Culture
All deaths of health and social care workers during the covid-19 pandemic should be referred to the coroner for independent review, says Dr Fiona Godlee, Editor in Chief of The BMJ today.
With many hundreds of deaths around the world, and over 100 reported in the UK, "it is impossible not to feel let down by political and healthcare leaders who, while sloganning, clapping for, and praising the NHS, have so evidently failed to protect those who work within it," she writes.
COVID-19 is unlikely to be spread through semen, according to University of Utah Health scientists who participated in an international study of Chinese men who recently had the disease. The researchers found no evidence of the virus that causes COVID-19 in the semen or testes of the men.
The study was not comprehensive enough to fully rule out the possibility that the disease could be sexually transmitted. However, the chances of it occurring, based on this limited finding, appear to be remote.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - Have you ever wondered what kind of rocks make up those bright and dark splotches on the moon? Well, the USGS has just released a new authoritative map to help explain the 4.5-billion-year-old history of our nearest neighbor in space.
For the first time, the entire lunar surface has been completely mapped and uniformly classified by scientists from the USGS, in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute.
Electron spin--a fundamentally quantum property--is central to spintronics, a technology that revolutionized data storage,[1] and that could play a major role in creating new computer processors. In order to generate and detect spin currents, spintronics traditionally uses ferromagnetic materials whose magnetization switching consume high amounts of energy.
CINCINNATI – Although advances in genetics and genomics reveal numerous disease-associated gene mutations, physicians and researchers still wrestle with the tricky challenge of linking those mutations to actual disease-causing processes.
Add this to the growing use of single-cell biology, which detects gene and/or protein expression in each cell at a given moment, and the task becomes even more daunting.
A team of biomaterials scientists and dentists at the UCLA School of Dentistry has developed a nanoparticle that, based on initial experiments in animals, could improve treatment for bone defects.
A paper describing the advance is published today in the journal Science Advances.
An enduring question in geology is when Earth's tectonic plates began pushing and pulling in a process that helped the planet evolve and shaped its continents into the ones that exist today. Some researchers theorize it happened around four billion years ago, while others think it was closer to one billion.
Periods of lockdown during the COVID-19 situation likely to exacerbate problems with mood regulation, say experts at the University of Oxford.
By studying a cohort of 190 children, a research team has discovered important clues that could help explain why some children with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections get mild cases while others get more severe disease and require hospitalization. The results identify important features in the immune response to RSV and could inform the development of a historically elusive vaccine for the disease. RSV is a common disease in children and represents the most frequent cause of hospitalization in newborns in developed countries, although it most often causes only mild symptoms.
A nationwide intervention to replace regular household salt with potassium-enriched salt substitutes in China could prevent nearly half a million cardiovascular deaths per year, according to a new modelling study published in the British Medical Journal.
The study found that overall, the blood pressure lowering effects of salt substitution could prevent around 460,000 cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths each year, including 208,000 due to stroke and 175,000 due to heart disease.
New research demonstrates unsustainable levels of soil erosion in the UK.
The study examined more than 1,500 existing records and found 16% relating to arable (crop-growing) land showed erosion above "tolerable" levels - meaning rates of soil loss are significantly greater than new soil formation.
This may not reflect the national picture, as the study has highlighted that existing studies are frequently biased towards places which have eroded in the past.
From two seeds grew a thousand plants.
University of Guelph researchers used advanced cloning techniques to give the threatened Hill's thistle a fighting chance.
This cutting-edge propagation method could rejuvenate the population of other threatened and endangered plant species, said lead researcher Prof. Praveen Saxena, Department of Plant Agriculture.
Researchers from the Department of Pharmacology, Paediatrics and Radiology at the University of Seville, in collaboration with Dr. Rodriguez from the International University of Catalonia, have confirmed that Orujo Olive OIL (POCTA), when introduced into the diet, produces a significant reduction in obesity and vascular and inflammatory complications in obese mice.
The common view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism's DNA. But Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, disagrees.
In two new papers, Jose argues that DNA is just the ingredient list, not the set of instructions used to build and maintain a living organism. The instructions, he says, are much more complicated, and they're stored in the molecules that regulate a cell's DNA and other functioning systems.
ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- The Army has a new type of multi-polymer filament for commonly-used desktop 3-D printers. This advance may save money and facilitate fast printing of critical parts at the point of need.
The research is also the cover story of the April edition of Advanced Engineering Materials, a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal.