Culture
Ants are one of the most successful groups of animals on the planet, occupying anywhere from temperate soil to tropical rainforests, desert dunes and kitchen counters. They're social insects and their team-working abilities have long since been identified as one of the key factors leading to their success. Ants are famously able to lift or drag objects many times their own weight and transport these objects back to their colony. But with previous research having focused on the social aspects of an ant colony, looking at an individual ant has been somewhat neglected.
Beijing, China 19 Oct 2020: Elevated birth weight is linked with developing atrial fibrillation later in life, according to research presented at the 31st Great Wall International Congress of Cardiology (GW-ICC).
GW-ICC 2020 is a virtual meeting during 19 to 25 October. Faculty from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) will participate in joint scientific sessions with the GW-ICC as part of the ESC Global Activities programme.
All modern life uses energy to reproduce itself. During this process, organisms build and break down larger molecules such as fats and sugars using a remarkably common set of reactive intermediate energy carrier molecules. These intermediate energy carriers (for example ATP) are often not building blocks in and of themselves, but they allow the energy coupling between separate reactions needed to push forward cellular reproduction. One class of these compounds are thioesters, chemical compounds that contain a high-energy carbon-sulfur bond.
One way CBD appears to reduce the "cytokine storm" that damages the lungs and kills many patients with COVID-19 is by enabling an increase in levels of a natural peptide called apelin, which is known to reduce inflammation and whose levels are dramatically reduced in the face of this storm.
Dental College of Georgia and Medical College of Georgia researchers reported this summer CBD's ability to improve oxygen levels and reduce inflammation as well as physical lung damage in their laboratory model of deadly adult respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS.
PHILADELPHIA (October 12, 2020) - Smell loss is a frequently reported symptom of COVID-19 but reports of prevalence vary from study-to-study and range from 5% to 98%. With such a wide range of estimates, it is difficult to prioritize its importance for testing and treatment.
Droplets of fat inside our cells are helping the body's own defence system fight back against infection, University of Queensland researchers have discovered.
LA JOLLA--Your pancreas is studded with cell clusters called islets. In most people, special beta cells live snug in the islets, happily making the insulin that the body uses to regulate blood sugar. But in people with type 1 diabetes, the body's T cells mistakenly move into the islets and kill the beta cells.
New research suggests that conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity syndrome (ADHD), bipolar disorder, and even aggressive behaviors may be linked with sugar intake, and that it may have an evolutionary basis.
The research, out today from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and published in Evolution and Human Behavior, presents a hypothesis supporting a role for fructose, a component of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and uric acid (a fructose metabolite), in increasing the risk for these behavioral disorders.
RNA interference is a gene regulatory mechanism in which the expression of specific genes is downregulated by endogenous microRNAs or by small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). Although siRNAs have broad potential for gene-silencing therapy, their instability is one of the difficulties to develop siRNA-based agents. To improve their stability, most of the developed siRNA-based drugs are chemically modified in their nucleotides or phosphodiester linkages.
Scientists from the University of Surrey have revealed the significant improvements they are making in perovskite-based solar cells.
Perovskite solar cells have shown significant potential in reaching the efficiency limit of the widely used solar cells currently on the market by absorbing light in a broader range of wavelengths. Industry has also been paying close attention to the development of perovskite-based cells thanks to their low-cost and simple fabrication, and their efficient combination with other types of solar cells to produce tandems.
In a series of recommendations to fix the struggling Covid-19 test, trace and isolate system in England, health researchers from University College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine say that pooled testing for Covid-19 could significantly increase testing capacity in a relatively short space of time and help with the identification of asymptomatic cases in key workers.
Until mid-March 2020, the WHO, the EU as well as German authorities were convinced that the spread of the virus could not be curbed by border closures. "This belief was fatally mistaken", argues Ruud Koopmans. "Travel restrictions should be given much greater weight", he urges. "This holds true for containing upcoming waves of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as similar pandemics in the future."
New research published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) reveals the much higher risk of mortality faced by COVID-19 patients in intensive care who have chronic kidney disease (CKD) or, those who develop new (acute) kidney injury (AKI) as a result of developing COVID-19.
Leesburg, VA, October 16, 2020--According to an article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), secondary interpretations of body MRI at tertiary care centers identify a high rate of discrepancies--with primary errors being interpretive in origin--suggesting that subspecialty interpretations should be encouraged, and institutions should provide adequate resources for these interpretations to occur.
A soil scientist from RUDN University discovered the effect of fertilization on the ability of the soil to retain carbon. To understand this mechanism, he and his team studied the movement of organic carbon in the soil of rice paddies. The results of the study can help increase the fertility of the paddies while at the same time reducing the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. An article about the study was published in the Soil Biology and Biochemistry journal.