Culture
The Fraser River estuary in British Columbia is home to 102 species at risk of extinction. A new study says it's not too late to save these species if action is taken now.
"There is currently no overarching plan to save them. If we don't act quickly, many species, including species of salmon and southern resident killer whales, are likely to be functionally extinct in the next 25 years," says senior author Tara Martin, a professor of conservation science at UBC, in a paper published today in Conservation Science and Practice.
Having conducted a large-scale study, a team of scientists improved the classification of human diurnal activity and suggested using 6 chronotypes instead of just 'early birds' and 'night owls'. Two thousand participants, including the employees of the Institute of Medicine of RUDN University, were tested in the course of the research. The results of the work were published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal.
An international study led from the University of Turku, Finland, discovered phosphorus and fluorine in solid dust particles collected from a comet. The finding indicates that all the most important elements necessary for life may have been delivered to the Earth by comets.
Researchers have discovered phosphorus and fluorine in solid dust particles collected from the inner coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It takes the comet 6.5 years to orbit the Sun.
In new research presented at Euroanaesthesia (the annual meeting of the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care [ESAIC]), doctors report a highly unusual case of a right-handed patient performing unconscious 'mirror-writing' with her left hand while in the midst of having epileptic seizures in the emergency room. The study is by Dr Laura Freitas and Dr Sofia R. de Valdoleiros, Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto, Portugal, and colleagues.
People borrowing money for the first time should only be given small amounts until they have proved their competence, a new study says.
The paper argues that new borrowers - especially young people and those of an "impulsive" disposition - need protection to prevent them falling into long-term debt.
It says lenders should have a duty of care, requiring them to consider age, experience and personality traits, which can be detected by psychometric tests.
Decreases in hospital attendances and admissions amid fears of COVID-19 may result in avoidable harm for under 16s say researchers, who warn against the "unintended consequences of pandemic control measures".
Research led by Dr Rachel Isba from Lancaster University, Dr Rachel Jenner from Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, and Dr Marc Auerbach from Yale University analysed attendances and admissions to Paediatric Emergency Departments (PED) at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital in the UK and Yale New Haven Children's Hospital in the US.
Jena, Germany (27.11.2020) Antibiotics work in different ways. Some, including penicillin, attack the cell wall of the bacteria by inhibiting their synthesis. But the bacteria are not helpless against this attack. "We have been able to identify a small ribonucleic acid that has a decisive influence on the antibiotic-resistance of the cholera-triggering bacterium Vibrio cholerae," says Kai Papenfort, Professor of General Microbiology at the University of Jena, Germany.
A new sensing method has made tracking movement easier and more efficient. A research group from Tohoku University has captured dexterous 3D motion data from a flexible magnetic flux sensor array, using deep learning and a structure-aware temporal bilateral filter.
"We can now track complex motions with higher accuracy," said Yoshifumi Kitamura, co-author of the study.
The pilot project aims to examine the costs and benefits of avoided crises - so-called "non-events" - in the domain of consumer health protection from an economic and psychological point of view, and will begin in January 2021. The project will also analyse whether and how cost-benefit considerations can be used in communication with different participants in risk communication and reputation management. For this reason, BfR President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel and HSU President Professor Dr. Klaus Beckmann signed a cooperation agreement yesterday.
In a ground-breaking new study, scientists used innovative molecular techniques to explain how corals on the east coast of Australia survived previous tough conditions--enabling the Great Barrier Reef to become the vast reef it is today.
"We sequenced the genomes of 150 individual colonies of the same species of corals and used this to find out which genes are important for survival in inshore reefs," said the study's lead author Dr Ira Cooke from James Cook University.
In the field of economics, the concept of a market economy is largely considered a modern phenomenon. Influential economists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, for example, argued that although markets existed in antiquity, economies in which structures of production and distribution responded to the laws of supply and demand developed only as recently as the 19th century.
An international collaboration between researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Oxford University, and University of Sheffield has revealed that colonies of slow moving bacteria can expand significantly quicker than their fast moving counterparts. The result is now published in Nature Physics.
Nearly one million people in the UK have dementia. People living with the most common form, Alzheimer's disease, can experience difficulties working out where they are, meaning they often get lost even in familiar environments. Today (Friday 27 November) research funded by Alzheimer's Research UK at the University of Exeter Medical School sheds new light about why this might happen.
An urgent rethink of infection control policies to keep COVID-19 infection at bay in schools is needed if primary schools are to be kept open this winter, and the knock-on effects on their families avoided, argue children's infectious disease specialists in a viewpoint, published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
The blanket policy currently deployed for children of all ages is not evidence based and is too restrictive and inflexible, significantly disadvantaging primary school children and their families, they say.
Inside every cell, thousands of different proteins form the machinery that keeps all living things - from humans and plants to microscopic bacteria - alive and well. Almost all diseases, including cancer, dementia and even infectious diseases such as COVID-19, are related to the way these proteins function. Because each protein's function is directly related to its three-dimensional shape, scientists around the world have strived for half a century to find an accurate and fast method to enable them to discover the shape of any protein.