In the Trade publications category of the 2023
@AHCJ
Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, Jennifer Couzin-Frankel took first place for coverage of a new procedure for organ donation.
Check out the winning story. 🏆
Italians can speak up to nine syllables per second, while Germans deliver five to six syllables in the same tick of a watch.
Yet, they transmit a similar amount of information, according to a new study.
It may not sound like much, but the audio clip in this story is the first reconstruction of an ancient human voice—one belonging to a 3000-year-old Egyptian mummy named Nesyamun.
Scientists and doctors are divided over whether myocarditis concerns should influence vaccine recommendations, especially now that a new
#COVID19
wave is looming and revamped boosters are hitting the scene.
As with other behavioral traits such as personality, there is no single “gay gene.” Instead, same-sex sexual behavior appears to be influenced by perhaps hundreds or thousands of genes, each with tiny effects, according to new research.
The
#NobelPrize
in Chemistry has been awarded to the two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called
#CRISPR
, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.
In an effort to save Guam’s remaining birds, researchers placed nests atop smooth poles they were sure no snake could climb.
But to their shock, the snakes scaled the poles and looped themselves into never-before-seen lassos to snag their prey.
They are no bigger than sesame seeds, and they pulse with a hypnotic rhythm.
These are human “minihearts,” the first to be created in the lab with clearly beating chambers.
“This is just amazing.”
For the first time, scientists have sharpened cryo-EM’s resolution to the atomic level, allowing them to pinpoint the positions of individual atoms in a variety of proteins at a resolution that rivals x-ray crystallography’s.
More than 1000 researchers have signed an open letter in support of Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity consultant who is being accused of harassment and blackmail by a lawyer representing
#COVID19
drug researcher Didier Raoult.
Artificial intelligence has solved one of biology’s grand challenges: predicting how proteins curl up from a linear chain of amino acids into 3D shapes that allow them to carry out life’s tasks.
The Arecibo Observatory is gone. Its 900-ton instrument platform, suspended above a dish in the karst hills of Puerto Rico, collapsed earlier this week.
New data released by the U.S. National Science Foundation underscore concerns that the academic community is facing a postdoc shortage and that early-career scientists are increasingly favoring higher paid positions outside academia.
@ScienceCareers
Nearly two dozen research groups are already at work on a “pancoronavirus” vaccine—a vaccine that could prevent the next pandemic. Learn more:
#WeekendReads
They turned an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, commonly called
#CRISPR
, into a tool, revolutionized the life sciences, and took home the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
#WomensHistoryMonth
"The Earth is round, gasoline is flammable, and vaccines are safe and effective ... All the rest are dangerous lies."
Those words began the media career of virologist Roberto Burioni.
It’s not exactly the T-1000—yet. But researchers have created a liquid metal robot that can mimic the shape-shifting abilities of the silvery, morphing killer robot in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Exclusive: Paleontologist Robert DePalma has been accused of faking data in a paper showing the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring.
Some mosquitoes are able to avoid running into walls, even in complete darkness. Now, researchers have figured out how these pesky insects do this, and they’ve used that information to build a sensor that may one day help keep helicopters safe:
Moderna has announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its
#COVID19
vaccine candidate, reporting that the vaccine had 100% efficacy against severe disease.
RIP Mario Molina, one of the most consequential scientists of the past 50 years, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican chemist who helped save the ozone layer.
#COVID19
is strangely—and tragically—selective. Researchers are now gearing up to scour patients’ genomes for DNA variations that could explain why some are more susceptible to the disease than others.
In Mexico, hundreds of early-career scientists have been forced out by the country’s science agency. A combination of budget cuts, politics, and a widening rift between the government and scientists is at work, researchers say.
Biologist David Sabatini, who has been forced out of or fired from three leading institutions for sexual misconduct, may now be hired by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine.
When asked to draw a scientist, school-age kids in the United States are increasingly sketching women, according to a study from 2018.
#ScienceMagArchives
#WomensEqualityDay
In a medical first, researchers have injected a
#CRISPR
drug into the blood of people born with a fatal nerve and heart disease and shown that in three of them it nearly shut off production of toxic protein by their livers.
Academic researchers in Israel say they are being “affected dramatically” by negative international reactions to Israel’s military actions against Hamas in Gaza, a recent survey finds.
"Proactive school closures—closing schools before there’s a case there—have been shown to be one of the most powerful nonpharmaceutical interventions that we can deploy."
#coronavirus
The
#DanceYourPhD
competition challenges scientists around the world to explain their research through the most jargon-free medium available: interpretive dance.
Here are this year's winners. 🏅
President-elect Biden has appointed Eric Lander, a research policy maven and geneticist, to be his science advisor and head up the White House office of Science and Technology Policy.
A dozen
#COVID19
scientists have filed a formal complaint with Rutgers University alleging that two faculty members violated the university’s policies by posting “provably false” comments that are often defamatory and that could incite harm against them.
Over the past 75 years, flowers have adapted to rising temperatures and declining ozone by altering ultraviolet pigments in their petals, new research suggests.
When asked to draw a scientist, school-age kids in the United States are increasingly sketching women, according to a study from 2018.
#ScienceMagArchives
#DayOfTheGirl
Experimental treatment strategies being tested by a large
@WHO
study and other clinical trials attempt to interfere with different steps in the
#coronavirus
replication cycle.
Learn more:
Breaking news: Data from a trial involving 4800 children in four African countries suggest a vaccine known as R21/MatrixM provides significant protection against
#malaria
.
It could receive WHO approval as soon as Monday.
Though neither of the two
#COVID19
vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer showed safety concerns in trials, some experts say the public must be made aware of the potential for “unpleasant but not dangerous" side effects, including fever and aches.
For the first time, one of the many
#COVID19
vaccines in development has protected an animal, rhesus macaques, from infection by the new coronavirus, scientists report.
@pulitzercenter
CRISPR may one day have a challenger. Meet retrons—mysterious complexes of DNA, RNA, and protein. Not only are they also part of the bacterial immune arsenal that defeats viruses, but they have genome-editing potential, too.
In serious cases,
#SARSCoV2
lands in the lungs and can do deep damage there. But the virus, or the body’s response to it, can injure many other organs.
Scientists are just beginning to probe the scope and nature of that harm. Learn more:
#coronavirus
Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium. But the light metal isn’t abundant. In 2020, researchers reported a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply.
#ScienceMagArchives
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, one of the most common causes of liver cancer.
The Arecibo Observatory is gone.
Its 900-ton instrument platform, suspended above a dish in the karst hills of Puerto Rico, collapsed this morning, at about 8 a.m. local time.
She didn’t win the Nobel Prize, a recognition many say was denied her because of her gender. But this week physicist Chieng-Shiung Wu will appear on a U.S. postage stamp—an honor previously bestowed on Einstein, Fermi, and Feynman.
Are you ready for a new era of “psychobiotics”? Treating the biome in the gut to ease the disorders of the brain is emerging as a promising field of study, and the market is watching.
#ScienceMagArchives
In serious cases,
#SARSCoV2
lands in the lungs and can do deep damage there. But the virus, or the body’s response to it, can injure many other organs. Scientists are just beginning to probe the scope and nature of that harm.
See the interactive here:
A fossil captured a 99-million-year-old encounter between a “hell ant,” one of the earliest known ants, and its prey, an extinct relative of the cockroach.
A new finding that Chinese pigs are more and more frequently becoming infected with a strain of influenza that has the potential to jump to humans has infectious disease researchers worldwide taking serious notice.
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to astrophysicists who made pioneering discoveries about the nature of black holes, and their existence at the center of the Milky Way.
Biologists have re-engineered a bacterium that normally eats a diet of simple sugars into one that builds its cells by absorbing carbon dioxide, much like plants.
Nearly two dozen research groups are already at work on a pancoronavirus vaccine in an effort to help prevent a future pandemic like
#COVID19
.
#LongReads