly reflecting its spread in the general population, according to a study by UCL researchers.
Lightning strikes were just as important as meteorites in creating the perfect conditions for life to emerge on Earth, geologists say.
Minerals delivered to Earth in meteorites more than 4 billion years ago have long been advocated as key ingredients for the development of life on our planet.
Scientists believed minimal amounts of these minerals were also brought to early Earth through billions of lightning strikes.
Nanozymes, a group of inorganic catalysis-efficient particles, have been proposed as promising antimicrobials against bacteria. They are efficient in killing bacteria, thanks to their production of reactive oxygen species (ROS).
Despite this advantage, nanozymes are generally toxic to both bacteria and mammalian cells, that is, they are also toxic to our own cells. This is mainly because of the intrinsic inability of ROS to distinguish bacteria from mammalian cells.
The bacterial equivalent of a traffic jam causes multilayered biofilms to form in the presence of antibiotics, shows a study published today in eLife.
The study reveals how the collective behaviour of bacterial colonies may contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance. These insights could pave the way to new approaches for treating bacterial infections that help thwart the emergence of resistance.
Philadelphia, March 16, 2021 - A significant proportion of hospitalized patients with influenza develop complications of acute respiratory distress syndrome, driven by virus-induced cytopathic effects as well as exaggerated host immune response. Reporting in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, investigators have found that treatment with an immune receptor blocker in combination with an antiviral agent markedly improves survival of mice infected with lethal influenza and reduces lung pathology in swine-influenza-infected piglets.
WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed a new intravascular imaging technique that could one day be used to detect coronary plaques that are likely to lead to a heart attack. Heart attacks are often triggered when an unstable plaque ruptures and then blocks a major artery that carries blood and oxygen to the heart.
Machine learning can be used to comb through online reviews of substance use treatment facilities to home in on qualities that are important to patients but remain hard to capture via formal means, such as surveys, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania show. The researchers found that professionalism and staff dedication to patients were two of the top qualities that could be attributed to either a negative or positive review of the facility. Findings from this study were published today in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- March 16, 2021 -- The findings of a recent analysis conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest that ecosystems suitable for harboring ticks that carry debilitating Lyme disease could be more widespread than previously thought in California, Oregon and Washington.
March 16, 2021, Mountain View, CA - In a comment published today in Nature Astronomy, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute, challenges assumptions about the possibility of modern life on Mars held by many in the scientific community.
Billions of years ago, the Red Planet was far more blue; according to evidence still found on the surface, abundant water flowed across Mars and forming pools, lakes, and deep oceans. The question, then, is where did all that water go?
The answer: nowhere. According to new research from Caltech and JPL, a significant portion of Mars's water--between 30 and 99 percent--is trapped within minerals in the planet's crust. The research challenges the current theory that the Red Planet's water escaped into space.
URBANA, Ill. - Corn didn't start out as the powerhouse crop it is today. No, for most of the thousands of years it was undergoing domestication and improvement, corn grew humbly within the limits of what the environment and smallholder farmers could provide.
For its fertilizer needs, early corn made friends with nitrogen-fixing soil microbes by leaking an enticing sugary cocktail from its roots. The genetic recipe for this cocktail was handed down from parent to offspring to ensure just the right microbes came out to play.
Corporate strategies should be as unique as possible, in fact highly specific to each individual company. This enables companies to compete successfully in the long term. However, the capital market and others, including analysts, often react negatively to the idea of unique strategies. The reason is that deviating from typical industry standards makes them more complex to evaluate. This regularly discourages companies from focusing on unique strategies, even though they would be beneficial for the company in the long term. This contradiction is known as the "uniqueness paradox".
(Vienna, March 17, 2021) When complex systems double in size, many of their parts do not. Characteristically, some aspects will grow by only about 80 percent, others by about 120 percent. The astonishing uniformity of these two growth rates is known as "scaling laws." Scaling laws are observed everywhere in the world, from biology to physical systems. They also apply to cities. Yet, while a multitude of examples show their presence, reasons for their emergence are still a matter of debate.
It has long been understood that a parent's DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father's lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome - heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.
March 16, 2021, PORT ST. LUCIE, FL: Researchers from Cleveland Clinic's Florida Research and Innovation Center (FRIC) have identified a potential new target for anti-COVID-19 therapies. Their findings were published in Nature Microbiology.
Led by FRIC scientific director Michaela Gack, Ph.D., the team discovered that a coronavirus enzyme called PLpro (papain-like protease) blocks the body's immune response to the infection. More research is necessary, but the findings suggest that therapeutics that inhibit the enzyme may help treat COVID-19.