Earth
More than half of the climate tipping points identified a decade ago are now "active", a group of leading scientists have warned.
This threatens the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected.
This "cascade" of changes sparked by global warming could threaten the existence of human civilisations.
Starting antiretroviral therapy within hours of birth drastically shrinks the reservoir of HIV virus - an important step in efforts to cure infections - and improves antiviral immune responses in newborns with HIV, shows a two-year study of a unique cohort of ten infants in Botswana. The findings demonstrate that starting treatment earlier in life than current guidelines recommend could substantially improve health outcomes in infants with HIV, who experience irreversible immune damage if left untreated.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to contain 100 million stellar black holes - cosmic bodies formed by the collapse of massive stars and so dense even light can't escape. Until now, scientists had estimated the mass of an individual stellar black hole in our Galaxy at no more than 20 times that of the Sun. But the discovery of a huge black hole by a Chinese-led team of international scientists has toppled that assumption.
(Jerusalem, November 26, 2019)--It is a feeling that many who receive a cancer diagnosis can identify with: heartbreak and fear, followed by hopes that chemotherapy will save the day. Unfortunately, for many patients, chemo's painful side effects cause them to stop treatment prematurely.
Tohoku University researchers have developed a strategy that could help cells get rid of disease-related debris. Further research could lead to treatments for neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases, Down syndrome, and maybe even aging-related diseases. The findings were published in the journal Molecular Cell.
Not all neonicotinoid insecticides have negative effects on bees, according to researchers at Lund University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Their new study indicates that the use of certain neonicotinoids could benefit bumblebees and pollination.
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Engineers from Carnegie Mellon University's Scott Institute for Energy Innovation have compiled carbon emissions for the U.S. electric power sector for the second quarter (Q2) of 2019 as part of the CMU Power Sector Carbon Index. The index tracks carbon emissions and electricity generation over time and by energy source. Compared to Q2 of 2018, total U.S. power generation fell by 4% in Q2 of 2019, and the carbon intensity of the sector, measured in pounds of CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour, dropped by 9%.
Sharks, penguins, turtles and other seagoing species could help humans monitor the oceans by transmitting oceanographic information from electronic tags.
Thousands of marine animals are tagged for a variety of research and conservation purposes, but at present the information gathered isn't widely used to track climate change and other shifts in the oceans.
Burning of the rainforest in southwestern Amazonia (the Brazilian, Peruvian and Bolivian Amazon) may increase the melting of tropical glaciers in the Andes, according to a study in Scientific Reports.
Many women in the WHO European Region, particularly those in their 40s, are diagnosed at a late stage of HIV infection when their immune system is already starting to fail. They are three to four times more likely to be diagnosed late than younger women.
According to data for 2018 released today by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the WHO Regional Office for Europe, women accounted for one-third of the 141 000 new HIV diagnoses in the Region, indicating that this population needs more attention in Europe's prevention and testing efforts.
White blood cells, which release a toxic potion of proteins to kill cancerous and virus-infected cells, are protected from any harm by the physical properties of their cell envelopes, find scientists from UCL and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
Until now, it has been a mystery to scientists how these white blood cells - called cytotoxic lymphocytes - avoid being killed by their own actions and the discovery could help explain why some tumours are more resistant than others to recently developed cancer immunotherapies.
HAMILTON, ON, Nov. 27, 2019 - Researchers at McMaster University have created a new coating to prevent clotting and infection in synthetic vascular grafts, while also accelerating the body's own process for integrating the grafted vessels.
Producing glass objects using 3D printing is not easy. Only a few groups of researchers around the world have attempted to produce glass using additive methods. Some have made objects by printing molten glass, but the disadvantage is that this requires extremely high temperatures and heat-?resistant equipment. Others have used powdered ceramic particles that can be printed at room temperature and then sintered later to create glass; however, objects produced in this way are not very complex.
If your DNA is a cookbook, a single gene is a recipe. But it's a flexible recipe that if edited one way can make a pie; edited another way can make a cake. And that difference can mean cancer, as a team of researchers who looked at those gene editors writes in the 26 November issue of Cell Reports.
Those gene editors are known as splicing factors. When a gene is read out and copied, splicing factors choose where to cut and past the text so that it will give the right recipe to the cell for that moment in time.
Many chemical processes depend on catalysts to facilitate reactions that would otherwise proceed very slowly, or not at all. An innovative procedure for visually representing the structure of catalysts via computer-assisted design, developed at KAUST, is helping researchers build better catalysts.
The software generates topographic steric maps and has been developed by Luigi Cavallo's research group at the KAUST Catalysis Research Center. The source code required is now freely available online.