Injectable antibody drug protects children from malaria in Mali trial
A single dose of an experimental antibody drug protects children from malaria for up to 6 months, according to a clinical study published today in
The New England Journal of Medicine
.
The therapy, an injectable monoclonal antibody called L9LS that has
already shown success in adults
, reduced infections and clinical disease in 6- to 10-year-olds in Mali. Although the drug is still undergoing clinical testing, the results suggest monoclonal antibodies could be an important addition to the arsenal against this deadly disease, researchers say.
Malaria caused an estimated 608,000 deaths in 2022...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
AI transcription tools ‘hallucinate,’ too
By now, the tendency for chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to occasionally make stuff up, or “hallucinate,” has been well documented. Chatbots have generated
medical misinformation
, invented
fake legal cases
, and fabricated
citations
. Now,
a new study
has found that AI models are not only seeing things, but hearing things: OpenAI’s Whisper, an AI model trained to transcribe audio input, made up sentences in about 1.4% of the transcriptions of audio recordings tested. Disconcertingly, a large portion of the fabricated sentences contained offensive or potentiall...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Where do elbows and knees come from? Biologists track them back to our boneless, sharklike ancestors
Ask an older person where painful arthritis strikes and most will point to their joints—knees, hips, and fingers. That’s because as people age, those joints lose the cartilage and viscous fluid, known as synovial fluid, that keeps them supple. Sharks and skates have no bones—and no arthritis—but they apparently have the same kind of joints we do. Once thought to exist only in bony vertebrates, these so-called
synovial joints actually evolved in the much older ancestor of cartilaginous and bony fish
, researchers reported earlier this month in a preprint on bioRxiv.
“They very convincingly show tha...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
The U.S. government is taking action to stop ‘cow flu.’ Is it too little, too late?
The U.S. government announced new measures yesterday to slow the spread of the H5N1 influenza virus among cattle, following the revelation that milk sold commercially in 10 states contained fragments of the virus. An order issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) restricts the movement of dairy cattle between states and mandates the reporting of infected cows.
The
order
comes as new genetic evidence suggests cattle infections with the virus, first announced on 25 March, may have started as early as the fall of 2023, and that the virus has likely circulated far beyond the 33 farms in eight states ...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Scientists repot flowering plants ’ tree of life—and find it has tangled roots
About 150 million years ago, life on Earth began a complete revamp, thanks to the rapid rise of one giant group: the flowering plants, or angiosperms. The more efficient photosynthesis of magnolias, waterlilies, as well as many early lineages now extinct pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and their nectar and fruits provided new types of food for insects and other animals, fueling new, more complex ecosystems that still dominate the planet today.
The sprouting of angiosperms happened so fast that the origins of certain groups has long been mired in mystery. Now, almost 300 plant biologists have banded together to r...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 24, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.K. visa changes imperil recruitment of scientific talent, policy experts warn
New U.K. immigration rules will deter international scientific talent and harm universities, science policy experts say. This month, a rise in the minimum salary that international skilled workers must meet to obtain a visa took effect, coming on top of a sharp hike in the fee migrants must pay to access health care, as well as new restrictions on visas for family members.
The changes “will make it much harder for higher education institutions to attract talent from overseas,” says Jenny Sherrard, national head of equality and policy for the University and College Union (UCU). They are “counterproductive to the...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 23, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Oldest ever ice offers glimpse of Earth before the ice ages
VIENNA—
Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week,
doubling the previous record
for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected.
Bubbles in the ice
trap
air from
the Pliocene epoch, a time before the ice ages when the planet was several degrees warmer than today and carbon dioxide (CO
2
)
levels may have been just as high as they are now. But an initial analysis of the bubbles suggests CO...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.S. government in hot seat for response to growing cow flu outbreak
In early March, veterinarian Barb Peterson noticed the dairy cows she cared for on a Texas farm looked sick and produced less milk, and that it was off-color and thick. Birds and cats on the farm were dying, too. Peterson contacted Kay Russo at Novonesis, a company that helps farms keep their animals healthy and productive. “I said, you know, I may sound like a crazy, tinfoil hat–wearing person,” Russo, also a veterinarian, recalled at a 5 April public talk sponsored by her company. “But this sounds a bit like influenza to me.”
She was right, as Peterson and Russo soon learned. On 19 March, birds on the Tex...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Forced to eat bat feces, chimps could spread deadly viruses to humans
On a sunny day 7 years ago in the Budongo Forest Reserve in Uganda, researchers were startled to observe chimpanzees scoop dry bat feces from under a hollow tree and devour it. In 60 years of observations at Budongo, no one had ever seen such a thing, recalls veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin—Madison. “Aside from the ick factor, we all had the exact same thought,” he says. “They must be exposed to horrible bat-borne viruses.”
That suspicion proved correct. Though the bat feces is rich in nutrients,
it contains dozens of previously unknown viruses
, Goldberg and...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Where did Earth ’s oddball ‘quasi-moon’ come from? Scientists pinpoint famed lunar crater
Astronomers suspect an unusual near-Earth rocky object is not a typical escapee from the Solar System’s asteroid belt, but is instead a chunk of the Moon blasted into space eons ago by a spectacular impact. Now, a team of researchers has modeled what sort of lunar impact could have ejected such a gobbet of Moon and deposit it in a stable, nearby orbit. Surprisingly, only one strong candidate emerged: the asteroid strike that created the famous Giordano Bruno crater, the youngest large crater on the Moon, the
group reports today
in
Nature Astronomy
.
“The authors’ modeling techniques are soli...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 19, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Africa intensifies battle against mpox as ‘alarming’ outbreaks continue
Researchers and public health officials in Africa are intensifying their battle against mpox, a neglected infectious disease that long has circulated on the continent and suddenly gained notoriety in 2022 when it started to spread rapidly in Europe and North America. At a meeting last week in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, scientists from there and nine other affected African countries reviewed an alarming rise of cases on the continent, discussed plans to improve mpox surveillance and introduce vaccination, and launched an African-led research consortium.
The meeting, convened by the Africa Centres for Disease Co...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 19, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Controversial wolf killing appears to help caribou, but concerns persist
Since 2015, a slaughter has unfolded in the mountains of British Columbia, all in the name of saving southern mountain caribous, classified as threatened in Canada. Each winter, sharpshooters hired by the provincial government kill hundreds of wolves from low-flying helicopters, sometimes using a tracking collar attached to a “Judas wolf” that leads them to other pack members. Nearly 2200 of the predators had been killed, including 248 in the most recent winter.
The policy has provoked lawsuits and protests from conservation groups and dueling papers in scientific journals about whether the carnage benefits carib...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
News at a glance: Global coral bleaching, preventing ship strikes on whales, and detecting prostate cancer
CLIMATE SCIENCE
Hot oceans prompt world’s worst coral bleaching
Coral reefs are on track for unprecedented damage from oceans that overheated during the past year, prompting government scientists to declare a global bleaching event for the fourth time in the past 25 years.
At least 54% of the world’s reefs, in 53 countries, have been hit by bleaching
since 2023, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the International Coral Reef Initiative announced on 15 April. Bleaching occurs when overheated coral polyps expel the symbiotic algae living inside them; it leaves c...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Bacteria found in mosquito guts could help scientists fight dengue, Zika
A team in China probing the guts of local mosquitoes has found a potential helper in the fight against two human diseases. Researchers identified a new bacterium that
disables the viruses responsible for dengue and Zika
before they can establish an infection in the insects. Although early stage, the work, reported this week in
Science
, paves the way for studying the bacterium’s effect on disease transmission in the real world.
It wouldn’t be the first time a microbe is used to thwart mosquito-borne diseases. About 15 years ago, researchers discovered that a different bacterium,
Wolbachia...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Daring ‘James Bond’ mission to drill Antarctic ice 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: ScienceNOW - April 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
