Tech
A drug used for cancer therapy has shown promise in reversing kidney damage caused by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE, or lupus), according to a Yale-led study published April 8 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
"Kidney damage affects about half of the patients with lupus, sometimes leading to renal failure with a requirement for dialysis or transplantation," said Joe Craft, the Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine (rheumatology) and professor of immunobiology. "Finding what causes that damage is extremely important."
Microscopic minerals excavated from an ancient outcrop of Jack Hills, in Western Australia, have been the subject of intense geological study, as they seem to bear traces of the Earth's magnetic field reaching as far back as 4.2 billion years ago. That's almost 1 billion years earlier than when the magnetic field was previously thought to originate, and nearly back to the time when the planet itself was formed.
An online education model in Russia in which national platforms license STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses from top universities to institutions with instructor shortages could significantly lower instruction costs, allowing resource-constrained universities to enroll more STEM students, according to a new study.
Parents who are using popular low-riding pushchairs could be exposing their babies to alarming levels of air pollution, finds a new study from the University of Surrey.
In a paper published by Environment International, experts from Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) investigated the amount of harmful air pollutants babies potentially inhale while out in a pram with their parents or carers.
Edith Smith bred a bluer and shinier Common Buckeye at her butterfly farm in Florida, but it took University of California, Berkeley, graduate student Rachel Thayer to explain the physical and genetic changes underlying the butterfly's newly acquired iridescence.
In the process, Thayer discovered how relatively easy it is for butterflies to change their wing colors over just a few generations and found the first gene proven to influence the so-called "structural color" that underlies the iridescent purple, blue, green and golden hues of many butterflies.
Timing is everything. A fresh example supporting the old saying has been found in connection with the systems regulated by biological clocks.
On April 8, Tropical Cyclone Harold is a major hurricane, a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, as it exits Fiji and heads toward the island of Tonga. NASA used satellite data to calculate the rainfall generated by this powerful and destructive storm in the Southern Pacific Ocean.
DALLAS, April 8, 2020 -- The younger you start smoking, the more likely you are to smoke daily as an adult, even into your 40s, and the harder it will be to quit, according to new data from a long-standing, international study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association.
For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple streams of calculations at a time.
While scientists have super-cooled atoms, doing the same for molecules, which are more complex in their behavior and structure, has proven to be a much bigger challenge.
What The Study Did: Metformin is the most commonly prescribed noninsulin medication for type 2 diabetes and this observational study examined postoperative death and hospital readmission among adults with type 2 diabetes who had a prescription for metformin before major surgery with those who didn't.
Authors: Christopher W. Seymour, M.D., M.Sc., of the Clinical Research, Investigation and Systems Modeling of Acute Illness Center in Pittsburgh, is the corresponding author.
Key Takeaways
Trace elements may increase with future Arctic melt releasing dissolved organic matter from permafrost thaw.
Nutrient levels and productivity may increase in the Arctic, but loss of ice cover will continue to worsen overall warming as more heat is absorbed from the atmosphere.
Research published today in Nature suggests mature forests are limited in their ability to absorb "extra" carbon as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increase. These findings may have implications for New York state's carbon neutrality goals.
Dr. John Drake, assistant professor in ESF's Department of Sustainable Resources Management, is a co-author of the paper in collaboration with researchers at Western Sydney University.
A new study provides some of the earliest pieces of evidence that the COVID-19 outbreak affected people mentally as well as physically.
The preliminary results reveal adults in locations more affected by COVID-19 had distress, and lower physical and mental health, and life satisfaction.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide, Tongji University and University of Sydney surveyed 369 adults living in 64 cities in China after they had lived under one-month of confinement measures in February this year.
A literal "trick of the light" can detect imperfections in next-gen solar cells, boosting their efficiency to match that of existing silicon-based versions, researchers have found.
The discovery opens a pathway to improved quality control for commercial production.
On small scales, perovskite solar cells - which promise cheap and abundant solar energy generation - are already almost as efficient as silicon ones.
However, as scale increases the perovskite cells perform less well, because of nanoscale surface imperfections resulting from the way they are made.
A team of scientists at Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has developed a novel mechanical cleaning method for surfaces on the nanoscale. The technique successfully removes even the tiniest contaminants down to the atomic scale, achieving an unprecedented level of cleanliness. The results of this study led by Prof. Dr. Erdmann Spiecker from the Department of Materials Science at FAU have now been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
World's smallest broom