Mindfully Curated
Summer is in full swing, and people are turning up their air conditioners to beat the heat. But the hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants in these and other cooling devices are potent greenhouse gases and major drivers of climate change. Today, scientists rep…
Many consumers hesitate to make the switch to electric vehicles. One reason is that it takes longer to power up an electric car than to gas up a conventional one. But charging too fast can damage the battery and reduce its lifespan. Now, scientists rep…
Studies have shown that pollution disproportionately affects communities where economically disadvantaged people and Hispanic, Black and Asian people live. Scientists have begun documenting these disparities in detail, but information on daily variatio…
Marijuana and hallucinogen use in the past year reported by young adults 19 to 30 years old increased significantly in 2021 compared to five and 10 years ago, reaching historic highs in this age group since 1988, according to a recent study.
Researchers have successfully synthesized fumarate (fumaric acid), a raw material for unsaturated polyester resin, by combining carbon dioxide (CO2) with pyruvate (derived from biomass), using two biocatalysts: malate dehydrogenase and fumarase. Fumara…
How do different materials react to the impact of ions? This is a question that plays an important role in many areas of research — for example in nuclear fusion research, when the walls of the fusion reactor are bombarded by high-energy ions. However…
Larvae with extremely inflated trunks, fossilized in amber, are giving zoologists insights into the evolution and lifestyle of early lacewings.
Accepted theories of how people’s visual attention behaves in situations with lots of stimuli, such as crossing a busy street, may need to be rethought.
Likely in order to survive in the oral cavity, bacteria evolved to divide along their longitudinal axis without parting from one another. Environmental cell biologists and microbial geneticists have just published their new insights. In their work, the…
Researchers have now reconstructed the extent of Switzerland’s glacier ice loss in the 20th century. The researchers used historical imagery and conclude that the country’s glaciers lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016.
The missing step in the formation of a lipid molecule that allows certain single-celled organisms to survive the most extreme environments on Earth has now been deciphered.
The introduction of Texas pumas to Florida in the 1990s as part of a genetic rescue may have helped save Florida panthers from extinction, but it also brought some harmful mutations with it along the way. Researchers show that nearly half of the harmfu…
Plastic upcycling efficiently converts plastics to valuable commodity chemicals while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. The method could recycle waste plastic pollution into useful products, helping keep it out of landfills.
In planetary disks, carbon monoxide is lurking in large chunks of ice, solving the decade-old question, ‘Where is the CO?’
It’s no secret that the internet and social media fuel rampant spread of (mis)information in many areas of life. Now, researchers have explored this phenomenon as it applies to news about spiders. The verdict? Don’t blindly trust anything you read onli…
Dogs and humans clearly have a special bond. But do dogs, like humans, produce more tears at times when they are flooded with emotion? A new study says that, indeed, the eyes of our canine companions do well up with tears. In fact, it happens regularly…
Researchers have discovered that vanadium dioxide, a compound used in electronics, is capable of ‘remembering’ the entire history of previous external stimuli. This is the first material to be identified as possessing this property, although there coul…
Scientists show that there is a close association between clinical cases of COVID-19 and viral loads in wastewater, with the viral loads picking up to two days before the cases were detected.
In the vast majority of diseases caused by mutations in a single DNA sequence, the disruption of a gene is to blame. However, many non-coding elements in the genome, which inhabit what is sometimes known as the ‘dark genome’ are also thought to play a …
A detailed analysis of pancreatic cancer by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has revealed details of two key transition points in the development of these tumors — the shift from normal cells to precancerous cells, …