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In addition to neurons, the infusion used for shamanic purposes also induces the formation of other neural cells such as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. “This capacity to modulate brain plasticity suggests that it has great therapeutic potential for a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases,” explained José Ángel Morales, a researcher in the UCM and CIBERNED Department of Cellular Biology. The study, published in Translational Psychiatry, a Nature Research journal, reports the results of four years of in vitro and in vivo experimentation on mice, demonstrating that these exhibit “a greater cognitive capacity when treated with this substance,” according to José Antonio López, a researcher in the Faculty of Psychology at the UCM and co-author of the study....

The findings, published in the journal Molecular Ecology, reveal the Indian wolf to be one of the world’s most endangered and evolutionarily distinct gray wolf populations. The study indicates that Indian wolves could represent the most ancient surviving lineage of wolves. The Indian wolf is restricted to lowland India and Pakistan, where its grassland habitat is threatened primarily by human encroachment and land conversion. “Wolves are one of the last remaining large carnivores in Pakistan, and many of India’s large carnivores are endangered,” said lead author Lauren Hennelly, a doctoral student with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine’s Mammalian Ecology Conservation Unit....

The scientists presented their findings at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). More archaeological searches are underway in order to find older ovens. They are called hangi. Abandoned stones at these locations could help elucidate the history of Earth’s magnetic Field, going back hundreds of years. There is a good record of palaeomagnetic data from across the world, but there is a gap in the southwest Pacific....

In a paper on the preprint site arXiv and soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team led by Dr. Nichole Barry from Australia’s University of Melbourne and the ARC Center of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) reports a 10-fold improvement on data gathered by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) – a collection of 4096 dipole antennas set in the remote hinterland of Western Australia....

Michigan State University researchers have found that when triclosan, a substance that reduces or prevents bacteria from growing, is combined with an antibiotic called tobramycin, it kills the cells that protect the CF bacteria, known as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, by up to 99.9 percent. CF is a common genetic disease with one in every 2,500 to 3,500 people diagnosed with it at an early age. It results in a thick mucus in the lungs, which becomes a magnet for bacteria....

When Venus transits the sun on June 5th and 6th, an armada of spacecraft and ground-based telescopes will be on the lookout for something elusive and, until recently, unexpected: The Arc of Venus. “I was flabbergasted when I first saw it during the 2004 transit,” recalls astronomy professor Jay Pasachoff of Williams College. “A bright, glowing rim appeared around the edge of Venus soon after it began to move into the sun....

Research using data from NASA’s ARTEMIS mission — short for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun — suggests how the solar wind and the Moon’s crustal magnetic fields work together to give the Moon a distinctive pattern of darker and lighter swirls. The Sun releases a continuous outflow of particles and radiation called the solar wind. The solar wind washes over the planets, moons and other bodies in our solar system, filling a bubble of space — called the heliosphere — that extends far past the orbit of Pluto....

The agency takes every effort to protect the crew prior to its launch through a health stabilization plan. Crew-3 astronauts will remain in quarantine at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida while preparing for their launch. Teams will continue to monitor crew health as they evaluate potential launch opportunities at the end of the week. The earliest possible opportunity for launch is 11:36 p.m. EDT Saturday, November 6. The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket are in good shape and will remain at Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy....

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using the Very Long Baseline Array, have directly measured a distance of more than 66,000 light-years to a star-forming region. This region, known as G007.47+00.05, is on the opposite side of our Milky Way Galaxy from the Sun. The researchers’ achievement reaches deep into the Milky Way’s terra incognita and nearly doubles the previous record for distance measurement within our Galaxy....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Acta Paediatrica. Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at around 30 weeks of gestational age, and this new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy. The fetus locks on the loudest sounds in the speech, which are the vowels. Previous studies have shown that newborns were born ready to learn and discriminate between language sounds within their first few months of life....

In the days following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, methane-eating bacteria bloomed in the Gulf of Mexico, feasting on the methane that gushed, along with oil, from the damaged well. The sudden influx of microbes was a scientific curiosity: Prior to the oil spill, scientists had observed relatively few signs of methane-eating microbes in the area. Now researchers at MIT have discovered a bacterial gene that may explain this sudden influx of methane-eating bacteria....

Nectar-feeding bats foraging in intensively managed banana plantations in Costa Rica have a less diverse set of gut microbes in comparison to bats feeding in their natural forest habitat or organic plantations, reveals new research published today in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. This is the first study to show an association between habitat alteration, sustainable agriculture, and the gut microbiota of wildlife. “Organic and conventional monoculture banana plantations both provide a very reliable food source for some nectar-feeding bat species....

Although most experts agree that a vaccine would significantly slow or eventually stop the spread, the work to develop, approve and distribute such a vaccine are likely months away. That leaves us with only prevention efforts such as masks, social distancing and disinfecting, which partially due to human inconsistencies in behavior, have proven to be variable in effectiveness. Despite these grim realities about the novel coronavirus that has taken 2020 by storm, disrupting the work, school and personal lives of nearly everyone on the globe, some University of New Mexico researchers have found a possible breakthrough in how to manage this virus, as well as future ones....

FDA database of drug side effects indicates the benefit may hold up no matter where Botox is injected. Botox, or Botulinum toxin, a medication derived from a bacterial toxin, is commonly injected to ease wrinkles, migraines, muscle spasms, excessive sweating, and incontinence. Researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego, in collaboration with two physicians from Germany, may have found a new use thanks to the U....

Did it all start 50 million years ago, when the granite that the valley cuts through was first exposed to the elements? Was it 30 million years ago when canyons in the southern Sierra Nevada started to form? Did the valley only begin to form when the Sierra tilted toward the west around 5 million years ago or did glaciers that formed in a cooling climate 2 to 3 million years ago account for the majority of its formation?...

How’s this for big data: A whole-slide image of a tumor section can be ten billion pixels. There can be thousands of such images in the tumor cohorts maintained by The Cancer Genome Atlas project, which are collected from a large pool of patients. The images are a potential treasure trove for the emerging field of precision medicine. Hidden in those billions of pixels is a story of how tumor cells organize themselves, the molecular networks that influence these structural traits, and what it all means for patients....

Inspired by the eye structures of the paper wasp species Xenos peckii, the research team completely suppressed optical noise between micro-lenses while reducing camera thickness. The camera has successfully demonstrated high-contrast clear array images acquired from tiny microlenses. To further enhance the image quality of the captured image, the team combined the arrayed images into one image through super-resolution imaging. An insect’s compound eye has superior visual characteristics, such as a wide viewing angle, high motion sensitivity, and a large depth of field while maintaining a small volume of visual structure with a small focal length....

Whenever muscles contract, so-called ryanodine receptors come into play. Calcium ions, which are ultimately responsible for the contraction of muscle cells, are released from storage organs and flow through these ion channels. Defective ryanodine receptors can lead, for example, to cardiac arrhythmias or sudden heart failure. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund have now analyzed the three-dimensional structure of the ryanodine receptor. The researchers inserted the receptors into tiny nano-membranes in order to study the proteins in a milieu similar to their natural environment in cells....

Water is vital to the survival of life. However, water scarcity has become a major problem in modern society. Today, one-fifth of the world’s population lives in water-deficient areas, especially in areas where there is no electricity. For people in such areas, access to clean drinking water is often a difficult task. Therefore, they urgently need an efficient, low-cost, sustainable, and easily accessible technologies and devices to generate clean water....

Sagittarius A* is a strong source of radio, X-rays, and gamma rays (visible light is blocked by intervening gas and dust). Astronomers have known for decades that Sagittarius A* flashes every day, emitting bursts of radiation that are ten to a hundred times brighter than normal signals observed from the black hole. To find out more about these mysterious flares, the team of astronomers, led by Andrés, searched for patterns in the data made available by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, an Earth-orbiting satellite dedicated to the detection of gamma-ray bursts....