Culture
For patients who receive a heart transplant in the near future, the old adage, "Good things come in small packages," may become words to live by. In a recent study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) demonstrated in mice that they can easily deliver a promising anti-rejection drug directly to the area surrounding a grafted heart by packaging it within a tiny three-dimensional, protein gel cocoon known as a hydrogel.
A new species of freshwater Crustacea has been discovered during an expedition of the desert Lut, known as the hottest place on Earth.
The newly identified species belongs to the genus Phallocryptus of which only four species were previously known from different arid and semiarid regions.
Dr Hossein Rajaei from the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History and Dr Alexander V Rudov from Tehran University made the discovery during an expedition of Lut to better understand the desert's ecology, biodiversity, geomorphology and paleontology.
Taking the "One Million-Mu (666 km2)" Plain Afforestation (Phase I) Project as an example, the authors characterized the growth status and temporal trends of forest patches using time series NDVI. They selected forest patches with greater than 50 ha in size as the main objects for analysis. Using the maximum NDVI in the base year (2012), they calculated the change ratio of forest patches in different years. These ratios were further divided into three categories using the natural break approach. That is decreasing, relatively stable without notable changes and increasing.
A new study led by Swansea University and the University of Bristol has revealed the size of the legendary giant shark Megalodon, including fins that are as large as an adult human.
There is a grim fascination in determining the size of the largest sharks, but this can be difficult for fossil forms where teeth are often all that remain.
Today, the most fearsome living shark is the Great White, at over six metres (20 feet) long, which bites with a force of two tonnes.
FRANKFURT. The Nebra sky disk is one of Germany's most significant archaeological finds and was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2013. It was discovered in an illegal excavation in 1999 together with Bronze Age swords, axes and bracelets according to the finders. This discovery context was important for the scientific dating, as the disk itself could neither be scientifically nor archeologically dated by comparison with other objects.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. - New Army-funded study looks at effects of sleep deprivation, which can greatly affect Soldiers on the battlefield.
Research conducted at the University of Rochester Medical Center and funded by the Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, suggests that people who rely on sleeping during daytime hours are at greater risk for developing neurological disorders.
A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
The U.S. Army partnered with the University of Pittsburg Medical Center to create a biocontainment unit that could help healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients.
Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and UPMC created an individual biocontainment unit that uses negative pressure to suction the air from around a patient and filter out viral particles. This prevents environmental contamination and limits exposure to SARS-CoV-2.
In one of the first comprehensive assessments of the fuel economy standards in the United States, Princeton University researchers found that, over their 40-year history, the standards helped reduce reliance on foreign oil producers, cut greenhouse gas emissions, and saved consumers money.
In the first study of its kind, University of Illinois Chicago researchers have found associations among disrupted sleep, elevated blood pressure and changes in the gut microbiome.
The research aimed to determine whether a 28-day period of disrupted sleep changed the microbiota in rats. The gut microbiota refers to the collection of microorganisms living in the intestines. The researchers also sought to identify biological features associated with undesirable arterial blood pressure changes.
The results were published in Physiological Genomics.
A lopsided merger of two black holes may have an oddball origin story, according to a new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere.
With many questions remaining around how children spread COVID-19, Children's National Hospital researchers set out to improve the understanding of how long it takes pediatric patients with the virus to clear it from their systems, and at what point they start to make antibodies that work against the coronavirus. The study, published Sept. 3 in the Journal of Pediatrics, finds that the virus and antibodies can coexist in young patients.
Breeding programs for crops with limited per-plant seed yield require one or more generations of seed increase to generate sufficient quantities for sowing replicated yield trials. The ability to accurately discard low potential lines at these early stages may reduce spending on costly yield testing.
Breeders typically rely on visual selection at these stages because extensive measurement of plant traits is difficult due to the large number of lines under evaluation. However, recent advances in remote sensing have made high-throughput data collection increasingly feasible.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The rapid increase of life-threatening antibiotic-resistant infections has resulted in challenging wound complications with limited choices of effective treatments. About 6 million people in the United States are affected by chronic wounds.
Now, a team of innovators from Purdue University has developed a wearable solution that allows a patient to receive treatment without leaving home. The Purdue team's work is published in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.
Cosmologists have zoomed in on the smallest clumps of dark matter in a virtual universe - which could help us to find the real thing in space.
An international team of researchers, including Durham University, UK, used supercomputers in Europe and China to focus on a typical region of a computer-generated universe.
The zoom they were able to achieve is the equivalent of being able to see a flea on the surface of the Moon.