Culture
When do bees sting and how do they organise their collective defence behaviour against predators? An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Constance and Innsbruck has provided new insights into these questions. Their study, published in BMC Biology, combined behavioural experiments with an innovative theoretical modelling approach based on "Projective Simulation". It shows that individual bees decide whether to sting - or not - based on the presence and concentration of an alarm pheromone.
A long-standing theory assumes that terrestrial plants could only have developed by entering into a symbiosis with fungi, whereby the two organisms exchange resources in a mutually beneficial way. A new study by an international group of scientists has now confirmed this theory. By studying a liverwort species (a bryophyte related to mosses), the scientists succeeded in demonstrating that a lipid transfer takes place between the plant and the fungus similar to that already known to exist in plants with stems and roots - so called vascular plants.
A recent study finds that the vast majority of Black adolescents have experienced racism, that they experience anticipatory stress about experiencing racism again, and that their racial identity can influence that stress in a variety of ways.
The Finnish solution to include all types of biodiversity data and the whole data life cycle, from collection to use, in the same data infrastructure is unique. It is also rare for one infrastructure to be able to serve cutting-edge research, public administration, business and the civil society simultaneously.
Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative disorder in which neurons gradually die off, leading to dementia. The exact mechanism and causes of this disorder have not yet been identified. However, it is known that amyloid plaques form in the brains of patients. Plaques consist of amyloid fibrils, which are special filamentous assemblies formed by amyloid proteins.
Killer flies can reach accelerations of over 3g when aerial diving to catch their prey - but at such high speeds they often miss because they can't correct their course.
These are the findings of a study by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Lincoln, and Minnesota, published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The researchers Juan A. Fernández-Ontiveros, of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Rome and Teo Muñoz-Darias, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have written an article in which they describe the different states of activity of a large sample of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. They have classified them using the behaviour of their closest "relations", the stellar mass black holes in X-ray binaries. The article has just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).
Mitochondria are the cell's power plants and produce the majority of a cell's energy needs through an electrochemical process called electron transport chain coupled to another process known as oxidative phosphorylation. A number of different proteins in mitochondria facilitate these processes, but it's not fully understood how these proteins are arranged inside mitochondria and the factors that can influence their arrangement.
Extra funding should be made available for early years care in the wake of the pandemic, researchers say.
Experts at the University of Leeds, University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University have made the call after assessing the benefits of early childhood education and care (ECEC) for children under three during COVID-19.
They found children who attended childcare outside the home throughout the first UK lockdown made greater gains in language and thinking skills, particularly if they were from less advantaged backgrounds.
Research Study Key Takeaways:
Ridesharing can reduce a passenger's risk of being a target of sexual assault by providing a more reliable and timely transportation option for traveling to a safer place.
The entry of Uber into a city contributes to a 6.3% reduction in rape incidents.
A 1% increase in Uber pickups in a neighborhood translates to a more than 3% decrease in the likelihood of sexual assaults.
Has your heart ever started to race at the thought of an upcoming deadline for work? Or has the sight of an unknown object in a dark room made you jump? Well, you can probably thank your amygdala for that.
CHICAGO, May 24, 2021--More than a year after COVID-19 appeared in the U.S., dentists continue to have a lower infection rate than other front-line health professionals, such as nurses and physicians, according to a study published online ahead of the June print issue in the Journal of the American Dental Association. The study, "COVID19 among Dentists in the U.S. and Associated Infection Control: a six-month longitudinal study," is based on data collected June 9 - Nov.
Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have developed an algorithm that combines data from a simple blood test and brief memory tests, to predict with great accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's disease in the future. The findings are published in Nature Medicine.
MIAMI - Scientists from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science analyzed ground movements measured by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) satellite data and GPS stations to precisely model where magma intruded and how magma influx changed over time, as well as where faults under the flanks moved without generating significant earthquakes. The GPS network is operated by the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaii Volcano Observatory.
A research group from Osaka University led by Professor Hisashi Arase and consisting of researchers from the Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, the Institute for Protein Research, the Immunology Frontier Research Center, the Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Graduate School of Medicine has discovered for the first time that both neutralizing antibodies that protect against infection as well as infection-enhancing antibodies that increase infectivity are produced after infection with SARS-CoV-2 by analyzing antibodies derived from COVID-19 patients.