Dengue fever is a major public health concern in many parts of South-East Asia and South America and its prevalence in Africa is thought to be expanding. Researchers have now conducted an analysis of the economic burden of dengue fever in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Cambodia. Their results appear this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical…
An interdisciplinary Northwestern University team has developed a pair of soft, flexible wireless sensors that replace the tangle of wire-based sensors that currently monitor babies in hospitals’ neonatal intensive care units (NICU) and pose a barrier to parent-baby cuddling and physical bonding. The team recently completed a series of first human studies on premature babies…
Northwestern University researchers have developed a blueprint for understanding and predicting the properties and behavior of complex nanoparticles and optimizing their use for a broad range of scientific applications. These include catalysis, optoelectronics, transistors, bio-imaging, and energy storage and conversion. Recent research findings have successfully enabled the synthesis, or creation, of a wide variety of…
Using New Horizons data from the Pluto-Charon flyby in 2015, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists have indirectly discovered a distinct and surprising lack of very small objects in the Kuiper Belt. The evidence for the paucity of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) comes from New Horizons imaging that revealed a dearth of small…
The 2015-2016 El Niño event brought weather conditions that triggered regional disease outbreaks throughout the world, according to a new NASA study that is the first to comprehensively assess the public health impacts of the major climate event on a global scale. El Niño is an irregularly recurring climate pattern characterized by warmer than usual…
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) led by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini from the Chair of Materials Science (biomaterials) and Prof. Dr. Ralf Dittrich from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Universitätsklinikum Erlangen have taken an important step towards developing artificial ovaries for patients suffering from cancer. Together, they have been…
Brazilian researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary history of amoebae and demonstrated that at the end of the Precambrian period, at least 750 million years ago, life on Earth was much more diverse than suggested by classic theory. The study, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation — FAPESP, revealed eight new ancestral lineages of…
People fall in love for many reasons — similar interests, physical attraction, and shared values among them. But if they marry and stay together, their long-term happiness may depend on their individual genes or those of their spouse, says a new study led by Yale School of Public Health researchers. Published in the journal PLOS…
A team of researchers led by Bradley Bernstein at the Ludwig Center at Harvard has used single-cell technologies and machine learning to create a detailed “atlas of cell states” for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) that could help improve treatment of the aggressive cancer. AML is characterized by the accumulation of white blood cells in the…
The Brassicaceae plant family boasts a stunning diversity of fruit shapes. But even in this cosmopolitan company the heart-shaped seed pods of the Capsella genus stand out. An estimated 8 million years ago Capsella embarked on a different evolutionary pathway from its close relatives Arabidopsis and Camelina. This led to radically different shapes in the…