Tag: Science

Back when dinosaurs stomped the Earth, mammals scurried about in their shadows. Those furballs, hiding in underground burrows, provided a fresh niche for a novel reptile: the snake. Skinny snakes could squeeze into mammals’ holes and gobble them up. At least, that’s how the dawn of snakes is imagined by Marc Tollis, an evolutionary biologist...

A normal human hears sound in the frequency range 20 hertz (Hz) to 20 kilohertz, and the normal loudness, measured in decibels (dB), is between 30 and 70 db. Higher volumes, e.g. 85 dB and above, can lead to hearing damage. Ultrasound is defined as sound frequencies far beyond the audible range, and are expressed...

Scientists are tweaking a powerful cancer therapy in hopes it could fight HIV instead, by supercharging patients’ own immune cells. On May 12, researchers said a single dose of those revved-up cells strongly suppressed HIV in two people — one for nearly a year and the other for nearly two years — without requiring their...

Volcanoes change the earth’s atmosphere by releasing gases and particles in large quantities. When a volcano erupts, it blasts sulphur dioxide high into the sky, which reacts with water to form aerosols. Since aerosols scatter sunlight, a powerful eruption can end up cooling the earth’s surface for many years. Large eruptions also spew clouds of...

Drugs that enhance the body’s immune response against cancer may also be altering one of its most tightly guarded boundaries: the blood-brain barrier (BBB). A recent study published by Yuval Shaked at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and his team, in Cancer Discovery, finds that PD-1 inhibitors, a widely used class of cancer immunotherapy, can...

Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another — mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes — which...

The human heart beats more than 1 lakh times a day, pushing blood through the body under constant physical strain. Every second, it encounters circulating cells, including cancer cells that travel through the bloodstream. Yet tumours of the heart are strikingly rare. For decades, scientists have tried to explain this puzzle using genetics, immune surveillance,...

A compound called ferrocene has been a landmark of chemistry for over seven decades. It consists of an iron atom sandwiched between two flat carbon rings. Its discovery launched the field of organometallic chemistry, with numerous applications in materials science and medicine. Since then, chemists have been trying to create a version of this sandwich...

Researchers have made the ground shake in southern Switzerland, triggering thousands of tiny earthquakes in a monitored setting, as they seek to discover seismicity insights that could reduce risks. “It was a success!” said Domenico Giardini, one of the lead researchers on the project, as he inspected a crack in the rock wall lining a...