Culture

New research has found that allotment gardening promotes positive body image, which measures someone's appreciation of their own body and its functions, and an acceptance of bodily imperfections.

The study, published in the journal Ecopsychology and led by Professor Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), involved 84 gardeners from 12 urban allotment sites in north London.

A group of scientists, physicians, funders, and policy makers from over 70 institutions from over 30 countries have launched an international coalition to respond to COVID-19 in resource-poor settings. The COVID-19 Clinical Research Coalition aims to accelerate desperately needed COVID-19 research in those areas where the virus could wreak havoc on already-fragile health systems and cause the greatest health impact on vulnerable populations.

Key Takeaways:

We propose a new way to measure how forward-looking consumers are based on their buying behavior, conditioning on their inventories at home.

Our method applies to storable goods such as laundry detergent, disinfectant spray, disinfectant wipes, toilet papers, etc.

Our estimates suggest that a consumer's planning horizon is roughly about 8 weeks.

Consumer buying behavior heavily depends on their expectation about future prices.

URBANA, Ill. - You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It's also a metaphor for what scientists call the "gut-brain axis," a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.

Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists," wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true.

A new study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) found that human-induced environmental stressors have a large effect on the genetic composition of coral reef populations in Hawai'i. They confirmed that there is an ongoing loss of sensitive genotypes in nearshore coral populations due to stressors resulting from poor land-use practices and coastal pollution. This reduced genetic diversity compromises reef resilience. 

A drug already tested against lung disease could potentially inhibit COVID-19 by reducing the coronavirus load that enters the lungs and other organs. That is according to a study in human cell cultures and organoids by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, published in the journal Cell.

The results could be promising for the treatment of COVID-19 patients who are in the early stages of infection, according to the researchers.

An international team led by University of British Columbia researcher Dr. Josef Penninger has found a trial drug that effectively blocks the cellular door SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect its hosts.

The findings, published today in Cell, hold promise as a treatment capable of stopping early infection of the novel coronavirus that, as of April 2, has affected more than 981,000 people and claimed the lives of 50,000 people worldwide.

New York, NY (April 2, 2020)--A new study from Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center suggests a compound in development for a rare kidney stone disease may have potential against pancreatic cancer. The compound starves tumors of an amino acid, cysteine, which was found to be critical to the survival of pancreatic cancer cells.

The study, conducted in mice with pancreatic cancer, was published online today in the journal Science.

One way to change the properties of a material is to stretch it just a wee bit, so its atoms are farther apart but the bonds between them don't break. This extra distance affects the behavior of electrons, which determine whether the material is an insulator or a conductor of electricity, for instance.

But for an important class of complex oxide materials, stretching doesn't work so well; they're as brittle as ceramic coffee cups and would break.

Researchers know that people are motivated to be vegetarian for different reasons -- the most common in western cultures being health, the environment and animal rights. But how compelling are these different factors for nonvegetarians?

University of California, Davis, researchers in the Department of Psychology surveyed 8,000 people of various ages and ethnicities, in two languages, in both the United States and Holland, to help determine why nonvegetarians decide to become vegetarian.

A paradox for advocacy efforts

An international team, including Arizona State University researcher Gary Schwartz, have unearthed the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in their anatomy and aspects of their behavior.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has already resulted in mass layoffs in several industries, other essential industries will instead face critical workforce shortages, according to a new report. Social distancing, school and daycare closures, and measures to protect those people who are most at-risk limit the pool of workers firms can draw upon. How important will these constraints turn out to be, especially in essential industries?

LA JOLLA, CA -- A prevalent heart protein known as cardiac myosin, which is released into the body when a person suffers a heart attack, can cause blood to thicken or clot--worsening damage to heart tissue, a new study shows.

A team led by John H. Griffin, PhD, a professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research, made the unexpected finding after a series of experiments spanning three years and involving researchers from multiple collaborating institutions.

The oldest known animals and plants preserved in amber from Southern Gondwana are reported in Scientific Reports this week. Gondwana, the supercontinent made up of South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Antarctica and Australia, broke away from the Pangea supercontinent around 200 million years ago. The findings further our understanding of ecology in Australia and New Zealand during the Late Triassic to mid-Paleogene periods (230-40 million years ago).