Two years of battling COVID-19 has been bad news for tuberculosis (TB) programmes. Respiratory clinicians and researchers have had their time and focus directed elsewhere. And TB has taken advantage. In 2021, the number of TB deaths rose for the first time in over a decade. The barriers caused by lockdowns and overstretched healthcare systems […]
C ardiovascular diseases currently form the most important class of non-contagious diseases and a leading cause of mortality in industrialized nations . Specifically, coronary heart disease is the first cause of death among the cardiovascular diseases . The myocardial infarction (MI), commonly known as a “heart attack”, occurs when blood flow decreases or stops in […]
Chromosome study hints at early evolution of animals Chromosome changes that took place about 800 million years ago have been examined and used to find genes that may have been present in the earliest moments of animal life. Researchers viewed genomes at the chromosome level to study what they call genome tectonics to find nearly […]
Inorganic and organic light-emitting diodes (ILEDs and OLEDs, respectively) are quickly replacing incandescent light bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps. The reasons for the success are easy to understand. For instance, ILEDs’ performance has met the market requirements for in-/out-door applications with single-point sources. However, ILEDs cannot be considered a sustainable solution as of today. One […]
In most animal species, males and females differ. This is true for people and other mammals, as well as many species of birds, fish and reptiles. But what about dinosaurs? In 2015, I proposed that variation found in the iconic back plates of stegosaur dinosaurs was due to sex differences. I was surprised by how […]
How an organism can sense and cope with warming temperatures is key for survival, particularly under current global warming trends. The importance of this subject was recognized by 2021’s Nobel prize in Physiology & Medicine awarded to work on TRP channels, key mammalian peripheral heat sensors. Endotherms -such as mammals and birds – maintain their […]
Andromeda may be home to intermediate-mass black hole The nearby Andromeda Galaxy may be harboring an intermediate-mass black hole, a kind of black hole that is yet to be observed. Scientists say evidence points to an intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster B023-G078, which is believed to have a stripped nucleus, a condition researchers […]
Not all matter in the universe is visible. The mass of matter that cannot be “seen” by direct observatops of its emitted or absorbed electromagnetic radiation is called dark matter. In the current lambda-Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) paradigm, the most accepted “theory to model the Universe in large scales”, so-called baryonic (visible) matter assembles where […]
While waiting to board a plane on a recent trip out of town, an airline staff member asked me to momentarily take off my face mask to allow the facial recognition technology to check me in to expedite my boarding process. I was taken aback by the bluntness of the request — I did not […]
For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]