Culture
The majority of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 appear to actively shed infectious virus for about 8 days, but there is a wide range of variability from person to person. Understanding how long people can remain actively infected is important, because it provides new details about a disease and a virus that are still not well understood and informs public health decisions.
Microbes and other microscopic organisms could serve as sustainable "factories" to create many types of industrial materials because they naturally convert nutrients such as sugars into byproducts. However, creating industrial amounts of organic acids from renewable resources poses a challenge, because not many organisms can grow in highly acidic environments. With the help of gene editing and computational modeling tools, a team of researchers explored one type of yeast that could survive in the harsh environment created by acidic products.
An earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or larger will almost always cause strong shaking, but a new study suggests that smaller earthquakes--those around magnitude 5.5 or so--are the cause of most occurrences of strong shaking at a 60-kilometer (37-mile) distance.
Small earthquakes are expected to produce relatively weak shaking, and for the most part that's true, said Sarah Minson of the U.S. Geological Survey. However, ground motion is highly variable, and there are always outlier earthquakes at every size that generate more shaking than expected.
On April 28, a supermagnetized stellar remnant known as a magnetar blasted out a simultaneous mix of X-ray and radio signals never observed before. The flare-up included the first fast radio burst (FRB) ever seen from within our Milky Way galaxy and shows that magnetars can produce these mysterious and powerful radio blasts previously only seen in other galaxies.
It is an experience we all share, as miraculous as it is mysterious. Birth.
Today, roughly one in three births in the United States occurs via cesarean section or C-section. In some other countries across the globe, like Brazil and Turkey, this percentage is even higher.
Yet little is known about how delivery by C-section affects an individual's long-term development.
Support staff and Black and Latinx hospital employees with and without patient care responsibilities are at highest risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection in health care settings, a Rutgers study found.
The very heart of inpatient care for psychiatric patients is socialization, group therapy, shared meals, and a standard two people per room. Then COVID-19 hit with the accompanying public health warnings to isolate, socially distance, and wear masks.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Nov. 4, 2020) -- For the first time, scientists have visualized a new class of molecular gates that maintain pH balance within brain cells, a critical function that keeps cells alive and helps prevent stroke and other brain injuries.
These gates, called proton-activated chloride channels (PAC), nest within cell membranes and regulate the passage of small molecules called chloride ions into and out of cells. This allows cells to sense and respond to their environment.
A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study sheds light on a protein key to controlling how cells grow, proliferate and function and long implicated in tumor development.
The findings, published this week in the journal Genes and Development, could lead not only to new therapies for hard-to-treat cancers, but also inform novel treatments for neurological diseases and rare developmental disorders, the authors say.
"These findings could have broad biomedical application," said lead author Dylan Taatjes, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry.
Despite extensive support for relationships between the gut microbiome and the brain (the "microbiota-gut-brain axis") in humans and rodents, little is known about these relationships in other animals, leaving questions about this system's generality.
The ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells depends on interactions between the viral spike protein and the human cell surface protein ACE2. To enable the virus to hook onto the cell surface, the spike protein binds ACE2 using three finger-like protrusions, called the receptor binding domains (RBDs). Blocking the RBDs therefore has the potential to stop the virus from entering human cells. This can be done using antibodies.
Nara, Japan - Mutants that reveal the secrets of how plants attack? No, it's not a scene from a science fiction movie, but you could be forgiven for thinking that. Instead, it's a scene from real life:
Researchers at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan report in a new study in Science Advances that parasitic plants use the plant hormone ethylene as a signal to invade the roots of host plants.
Fungus farming is a fascinating symbiosis that has evolved multiple times in social insects: once in ants, once in termites, and several times in weevils (beetles) from the subfamilies Scolytinae and Platypodinae. The behavior of these "ambrosia beetles" - over 3,000 species - is poorly known, because they live inside galleries in wood, making observation hard. Here, a study focuses for the first time on the division of labor within colonies of ambrosia beetles.
Vitamin D supplementation eased the symptoms experienced by children with severe atopic dermatitis, or eczema, in a recent randomized controlled trial published in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
Investigators reported on the results of 86 patients with the inflammatory skin condition who completed the trial and received either oral daily vitamin D or placebo, in addition to standard care, for 12 weeks.
Researchers from John Carroll University and University of Kansas published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that investigates how recipients respond to charities' pre-giving incentives to determine if they are worth the investment.
The study forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing is titled "Coins are Cold and Cards are Caring: The Effect of Pre-giving Incentives on Charity Perceptions, Relationship Norms and Donation Behavior" and is authored by Bingqing (Miranda) Yin, Yexin Jessica Li, Surendra Singh.