“Prior to this research, no one had ever published a study of the skull in this level of detail through the lifespan of any lizard or snake,” said Catie Strong, an undergraduate student at the University of Alberta who led the research project under the supervision of evolutionary biologist Michael Caldwell. “There is a huge gap in our knowledge of the development of lizards and snakes.” The biologists used a technique called micro-computed tomography to examine Plains garter snake skulls throughout their lifespan, from embryo to juvenile to adult....

P. appalachius was discovered at the Arlington Archosaur Site (AAS) of Texas, which preserves the remnants of an ancient Late Cretaceous river delta that once existed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and is also known for discoveries of fossil crocodyliformes and dinosaurs. P. appalachius belonged to an extinct lineage of pleurodiran (side-necked) turtles referred to as the Bothremydidae, a diverse and geographically widespread clade that occupied a wide range of ecological niches....

Among the greatest challenges when treating life-threatening tuberculosis infections is the increasing resistance to antibiotics. But the pathogen itself also makes the life of doctors difficult: its dense mycomembrane hampers the effect of many medications. A team of scientists headed by Stephan A. Sieber, Professor of Organic Chemistry at TU Munich, has discovered a substance that perturbs the formation of this membrane significantly. The mycomembrane of the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis consists of a lipid double layer that encapsulates the cell wall, forming an exterior barrier....

The new study, led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC and published in the journal Aging Cell, found that disrupting a process called meiosis in C. elegans reproductive cells caused a decline in the worms’ health and triggered an accelerated aging gene signature similar to that of aging humans. “This study is exciting because it’s the first direct evidence that manipulating the health of reproductive cells leads to premature aging and a decline in healthspan,” said senior author Arjumand Ghazi, Ph....

Clinicians using a new viral screening test can not only diagnose COVID-19 in a matter of minutes with a portable, pocket-sized machine, but can also simultaneously test for other viruses—like influenza—that might be mistaken for the coronavirus. At the same time, they can sequence the virus, providing valuable information on the spread of COVID-19 mutations and variants. The new test, dubbed NIRVANA, was described online on March 31, 2021, by a multi-institution team of scientists in the journal Med....

How can carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, be removed from the exhaust of fossil fuel power plants before it ever enters the atmosphere? New research findings suggest that a promising answer lies in a simple, economical, and potentially reusable material that was analyzed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Scientists there from multiple institutions have determined why this material works as well as it does. Aluminum formate was the team’s object of study....

Free of toxic and hallucinogenic side effects, ibogaine-inspired tabernanthalog shows promise as a potential treatment for the detrimental effects of stress on the brain. Researchers found that a single dose of tabernanthalog (TBG) can correct stress-induced behavioral deficits, including anxiety and cognitive inflexibility, and also promotes the regrowth of neuronal connections and restores neural circuits in the brain that are disrupted by stress. The study was published on May 25, 2021, in Molecular Psychiatry....

All of the nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. today were built using the same general formula. For one thing, companies made their reactors big, with power capacities measured in the hundreds of megawatts. They also relied heavily on funding from the federal government, which through large grants and lengthy application processes has dictated many aspects of nuclear plant design and development. That landscape has had varying degrees of success over the years, but it’s never been particularly inviting for new companies interested in deploying unique technologies....

Viruses are non-living creatures, consisting of genetic material encased in a protein coat. Once the virus infects a living organism, it can replicate itself and continue on. But what happens if a virus lacks the proper tools to infect an organism? How can it propagate? An international collaboration led by scientists at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in Japan has uncovered a novel virus that may help answer those questions....

Obese people among black and minority ethnic communities (BME) are at around two times higher the risk of contracting COVID-19 than white Europeans, a study conducted by a team of Leicester researchers has found. Previous research has shown that ethnicity can alter the association between the body mass index (BMI) and cardiometabolic health so the researchers wanted to explore whether a person’s weight could change the relative risk of COVID-19 across ethnic groups....

The recent discovery of Turnersuchus hingleyae is a result of a remarkable excavation of fossils on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, UK, which included a partial head, backbone, and limbs. This excavation at the Charmouth Mudstone Formation was so fruitful that Turnersuchus is the only thalattosuchian of its age – dating back to the Early Jurassic, Pliensbachian period, around 185 million years ago – to be named to date due to its sufficient completeness....

One of the most incomplete fossil records of marine life is being filled in by a new find by a team of paleontologists from the University of Alberta, Yale University, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute—with the discovery of hundreds of tiny comma shrimp fossils. “Comma shrimp are small, delicate crustaceans with one of the poorest fossil records among marine arthropods—which is shocking as they are abundant today and live in soft sediments with good fossilization potential,” said Javier Luque, lead author who conducted the research as a Ph....

The Thomas Fire, which started in early December 2017, scorched almost 300,000 acres in Southern California. The intense heat of the flames not only killed vegetation and trees on the hillsides above Montecito, but it also vaporized their roots. A powerful storm dumped more than half an inch of rain in five minutes on the barren slopes a month later, in the early morning hours of January 9. The rootless soil transformed into a powerful slurry that rushed down a canyon created by a creek, gathering up boulders in its rush, before spreading out at the bottom and slamming into homes....

The face-on Pinwheel spiral galaxy is seen at ultraviolet wavelengths in this image taken by ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope. Also known as M101, the galaxy lies 21 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It measures 170,000 light-years across – nearly twice the diameter of our own Milky Way Galaxy – and contains at least a trillion stars. About a billion of these stars could be similar to our own Sun....

The international team studied three tiny dust particles collected from the surface of an ancient 500-meter-long (1600-foot-long) rubble pile asteroid, Itokawa, returned to Earth by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa 1 probe. The study’s results showed asteroid Itokawa, which is 2 million kilometers from Earth and around the size of Sydney Harbour Bridge, was hard to destroy and resistant to collision. Lead author Professor Fred Jourdan, Director of the Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, part of the John de Laeter Centre and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin, said the team also found Itokawa is almost as old as the solar system itself....

Iron is highly reactive with oxygen — forming reddish rust commonly seen on Earth. The lunar surface and interior, however, are virtually devoid of oxygen, so pristine metallic iron is prevalent on the Moon and highly oxidized iron has not been confirmed in samples returned from the Apollo missions. In addition, hydrogen in solar wind blasts the lunar surface, which acts in opposition to oxidation. So, the presence of highly oxidized iron-bearing minerals, such as hematite, on the Moon is an unexpected discovery....

Record warmth in 2010 and 2012 resulted in similarly extraordinary spring flowering in the eastern United States — the earliest in the more than 150 years for which data is available — researchers at Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Wisconsin have found. “We’re seeing spring plants that are now flowering on average over three weeks earlier than when they were first observed — and some individual species that are flowering as much as six weeks earlier,” said Charles Davis, a Harvard professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and the study’s senior author....

The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 1 million deaths which can be attributed to its severe progressive pulmonary compromise. The necessity to understand this disease has resulted in detailed analyses of its transmission and clinical aspects published worldwide. In this recent report, doctors in Bolivia provide, who live and work at more than 3,600m from above sea level, a high altitude specialists’ perspective. At high-altitude, hypoxemia (low oxygen in the blood), the main complication in COVID-19, is every day’s life experience at the High Altitude Pulmonary and Pathology Institute (HAPPI-IPPA) in La Paz, Bolivia, for 50+ years....

At least, this is what comes across from the recent reports of five miniature species identified from Taiwanese waters by local citizen scientists and passed along via Facebook and Instagram. Amongst the findings, there are two species that had never before been reported from the country, including last year’s media sensation: the ‘Japan pig’, considered to only be found in the “Land of the Rising Sun”. The study, conducted by the team of Mr....

An efficient method of combating SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may be possible based on findings from a recent study by a research team led by Johns Hopkins Medicine that avoids the issue of waning immunity that is frequently noticed when current vaccines address emerging COVID variants. The technique stops the virus’s ability to take over a host cell’s “genetic manufacturing plant” and replicate itself by using a tiny molecule inhibitor called RK-33....