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There are two fundamentally different cell types in the brain, neurons, and glial cells. One purpose of the latter is to insulate the “wiring” of nerve cells or guarantee optimal working conditions for them. A new study led by the University of Bonn has now discovered another function in rodents: The results suggest that a certain type of glial cell plays an important role in spatial learning. The German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) was involved in the work....

The age-adjusted prevalence of dementia fell from 12.2% of people over age 65 in 2000 to 8.5% of people over age 65 in 2016, representing a nearly one-third reduction from the 2000 level. The prevalence of dementia decreased consistently over the entire study period, with a particularly rapid decline observed between 2000 and 2004. Differences in the prevalence of dementia between Black men and white men narrowed, with the prevalence of dementia dropping by 7....

Whether you are a company or a reporter trying to boost your visibility online, what is ok to do and what is considered “unfairly gaming the system?” Is it ok to use keywords that you know people are searching for, but not ok for “bots” to direct traffic to your site? Will you be punished, suspended or banned from Google, Facebook and Instagram because how you strategize with the algorithm is deemed illegitimate?...

Seven years ago, researchers in Dr. Joseph Bonventre’s laboratory discovered how to create the first building block, known as metanephric mesenchyme, from human stem cells. Dr. Bonventre is the Chief of the Renal Unit and Founding Chief of the Engineering in Medicine Division at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The same team has recently created a very efficient method for producing the second building block (ureteric bud), which grows into the adult kidney collecting system....

Obesity may increase the risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes. Although long-term weight change and the likelihood of acquiring type 2 diabetes are not fully understood, controlling weight may be a useful strategy for preventing and managing obesity and associated disorders. Qi Sun and colleagues from the TH Chan Harvard School of Public Health in the United States analyzed healthy individuals from three prospective cohort studies conducted between 1988 and 2017....

Nagoya University scientists have developed a one-step fabrication process that improves the ability of nanocarbons to remove toxic heavy metal ions from water. The findings, published in the journal ACS Applied Nano Materials, could aid efforts to improve universal access to clean water. Various nanocarbons are being studied and used for purifying water and wastewater by adsorbing dyes, gases, organic compounds, and toxic metal ions. These nanocarbons can adsorb heavy metal ions, like lead and mercury, onto their surfaces through molecular attraction forces....

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there were high hopes that hot summer temperatures could reduce its spread. Although summer didn’t bring widespread relief, the connection between the weather and COVID-19 continues to be a hot topic. The link between weather and COVID-19 is complicated. Weather influences the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before infecting a new host. But it also influences human behavior, which moves the virus from one host to another....

If there’s one thing in the universe that is certain, it’s that life exists. It must have begun at some point in time, somewhere. But despite all we know from biology and physics, the exact details about how and when life began, and also whether it began elsewhere, are largely speculative. This enticing omission from our collective knowledge has set many curious scientists on a journey to uncover some new detail that might shed light on existence itself....

A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 5806, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Virgin). It lies around 80 million light-years from Earth. Also visible in this image is a supernova explosion called SN 2004dg. The exposures that are combined into this image were carried out in early 2005 in order to help pinpoint the location of the supernova, which exploded in 2004. The afterglow from this outburst of light, caused by a giant star exploding at the end of its life, can be seen as a faint yellowish dot near the bottom of the galaxy....

The universe is expanding and accelerating, and collisions between galaxies in close proximity to each other still happen because they are bound by the gravity of the dark matter surrounding them. The Hubble Space Telescope’s deep views of the universe show such encounters between galaxies were more common in the past when the universe was smaller. A century ago astronomers did not realize that M31 (also known as Messier 31 or the Andromeda Galaxy) was a separate galaxy far beyond the stars of the Milky Way....

The team also continued work on developing and testing changes to instrument software that would allow them to conduct science operations even if they encounter several lost synchronization messages in the future. Those changes would first be installed on the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph once they’re completed and tested within a few weeks. Hubble’s other instruments would also receive similar changes. The team has not detected further synchronization message issues since monitoring began November 1....

A team of scientists from Scripps Research and the University of North Carolina (UNC) has found antibodies in the blood of certain COVID-19 donors that can block infection from a broad set of coronaviruses—specifically, in people who have recovered from the virus and were then vaccinated. They found this includes not only the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2, but also SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV. The scientists’ detailed study of the antibodies and their virus binding sites, reported on February 15, 2023, in the journal Immunity, could lead to the development of a broad coronavirus vaccine and related antibody therapeutics....

In an article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution on June 22, 2020, the leaders of a new global initiative explain how research during this devastating health crisis can inspire innovative strategies for sharing space on this increasingly crowded planet, with benefits for both wildlife and humans. Many countries around the world went into lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19. Brought about by the most tragic circumstances, this period of unusually reduced human mobility, which the article’s authors coined “anthropause,” can provide invaluable insights into human–wildlife interactions....

Dogs were the first domesticated animal, with humans and dogs sharing more than 40,000 years of social interactions and life together. According to the co-domestication hypothesis, this process allowed humans and dogs to evolve special emotional signals and cognitive skills that favor mutual understanding. We know, for example, that over the millennia, dogs have evolved the ability to understand human words, iconic signs, and other gestures, and research has shown that dogs can even use tone of voice and facial expressions to recognize human emotions....

The sensors, which detect hydrogen peroxide inside human cells, could help researchers identify new cancer drugs that boost levels of hydrogen peroxide, which induces programmed cell death. The sensors could also be adapted to screen individual patients’ tumors to predict whether such drugs would be effective against them. “The same therapy isn’t going to work against all tumors,” says Hadley Sikes, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT. “Currently there’s a real dearth of quantitative, chemically specific tools to be able to measure the changes that occur in tumor cells versus normal cells in response to drug treatment....

Prior research has shown that immigrants have lower rates of offending, arrest, and incarceration than nonimmigrants. However, that work hasn’t examined whether this holds true for recidivism. A new study compared recidivism rates of foreign-born and native-born individuals formerly incarcerated for felonies and released from prisons in Florida. It found that immigrants are significantly less likely to re-offend by committing another felony than their nonimmigrant peers. The study, by researchers at Florida State University, appears in Justice Quarterly, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences....

During this period, called “late accretion,” collisions with moon-sized planetary bodies, known as planetesimals, embedded extensive amounts of metal and rock-forming minerals into the Earth’s mantle and crust. It is estimated that approximately 0.5 percent of Earth’s present mass was delivered during this stage of planetary evolution. With the support from a NASA Exobiology grant and NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute, or SwRI, and University of Maryland have created high-resolution impact simulations that show significant portions of a large planetesimal’s core could penetrate all the way down to merge with Earth’s core—or ricochet back into space and escape the planet entirely....

Through the strategic use of the element indium to replace some of the lead in perovskites, Rice materials scientist Jun Lou and his colleagues at the Brown School of Engineering say they’re better able to engineer the defects in cesium-lead-iodide solar cells that affect the compound’s band gap, a critical property in solar cell efficiency. As a side benefit, the lab’s newly formulated cells can be made in the open air and last for months rather than days with a solar conversion efficiency slightly above 12%....

The findings suggest that these men may benefit from early screening and long-term monitoring for prostate cancer. Prostate cancer and male infertility are both very common disorders, affecting approximately 10% and 8%, respectively, of all men in Western societies. As prostate cancer and many forms of infertility are male sex hormone related, a possible link between them has been investigated previously. But study weaknesses have so far prevented researchers from drawing any firm conclusions....

Antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein produced by the immune system can help identify and fend off future infections, but not all antibodies are the same. People who either recovered from COVID-19 early in the pandemic or received a current vaccine may not be able to fend off new and emerging variants. But, this week in mBio, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers report that the combination of the 2 can produce a more potent defense....