Culture
University of Groningen Professor of Drug Design, Alexander Dömling, has devised a method to rapidly synthesize thousands of new molecules and evaluate their properties as potential drugs. In a paper published by Science Advances on 5 July, he shows that this method works well when applied to boronic acid chemistry, an important technique in synthetic organic chemistry. The study also produced an inhibitor of the phosphatase MptpB, a virulence factor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which had previously been considered an 'undruggable' target.
Predators are not only a deadly threat to many animals, they also affect potential prey negatively simply by being nearby. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have studied what happens to the prey's immune system when they are forced to expend a large amount of their energy on avoiding being eaten.
A hard tackle on the football-field, a crash on your bike or a fall from a ladder in your home can easily cause a concussion, which eventually can cost your job - especially if you are in your thirties, and have a higher education.
Cheetah experts in many zoos around the world are at a loss. Despite all their efforts, these cats often do not reproduce in the desired manner. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), together with colleagues from the Allwetterzoo Münster, have now found a key to the issue: the age of the mothers at the first pregnancy is the decisive factor. In contrast to the wild, felines kept in zoos are often bred only years after they have reached sexual maturity.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 9, 2019 -- Microfluidics and learning-on-a-chip research -- involving the manipulation of small amounts of fluids to run miniaturized experiments in physics, chemistry, biology and medicine -- are a prolific research field. But, so far, there aren't many published examples of how to teach it in an easily understandable way to students or how to communicate the numerous significant advances within the field to public audiences in a relatable manner.
WASHINGTON -- Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) developed a new technique that could enable future advancements in quantum technology.
The technique squeezes quantum dots, tiny particles made of thousands of atoms, to emit single photons (individual particles of light) with precisely the same color and with positions that can be less than a millionth of a meter apart.
A new study from researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Carolina Population Center found that the risk of dying between the ages of 1 and 24 is substantially higher for children whose parents have lower levels of education, lower levels of income, or for those who live in a single-parent family.
Parents who financially help their unemployed adult children offset such costs by adjusting their behavior, particularly by spending less money on food, working more and reducing retirement savings, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
It is known that parents are increasingly helping their adult children, including by letting them live at home and providing them money and other assistance. Little, though, has been documented on the economic impact of such decisions on parents themselves.
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) may not be a household name as far as viruses go, but according to Xiaoping Zhu, professor and chair in Veterinary Medicine at UMD, half of the population walking around campus is likely to be a carrier. Once contracted, it lays dormant in your body for the rest of your life and can flare up whenever your immune system is severely compromised, giving you flu-like symptoms. This becomes a severe problem for people who already have weakened immune systems, for example the very young, old, pregnant women, organ transplant recipients, or HIV/AIDS patients.
A new study soon to appear in the Faculty of Public Health's Journal of Public Health suggests that participating in local food projects may have a positive effect on wellbeing and psychological health.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation has been responsible for widespread, simultaneous crop failures in recent history, according to a new study from researchers at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other partners. This finding runs counter to a central pillar of the global agriculture system, which assumes that crop failures in geographically distant breadbasket regions such as the United States, China and Argentina are unrelated.
In Gallium Nitride (GaN) implanted with a small amount of magnesium (Mg), NIMS succeeded for the first time in visualizing the distribution and optical behavior of the implanted Mg at the nanoscale which may help in improving electrical performance of GaN based devices. Some of the mechanisms by which introduced Mg ions convert GaN into a p-type semiconductor are also revealed. These findings may significantly expedite the identification of optimum conditions for Mg implantation vital to the mass production of GaN power devices.
An analysis of a 160,000-year-old archaic human molar fossil discovered in China offers the first morphological evidence of interbreeding between archaic humans and Homo sapiens in Asia.
The study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, centers on a three-rooted lower molar--a rare trait primarily found in modern Asians--that was previously thought to have evolved after H. sapiens dispersed from Africa.
The new research points to a different evolutionary path.
Mental health patients want mental health diagnostic descriptions to better reflect what it feels like to live with their conditions in the World Health Organisation's global manual of diagnoses - according to a new Lancet Psychiatry report.
The study, by UK and US researchers at Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), the University of East Anglia, and Columbia University, in collaboration with the WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, is the first to report feedback from service users on such a major mental health diagnosis guideline.
Vegetated highway medians are a proverbial buffet for small mammals, according to new research by University of Alberta biologists. Animals such as weasels, mink, and chipmunks use the roadside bands of vegetation as habitat to find food.