Category: Science

Back when dinosaurs stomped the Earth, mammals scurried about in their shadows. Those furballs, hiding in underground burrows, provided a fresh niche for a novel reptile: the snake. Skinny snakes could squeeze into mammals’ holes and gobble them up. At least, that’s how the dawn of snakes is imagined by Marc Tollis, an evolutionary biologist…

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Scientists are attempting to restore vision using ultrasound when the optic nerve is impaired. Representative image. | Photo Credit: Youngeon Lee/Unsplash A normal human hears sound in the frequency range 20 hertz (Hz) to 20 kilohertz, and the normal loudness, measured in decibels (dB), is between 30 and 70 db. Higher volumes, e.g. 85 dB…

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This colourised electron microscope image provided by the U.S. NIH shows a human T cell (blue) under attack by HIV (yellow). | Photo Credit: AP Scientists are tweaking a powerful cancer therapy in hopes it could fight HIV instead, by supercharging patients’ own immune cells. On May 12, researchers said a single dose of those…

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The underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, off Tonga, erupted powerfully in 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters Volcanoes change the earth’s atmosphere by releasing gases and particles in large quantities. When a volcano erupts, it blasts sulphur dioxide high into the sky, which reacts with water to form aerosols. Since aerosols scatter sunlight, a powerful eruption…

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Drugs that enhance the body’s immune response against cancer may also be altering one of its most tightly guarded boundaries: the blood-brain barrier (BBB). A recent study published by Yuval Shaked at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and his team, in Cancer Discovery, finds that PD-1 inhibitors, a widely used class of cancer immunotherapy, can…

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Close up of an Aedes aegypti mosquito sucking human blood. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another — mainly the smell and…

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