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‘Wherever we’ve looked, we see destruction.’ The Ukraine war’s impact on buried archaeological sites
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began nearly 2 years ago, international observers have verified damage to hundreds of buildings , including museums and more than 150 churches. Now, a team of Ukrainian and U.S. archaeologists is surveying another category of destruction: damage to Ukraine’s archaeological heritage, much of which remains underground, often unexcavated and undocumented. Ukraine’s open steppes, now crisscrossed by lines of trenches and pocked with bomb and artillery craters, gave rise to huge settlements in the early days of farming. The country is the homeland of the Yamnaya, the Bro...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - December 1, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘Toxic bait’ from Indian pitcher plants lures hungry insects to their doom
Pitcher plants in the genus Nepenthes thrive in places where they shouldn’t. There’s very little nitrogen in the Southeast Asian and Australian soils where they grow—but they do just fine, thanks to a macabre source for this essential nutrient: the dissolved flesh of small animals, mostly insects, that slip into their bulbous traps. A new study suggests why Nepenthes is so effective at catching its victims: It produces a sweet nectar containing a potent neurotoxin that could make them lose their balance at the pitcher’s edge. The work, published as a preprint on bioRxiv th...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Climate crisis sparks effort to coax oceans to suck up carbon dioxide
Standing on the aft deck of a modified 13-meter fishing boat in Halifax Harbour, Dariia Atamanchuk gazes at both a cause of the climate crisis and, she hopes, part of the solution. On the nearby shore, three red-and-white-striped smokestacks rise like enormous barber poles, funneling carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) from a natural gas–fueled power plant into the pale morning sky. At the seawall in front of the plant, seawater used to cool its piping flows into the harbor. Normally that water runs clear. But today, the outflow roils in a pink froth, like a cauldron of Pepto Bismol. “Ooh, that’s very milky,” sa...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Amid Congo ’s deadliest mpox outbreak, a new worry: virus has become sexually transmissible
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was experiencing its largest, most deadly outbreak of mpox ever, with more than 12,000 suspected cases so far this year and nearly 600 deaths, far surpassing those from the global outbreak of the same viral disease over the past 2 years. The WHO report and a study out today also explore a worrisome possibility: that the strain of virus in the DRC, far deadlier than the one that drove the global outbreak, is in some cases spreading between sexual partners. Originally known as monkeypox, the disease is caused by a vi...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Amid Congo's deadliest mpox outbreak, a new worry: virus has become sexually transmissible
Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was experiencing its largest, most deadly outbreak of mpox ever, with more than 12,000 suspected cases so far this year and nearly 600 deaths, far surpassing those from the global outbreak of the same viral disease over the past 2 years. The WHO report and a study out today also explore a worrisome possibility: that the strain of virus in DRC, far deadlier than the one that drove the global outbreak, is in some cases spreading between sexual partners. Originally known as monkeypox, the disease is caused by a virus ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

UK Biobank releases half a million whole-genome sequences for biomedical research
One of the world’s largest databases of whole genomes has just become a lot larger. The British health study known as the UK Biobank today made the full genetic sequences of nearly 500,000 people available to scientists for analysis, more than doubling the size of an earlier data set. Combined with long-term health data on participants, this “treasure trove” has the potential to transform biomedical science, organizers say. Geneticists are excited by the news. Such a large set of sequences provides a uniquely rich resource for studying the biological underpinnings of human health and disease, says Eleftheria Ze...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 30, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Materials-predicting AI from DeepMind could revolutionize electronics, batteries, and solar cells
The materials cookbook has suddenly grown tens of times longer. Modern technologies, from electronics to airplanes, draw on just 20,000 inorganic materials, largely discovered through trial and error; scientists have predicted but not made tens of thousands more. This week, however, researchers report that with a new artificial intelligence (AI), they have predicted the ingredients and properties of another 2.2 million materials. In a companion study, a separate team has shown that such predicted materials can be made efficiently, again with the help of AI. Together, researchers say, the reports foreshadow a new age ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Astronomers stunned by six-planet system frozen in time
Astronomers have discovered a highly unusual planetary system around a nearby star. It holds six planets, all bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, a variety that is absent in our Solar System but common across the Milky Way. Moreover, all of the planets orbit in rhythmic harmony, which suggests the system has remained undisturbed since its formation billions of years ago. The brightness of the star, its relative proximity to Earth, and its six orbiting oddities could make the system a perfect laboratory for studying the formation of these planets, known as sub-Neptunes. “It’s a delightful system,” says a...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

XPRIZE on aging will award up to $101 million for therapies that restore vigor to the elderly
The XPRIZE Foundation today announced $101 million in prizes for researchers who can restore the function of an elderly person’s muscle, cognition, and immune system to a more youthful state. The competition, backed by Saudi money and the success of a women’s athletic clothing line, seeks drugs, other therapies, and lifestyle strategies that target the biology of human aging to extend a person’s “health span,” or the period of life free of disease or disability. Such breakthroughs could also help prevent chronic diseases closely linked to aging that threaten to overwhelm the health care system. “This is t...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Explainer: What ’s behind FDA’s concern that a cancer-fighting cell therapy can also cause the disease?
Cancer treatments that harness the immune system to fight the disease have revolutionized its care in recent years. One strategy, chimeric antigen receptor T cell, or CAR-T, therapy, is a personalized treatment that engineers a cancer patient’s own immune cells to target and destroy their malignant cells. Several such lifesaving treatments are on the market for blood cancers and others are in clinical trials for many cancer types, including solid tumors. Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) surprised the CAR-T community by announcing that it’s investigating blood cancer cases apparently caused b...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 29, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Proposed changes to rules for policing fraud in U.S.-funded biomedical research draw a mixed response
The first proposed update in nearly 20 years to U.S. rules governing research misconduct by biomedical scientists is drawing mixed reviews. The revamped rules would give universities less time to decide whether to pursue an allegation against a faculty member, require more record-keeping, and bar institutions from quickly closing a case they believe reflects “honest error.” At the same time, academic administrators are pleased that the update would preserve the current definition of misconduct and streamline the process for those appealing a guilty finding. The changes are meant to bring more clarity to what has ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 28, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

This may be one of the last giant rats of Vangunu
One of Earth’s largest rats is also among its most endangered . Researchers have discovered that four individuals of the Vangunu giant rat ( Uromys vika ) survive in the wild, but even they may soon disappear. The rodent lives in the tropical forests of its namesake island of Vangunu, part of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Although it’s twice the size of the common black rat, researchers had never been able to study it. The giant rat makes its nests within ferns that grow on lowland trees. According to local knowledge, it can gnaw into green coconuts, but nothing more about it...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Cheaper microscope could bring protein mapping technique to the masses
Talk to any structural biologist, and they’ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique can catch wriggly proteins in multiple configurations, and it can even capture those that have been off-limits to traditional x-ray analysis because they stubbornly resist being crystallized. Many researchers expect cryo-EM will surpass x-ray crystallography ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Saudi universities lose highly cited researchers after payment schemes raise ethics concerns
The number of top researchers affiliated with universities in Saudi Arabia has dropped sharply, months after the institutions were revealed to be enticing eminent scientists abroad to declare a Saudi affiliation—often in exchange for cash—in a bid to boost their rankings. Saudi Arabian universities now boast affiliations with just 76 of the world’s most cited researchers, compared with 109 in 2022, according to an analysis released Friday by the Barcelona, Spain–based research consultancy Siris Academic. The decrease could cause some Saudi institutions to fall in global rankings of universiti...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 27, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Brought up in a creationist home, a scientist fights for evolution
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), known for fighting to defend evolution’s place in school curricula, has a new leader who knows how hard that work can be. Amanda (Glaze) Townley, who next month becomes executive director of the Oakland, California–based nonprofit, grew up in rural northeastern Alabama, where she learned firsthand how religion and culture can collide with one of the central tenets in biology. “I grew up in a young Earth creationism home, with a worldview that was based in evangelical Christianity and a literal translation of the Bible,” recalls the 42-year-old Townle...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - November 24, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research