Culture
Vitamin D is a critical nutrient and has many important functions in the body. A mother’s vitamin D supply is passed to her baby in utero and helps regulate processes including brain development.
Predicting influenza outbreaks just got a little easier, thanks to a new A.I.-powered forecasting tool developed by researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology.
By incorporating location data, the A.I. system is able to outperform other state-of-the-art forecasting methods, delivering up to an 11% increase in accuracy and predicting influenza outbreaks up to 15 weeks in advance.
A new study led by the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) revealed that diversity in Hawaiian corals is likely driven by co-evolution between the coral host, the algal symbiont, and the microbial community.
VANCOUVER, Wash. - Reports of racial discrimination against Asians and Asian-Americans have increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, coinciding with an increase in reported negative health symptoms.
That's according to a new paper written by Washington State University researchers recently published in the journal Stigma and Health.
At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there were high hopes that hot summer temperatures could reduce its spread. Although summer didn't bring widespread relief, the connection between the weather and COVID-19 continues to be a hot topic.
The link between weather and COVID-19 is complicated. Weather influences the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before infecting a new host. But it also influences human behavior, which moves the virus from one host to another.
DES PLAINES, IL -- A study published in the most recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), journal showed an increased risk of restraint use in Black patients compared with white patients in the emergency setting. The risk was not increased in other races or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.
AUSTIN, Texas -- A new type of soil created by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reducing water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts.
TORONTO, ON - The era of COVID-19 and the need to constantly wash one's hands and sanitize things have brought microbes to new levels of scrutiny, particularly for their impact on an individual's health.
While associations between microbes and their hosts, from the beneficial - think probiotics in yogurt - to the harmful - such as with viruses spread by touch - have long been known, little is known about how microbes evolve and how their evolution affects the health of their hosts.
North America's beloved Monarch butterflies are known for their annual, multi-generation migrations in which individual insects can fly for thousands of miles. But Monarchs have also settled in some locations where their favorite food plants grow year round, so they no longer need to migrate.
Today, the imminent climate change crisis demands a shift from conventionally used fossil fuels to efficient sources of green energy. This has led to researchers looking into the concept of "personalized energy," which would make on-site energy generation possible. For example, solar cells could possibly be integrated into windows, vehicles, cellphone screens, and other everyday products. But for this, it is important for the solar panels to be handy and transparent.
PITTSBURGH, Nov. 2, 2020 - University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists have discovered the fastest way to identify potent, neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The method--as well as a trio of successful animal studies on an antibody called "Ab1"--are described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ab1 is on track for human clinical trials by early next year.
Global warming of 2°C would lead to about 230 billion tonnes of carbon being released from the world's soil, new research suggests.
Global soils contain two to three times more carbon than the atmosphere, and higher temperatures speed up decomposition - reducing the amount of time carbon spends in the soil (known as "soil carbon turnover").
The new international research study, led by the University of Exeter, reveals the sensitivity of soil carbon turnover to global warming and subsequently halves uncertainty about this in future climate change projections.
Why do most viral epidemics spread cyclically in autumn and winter in the globe's temperate regions? According to an interdisciplinary team of researchers of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, the University of Milan, the Lombardy regional agency for the environment and the Don Gnocchi Foundation, the answer is intimately related to our Sun: their theoretical model shows that both the prevalence and evolution of epidemics are strongly correlated with the amount of daily solar irradiation that hits a given location on the Earth at a given time of the year.
Everything you ever really needed to know you learned back in kindergarten - that old saying gets some scientific support in a new study by researchers at Canada's Université de Montréal and Université Sainte-Anne.
"We've known for years that getting off to a good start in kindergarten leads to better achievement over the long-term," said lead author Caroline Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor of psychology at USA, in Nova Scotia.
Scientists from an international group led by the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences and Yokohama City University have discovered that a pair of proteins play a key role in allowing an important type of functional non-coding RNA, known as SINEUPs, to act to promote their target messenger RNA.SINEUPs are a recently discovered type of RNA that work specifically to amplify the production of proteins by messenger RNAs, and hence could be important for developing therapeutics for diseases where a certain protein is insufficiently synthesized.