Posts

The body’s tissues routinely communicate with each other through RNA messages sent back and forth between cells. So, it seemed obvious to scientists that, by eavesdropping on these extracellular communiqués carried in blood, saliva, urine and other fluids, they should be able to intercept dispatches indicative of health and disease. If only it were that easy. “When people got into this, we were all a bit naive,” says Louise Laurent, a perinatologist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD)....

By Zeeya MeraliIt’s another victory for Einstein – albeit not a resounding one. General relativity has been confirmed at the largest scale yet. But the galactic tests used to put the theory through its paces cannot rule out all rival theories of gravity.General relativity has been rigorously tested within the Solar System, where it explains the motion of planets with precision. But its reach between galaxies has been harder to verify and should not be taken for granted, says cosmologist Alexie Leauthaud, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California....

With COVID-19 reaching the most dangerous levels the U.S. has seen since the pandemic began, the country faces a problematic holiday season. Despite the risk, many people are likely to travel using various forms of transportation that will inevitably put them in relatively close contact with others. Many transit companies have established frequent cleaning routines, but evidence suggests that airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus poses a greater danger than surfaces....

BERLIN (Reuters) - German authorities on Saturday confirmed a second case of the H5N8 strain of bird flu in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with the virus found in a wild bird. The strain is highly contagious among birds but has never been detected in humans. “For the first time, the H5N8 virus has been confirmed in a wild bird in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,” Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt said in a statement. “With that the suspicion is strengthened that wild birds are connected with the cases in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as well as in the Netherlands and Britain,” the minister said....

In the 12th episode of Cosmos, which aired on December 14, 1980, the program’s co-creator and host Carl Sagan introduced television viewers to astronomer Frank Drake’s eponymous equation. Using it, he calculated the potential number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way that could contact us using the extraterrestrial equivalent of our modern radio-communications technology. Sagan’s estimate ranged from “a pitiful few” to millions. “If civilizations do not always destroy themselves shortly after discovering radio astronomy, then the sky may be softly humming with messages from the stars,” Sagan intoned in his inimitable way....

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study. That’s the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang. But not everyone is convinced; the new findings, based on data released in 2018, contradict both years of conventional wisdom and another recent study based on that same CMB data set....

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazineThe disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant is putting the nation’s ambitious plans to reduce carbon emissions under serious pressure. With few natural resources, Japan has long been forced to rely on imports of oil, coal and natural gas to provide about 80 percent of the energy needed to sustain its economy. Nuclear energy was supposed to help Japan limit these energy imports and cut its carbon emissions at the same time–but that was before Fukushima....

What does it mean to be “brain dead”? For years one of the hallmarks has been a lack of electrical activity in the brain, which shows up on an electroencephalogram, or EEG, as a flat line. But what if inside the brain of a person who had already flat lined, there was still something going on—some murmur of electrical signals? Could the person still be considered brain dead? These questions were thrown into relief when researchers investigated a heart-attack patient in a hospital in Romania in August 2011....

EACH NEW GENERATION of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors—the glia and astrocytes—within the nervous system....

California is experiencing more wildfires, illness and drought as the impacts of climate change accelerate, according to a report released Tuesday. The state’s fourth edition of “Indicators of Climate Change in California” finds that such impacts are hitting California sooner and more forcefully than previously expected. Published by the state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the report says that half of the state’s 20 largest wildfires occurred in 2020 and 2021, heat waves have doubled in frequency in some areas, and glaciers are rapidly disappearing....

A tree’s annual growth cycle creates a record of good seasons—and poor ones. Analyzing ring patterns in living and dead wood can help scientists date ancient ships or reconstruct changing climates. In the U.S. Southwest researchers rely on tree rings to track changes in the seasonal monsoon rains that deliver about half of New Mexico and Arizona’s precipitation. In the June issue of Scientific American Connie Woodhouse, associate professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, describes what the annual rings reveal....

For anxious climate hawks fretting over the expected rollback of environmental regulations from the Donald Trump presidency, here is a small spot of good news: Global carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuel did not grow at all last year. What’s more, the carbon dioxide emissions that cause the Earth to warm may have plateaued even as the United States enters an era with a president promising to rejuvenate its depleted coal industry, experts said....

WASHINGTON—Dr. Stephen Hahn will now be the man in charge of regulating e-cigarettes, ultra-expensive drugs, and medical cannabis products—at a time of increased political focus on all fronts. The Senate on Thursday voted to confirm Hahn, who has no previous political experience in Washington, as the next head of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency charged with regulating countless other food and drug products. His confirmation comes at a particularly sensitive time for the FDA....

In habitats across the planet, animals periodically drop everything to walk, fly or swim to a new locale—and lightweight tracking technology has given biologists their best-ever understanding of these seasonal treks. Wildlife such as whales and geese learn migration routes by following their parents and other older counterparts. Others, including small songbirds, inherit the distance and direction of their migration deep within their genetic code. And some animals use a combination of genetics and culture to guide their migration....

Humans have long drawn inspiration from bird wings to design mechanical ones—and now a team of mathematicians has taken this biomimicry to a new level. By 3-D-printing a variety of wing shapes, racing them in a laboratory and feeding the data into an algorithm that simulates evolution, the researchers found that a teardrop-shaped wing is fastest for both flapping flight and swimming. This is the first time such a combined process has been used to find an optimal wing shape for fast flight, says Leif Ristroph, a mathematician at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and senior author of the new study....

Maya civilization once stretched hundreds of miles across Mesoamerica and the Yucatán Peninsula, with bustling cities, a thriving economy, and a booming arts and culture scene. But between the eighth and 10th centuries C.E., it endured sudden population fluctuations, increased conflict and abandoned urban centers. Archaeologists and other researchers have considered landscape degradation, volcanoes and drought as possible drivers of this dramatic instability throughout Maya society. For a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, researchers probed a lake bed near the ancient Maya city of Kaminaljuyú to investigate another possible stressor: harmful algae in the water supply....

The U.S. could face a shortfall of thousands of doctors, experts warn, because Pres. Donald Trump issued an executive order last week that banned citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days. The order has created fears among foreign-born doctors and medical students—more than a quarter of the physician workforce in the U.S. comes from other countries, including Syria and Iran—that they will be persecuted in the U....

There are several hundred people in Washington, D.C., paid with taxpayer dollars, who are not doing their jobs. This November we have the chance to do something about that because these people are members of the U.S. Congress, and in upcoming elections, they can be replaced with representatives who will live up to their responsibilities. Those responsibilities, set out by the Constitution, include oversight of the executive branch, in this case the Trump administration....

Imagine you’ve lost your job. You have some money saved, and a chance to double it with a gamble. But if you lose the bet, you’ll forfeit everything. What would you do? Most people would not gamble their savings, according to Benedetto De Martino of California Institute of Technology, author of a study published February 8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. People tend to choose avoiding losses over acquiring gains—a behavior known as loss-aversion....

Buried oceans like the one thought to slosh beneath the icy surface of the dwarf planet Pluto may be incredibly common across the cosmos. A gassy insulating layer probably keeps Pluto’s liquid-water ocean from freezing solid, a new study reports. And something similar could be happening under the surfaces of frigid worlds in other solar systems as well, study team members said. “This could mean there are more oceans in the universe than previously thought, making the existence of extraterrestrial life more plausible,” lead author Shunichi Kamata, of Hokkaido University in Japan, said in a statement....