Serpents that bit ancient Egyptians slither into focus
If a snakebitten patient stumbled into an Egyptian physician’s office some 2500 years ago, the doctor might have reached for a papyrus scroll describing 34 snakes and their bites in hieratic script used by ancient Egyptians, with advice on how to treat them. This ancient manual is considered one of the world’s first medical texts.
Since the scroll was first translated 60 years ago, researchers have fiercely debated the identities of the serpents it describes. Now, researchers have used an ecological technique called niche modeling to confidently name 10 of these snakes. Today, Egyptian doctors wouldn’t find the...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 16, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.S. hands out $7 billion for hydrogen hubs
President Joe Biden’s administration today announced $7 billion in funding for seven regional “hubs” to produce hydrogen, which produces water as exhaust when combusted. If made cleanly, hydrogen could help fight global warming by replacing fossil fuels in the fertilizer and steel industries, and in tricky-to-electrify vehicles such as long-haul trucks.
The hubs, which will be funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), are meant to shift hydrogen production away from today’s dirty approach: cooking methane under high pressure with steam, a process that has a big carbon footprint. The hubs include both producer...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 13, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
More than red blood cells depend on hemoglobin, surprising study of cartilage reveals
Blood is red because it’s brimming with the oxygen-toting protein hemoglobin, but scientists have long wondered whether cells outside of the bloodstream depend on this protein as well. Now, a team of researchers from China has demonstrated that cartilage-making cells called chondrocytes manufacture and use hemoglobin, perhaps to help them survive in cartilage’s oxygen-poor environment.
The results surprised bone researchers, but they give the study high marks. The authors “provide solid and convincing evidence that chondrocytes can produce hemoglobin and that it has a physiological role,” says bone developmen...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 13, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
NASA launches spacecraft to a mysterious metal-rich asteroid
When Lindy Elkins-Tanton imagines the metallic asteroid Psyche, she dreams of terrain unlike any seen before. Small craters could look like frozen splashes of water, fringed with silvery spires. Metallic lavas, squeezed out billions of years ago, might shimmer nearby. Gigantic cliff faces, cleaved from the asteroid’s metal crust as it cooled and contracted long ago, might be studded with green crystals of olivine.
Whether these vistas exist depends on whether the asteroid, a beguiling 220-kilometer-wide object discovered in 1852, really is the hunk of iron and nickel long assumed by astronomers. Now, Elkins-Tanton ...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 13, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Co-developer of Cassava ’s potential Alzheimer’s drug cited for ‘egregious misconduct’
Cassava Sciences, a biotech company whose work on the experimental Alzheimer’s drug simufilam has been heavily criticized and is the subject of ongoing federal probes, has suffered another blow. A much-anticipated investigation by the City University of New York has accused neuroscientist Hoau-Yan Wang, a CUNY faculty member and longtime Cassava collaborator, of scientific misconduct involving 20 research papers. Many provided key support for simufilam’s jump from the lab into ongoing clinical trials.
The investigative committee found numerous signs that images were improperly manipulated, for example in a 2012
...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 12, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Potent strain of bluetongue virus is spreading in northern Europe, threatening sheep and cattle
A dreaded pathogen is spreading rapidly among livestock in the Netherlands for the first time in 14 years, killing sheep and sickening cattle. Bluetongue virus (BTV), which is endemic in tropical and subtropical regions, is transmitted by biting insects called midges. It does not infect humans, but the new outbreak is especially concerning because Dutch livestock have been stricken with a potent strain for which no vaccine is available in Europe.
Within 2 weeks of its first detection in the country, the virus had been confirmed in 18 flocks of sheep and 55 cattle herds. And this week a sheep on a farm across the bord...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 11, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Botanists fight removal of plant specimens from one of the world ’s most spectacular gardens
The herbarium at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew may be the largest and most significant plant collection in the world. It contains more than 7 million specimens dried and pressed on paper sheets; laid end to end, they would extend three times the length of the United Kingdom. The research at Kew, in southwest London, is equally impressive, says Barbara Thiers, who for many years directed the herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. “What Kew does is immensely important and immensely influential.”
But controversial
plans for the herbarium
, announced in June, have left Thiers and many other botanists worr...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 11, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Should you pick Novavax ’s COVID-19 shot over mRNA options?
For cardiologist Eric Topol, this week’s vaccine news presented a personal dilemma. Topol, who directs the Scripps Research Translational Institute and is a popular commenter on COVID-19 research, had hoped to get an updated COVID-19 vaccine from Novavax, rather than a messenger RNA (mRNA) shot from Pfizer or Moderna. Novavax relies on an older, protein-based approach that has shown long-lasting effects against other pathogens, and Topol wondered whether it might produce more durable protection. On Tuesday, it seemed he might get his chance: a drugstore he visited for an mRNA vaccine ran out of doses, and hours later the...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 6, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
News at a glance: More success for fusion, medical tests under scrutiny, and a grizzly reintroduction
PHYSICS
Fusion experiment beats previous energy record
Lightning has struck a second time for physicists using lasers to achieve nuclear fusion, in which two atomic nuclei combine into one while releasing enormous amounts of energy. On 30 July, the 192 lasers of the stadium-size National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory instantaneously crushed a tiny capsule filled with heavy isotopes of hydrogen. In doing so, they prompted a fusion reaction that produced more energy than the laser beams deposited onto the target. The new results, presented by NIF scientists at a conf...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 5, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
New footprint dates bolster claim that humans lived in Americas during Ice Age
Two years ago, a team of scientists
published a finding
that rocked the world of archaeology: Human footprints found in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park were between 23,000 and 21,000 years old. That was during the height of the Last Ice Age and at least 5000 years before most archaeologists thought people arrived in the Americas. The paper drew praise but also skepticism, particularly around its radiocarbon dating method. Now, the White Sands team says new work with two additional dating techniques confirms the great antiquity of the footprints.
If they’re right, “it resets the playing field of...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 5, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Laser mapping reveals hidden structures in Amazon —with hints at thousands more
Home to an estimated 16,000 tree species, the Amazon rainforest is an unparalleled hot spot for biodiversity. Western scientists once saw it as a leafy paradise relatively untouched by humans, but they have more recently recognized that human cultures have lived in large swaths of the rainforest for many millennia. Now, a new laser mapping and modeling study suggests thousands of human archeological sites remain undiscovered beneath the rainforest canopy.
The new study offers data to support what archaeologists working in the Amazon have argued for decades, says archaeologist Eduardo Neves of the University of São P...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 5, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Ancient marriage traditions —and politics—revealed in giant family trees built from DNA
The burial jar, found under the floor of a mountaintop citadel called La Almoloya in southeastern Spain, held a puzzle. Almost 1 meter in diameter, the vessel entombed a woman in her late 20s with a shining silver diadem on her forehead. She also had silver earplugs threaded through with silver hoops, an awl covered in silver—and a companion: a middle-age man laid to rest in the same jar with a fraction of her wealth. The pair were likely prominent members of a Bronze Age protostate called El Argar, which dominated much of the Iberian Peninsula from hilltop strongholds for nearly 700 years, beginning around 2200 B.C.E.
...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 5, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
Immunity-enhancing cocktail protects mice against multiple hospital germs
Some people in hospital die not from the illness or accident that got them admitted but from germs they catch once there. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of thousands of hospital-acquired infections each year, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Seeking to lower this toll, researchers have now come up with an
immune-boosting cocktail that increases the survival
of mice exposed to the microbes responsible.
The three-compound formulation, which the researchers unusually refer to as a vaccine, provided up to 28 days of protection from the notorious hospital bacterium
Pseudomonas aerugin...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 4, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
How do cats purr? New finding challenges long-held assumptions
One of the most delightful sounds to a cat lover is their feline friend’s rumbling noise when they get a little scritch behind the ears. Yet how cats produce their contented purrs has long been a mystery.
A new study may finally have the answer. Domestic cats possess “pads” embedded within their vocal cords, which add an extra layer of fatty tissue that allows them to vibrate at low frequencies, scientists report today in
Current Biology
. What’s more, the larynx of these animals
doesn’t appear to need any input from the brain to produce such purring
.
“Purring has historically h...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 3, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
U.S. avoids shutdown, but prospects for boosting science funding remain dim
U.S. scientists
bracing for a government shutdown
that would have furloughed federal researchers and disrupted grantmaking are relieved that Congress averted a closure over the weekend with a temporary spending agreement. But Congress is still a long way from approving 2024 spending bills for research agencies. And scientists are likely to be disappointed with many of the final numbers.
The so-called continuing resolution (CR) passed overwhelmingly on 30 September by both chambers allows agencies to operate until 17 November with spending at current levels. That means science agencies can continue to accept...
Source: ScienceNOW - October 2, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: news
