The oldest-known primate skeleton, 62-million-years-old, dwelled in treetops, not on the ground, according to a new analysis.
The study shows that Torrejonia, a small mammal from an extinct group of primates called plesiadapiforms, had skeletal features adapted to living in trees, such as flexible joints for climbing and clinging to branches. Previously, researchers had proposed that plesiadapiforms in Palaechthonidae, the family to which Torrejonia belongs, were terrestrial based on details from cranial and dental fossils consistent with animals that nose about on the ground for insects.
A new paper found that the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 can introduce hundreds of unintended mutations into the genome, important as it starts to move into clinical trials.
CRISPR-Cas9 editing technology—by virtue of its speed and unprecedented precision—has been a boon for scientists trying to understand the role of genes in disease. The technique also has raised hope for more powerful gene therapies that can delete or repair flawed genes, not just add new genes.
Capacity for vicarious experiences is a fundamental aspect of human social behavior. For example, seeing others experiencing pain can activate brain circuits that are known to support actual first-hand experience of pain.
A new study has revealed how the human brain’s opioid system modulates responses to other people’s pain. The less opioid receptors the participants had in their brain, the stronger were their emotion and pain circuits’ response to seeing others in distress. Similar association was not found for the dopamine system despite its known importance in pain management.
Today I gave a seminar at the Physics Department of the University of Helsinki, to talk of "
Controversial Phenomena in Collider Data and the 5-Sigma Criterion in HEP", invited by Juska Pekkanen and Mikko Voutilanen, two CMS colleagues.
The seminar is more or less the same I have given several times in the past year around Europe and the US. It contains some statistics, some HEP history, and some material taken from my recent book,
"Anomaly!".
The effects of a "bug" in the analysis of functional neuroimages (AFNI) software was greatly exaggerated, a finding that is in defiance of numerous other studies which have found that false positive rates in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain may negate the findings of countless previous studies.
The CMS collaboration at the CERN Large Hadron Collider has pulled off an extremely neat new measurement of the Higgs boson production rate - one which, for some reasons, is extraordinary in its own right.
Despite being the decay mode with the highest probability (two thirds of Higgs bosons die that way), the H->bb process is among the most elusive to put in evidence in LHC data, because b-quarks are quite commonplace there.
As I explained in the previous post of this series, students in high schools of the Venice area have been asked to produce artistic works inspired by LHC physics research, and in particular the Higgs boson.
The surface of water drops at 100 nm size changes with temperature. At room temperature, the surface water molecules of these droplets have much stronger interactions than a normal water surface. The structural difference corresponds to a difference in temperature of -50°C.
Nanometric-sized water drops are everywhere, as droplets or aerosols in air, in our bodies as medication, and in rocks and oil fields. How they interact with their hydrophobic environment, at the curved droplet interface, a sub-nanometric region that surrounds the small pocket of water, could boost our understanding of atmospheric, biological and geological processes.
This is the first of a series of posts that will publish the results of artistic work by high-school students of three schools in Venice, who participate in a contest and exposition connected to the initiative "Art and Science across Italy", an initiative of the network CREATIONS, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme
Tablet and phone marketing executives can sleep well tonight. While those devices are commonly blamed for recent sleep problems, beams of pure digital energy shot straight into the eyeballs will do that, a new paper seeks to shore up the failing claim that tiny particulate matter, PM 2.5 (2.5 microns per cubic meter of air), is impacting human health and should be the source of new regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency.
