Anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) work like the drug Warfarin on humans, which itself was used as a first-generation AR, and was less lethal and less prone to bioaccumulation than its second-generation successors. Second-generation ARs seem to act like pesticides such as DDT, which build up in animals that prey on target pests. “It seems that every time anybody goes out and gets a bunch of dead birds of prey and looks at their livers, they find surprisingly high incidence of these compounds,” says John Elliott, an ecotoxicologist at Environment Canada in Delta....

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ADHD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in childhood, affecting approximately 6 million American children between the ages of 3 and 17 years.m Children with the disorder may have trouble paying attention and controlling impulsive behaviors, or they may be overly active. Diagnosis relies on a checklist completed by the child’s caregiver to rate the presence of ADHD symptoms....

A small group of nerve cells in the brain determines whether an individual continues to consume alcohol even when it has negative consequences. This is the conclusion of a study carried out on rats by researchers at Linköping University, Sweden. The scientists have identified a previously unknown mechanism that may be a suitable target for treatment by medication. The study has been published in the scientific journal Science Advances. “We discovered that a small group of nerve cells in a small region of the brain are the difference between being able to put the brakes on in a normal manner, as most of our rats did, and not being able to stop yourself,” says Markus Heilig, professor of psychiatry in the Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences and director of the Center for Social and Affective Neuroscience (CSAN) at Linköping University....

“The people with hemispherectomies that we studied were remarkably high functioning. They have intact language skills; when I put them in the scanner we made small talk, just like the hundreds of other individuals I have scanned,” says first author Dorit Kliemann, a post-doc at the California Institute of Technology. “You can almost forget their condition when you meet them for the first time. When I sit in front of the computer and see these MRI images showing only half a brain, I still marvel that the images are coming from the same human being who I just saw talking and walking and who has chosen to devote his or her time to research....

Astronomers have long known that stars experience a process known as ‘magnetic braking’: a steady stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind, escapes from the star over time, carrying away small amounts of the star’s angular momentum. This slow drain causes stars like our Sun to gradually slow down their rotation over billions of years. In turn, the slower rotation leads to altered magnetic fields and less stellar activity – the numbers of sunspots, flares, outbursts, and similar phenomena in the atmospheres of stars, which are intrinsically linked to the strengths of their magnetic fields....

A new Princeton University-led study in Nature Communications is among the first to show that solar and wind energy not only enhance drought resilience, but also aid in groundwater sustainability. Using drought-prone California as a case study, the researchers show that increased solar and wind energy can reduce the reliance on hydropower, especially during drought. Consequently, this could help divert more surface water from hydropower to irrigation, thereby reducing overall groundwater abstraction....

The team conducted genetic analyses on eight common obesity-related cancer types. They compared the genetic Mendelian randomization estimates of the association between body mass index (BMI) and cancer risk with the estimates from classical cohort studies. Excess body fatness is already recognized as an important cause of cancer and has been estimated to account for six percent of all cancers in high-income countries. According to the results of this new analysis, the proportion of cancers attributable to overweight and obesity is, in fact, substantially higher....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature Materials. Scientists have come up with a stealthy neural interface made from a single carbon fiber and coated with chemicals to make it resistant to proteins in the brain. This new microthread electrode is designed to pick up signals from a single neuron as it fires and is only 7 micrometers in diameter. This is the thinnest electrode that has ever been developed, and is about 100 times as thin as conventional metal electrodes used to study animal brains....

“The discovery suggests that the atmosphere of Titan’s southern hemisphere is cooling much faster than we expected,” said Remco de Kok of Leiden Observatory and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, lead author of the study published today in the journal Nature. Titan is the only moon in the solar system that is cloaked in a dense atmosphere. Like our home planet, Earth, Titan experiences seasons. As it makes its 29-year orbit around the sun along with Saturn, each season lasts about seven Earth years....

Scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. Astronomers have known for decades that the Moon’s poles host craters with lofty rims, which shield their floors from sunlight, making searches difficult. Over the past few months, astronomers have built a catalog of other permanently shadowed regions on the Moon. The team used software they developed, called LunarShader, to simulate the lighting conditions on the moon throughout its solar cycles. Once topographical models were inputted, the software identified 100 craters that could contain permanent shadows....

The team, led by Chongmin Wang at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has shown that the presence of certain compounds in the electrolyte—the liquid material that makes a battery’s critical chemistry possible—prompts the growth of dendrites and whiskers. The team hopes the discovery will lead to new ways to prevent their growth by manipulating the battery’s ingredients. The results were published online October 14, 2019, in Nature Nanotechnology....

This “extrasolar” CME was seen emanating from a star called HR 9024, which is located about 450 light years from Earth. This represents the first time that researchers have thoroughly identified and characterized a CME from a star other than our Sun. This event was marked by an intense flash of X-rays followed by the emission of a giant bubble of plasma, i.e., hot gas containing charged particles.

MIT astronomers have discovered new and unusual galactic neighborhoods that previous studies overlooked. Their results, published on March 26, 2021, in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest that roughly 1 percent of galaxy clusters look atypical and can be easily misidentified as a single bright galaxy. As researchers launch new cluster-hunting telescopes, they must heed these findings or risk having an incomplete picture of the universe. Galaxy clusters contain hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity....

The skeleton of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus, was collected more than 160 years ago on west Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. The rocks in which it was fossilized are around 193 million years old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs. This remarkable specimen — the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever recovered — was sent to Richard Owen at the British Museum, the man who invented the word dinosaur. So, what did Owen do with this find?...

The results of the multicenter study, which was supported by a grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and co-led by Columbia’s Giovanni Ferrari, PhD, and CHOP’s Robert J. Levy, MD, were published earlier this month in Science Translational Medicine. Degenerative Mitral Regurgitation Degenerative mitral regurgitation (DMR) is one of the most common types of heart valve disease. The mitral valve is located between the left atrium and left ventricle of the heart....

In recent years, subcortical small-vessel disease has become an increasingly common cognitive diagnosis. Researchers at University of Gothenburg have now shown that it is possible to identify patients with the disease by combining two biomarkers that are measured in spinal fluid and blood, increasing the potential for both treatment and development of medication. Subcortical small-vessel disease is one of the most common cognitive diseases, along with Alzheimer’s disease and mixed dementia, which is a form in which Alzheimer’s disease occurs together with vascular damage in the brain....

Contract tracing apps used to reduce the spread of COVID-19 are unlikely to be effective without proper uptake and support from concurrent control measures, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The systematic review*, published in Lancet Digital Health, shows that evidence around the effectiveness of automated contact tracing systems is currently very limited, and large-scale manual contact tracing alongside other public health control measures – such as physical distancing and closure of indoor spaces such as pubs – is likely to be required in conjunction with automated approaches....

How do we know? The bodies consumed by the star leave telltale “fingerprints” – caught by the Hubble Space Telescope and other NASA observatories – on its surface. The spectral evidence shows that the white dwarf is siphoning off both rocky-metallic and icy material – debris from both its system’s inner and outer reaches. Uncovering evidence of icy bodies is intriguing, since it implies that a “water reservoir” might be common on the edges of planetary systems, improving the chances for the emergence of life as we know it....

Caltech astronomers have taken unprecedented images of the intergalactic medium (IGM) — the diffuse gas that connects galaxies throughout the universe—with the Cosmic Web Imager, an instrument designed and built at Caltech. Until now, the structure of the IGM has mostly been a matter for theoretical speculation. However, with observations from the Cosmic Web Imager, deployed on the Hale 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory, astronomers are obtaining our first three-dimensional pictures of the IGM....

Expedition 68 Commander Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Petelin completed their major objective, preparing a radiator on the Rassvet module for installation on the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. Prokopyev was wearing a Russian spacesuit with red stripes, while Petelin was wearing a Russian suit with blue stripes. This was the third spacewalk in Prokopyev’s career, and the first for Petelin. It was the tenth spacewalk at the station in 2022 and the 255th spacewalk for space station assembly, maintenance, and upgrades....