Culture
As you stir milk into a cup of coffee, you will see fluid turbulence in action - rapid mixing that has defied deep scientific understanding.
A collaboration between researchers at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and University of Queensland, Australia, set out to learn more about the everyday enigma of turbulence by using the remarkable properties of superfluids, strange quantum fluids able to flow endlessly without any friction.
It's no surprise that using human embryos for biological and medical research comes with many ethical concerns. Correct though it is to proceed with caution in these matters, the fact is that much science would benefit from being able to study human biology more accurately.
One solution lies with alternative tools - what scientists call in vitro models. But despite some advancements with adult tissues, when it comes to modelling the early developmental processes of the human embryo, things become complicated.
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.
The secret to making clothing practically indestructible could be the same thing that makes us grow out of it: sugar.
A new discovery from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reveals how sugars could be used to make almost indestructible cloth and other materials. Nature figured it out long ago, but the answer has been hidden away in bubbling baths of acid.
Amazing Extremophiles
A big data study covering more than 7,500 households across 23 tropical countries shows that natural biodiversity could be effective insurance for rural farmers against drought and other weather-related shocks.
Frederick Noack, assistant professor of food and resource economics in UBC's faculty of land and food systems, worked with colleagues from ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva to study whether natural biodiversity helps buffer farmers' incomes against weather shocks.
A study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that individuals reported more gastrointestinal bloating when they ate a diet high in salt.
The scientists re-analyzed data from a large clinical trial--the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension-Sodium trial (DASH-Sodium)--conducted two decades ago, and found that high sodium intake increased bloating among trial participants. The researchers also found that the high-fiber DASH diet increased bloating among trial participants compared to a low-fiber control diet.
For years, researchers have documented both gastrointestinal issues and problematic behaviors, such as aggression, in many children with autism spectrum disorder.
Researchers from the University of Missouri have now found that both internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors might indicate gastrointestinal distress in children and adolescents with autism.
An Australian-led team of astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile have successfully confirmed the distance to a galaxy hosting an intense radio burst that flashed only once and lasted but a thousandth of a second. The team made the initial discovery of the fast radio burst (FRB) using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope.
The critical Gemini observations were key to verifying that the burst left its host galaxy some 4 billion years ago.
URBANA, Ill. - Conflict over resource extraction is rampant in sub-Saharan Africa, with small-scale miners violently pitted against multinational mining corporations - and the state security forces that protect them - for access. Attempts to solve the problem by imposing Western environmental systems and regulations aren't working. But it's not for the reasons most experts might suspect, according to a new Illinois study.
MicroRNAs are tiny molecules of nucleic acid that control gene expression, acting like a dimmer switch to tone down gene output at key positions in the network of information that governs a cell's function. MicroRNAs are important for the day-to-day inner working of cells and especially important during development. They also become profoundly defective in diseases such as cancer. Unlike most other human or animal genes, microRNAs are often encoded in genomes and expressed as beads-on-a-string groupings, known as polycistrons.
LA JOLLA--(June 27, 2019) There are hundreds of thousands of distinct colors and shapes that a person can distinguish visually, but how does the brain process all of this information? Scientists previously believed that the visual system initially encodes shape and color with different sets of neurons and then combines them much later. But a new study from Salk researchers, published in Science on June 27, 2019, shows that there are neurons that respond selectively to particular combinations of color and shape.
Losing a limb, either through illness or accident, can present emotional and physical challenges for an amputee, damaging their quality of life. Prosthetic limbs can be very useful but are often expensive and difficult to use. The Biological Systems Engineering Lab at Hiroshima University has developed a new 3D printed prosthetic hand combined with a computer interface, which is their cheapest, lightest model that is more reactive to motion intent than before. Previous generations of their prosthetic hands have been made of metal, which is heavy and expensive to make.
In many ways, a cell is like a city. Proteins or people do daily work to keep the economy going, and items are imported and exported for trade. Imports are shipped into cells by way of endocytosis. Before reaching their final destination, they are kept at the early endosome, a structure that determines whether the material will be disposed, recycled or delivered to a specific region in the cell.
People who report a declining quality of sleep as they age from their 50s to their 60s have more protein tangles in their brain, putting them at higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life, according to a new study by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The new finding highlights the importance of sleep at every age to maintain a healthy brain into old age.
Financial crises not only result in severe disruptions to the economic system, they also affect people's life satisfaction. A new study by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) shows that weaker members of society are more affected by increased uncertainty during crisis times, even if they may not be speculating on the stock market themselves. This could potentially also lower their propensity to consume, thereby intensifying the impact of a financial crisis. The study was recently published in "The B.E.