Earth
SPOKANE, Wash. - Treatment for breast cancer commonly includes radiation therapy, which offers good chances of success but comes with a serious long-term side effect: toxicity due to radiation that reaches the heart, causing DNA damage in healthy heart cells. Over time, this can lead to heart disease and eventually heart failure.
Boulder, Colo., USA: Rare metallic elements found in clumps on the deep-ocean floor mysteriously remain uncovered despite the shifting sands and sediment many leagues under the sea. Scientists now think they know why, and it could have important implications for mining these metals while preserving the strange fauna at the bottom of the ocean.
Like a long-distance food delivery app with no apparent highway, fungi that associate with shallow-rooted shrubs in the tundra are accessing deep stores of nitrogen being released by thawing permafrost. The findings by Northern Arizona University researchers, announced this week in New Phytologist, could change scientists' understanding of who accesses nutrients from permafrost, and how.
A new analysis shows the world's oceans were the warmest in 2019 than any other time in recorded human history, especially between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters. The study, conducted by an international team of 14 scientists from 11 institutes across the world, also concludes that the past ten years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures, with the past five years holding the highest record.
PITTSBURGH, Jan. 13, 2020 - Coaching Boys Into Men, a program that seeks to prevent dating violence and sexual assault, reduces abusive behaviors among middle school male athletes toward their female peers, according to clinical trial results published today in JAMA Pediatrics.
The trial, led by Elizabeth Miller, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, examined the short- and long-term effectiveness of the program.
A database of 10,000 bird species shows how measurements of wings, beaks and tails can predict a species' role in an ecosystem.
Given that many bird species perform important ecological functions, such as pollinating plants, spreading seeds, or controlling pests, the database may help scientists to understand and predict how the loss of species will affect ecosystem health.
A team of physicists has mapped how electron energies vary from region to region in a particular quantum state with unprecedented clarity. This understanding reveals an underlying mechanism by which electrons influence one another, termed quantum "hybridization," that had been invisible in previous experiments.
The findings, the work of scientists at New York University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Rutgers University, and MIT, are reported in the journal Nature Physics.
Flinders researchers have studied the giant cassowary’s eating, breathing and vocal structures and found a surprising missing link between two vastly different birds thought to be each other’s closest relative, the small flights South American tinamou, and the New Zealand moa.
The iconic and colourful Australian cassowary, the second largest living bird, has been studied for hundreds of years. However, their solitary nature in the dense rainforests of northern Queensland has ensured that many fundamental aspects of these animals continue to elude scientists.
Just like we take a shower to wash away all the dirt and other particles, semiconductors also require a cleaning process. However, its cleaning goes extreme to make even trace contaminants "leave no trace". After all the chip fabrication materials are applied to a silicon wafer, a strict cleaning process is taken to remove residual particles. If this high-purity cleaning and particle-removal step goes wrong, its electrical connections in the chip are likely to suffer from it.
Intense winds blowing from Africa through a mountainous gap on the western Red Sea coast have led to a buildup of summer dust over the Arabian Peninsula in the past decade. This increasing dust load could have long-term health and global climatic implications.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13, 2020 -- People have been developing different forms of shark repellent for decades -- the military even issued a chemical shark repellent called "Shark Chaser" to pilots, sailors and astronauts(!) from the end of World War II through the start of the Vietnam War. Thing is ... it didn't really work. Learn why they bothered passing it out or even created it in the first place: https://youtu.be/4u54c7cRAog.
Scientists have discovered that Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) grows by taking advantage of the B6 vitamin to accelerate cell division. The research team from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) suggest they could halt the growth of this cancer by limiting its ability to manipulate the enzyme that pushes B6 to make proteins essential for cell division. It's an approach to attacking cancer without harming healthy cells, which need the B6 vitamin to survive.
London, UK: A neuroimaging study recently published in the journal Cephalalgia, the official journal of the International Headache Society, shared more evidence of structural changes in the brain of migraine patients. The study, entitled "Structural connectivity alterations in chronic and episodic migraine: A diffusion magnetic resonance imaging connectomics study", was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of neurologists and bioengineers, coordinated by Dr. Ángel Luis Guerrero, from the Headache Unit, Department of Neurology, University of Valladolid, Spain.
DES PLAINES, IL-- The results of a study conducted by researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine may not support troponin testing for acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in selected elderly patients with nonspecific complaints (NCSs). The study findings will be published in the January 2020 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM).
Tempe, Ariz., January 10, 2020 - According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are only an estimated 1,500 Bornean elephants in the wild, with populations mostly concentrated in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo--a region that has historically experienced unprecedentedly high rates of deforestation. Due to the conversion of Bornean forests for agriculture, elephants were forced from their natural habitats into human-dominated landscapes, increasing incidences of conflicts between people and elephants, such as ivory poaching and crop raids.