On bright summer days, the sunlight all around us is breaking bad by breaking bonds. Chemical bonds.
Ultraviolet light shatters the links between atoms in the DNA of our skin cells, potentially causing cancer. UV light also breaks oxygen bonds, eventually creating ozone, and cleaves hydrogen off other molecules to leave behind free radicals that can damage tissue.
There’s no known way to prove a three-dimensional “quantum spin liquid” exists, so Rice University physicists and their collaborators did the next best thing: They showed their single crystals of cerium zirconium pyrochlore had the right stuff to qualify as the first possible 3D version of the long-sought state of matter.
Depression is linked to diminished activity in parts of the brain believed to regulate mood, which previous research suggests may explain why depressed persons display an lessened ability to govern their ruminative thought process.
In mouse study, neonatal exposure changed biochemistry of reward circuitry; researchers suggest same mechanism may be at work in humans
Neonatal exposure to nicotine alters the reward circuity in the brains of newborn mice, increasing their preference for the drug in later adulthood, report researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine in a study published “in press” April 24, 2019 in Biological Psychiatry.
In a study published online May 21, 2019 in the journal Environmental Research , researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found higher blood pressure and pesticide exposures in children associated with a heightened pesticide spraying period around the Mother’s Day flower harvest. This study involved boys and girls living near flower crops in Ecuador.
Scientists at The Ohio State University have discovered a new species that lived more than 500 million years ago—a form of ancient echinoderm that was ancestral to modern-day groups such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars and crinoids. The fossil shows a crucial evolutionary step by echinoderms that parallels the most important ecological change to have taken place in marine sediments.
Researchers have built a more efficient, more reliable potassium-oxygen battery, a step toward a potential solution for energy storage on the nation’s power grid and longer-lasting batteries in cell phones and laptops.
Nearly half of current hospital admissions for heart failure are caused by a type of the disease with no treatment options. Cardiology researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center are changing that reality with a fresh approach, recently published in Nature.
