Thursday, 29 August 2019 - Adults with cerebral palsy are about twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease and chronic respiratory disease compared to adults without cerebral palsy, according to a new study led by RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) and Brunel University London.
A study led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has revealed the effects of the stress of parenting in the brains of both mothers and their children.
The researchers analysed the brain activity of 31 pairs of mother and child from Singapore while they were watching children's animation clips together.
They found that mothers who reported higher levels of parenting stress had less synchrony in brain activity with their child (all aged around 3 years old) than those who reported lower levels of parenting stress.
Clues from Canadian rocks formed billions of year ago reveal a previously unknown loss of life even greater than that of the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, when Earth lost nearly three-quarters of its plant and animal species.
Rather than prowling animals, this die-off involved miniscule microorganisms that shaped the Earth's atmosphere and ultimately paved the way for those larger animals to thrive.
Visible and infrared imagery from NASA's Terra satellite revealed that strong wind shear was adversely affecting Tropical Depression Erin, located about 200 miles off the Carolina coast.
On Aug. 27, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Tropical Depression Erin. In the image, Erin appeared as a swirl of clouds around its center with most of its clouds and thunderstorms pushed southeast of center. Strong northwesterly vertical wind shear was pushing at the storm.
A wireless sensor small enough to be implanted in the blood vessels of the human brain could help clinicians evaluate the healing of aneurysms -- bulges that can cause death or serious injury if they burst. The stretchable sensor, which operates without batteries, would be wrapped around stents or diverters implanted to control blood flow in vessels affected by the aneurysms.
Drugs that help prevent the formation of unwanted or harmful proteins are currently being developed to treat a number of diseases, including cancer. The drugs are based on small interfering RNA, or siRNA, which are pieces of nucleic acids that work by interfering with the production of proteins. But getting these drugs to the right target, such as to a tumor, remains challenging because siRNAs can degrade rapidly in the body -- making systemic delivery inefficient. They also can have some difficulty entering cells where they do their work.
Temperate grasslands are the most endangered but least protected ecosystems on Earth. Grassland restorations are crucial for recovering this important but highly degraded ecosystem. Restored grasslands, however, tend to be more species poor and lose diversity through time as compared to remnant, or never-been plowed, grasslands. A new study from the University of Missouri found that milkweeds and other plants that have seeds carried by the wind are an important source for enriching the diversity of plants in these valuable ecosystems.
NASA's Terra satellite passed over the northwestern Atlantic Ocean as Dorian reached hurricane status during the afternoon of August 28, 2019.
On Aug. 28, 2019 at 1:30 p.m. EDT, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Dorian near St. Thomas and the U.S. Virgin Islands. At 2 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center noted, "Satellite and radar images indicate that the cloud pattern has become better organized during the past several hours."
A team of paleontologists from the Borissiak Paleontological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) discovered four new species of extinct insects with sucking mouthparts in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. Researchers believe that they visited first angiosperm flowers, but eventually went extinct due to the inefficient design of the proboscis. According to the research, Paradoxosisyrinae, the group to which these creatures belong, is a kind of «Nature's failed experiment». The results of the study are published in the Cretaceous Research journal.
Elaborate burial sites can provide insight to the development of socio-political hierarchies in early human communities, according to a study released August 28, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by an international team of archaeologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists of the Ba'ja Neolithic Project hosted at the Free University of Berlin in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.