Culture
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- How do you fight a fungal infection that is becoming increasingly resistant to medicine? By starving it, found a team of University at Buffalo and Temple University researchers.
To treat Candida albicans, a common yeast that can cause illness in those with weakened immune systems, researchers limited the fungus' access to iron, an element crucial to the organism's survival.
While many juries use commonsense when determining an innocent or guilty verdict, research has shown that commonsense can be misleading and inaccurate. In a new study, researchers propose a new federal rule of evidence that ensures a jury is educated on theories of false memory in order to produce more just verdicts--a rule that would especially be of aid in testimonies from children.
The clearing and subsequent instability of Amazonian forests are among the greatest threats to tropical biodiversity conservation today.
Although the devastating consequences of deforestation to plants and animal species living above the ground are well-documented, scientists and others need to better understand how soil communities respond to this deforestation to create interventions that protect biodiversity and the ecosystem. But that information has been lacking.
Crabs from a single species rely on different camouflage techniques depending on what habitat they live in, new research shows.
University of Exeter scientists compared the colour patterns of common shore crabs (Carcinus maenas) from rock pools with those living on mudflats.
They found that crabs from mudflats closely matched the appearance of the mud they live on, while rockpool crabs did not match the background but instead relied on "disruptive colouration" - the use of high-contrast patterns to break up the appearance of the body outline.
A technique to stabilise alkali metal vapour density using gold nanoparticles, so electrons can be accessed for applications including quantum computing, atom cooling and precision measurements, has been patented by scientists at the University of Bath.
Alkali metal vapours, including lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and caesium, allow scientists to access individual electrons, due to the presence of a single electron in the outer 'shell' of alkali metals.
Scientists from the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum in London have reconstructed the evolutionary history of the chelicerates, the mega-diverse group of 110,000 arthropods that includes spiders, scorpions, mites and ticks.
They found, for the first time, genomic evidence that mites and ticks do not constitute two distantly related lineages, rather they are part of the same evolutionary line. This now makes them the most diverse group of chelicerates, changing our perspective on their biodiversity.
Chemists from the University of Bonn and their US colleagues at Columbia University in New York have discovered a novel mechanism in catalysis. It allows the synthesis of certain alcohols more cheaply and environmentally friendly than before. The reaction follows a previously unknown pattern in which hydrogen is split into three components in a time-coordinated manner. More than five years passed between the idea and its practical realization. The results are published in the prestigious journal Science.
New research has revealed that the short lives and violent deaths of some of coral reefs' smallest tenants may be vital to the health of reef systems, including the iconic Great Barrier Reef.
Dr Simon Brandl, from Simon Fraser University in Canada, led an international team of researchers searching for answers to the longstanding puzzle of 'Darwin's paradox'.
Years of home-schooling don't appear to influence the general health of children, according to a Rice University study.
A report by Rice kinesiology lecturer Laura Kabiri and colleagues in the Oxford University Press journal Health Promotion International puts forth evidence that the amount of time a student spends in home school is "weakly or not at all related to multiple aspects of youth physical health."
Computational modeling of social networks suggests that vaccination programs are more successful in containing disease when individuals have access to local information about disease prevalence. Anupama Sharma of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, India, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.
Athens, Ga. - Researchers at the University of Georgia have shown that a simple intervention - daily self-weighing - can help people avoid holiday weight gain.
Participants in a 14-week UGA study who weighed themselves daily on scales that also provided graphical feedback showing their weight fluctuations managed to maintain or lose weight during and after the holiday season, while a control group gained weight.
The University of Texas at Austin team that led a twin satellite system launched in 2002 to take detailed measurements of the Earth, called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), reports in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Climate Change on the contributions that their nearly two decades of data have made to our understanding of global climate patterns.
Among the many contributions that GRACE has made:
May 23, 2019 - Model organisms such as yeast, fruit flies, and worms have advanced the study of genomics, eukaryotic biology, and evolution. An important resource for any model organism is a near-complete reference genome from which a multitude of scientific questions can be answered. Caenorhabditis elegans have been widely studied due to their short generation time and transparent anatomy and were one of the first multicellular organisms sequenced, yet gaps in their reference genome remain.
ITHACA, N.Y. - A new Cornell University-led study finds that the genome for a widely researched worm, on which countless studies are based, was flawed. Now, a fresh genome sequence will set the record straight and improve the accuracy of future research.
When scientists study the genetics of an organism, they start with a standard genome sequenced from a single strain that serves as a baseline. It's like a chess board in a chess game: every board is fundamentally the same.
A unique bark shield, thought to have been constructed with wooden laths during the Iron Age, has provided new insight into the construction and design of prehistoric weaponry.
The only one of its kind ever found in Europe, the shield was found south of Leicester on the Everards Meadows site, in what is believed to have been a livestock watering hole.