Heart-brain link offers new potential explanation for fainting
Fainting, a temporary loss of consciousness, affects almost 40% of people, yet scientists and physicians don’t know exactly why it happens. A drop in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate—a trio of symptoms long known as the Bezold-Jarisch reflex—can contribute to fainting, researchers have hypothesized. Now, neuroscientists have pinpointed a nerve pathway between the heart and brain that triggers the reflex and can prompt fainting in mice. The findings prove the once-debated reflex exists, and they could one day point toward treatments for fainting in humans.
The study is “an elegant tour de force,...
Source: ScienceNOW - November 1, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.K. funding agency suspends diversity panel following pressure from science minister
The United Kingdom’s national funding agency today suspended operations of its newly formed diversity advisory panel “with immediate effect” after science minister Michelle Donelan expressed “disgust and outrage” that members of the panel had publicly posted opinions about the Israel-Hamas conflict that she viewed as “extremist.”
Today’s move came after Donelan publicly released on X (formerly Twitter) a 28 October letter to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) head Ottoline Leyser. In it, Donelan wrote that after seeing social media posts from two panelists, her “strong preference would be that [UKRI]...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 31, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
A chikungunya vaccine is nearing approval. Who will get it?
The first vaccine against the mosquito-borne viral disease chikungunya will likely come to market next month. With the debilitating disease now afflicting more than half the countries in the world and threatening to spread further, the imminent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the vaccine is “great news,” says Scott Weaver, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch whose own lab started to work on a chikungunya vaccine nearly 2 decades ago.
The vaccine, made by the French company Valneva, will likely be recommended mainly to U.S. travelers at first. But many expect an FDA approval ...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 30, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Hurricane Otis smashed into Mexico and broke records. Why did no one see it coming?
Early Wednesday morning, Hurricane Otis became the strongest storm in recorded history to strike the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Category 5 hurricane made landfall near Acapulco, where its heavy rain and 265-kilometer-per-hour (kph) winds unleashed massive landslides and knocked out power lines, killing at least 2 dozen people and causing widespread devastation.
But just 2 days earlier, meteorologists doubted whether Otis—then a tropical storm—would even achieve hurricane status. Forecasters at the U.S. National Hurricane Center expected the storm to undergo “
gradual strengthening
,” with m...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 26, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Menopause may be widespread among mammals, challenging famed hypothesis
By age 69, Marlene was gaunt, with rundown teeth, grizzled fur, and a receding hairline. The elderly chimpanzee living in Kibale National Park posed a puzzle for scientists. Multiple studies have shown female chimps can reproduce until the end of their lives, but Marlene had last given birth 23 years before. The great ape, it appeared, had undergone menopause—a reproductive shutdown that researchers have only documented in humans and a handful of whale species.
A pair of studies published today suggests Marlene isn’t as rare as scientists thought. Chimps can undergo menopause, researchers have found, and females ...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 26, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘Why can’t you make a coral out of an anemone?’
Reefs are vibrant, living structures laid down over time by tiny tentacled animals. But how exactly corals construct the crystals that become the reefs’ craggy rocks—a process known as biomineralization—has long been a mystery. In June, University of Florida (UF) marine biologist Federica Scucchia believed she and her colleagues had finally made a breakthrough. Peering through a microscope at blue and red blobs along the tentacle of a 0.6-millimeter anemone, a soft-bodied coral relative, Scucchia saw signs that the team had managed to coax the creature to
produce a coral protein that concentrates reef-building c...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 25, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Little nuclear physics lab to tackle Department of Energy ’s big data problem
At risk of drowning in the output from its own facilities, the Department of Energy (DOE) plans to build a major new computing center specifically to crunch experimental data. The agency will construct a $305 million High Performance Data Facility at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Virginia,
officials announced last w
eek. To be completed by 2028, the new data center marks an evolution in the agency’s approach to science and gives a new lease on life to JLab, a small lab that currently focuses on nuclear physics and accelerator development.
“This is a major res...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 25, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
First malaria vaccine slashes early childhood deaths
In a major analysis in Africa, the first vaccine approved to fight malaria cut deaths among young children by 13% over nearly 4 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week. The huge evaluation of a pilot rollout of the vaccine, called RTS,S or Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, also showed a 22% reduction in severe malaria in kids young enough to receive a three-shot series. Hundreds of thousands of children are born annually in the parts of Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi included in the analysis, for which WHO revealed the final data on 20 October at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical M...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 24, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Prominent journal editor fired for endorsing satirical article about Israel-Hamas conflict
Michael Eisen, editor-in-chief of the prominent open access journal
eLife
and a longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.
“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians,” Eisen tweeted today.
The furor began on 13 October when Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkel...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 24, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.S. urges DNA synthesis firms to ramp up screening for biosecurity threats
Worried that bioterrorists will take advantage of the growing ease of creating risky pathogens in the lab, federal officials are beefing up guidelines for companies that sell nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. The recommendations, released earlier this month, update the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s (HHS’s) 13-year-old guidance for screening orders to cover more forms of DNA and RNA, as well as new desktop devices for printing these molecular blueprints. Yet the guidelines will remain voluntary under HHS’s plan, disappointing some biosecurity experts.
Biologists seeking to synthesize genes comm...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 23, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
First detailed U.S. scientific integrity draft policies get mixed responses
Keep working on it. That’s the reaction of U.S. science watchdog groups to the first attempts by federal health agencies to flesh out a promise by President Joe Biden to restore trust in government by ensuring that government scientists are free to do their jobs without political meddling.
One week after taking office in January 2021, Biden ordered
a review of agency policies on scientific integrity
, and 2 years later the White House
issued guidelines
for agencies to follow in revising existing policies. In July, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was first across t...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 23, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Women leaders at six top research universities urge more diversity in semiconductor workforce
A push to rejuvenate the U.S. semiconductor industry won’t succeed without including more women and minorities in the workforce. That’s the rationale for a new academic consortium aimed at increasing diversity in microelectronics being launched by the women presidents and engineering deans at six prominent universities.
“This is personal for us,” say the founders of the Education group for Diversification and Growth in Engineering (
EDGE) Consortium
, which is holding a summit next week in Washington, D.C., to lay out a national strategy. “We have often been the ‘first’ women to occupy leaders...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Historic dam removal poses challenge of restoring both river and landscape
Standing on an outcrop of volcanic rock, Joshua Chenoweth looks across the languid waters of California’s Iron Gate Reservoir and imagines the transformation in store for the landscape. In early 2024, operators will open the floodgates on the 49-meter-high dam that blocks the Klamath River, allowing the more than 50 million tons of water it impounds to begin to drain. Once it’s gone, heavy equipment will dismantle the structure. All that will remain of the 11-kilometer-long reservoir that filled the valley for 60 years will be steep-sided slopes coated in gray mud, split once again by a free-flowing river.
Within...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 19, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Parasitic worms may control minds of insects with ‘borrowed’ genes
Adult horsehair worms look about how you’d expect given their name: They’re long, noodlelike creatures that resemble wiggling horse hairs. They live and reproduce in water, but their young only develop inside the bodies of other animals—usually terrestrial insects such as praying mantises. Once they’ve finished growing inside their unwitting vessel, the worms must convince their hosts to drown themselves to complete their life cycle. How these parasites manage to lethally manipulate their hosts has long puzzled scientists. Researchers behind a new study published today in
Current Biology
suggest
hors...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 19, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Senate hearing goes smoothly for Biden ’s pick for NIH director
A Senate hearing today to consider the nomination of Monica Bertagnolli to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) went well for the cancer surgeon. Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I–VT) grilled Bertagnolli about NIH’s role in controlling drug prices, and Republican members pressed her on politically sensitive research. But the overall tone was friendly and suggested no major obstacles to her confirmation.
The 2-hour
hearing
also offered a look at Bertagnolli’s priorities if she takes the helm at NIH. Citing her experiences as a cancer doctor and researcher who grew up on a Wyoming ranch, she emp...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 18, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
