Culture
With almost every aspect of their biology and anatomy adapted to their specialized parasitic lifestyle, fleas have long troubled evolutionary biologists. Their early evolution and position on the insect tree of life remained a mystery even after the first flea genomes were sequenced over the last decade.
Now, however, researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and the University of Bristol in the UK have solved this long-standing evolutionary riddle.
CHICAGO (December 21, 2020): A virtual telehealth platform is allowing the surgery program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) to evaluate and wait-list patients for kidney transplantation despite reductions in direct, in-person health care visits brought about by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel...December 21, 2020 - The identification of people wearing masks has often presented a unique challenge during the pandemic. A new study by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel and York University in Canada reveals the impact of this predicament and its potentially significant repercussions.
The findings were just published in the journal Scientific Reports.
A prehistoric croc measuring more than five metres long - dubbed the 'swamp king' - ruled south eastern Queensland waterways only a few million years ago.
University of Queensland researchers identified the new species of prehistoric croc - which they named Paludirex vincenti - from fossils first unearthed in the 1980s.
UQ PhD candidate Jorgo Ristevski, from UQ's School of Biological Sciences, said they named the species after Geoff Vincent who discovered the giant fossilised skull near the town of Chinchilla.
Hospital in-patients from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to receive prompt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after their hearts stop beating and less likely to survive than patients from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
A study of more than 1,400 protein-coding genes of fleas has resolved one of the longest standing mysteries in the evolution of insects, reordering their placement in the tree of life and pinpointing who their closest relatives are.
Lower rates of hospital attendance for urgent heart problems during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may have contributed to avoidable deaths in England, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, a marked decline* in patient visits to Emergency Departments (EDs) was observed in England and the US, including for people with heart problems.
For the first time, researchers have provided physiological evidence that a pervasive neuromodulation system - a group of neurons that regulate the functioning of more specialized neurons - strongly influences sound processing in an important auditory region of the brain. The neuromodulator, acetylcholine, may even help the main auditory brain circuitry distinguish speech from noise.
DURHAM, N.C. - Mechanical engineers at Duke University have devised a method for spinning individual droplets of liquid to concentrate and separate nanoparticles for biomedical purposes. The technique is much more efficient than traditional centrifuge approaches, working its magic in under a minute instead of taking hours or days, and requires only a tiny fraction of the typical sample size. The invention could underline new approaches to applications ranging from precision bioassays to cancer diagnosis.
The results appear online on December 18 in the journal Science Advances.
December 18, 2020--(BRONX, NY)--People hospitalized with COVID-19 and neurological problems including stroke and confusion, have a higher risk of dying than other COVID-19 patients, according to a study published online today by researchers at Montefiore Health System and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the journal Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
A group of more than 300 leading scientists across the globe are calling for European governments to work together in managing the pandemic and make a clear commitment to COVID-19 case number targets.
The letter, co-authored by Dr Deepti Gurdasani from Queen Mary University of London and coordinated by Viola Priesemann from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, is published today in The Lancet.
There is light at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic tunnel. Several vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 are now in clinical trials, with one — developed by Pfizer/BioNTech — already having been approved for emergency use in the United States. This has been the fastest development and rollout of any vaccine in history, starting with the first gene sequence released in January. (The previous record was held by the mumps vaccine, which took four years.)
Land ecosystems currently play a key role in mitigating climate change. The more carbon dioxide (CO2) plants and trees absorb during photosynthesis, the process they use to make food, the less CO2 remains trapped in the atmosphere where it can cause temperatures to rise. But scientists have identified an unsettling trend - as levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase, 86 percent of land ecosystems globally are becoming progressively less efficient at absorbing it.
- A University of Sheffield-led research programme finds Local Authorities and the Voluntary and Community Sector are best placed to support the response to the Covid-19 crisis locally
Mobilising Volunteers Effectively found local initiatives are best placed to identify and mobilise volunteers
Thousands of members of the public have volunteered, helping their neighbours to stay fed, safe and connected
As Chile and Argentina witnessed the total solar eclipse on Dec. 14, 2020, unbeknownst to skywatchers, a little tiny speck was flying past the Sun -- a recently discovered comet.
This comet was first spotted in satellite data by Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod on the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project -- a citizen science project that invites anyone to search for and discover new comets in images from the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO.