Science of Aging Knowledge Environment This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Anonymizing research funding applications could reduce ‘prestige privilege’
For research funders seeking to minimize bias in their selection process, removing applicants’ institutional affiliations from their submissions could help address a common disparity: disproportionate funding going to those at the most prestigious places. That’s the finding from researchers at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, who reported last month in eLife that anonymized applications partially reduced the effects of reputational bias and evened the playing field for early-career faculty at lesser known institutions applying for their Beckman Young Investigator (BYI) awards. T...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 18, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Daring ‘James Bond’ mission to drill Antarctic ices cores could reveal future of sea level rise
The helicopter hovered overhead, whipping up snow. Shielding his face, Peter Neff grabbed the dangling cargo load and guided it to the Antarctic ice. The helicopter sped back to the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon , 20 kilometers away, to fetch more gear. One trip down, 17 more to go, thought Neff, a polar glaciologist at the University of Minnesota (UM) Twin Cities. Time was ticking away on this day in January. In the best-case scenario, Neff and his team would have just 10 days to drill ice cores on Canisteo, a peninsula on the west coast of Antarctica—and a blizzard was already looming. Ever...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 18, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Striking Amazonian butterfly is result of ancient hybrid event
When separate species mate, it’s often an evolutionary dead end. Even if breeding succeeds, it can lead to infertile offspring, such as mules, or to the two species gradually merging into one as they interbreed over generations. An Amazonian butterfly species represents a rare third scenario. In a study out today in Nature , researchers report that Heliconius elevatus —a red, black, and yellow butterfly found throughout the Amazon—is a genetically unique, reproductively healthy insect that resulted from an ancient pairing of two other, still-present butterfly species . The work con...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 17, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Charred bones are signs of Maya ritual to erase past rulers
In 2022, Christina Halperin was excavating a pile of rubble in a Maya pyramid at a Guatemalan site called Ucanal. As she sorted through thousands of shattered greenstones, seashells, and obsidian pieces, she noticed something peculiar. “This soil was so sooty and full of carbon,” the University of Montreal archaeologist recalls. “You couldn’t excavate … you couldn’t be clean.” Now, her team knows what the dense, sooty debris was made of: the burnt bones of ancient Maya royalty and their ornaments. In a paper published today in Antiquity , the researchers describe the unusual burning event...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 17, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

New initiative aims to bolster funding for scientists in war-torn Ukraine
WASHINGTON, D.C.— For astrophysicist David Spergel, teaching at a summer school about data science in August 2023 in Ukraine was a “surreal” experience. At times, utterly normal—smart students and collegial dinners in the charming cobblestoned city of Lviv. But punctuated by sirens and cellphone alerts warning of Russian missile attacks that compelled attendees to seek refuge in bomb shelters. Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation , started to think there had to be something more the West could do to aid his Ukrainian colleagues. Eight months later, that idea has blossomed into the Scienc...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 17, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Should researchers use AI to write papers? Group aims for community-driven standards
When and how should text-generating artificial intelligence (AI) programs such as ChatGPT help write research papers? In the coming months, 4000 researchers from a variety of disciplines and countries will weigh in on guidelines that could be adopted widely across academic publishing, which has been grappling with chatbots and other AI issues for the past year and a half . The group behind the effort wants to replace the piecemeal landscape of current guidelines with a single set of standards that represents a consensus of the research community. Known as CANGARU, the initiative is a partnership between res...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 16, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Plans to expand African vaccine production face steep hurdles
In March 2022, when the pandemic was still raging, the messenger RNA (mRNA) company Moderna announced it would build a $500 million plant in Kenya to manufacture half a billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine annually. “ This is major ,” Kenyan President William Ruto said at the time. The plant would help reduce Africa’s dependence on vaccines produced elsewhere, Ruto said—a situation that had turned disastrous during the pandemic—and bring economic benefits as well. But Moderna may never break ground on the Kenya factory. On 11 April, the company said it had “paused its efforts” becau...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 16, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Young toads are teaching Australian lizards to avoid deadly snacks
Releasing 200,000 eggs and young of a toxic invasive species might seem to be a sure way to make a bad situation worse. But by doing just that in Western Australia, conservation biologists have begun to rescue the region’s largest lizard. Yellow spotted monitor lizards usually die after eating a single adult cane toad, an introduced pest with toxic skin secretions that has wreaked havoc on Australia’s native wildlife. But if these lizards first taste the species’ young, which are only slightly toxic, the predators learn to avoid eating the lethal adults. As a result, they survive even after a wave of adult...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 16, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Giant planets ran amok soon after Solar System ’s birth
In its youth, the Solar System underwent a momentous upheaval: Gravitational tugs between the giant planets threw them off-track, causing Jupiter’s orbit to jump closer to the Sun, while Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were flung outward. The gravity of the rampaging giants scattered Pluto and other icy bodies to the Kuiper belt, shepherded the asteroid belt into its current location, and sent countless bodies crashing into the inner Solar System. For many years, researchers believed this “giant planet instability” occurred 600 million years after the Solar System’s birth 4.57 billion years ago, based on the ages...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 16, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Researchers need ‘open’ bibliographic databases, new declaration says
When universities are deciding whom to hire and promote, or grant organizations are selecting projects to fund, there’s a good chance they’re referencing more than just the application materials. Many organizations rely on databases that compile publication information including authors, affiliations, citations, and funding sources to create metrics meant to quantify a researcher’s productivity and the quality of their work. Some of the best known databases, such as the Web of Science and Scopus, are proprietary and offer pay-to-access data and services supporting these and other metrics, including university r...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 16, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

People with complicated pregnancies may suffer health problems, die early
Preterm births are a well-known hazard for babies—who can require months and sometimes years of extra care—but far less attention is paid to the people who deliver them. Now, a new analysis of more than 2 million pregnancies over 4 decades finds those parents need consideration, too: Even years later, people who experienced some common pregnancy complications had a higher risk of death. “We are starting to understand that pregnancy complications … are windows into longer term complications,” says Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the University of California San Diego who was...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 15, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Deadly marine ‘cold spells’ could become more frequent with climate change, scientists warn
In March 2021, a grisly scene materialized on the beaches of South Africa. Giant bat-winged manta rays sprawled belly up on rocks. Hulking bull sharks lay dead in the sand. Puffer fish littered shorelines like deflated footballs. Such fish kills are usually triggered by hot water, low oxygen, or toxic algae blooms. But this time it was a surprising culprit. In the middle of the southern summer, these fish died of cold—a phenomenon that may be linked to climate change, according to a new paper . At a time when global warming is driving ocean temperatures to record-setting highs and marine heat w...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 15, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

As the lakes that flamingos inhabit expand, the birds ’ food supplies are rapidly shrinking
Every year, millions of lesser flamingos ( Phoeniconaias minor ) flock to a few small soda lakes in East Africa, attracting as many tourists as do migrating wildebeest. But the bright pink birds’ numbers are falling sharply, a decline researchers have now linked to a paradoxical effect of climate change. Rainfall in the region is increasing, expanding the lakes, which might suggest the flamingos’ habitat is growing. But the extra water  dilutes the nutrients in the lakes, depleting the microbes on which the birds feed, researchers report today in Current Biology . So, even as the lakes expand...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 12, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all
It was 5 a.m., and Maud Mouginot was waiting for the Sun to rise over the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. Suddenly, two male bonobos—close relatives of chimpanzees—came hurtling out of the darkness, one rushing through the trees, the other giving chase. The terrified cries of the fleeing male suggested this was no friendly game of tag. Mouginot, a biological anthropologist at Boston University, hadn’t expected such behavior from bonobos, which, unlike chimps, have a reputation for making love, not war . But research by Mouginot and colleagues, published today in Current Biology , shows male ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 12, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Jailed conservationists freed, physics titan dies, and diversity in anatomical illustrations
ASTRONOMY Scientists flock to the eclipse Tens of millions in North America turned their specially protected eyes to the skies on 8 April for several minutes of darkness when the Moon blocked the disk of the Sun, casting a shadow across Mexico, 15 U.S. states, and Canada. Researchers and citizen scientists seized the opportunity to study the corona—the wispy, outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere—from the ground and in eclipse-chasing aircraft. They expected to see loops of plasma and other solar flares because the eclipse coincided with solar maximum, a period of high magnetic activity. Research...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 11, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research