Culture
When it comes to water and Mars, there's good news and not-so-good news. The good news: there's water on Mars! The not-so-good news?
There's water on Mars.
The Red Planet is very cold; water that isn't frozen is almost certainly full of salt from the Martian soil, which lowers its freezing temperature.
You can't drink salty water, and the usual method using electricity (electrolysis) to break it down into oxygen (to breathe) and hydrogen (for fuel) requires removing the salt; a cumbersome, costly endeavor in a harsh, dangerous environment.
Hydrothermally-active submarine volcanoes account for much of Earth's volcanism and are mineral-rich biological hotspots, yet very little is known about the dynamics of microbial diversity in these systems. This week in PNAS, Reysenbach and colleagues, show that at one such volcano, Brothers submarine arc volcano, NE of New Zealand, the geological history and subsurface hydrothermal fluid paths testify to the complexity of microbial composition on the seafloor, and also provide insights into how past and present subsurface processes could be imprinted in the microbial diversity.
A plant-based diet boosts after-meal burn, leads to weight loss, and improves cardiometabolic risk factors in overweight individuals, according to a new randomized control trial published in JAMA Network Open by researchers with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
November 30, 2020 - For men with early-stage prostate cancer, choices about initial treatment carry varying risks of "financial toxicity," reports a study in The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA).
The recent serious outbreak of Covid19 has affected (November 13, 2020) 53,796,098 people worldwide, resulting in 37,555,669 recovered, 1,310,250 deaths (Figure 1), and a large number of open cases. It has required urgent medical treatments for numerous patients. No clinically active vaccines or antiviral agents are available for Covid19. According to several studies, Chloroquine (CQ) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) have shown promises as Covid19 antiviral especially when administered with Azithromycin (AZM). However, there is significant controversy.
Achieving universal access to healthcare is a key development priority and a major target of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 3. The COVID-19 pandemic has only reinforced this urge. A rapid development and expansion of public, affordable healthcare infrastructure is particularly crucial in sub-Saharan Africa. In the region, communicable diseases are the first cause of death, infant mortality rates are above five percent, and lengthy journeys to healthcare facilities undermine the accessibility to basic healthcare for millions.
Results of a new five-year study of recycled concrete show that it performs as well, and in several cases even better, than conventional concrete.
Researchers at UBC Okanagan's School of Engineering conducted side-by-side comparisons of recycled and conventional concrete within two common applications--a building foundation and a municipal sidewalk. They found that the recycled concrete had comparable strength and durability after five years of being in service.
Researchers from the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) working with Silicon Quantum Computing (SQC) have located the 'sweet spot' for positioning qubits in silicon to scale up atom-based quantum processors.
Creating quantum bits, or qubits, by precisely placing phosphorus atoms in silicon - the method pioneered by CQC2T Director Professor Michelle Simmons - is a world-leading approach in the development of a silicon quantum computer.
WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- Octopuses have the most flexible appendages known in nature, according to a new study in Scientific Reports. In addition to being soft and strong, each of the animal's eight arms can bend, twist, elongate and shorten in many combinations to produce diverse movements. But to what extent can they do so, and is each arm equally capable?
Early populations shifted from quasi-egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to communities governed by a centralized authority in the middle to late Holocene, but how the transition occurred still puzzles anthropologists. A University of Maine-led group of researchers contend that population size and density served as crucial drivers.
Anthropology professor Paul "Jim" Roscoe led the development of Power Theory, a model emphasizing the role of demography in political centralization, and applied it to the shift in power dynamics in prehistoric northern coastal societies in Peru.
The COVID-19 pandemic could result in net losses from $3.2 trillion and up to $4.8 trillion in U.S. Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the course of two years, a new USC study finds.
Does poverty cause lying? An international research team led by behavioral economist Agne Kajackaite from the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Suparee Boonmanunt (Mahidol University, Bangkok) and Stephan Meier (Columbia Business School) examined whether poverty-stricken individuals were especially prone to acts of dishonesty. The researchers ran a field experiment with rice farmers in Thailand which incentivized cheating during a card game. They found that poverty itself did not cause individuals to act dishonestly.
LAWRENCE -- Researchers from the University of Kansas have described a galaxy more than 5.25 billion light years away undergoing a rarely seen stage in its galactic life cycle. Their findings recently were published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The galaxy, dubbed CQ 4479, shows characteristics that normally don't coexist: an X-ray luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) and a cold gas supply fueling high star formation rates.
When the famous Spanish physician Santiago Ramón y Cajal looked through his microscope in 1910, he discovered irregular and "transparent lumps" that appeared throughout the nucleus of a neuron. What these nuclear speckles are all about is still largely unclear, even though the biological and medical sciences have experienced several revolutions since then. "Even though we know quite a bit about their function, we didn't know how nuclear speckles originate, i.e. what their core consists of," says Tuçe Akta from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics.
Men with muscles like a young Arnold Schwarzenegger look powerful but a handshake will give away whether they're a healthy specimen - or at risk of a chronic disease or premature ageing, experts say.
Medical researchers in South Australia, led by respiratory and sleep expert Professor Robert Adams, assessed more than 600 men aged over 40 to 88 years in the Men, Androgen, Inflammation, Lifestyle, Environment, and Stress (MAILES) study to measure the link between sleep apnea and muscle mass with grip strength.