Doctors and nurses on the Covid-19 frontline are spending many hours a day wearing face masks, and many members of the general public are doing the same. But although the devices offer invaluable protection, they can be the cause of significant skin damage through sweating and the rubbing of the masks against the nose. Skincare experts at the University of Huddersfield are warning of the risks and suggesting remedies. Professor Karen Ousey is Director at the Institute of Skin Integrity and Infection Prevention at the University and she was part of a team that conducted detailed research into the pressure damage that can be caused by a wide range of medical devices, including face masks....

Grade-school science teachers sometimes hand out “mystery boxes” containing ramps, barriers, and a loose marble. By rotating the boxes and feeling the marble hang up or drop, the students try to deduce what’s inside the box. Physicists trying to understand why tiny particles rain incessantly down from space face a similar dilemma, but their box is a hundred thousand light-years across and their only clues are the particles themselves. Just to make things more interesting, the particles don’t travel in straight lines through the galaxy but instead follow tortuous paths that provide no clue to their starting point....

Harvard-led researchers have discovered that an Ascomycete fungus that is common in polluted water produces environmentally important minerals during asexual reproduction. The key chemical in the process, superoxide, is a byproduct of fungal growth when the organism produces spores. Once released into the environment, superoxide reacts with the element manganese (Mn), producing a highly reactive mineral that aids in the cleanup of toxic metals, degrades carbon substrates, and controls the bioavailability of nutrients....

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse. Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries....

Don’t despair the next time you forget where you placed your keys, parked your car, or set down your glasses. Previous research has shown that if individuals are shown a large number of objects, they are very good at subsequently remembering which objects they have seen. A recent study suggests that people are also shockingly skilled at remembering where and when they saw those objects In a series of experiments conducted by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, participants were able to recall the location of over 100 items when shown on a 7-by-7 grid, accurately selecting the right location or a cell adjacent to it....

Infants outperform artificial intelligence in detecting what motivates other people’s actions, finds a new study by a team of psychology and data science researchers. Its results, which highlight fundamental differences between cognition and computation, point to shortcomings in today’s technologies and where improvements are needed for AI to more fully replicate human behavior. “Adults and even infants can easily make reliable inferences about what drives other people’s actions,” explains Moira Dillon, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, that was published on February 16 in the journal Cognition....

Critically ill COVID-19 patients treated with non-altered stem cells from umbilical cord connective tissue were more than twice as likely to survive as those who did not have the treatment, according to a study published today (June 8, 2021) in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine. The clinical trial, carried out at four hospitals in Jakarta, Indonesia, also showed that administering the treatment to COVID-19 patients with an added chronic health condition such as diabetes, hypertension or kidney disease increased their survival more than fourfold....

In this effort, Steven May, Ph.D., and his colleagues from Drexel University’s College of Engineering, along with researchers from the University of Saskatchewan and Lawrence Berkeley, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Labs have recently demonstrated a new approach for examining — with atomic-layer precision — changes in the behavior of electrons at the interfaces between two materials. In particular, the approach provides a glimpse into how the degree of covalent and ionic bonding between metal and oxygen atoms is altered in moving from one material to the next....

For that we have computational linguistics, also known as natural language processing (NLP), to thank. It’s one of the research focuses of Dragomir Radev, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science. It’s an area of study where computer science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence intersect, and it has become increasingly prominent in our lives, from Apple’s Siri to automated customer service. In a nutshell, NLP is a means of training computers to understand human language....

Animals that maintain cooperative relationships show gains in longevity and offspring survival. However, little is known about the cognitive or hormonal mechanisms involved in cooperation. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now found that cooperative relationships are facilitated by an endocrinological mechanism involving the hormone oxytocin, even when these are between non-kin. They collected urine samples of 33 chimpanzees from Budongo Forest, Uganda, and measured their urinary oxytocin levels after single episodes of a specific cooperative behavior, mutual grooming....

Swift J1357.2-0933 is a black hole obscured by a disc of gas with a vertical structure (rather like a donut) that continues to expandThis is the first time a black hole has been seen with this inclination and it’s the first time that eclipses in brightness have been detected in this kind of systemThe structure described in the study could be present in many other systems, which would make Swift J1357....

The mystery of why zebras have their characteristic stripes has perplexed researchers for over a century. Over the last decade, Professor Tim Caro at the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences has examined and discredited many popular theories such as their use as camouflage from predators, a cooling mechanism through the formation of convection currents and a role in social interactions. Stripes acting to confuse predators is another common explanation, but it too is flawed when looking at the scientific data....

The Basics of Bioluminescence Bioluminescence is the name given to the light that living organisms emit. This light comes from a reaction between two groups of molecules — luciferins and luciferases. While the exact form of these molecules varies from animal to animal, they all work in essentially the same way through the catalyzed oxidation of luciferin by the luciferase enzyme. The Uses of Bioluminescence in Nature There is not just one purpose to bioluminescence, and depending on the organism, the benefits can be wildly different....

In a study recently published in the top journal Allergy, a team of MedUni Vienna scientists led by immunologist Winfried F. Pickl and allergologist Rudolf Valenta (both from the Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology) showed that there are seven “forms of disease” in COVID-19 with mild disease course and that the disease leaves behind significant changes in the immune system, even after 10 weeks. These findings could play a significant role in the treatment of patients and in the development of a potent vaccine....

“Looking at data for this volcano spanning about 12 years, we found that this correlation between the amplitude of seismic tremor and tidal cycles developed only in the three months before this eruption,” said Társilo Girona, the study’s lead author. “What that suggests is that the tides could provide a probe for telling us whether or not a volcano has entered a critical state.” Girona, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led the research during a postdoctoral appointment at Brown University, working with Brown professor Christian Huber and Corentin Caudron, a postdoctoral researcher at the Ghent University in Belgium....

“The acquisition of mitochondria was considered either to be the crucial first step or the last step in the development of eukaryotic cell complexity,” explains Gabaldón, “our findings show that it was indeed a crucial event, but that it happened in a scenario where cell complexity had already increased.” Complexity as a prelude to the diversity of life For roughly the first half of the history of life on Earth, the only forms of life were the relatively simple cells of bacteria....

The researchers presented their findings during the European Planetary Science Congress of 2012 in Madrid last Friday. Athena Coustenis, from the Paris-Meudon Observatory in France, analyzed the data. Just like Earth, the seasons on Titan change. There are differences in atmospheric temperatures, chemical composition and circulation patterns, especially around the poles. Hydrocarbon lakes form around the north-polar region during the winter due to colder temperatures and condensation. A haze layer surrounds Titan at the northern pole and it is significantly reduced during the equinox because of atmospheric circulation patterns....

“What immediately comes to mind as one the most significant points here is that the existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on the study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. “It also tells us about the ancient climate and its evolution. Based on these findings, we know there had to have been a period when it was warm enough and the atmosphere was thick enough to support this much liquid water at one time....

Based on previous literature, the researchers knew that the brain attempts to organize information in ways that follow familiar patterns and sequences. One of the most universal, well-known patterns is the alphabet, and the investigators suspected that claims with first letters conforming to the arbitrary “ABCD” sequence—such as Andrenogel Increases Testosterone—would be perceived as more truthful. The study is available online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “We go about our lives looking for natural sequences, and when we find a match to one of these patterns, it feels right,” says study author Dan King, Ph....

Every massive galaxy has a central supermassive black hole, more than a million times more massive than the sun, revealing its presence through its gravitational effects on the galaxy’s stars and sometimes powering the energetic radiation from an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The energy pouring into a galaxy from an active galactic nucleus is thought to turn off star formation by heating and dispelling the gas that would otherwise condense into stars as it cooled....