Culture
As Charles Darwin wrote in at the end of his seminal 1859 book On the Origin of the Species, "whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Scientists have since long believed that the diversity and range of forms of life on Earth, provide evidence that biological evolution spontaneously innovates in an open-ended way, constantly inventing new things.
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Geospatial scientists have developed a new program to monitor street signs needing replacement or repair by tapping into Google Street View images.
The fully-automated system is trained using AI-powered object detection to identify street signs in the freely available images.
Municipal authorities currently spend large amounts of time and money monitoring and recording the geolocation of traffic infrastructure manually, a task which also exposes workers to unnecessary traffic risks.
Singapore, 18 June 2019 - How dormant neural stem cells in fruit flies are activated and generate new neurons is described in a new research study by Duke-NUS Medical School. The findings could potentially help people with brain injury or neuronal loss, if similar mechanisms apply in humans.
Bad news, Jurassic Park fans--the odds of scientists cloning a dinosaur from ancient DNA are pretty much zero. That's because DNA breaks down over time and isn't stable enough to stay intact for millions of years. And while proteins, the molecules in all living things that give our bodies structure and help them operate, are more stable, even they might not be able to survive over tens or hundreds of millions of years. In a new paper published in eLife, scientists went looking for preserved collagen, the protein in bone and skin, in dinosaur fossils.
Adequate intake of protein is associated with a reduced risk of frailty and prefrailty in older women, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland and Kuopio University Hospital. Adequate protein intake was defined as at least 1.1 g per kg of body weight. The findings were published in European Journal of Nutrition.
Scientists in the FinnBrain research project of the University of Turku, Finland, discovered that the gut microbes of a 2.5-month-old infant are associated with the temperament traits manifested at six months of age. Temperament describes individual differences in expressing and regulating emotions in infants, and the study provides new information on the association between behaviour and microbes. A corresponding study has never been conducted on infants so young or in the same scale.
Researchers have developed a new class of drugs to tackle a common hereditary kidney disease
The disease affects 12 million people worldwide
The compound tested successfully in cell lines cultured from kidney patients
Scientists from the University of Sheffield are part of an international collaboration to develop a new class of drugs to treat a common genetic kidney disease which is a major cause of kidney failure.
DNA, the hereditary material, may have appeared on Earth earlier than has been assumed hitherto. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich chemists led by Oliver Trapp show that a simple reaction pathway could have given rise to DNA subunits on the early Earth.
New research from the Danish psychiatric project, iPSYCH, shows that a specific gene is associated with an increased risk of cannabis abuse. The gene is the source of a so-called nicotine receptor in the brain, and people with low amounts of this receptor have an increased risk of cannabis abuse.
Cannabis is the most commonly used illegal drug in both Denmark and internationally, and around one in ten users becomes addicted to the drug. Researchers from iPSYCH have discovered a gene that they associate with the abuse of cannabis.
Geneticists exploring the dark heart of the human genome have discovered big chunks of Neanderthal and other ancient DNA. The results open new ways to study both how chromosomes behave during cell division and how they have changed during human evolution.
Temporary bans on fishing can be better than permanent ones as a way of allowing fish stocks in an area to recover, while still providing enough to eat, a research team has found.
Amsterdam, June 18, 2019 - Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease is the most common inherited neurological disorder affecting peripheral motor and/or sensory nerves in humans. Monogenic disorders like CMT1A, CMT's most prevalent subtype, are caused by a single gene defect. However, its clinical presentation and severity can vary widely, leading doctors to wonder what factors might be responsible for these differences.
WASHINGTON -- Materials science researchers with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory have found a remnant of ancient dust from the early stages of the solar system inside a primitive meteorite, named La Paz Icefield 02342 after the location of its discovery in Antarctica.
NRL scientists Rhonda Stroud and Bradley De Gregorio contributed to a paper describing the find, which published in Nature Astronomy, April 15.
PULLMAN, WA-- College students who viewed alcohol advertisements that included objectified images of women were less likely than others to report intentions to intervene in alcohol-facilitated sexual assault situations in a study published in the Journal of Health Communication.
The role of alcohol in sexual assault has long been an interest among health communication scholars, but few have examined whether alcohol advertising may contribute to beliefs associated with alcohol-facilitated sexual assault.