A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
Weather conditions, including record summer temperatures and hot dry winds, have made parts of the Mediterranean, including Greece and southern Italy, a tinderbox, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said.
Greece has experienced more wildfire activity this August than other European countries have over the last decade, according to data from ESA satellites. The country is currently battling an outbreak of blazes, which began last Thursday, that have spread across the country killing more than 60 people.
The ATSR World Fire Atlas provides data approximately six hours after acquisition. All available satellite passes are processed to create the ATSR World Fire Atlas. In addition to maps, the time, date, longitude and latitude of the hot spots are provided.
Astronomers at the University of Rochester have discovered five Earth-oceans’ worth of water that has recently fallen into the planet-forming region around an extremely young, developing star.
Dan Watson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, believes he and his colleagues are the first to see a short-lived stage of protoplanetary disk formation, and the manner in which a planetary system’s supply of water arrives from the natal envelope within which its parent star originally formed.
The findings, published in today’s Nature, are the first-ever glimpse of material directly feeding a protoplanetary disk.
Artist's rendition of the forming system at IRAS4B. Credit: JPL/CalTech
Throughout Earth's history, 90,000 out of every 100,000 years have been ice ages - and it's been 12,000 years since the last one. You can thank global warming, it seems.
Future ice ages may be delayed by up to 500,000 years by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, according to recent work by Dr Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton.
If their numerical model is accurate, this sets a new standard for detailing the disruption of long-term planetary processes by human activity.
In evolutionary terms, the difference between 2.1 and 2.2 children is a lot more important than the small difference sounds, especially as it accumulates over time.
A new study in Royal Society Biology Letters says that achieving that maximum offspring count is best accomplished by men if their partner is approximately 6 years younger and by women if their partner is approximately 4 years older.
This means that a man may not just be interested in a trophy wife, he may be thinking about the future of humanity. But this happens with women also. Women who find a new mate still choose a partner older than themselves, though younger than the first.
In a study to be published in the September issue of Psychological Science journal, researchers investigated how thinking about God and notions of a higher power influenced positive social behavior, specifically cooperation with others and generosity to strangers.
UBC PhD graduate Azim Shariff and UBC Assoc. Prof. Ara Norenzayan found that priming people with ‘God concepts’ – by activating subconscious thoughts through word games – promoted altruism. In addition, the researchers found that this effect was consistent in behaviour whether people declared themselves believers or not. The researchers also found that secular notions of civic responsibility promote cooperation and generosity.
A website dubbing itself 'YouTube for scientists' has been launched, saying the intent is to bring science closer to the people, according to backers Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
SciVee allows scientists to upload published papers, as well as a podcast presenting the paper. The groups behind the initiative say they are confident that it will contribute to the widespread dissemination and comprehension of science.
First, we don't see how it's YouTube if you can only upload a podcast and a printed article.
Capuchin monkeys are playful, inquisitive primates known for their manual dexterity, complex social behavior, and cognitive abilities. New research now shows that just like humans, they display a fundamental sex difference in the organization of the brain, specifically in the corpus callosum, the region that connects the two cerebral lobes.
A recently published paper by Associate Professor of Psychology and Biology Kimberley A. Phillips (Hiram College), Chet C. Sherwood (George Washington University) and Alayna L. Lilak (Hiram College), reports finding both sex and handedness influences on the relative size of the corpus callosum.
The Johns Hopkins scientist who first showed that the absence of the protein myostatin leads to oversized muscles in mice and men has now found a second protein, follistatin, whose overproduction in mice lacking myostatin doubles the muscle-building effect.
Results of Se-Jin Lee’s new study show that while mice that lack the gene that makes myostatin have roughly twice the amount of body muscle as normal, mice without myostatin that also overproduce follistatin have about four times as much muscle as normal mice.
Lee, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of molecular biology and genetics, says that this added muscle increase could significantly boost research efforts to “beef up” livestock or promote muscle growth in patients with muscular dystrophy and other wasting diseases.
Neighborhood property values predict local obesity rates better than education or incomes, according to a study from the University of Washington being published online this week by the journal Social Science and Medicine. For each additional $100,000 in the median price of homes, UW researchers found, obesity rates in a given ZIP code dropped by 2 percent.
The study, based on analyses of responses to a telephone survey conducted in King County by the local health department and the federal Centers for Disease Control, found six-fold disparities in obesity rates across the Seattle metropolitan area. Obesity rates reached 30 percent in the most deprived areas but were only around 5 percent in the most affluent ZIP codes.
Physicists have found the formula for a Spiderman suit. Recent research determined that van der Waals forces, the weak attraction that molecules have for each other when they are brought very close together, are responsible for the amazing sticking power of geckos and spiders. It is the tiny hairs on spiders’ feet that attract to the molecules of surfaces, even glass, and keep them steady.
The historic collaboration between leading scientists and Evangelicals to protect the environment, spearheaded by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) continues this week with a trip to Alaska. A group of five scientists and five evangelical leaders began traveling together on August 25th to observe first- hand the dramatic effects of climate change on local people and on the land, ocean, plants, and wildlife of the nation’s northernmost state.
“The goal of our trip is to witness together what human-caused climate change is doing to our world,” said co-leader of the trip Eric Chivian, who shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize and is Director of the HMS Center.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is probably one you don’t think of very often — the capacity to learn based merely on what someone tells you.
For instance, if we are told that our neighbors’ son has died his hair purple, we update our mental image of him to accommodate this newly acquired information.
What is unknown, however, is when we become capable of revising our mental representations of objects or situations based solely on what someone tells us.
