There are spiders that eat snakes. Observations of snake-eating spiders have been reported around the world. Two researchers from Basel and the US consolidated and analyzed over 300 reports of this unusual predation strategy. Spiders are primarily insectivores, but they occasionally expand their menu by catching and eating small snakes. Dr. Martin Nyffeler, arachnologist at the University of Basel, and American herpetologist Professor Whitfield Gibbons of the University of Georgia, USA, got to the bottom of this phenomenon in a meta-analysis. Their findings from ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Chunxiong Zheng, Mingqiang Li and Jianxun Ding from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China and Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Changchun, China discuss the challenges and opportunities of nanomedicines in clinical translation. Researchers are rapidly gaining a much deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities of nanomedicines allowing for improvements in disease treatment and improved patient survival. Deep exploration of the connections between preclinical and clinical ...

In March 2020, daily life in the United States changed in an instant as the country locked down to deal with the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. New research reveals how residents in one community returned to their routines as the restrictions lifted, according to a team of Penn State scientists. "We used sound signals captured by underground fiber-optic sensors to understand how COVID measures impacted human activities," said Junzhu Shen, a graduate student in geosciences at Penn State. "These sensors provide very accurate, high-resolution data that can help us understand what's happening in our communities." The scientists analyzed sound data recorded from March through June 2020 in and around the Penn State University Park campus and State College, ...

Researchers have developed smart wound dressings with built-in nanosensors that glow to alert patients when a wound is not healing properly. The multifunctional, antimicrobial dressings feature fluorescent sensors that glow brightly under UV light if infection starts to set in and can be used to monitor healing progress. The smart dressings, developed by a team of scientists and engineers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, harness the powerful antibacterial and antifungal properties of magnesium hydroxide. They are cheaper to produce than silver-based dressings but equally as effective in fighting bacteria and fungi, with their antimicrobial power lasting up to a week. Project leader Dr Vi Khanh Truong said the development of cost-effective antimicrobial ...

Results of this technique, known as transfer learning, achieved a 99.24 per cent success rate when detecting COVID-19 in chest x-rays. The study tackles one of the biggest challenges in image recognition machine learning: algorithms needing huge quantities of data, in this case images, to be able to recognise certain attributes accurately. ECU School of Science researcher END ...

Osaka, Japan - Scientists at Osaka University, Panasonic Corporation, and Waseda University used scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy to determine which additives induce crystallization in supercooled aqueous solutions. This work may lead to the development of new energy storage materials based on latent heat. If you put a bottle of water into the freezer, you will expect to pull out a solid cylinder of ice after a few hours. However, if the water has very few impurities and left undisturbed, it may not be frozen, and instead remain as a supercooled liquid. Be careful, because this state is very unstable, and the water will crystallize quickly if shaken or impurities are added - as many YouTube videos will attest. ...

A group of researchers at Nagoya University, Japan, have developed a new method for quickly and efficiently synthesizing nanographenes, a type of nanocarbon with great potential as a next generation material. Nanographenes are the part structures of graphene, which is a sheet of carbon atoms around 3 nanometers thick with particular potential for use in semiconductor development, having electron mobility several hundred times better than current generation materials. Graphene was first isolated in 2004, a discovery which received the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, making it a very new material which is currently the subject of a great deal of research. With ...

The buff-tailed bumblebee Bombus terrestris is one of the most common bumblebee species in Europe. It is not only active in nature as a pollinator - humans also use it in greenhouses and foil tunnels to get good harvests of tomatoes or strawberries. The buff-tailed bumblebee is also used in science: "Basic research is increasingly using it as a model organism to analyse learning and memory, the visual system, flight control and navigation abilities," says Dr. Keram Pfeiffer, Professor of neurobiology at the Biocenter of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Pfeiffer investigates the neuronal ...

A RMIT-led international collaboration published this week has achieved record-high electron doping in a layered ferromagnet, causing magnetic phase transition with significant promise for future electronics Control of magnetism (or spin directions) by electric voltage is vital for developing future, low-energy high-speed nano-electronic and spintronic devices, such as spin-orbit torque devices and spin field-effect transistors. Ultra-high-charge, doping-induced magnetic phase transition in a layered ferromagnet allows promising applications in antiferromagnetic spintronic devices. The FLEET collaboration of researchers at RMIT, UNSW, the University of Wollongong and FLEET partner ...

The invention of the laser has opened the era of nonlinear optics, which today plays an important role in many scientific, industrial and medical applications. These applications all benefit from the availability of compact lasers in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The situation is different at XUV wavelengths, where very large facilities (so called free-electron lasers) have been built to generate intense XUV pulses. One example of these is FLASH in Hamburg that extends over several hundred meters. Smaller intense XUV sources based on HHG have also been developed. However, these sources still have a footprint of tens of meters, and have so far only been demonstrated at a few universities and research institutes worldwide. ...

A naturally occurring peptide in sunflower seeds was synthetically optimised and has now been identified as a potential drug for treating abdominal pain or inflammation (in the gastrointestinal tract, abdominal area and/or internal organs). That is the finding of an international study led by Christian Gruber from MedUni Vienna's Institute of Pharmacology (Center for Physiology and Pharmacology), which was conducted jointly with the University of Queensland and Flinders University in Australia and has now been published. The scientific aim of the study is to find analgesics that are only active in the periphery and do not cross the blood-brain barrier, as an alternative to commonly used synthetic opioids. Gruber explains the background: "Morphine was one of the first ...

In a new scientific investigation headed by the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), water from African and Mongolian waterholes as well as bloodmeals from Southeast Asian leeches were assessed for the ability to retrieve mammalian viruses without the need to find and catch the mammals. The scientists analysed the samples using high throughput sequencing to identify known viruses as well as viruses new to science. Both approaches proved to be suitable tools for pandemic prevention research as they allow finding and monitoring reservoirs of wildlife viruses. For example, a novel coronavirus most likely associated with Southeast Asian deer species was identified. The results are ...

An international research team led by HKUST has developed a simple but robust blood test from Chinese patient data for early detection and screening of Alzheimer's disease (AD) for the first time, with an accuracy level of over 96%. Currently, doctors mainly rely on cognitive tests to diagnose a person with AD. Besides clinical assessment, brain imaging and lumbar puncture are the two most commonly used medical procedures to detect changes in the brain caused by AD. However, these methods are expensive, invasive, and frequently unavailable in many countries. Now, a team led by Prof. Nancy IP, Vice-President for Research and Development at HKUST, has identified 19 out of the 429 plasma proteins associated with AD to form ...

University of Otago, New Zealand, and UK researchers have developed a world-first weight-loss device to help fight the global obesity epidemic. DentalSlim Diet Control is an intra-oral device fitted by a dental professional to the upper and lower back teeth. It uses magnetic devices with unique custom-manufactured locking bolts. It allows the wearer to open their mouths only about 2mm, restricting them to a liquid diet, but it allows free speech and doesn't restrict breathing. Participants in a Dunedin-based trial lost an average of 6.36kg in two weeks and were motivated to continue with their weight loss ...

Coral bleaching and the ecological degradation of coral reefs have become increasingly severe due to the global warming and human activities. As "mixotrophic" organisms, scleractinian coral can not only obtain energy through photosynthesis of symbiotic zooxanthellae (autotrophy), but also ingest nutrients in seawater through the coral host (heterotrophy). However, the influence of coral's trophic flexibility on environmental adaptability remains unclear. Coral reefs are widely distributed in the South China Sea (SCS), spanning about 20 latitudes from north to south. The environmental conditions of coral reef areas at different latitudes are significantly different. ...

Thousands of scientific papers describing the inner workings of the brain and its dysfunction have been published using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI). This powerful tool allows researchers to look at each cubic millimeter of the brain, in voxels - the 3D version of a pixel. The average brain is well over 1,000,000 cubic mm, so researchers need to perform multiple comparisons correction (MCC) to reduce the possibility of making false claims, i.e., reduce the false positive rates. As part of this MCC, a smaller p value threshold is widely recommended for declaring ...

Multi-photon approaches provide printing rates of up to about ten million voxels per second. And, multi-photon-based 3D approaches structure matter with a resolution approaching sub-micrometer and nanometer feature sizes. Such spatial resolution is crucial for many applications in photonics and electronics and is inaccessible to most other 3D additive manufacturing approaches. However, the vast majority of 3D printed objects and devices made along these lines has been composed of only a single polymeric material. Multi-material architectures are much less investigated ...

The most significant feature of global land surface wind speed (SWS) recently is the long-term weakening trend since the 1960s, that is, the phenomenon known as global terrestrial stilling. Many studies have found that stilling is widespread worldwide. It has seriously affected the ecological environment and social economy, especially restricted the sustainable development of the wind energy industry. It is found that the stilling reversed around 2010 and global SWS is strengthening; then, has the stilling of surface wind speed ended in China? A recent study systematically answered this question. The related paper titled "Has the stilling of the surface wind ...

In the 1970s, Fleischmann, the scientist in British, discovered that on noble metallic nanostructure, the Raman scattering of pyridine was enhanced hundreds-hold. Then, the scientists attributed the enhancement to the localized electric field highly amplified near the surface of specific noble metallic nanostructures. Thus, this phenomenon was termed surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Currently, although the enhancement mechanism of SERS is still in the debate, the SERS exhibits incomparable abilities of monitoring and sensing with high sensitivity in diverse fields ...

Human's understanding of the oceans is still limited. The oceans are rich of various kinds of resource which have great exploitation potential and are far away from fully development. Marine biosafety also needs to be noticed. There are not only many animal and plant species undiscovered, but also a much larger and diverse number of microorganisms such as viruses. Traditional studies of marine viruses have focused on bacteriophage represented DNA viruses, and little is known about the genetic diversity, distribution characteristics and transmission patterns of marine invertebrate RNA viruses. Here, CUI Jie's team have collected a total of 58 marine invertebrate samples from 3 phyla and 6 classes and ...

The research team led by Prof. XIONG Wei and Prof. CANG Chunlei from Life Science and Medicine of University of Science and Technology of China, realized lysosome typing based on single lysosome metabonomic information for the first time by stablishing a single lysosome metabonomic mass spectrometry detection technology. A deeply explore to the heterogeneity changes of lysosome metabonomics in the process of cellular senescence has been achieved. The result was published on Nature Methods. Lysosomes are organelles present in almost all eukaryotic cells. Lysosomes are essential for maintaining energy and metabolic homeostasis, signal transduction, and recovery of damaged proteins and organelles. Previous reports indicate that cellular senescence is closely related to lysosomes and their ...

As the average life expectancy of residents increases, there are more and more cases of human bone tissue disease. With the upgrading of treatment methods, more and more bone tissue lesions can be treated with artificial implants for replacement. Due to the huge demand in the field of biophysical therapy, biomedical materials have very broad market prospects. In the past 10 years, the market growth rate of biomedical materials has remained at 20-25%, and the world population is nearly 6.5 billion. Statistics show that there are close to 400 million disabled people, 60 million physically disabled, and about 2 billion dental patients. At present, there are only 35 million implanters of biomaterial devices, and the annual joint replacement volume is about 1.5 million, ...

Research team, led by academician GUO Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with researchers from Sun Yat-sen University and Zhejiang University, realized two-photon quantum interference in the structure of valley-dependent topological insulators based on the valley Hall effect. The study was published in Physical Review Letters on June 11st, 2021. Topological photonics has a practical application prospect in the research of photonic chips due to its robust energy transport prosperities. The key to topological phase transition is to generate an energy gap at certain degenerate points by breaking either the time-reversal ...

Saturated fatty acid levels unexpectedly rise in the brain during memory formation, according to END ...

Newly-available scientific evidence, which could prove critical to the success of climate-related lawsuits, is often not produced in court, according to a new study published today by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme and Environmental Change Institute. Filling the evidentiary gap in climate litigation in Nature Climate Change, a leading interdisciplinary science journal, is the first global study on the use and interpretation of climate-science evidence in lawsuits. The study reveals evidence submitted by litigants in 73 lawsuits across 14 jurisdictions is significantly behind state-of-the-art ...