Culture
Millions of ibis and birds of prey mummies, sacrificed to the Egyptian gods Horus, Ra or Thoth, have been discovered in the necropolises of the Nile Valley. Such a quantity of mummified birds raises the question of their origin: were they bred, like cats, or were they hunted? Scientists from the CNRS, the Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 and the C2RMF (1) have carried out extensive geochemical analyses on mummies from the Musée des Confluences, Lyon. According to their results, published on 22nd September 2020 in the journal Scientific Reports, they were wild birds.
The Heteroptera are a large group of insects. However, not all of its representatives are widely known as true bugs. For example, it includes a pond water strider (Gerris lacustris), which is very common in Russia. 'Most often, when it comes to these insects, people imagine blood-sucking bed bugs. They bring the rest of the bugs into disrepute, but most of these insects do not bite.
September 22, 2020 - A geocoding approach - linking routinely collected public health data to neighborhood socioeconomic factors - shows consistently higher rates of COVID-19 illness and death among people living in more-disadvantaged communities, reports a study in the November/December Journal of Public Health Manageme
A new study suggests that the messages Black girls hear at home about being Black, and about being Black women in particular, can increase or decrease their risk of exhibiting the symptoms of depression. Positive messages - and positive feelings about being Black - were associated with a decreased likelihood of symptoms of depression; negative messages about Black women were associated with a greater risk of symptoms of depression.
Much of life on planet Earth today relies on oxygen to exist, but before oxygen was present on our blue planet, lifeforms likely used arsenic instead. These findings are detailed in research published today in Communications Earth and Environment.
Topographically sketched catchment areas are a spatial unit based on the shapes of the earth's surface. They show how human activities and climate change influence the available quantities of water. Knowledge of these units is fundamental to sustainable water management. However, due to underground connections, some catchment areas accumulate water from areas beyond their topographic boundaries, while others are effectively much smaller than their surface topography would suggest.
In 2016, a supercomputer beat the world champion in Go, a complicated board game. How? By using reinforcement learning, a type of artificial intelligence whereby computers train themselves after being programmed with simple instructions. The computers learn from their mistakes and, step by step, become highly powerful.
Recently computer scientists at USC Institute of Technologies (ICT) set out to assess under what conditions humans would employ deceptive negotiating tactics. Through a series of studies, they found that whether humans would embrace a range of deceptive and sneaky techniques was dependent both on the humans' prior negotiating experience in negotiating as well as whether virtual agents where employed to negotiate on their behalf.
The field of structural biology has made enormous strides, peering into the activities of nature at the tiniest scale. Such investigations are critical for charting the behavior of important macromolecules and understanding their essential role in living organisms.
New research by an international team of chemists describes a new type of artificial cell that can communicate with other cells within the body--with potential applications in the field of smart pharmaceuticals.
Researchers from the OU Institute for Environmental Genomics and Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology lead a study that aims to better understand ecological community assembly mechanisms in response to climate warming.
Widespread COVID-19 testing may be an obvious way to control an outbreak in a long-term care facility. But communication among the facility's staff, its residents and the residents' family members is crucial, too.
A new study led by Carl Shrader, a physician and researcher in the Department of Family Medicine in the West Virginia University School of Medicine, revealed the role that communication played in quashing a COVID-19 outbreak at Sundale, a long-term care facility in Morgantown.
A study conducted by researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) suggests that irisin, a hormone secreted from muscles in response to exercise, could have a therapeutic effect on COVID-19 patients. When they analyzed adipose cell gene expression, the researchers found that irisin modulated genes associated with replication of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 in human cells.
Scientists from the CNRS, ENS-PSL, Inserm, and Sciences Po (1) revealed an increase in facial displays of trustworthiness in European painting between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. The findings, published in Nature Communications on 22 September 2020, were obtained by applying face-processing software to two groups of portraits, suggesting an increase in trustworthiness in society that closely follows rising living standards over the course of this period.
Boston, Mass. - A new review article from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) shows people who are biologically male are dying from COVID-19 at a higher rate than people who are biologically female. In a review published in Frontiers in Immunology, researcher-clinicians at BIDMC explore the sex-based physiological differences that may affect risk and susceptibility to COVID-19, the course and clinical outcomes of the disease and response to vaccines.