Non-pharmaceutical interventions include actions individuals can take to reduce disease spread, such as hand washing and minimizing contacts with sick people, and they play a key role in reducing the spread of infectious diseases such as influenza, according to a new paper.

Social distancing, staying indoors and avoiding social activity, is an important Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in the event of an epidemic, especially when a vaccine is unavailable or limited. Whether privately initiated or policy directed, NPIs calling for the closure of schools and entertainment venues, and cancelling public events are becoming more relevant in control strategies.

A new study by researchers at Children's Hospital Los Angeles has shown that neonatal mouse hearts have varying regenerative capacities depending upon the severity of injury. Using cryoinjury - damaging the heart through exposure to extreme cold in order to mimic cellular injury caused by myocardial infarction - investigators found that neonatal mouse hearts can fully recover normal function following a mild injury, though fail to regenerate after a severe injury.

Published online by the journal Developmental Biology, the study suggests that cardiac regeneration strategies should be based on the type and severity of heart injury.

A team of scientists from Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation Embrapa and the University of Brasilia have discovered tranquilizing properties in previously unknown protein fragments of coffee beans.

They did tests and found that these opioid peptides outperformed morphine in mice.

The night before the famous "Raid at Entebbe" in 1976, when the Israel Defense Forces rescued over 100 kidnapped hostages from German and Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda, Tel Aviv University's Prof. Pinhas Alpert, then head of an Israel Air Force base forecasting unit, provided intelligence that was critical to the success of the operation - the weather conditions commandos were likely to encounter en route and on the ground. 

Had they been wrong, the mission might have ended differently.

A study has uncovered several new genetic mutations that could drive testicular cancer - and also identified a gene which may contribute to tumors becoming resistant to current treatments.

The study is the first to use state-of-the-art sequencing technology to explore in detail testicular germ cell tumors - which make up the vast majority of testicular cancers and are the most common cancers in young men. The study in Nature Communications used whole-exome sequencing to examine tumor samples from 42 patients with testicular cancer treated at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

The Permian was a geologic period that ended more than 250 million years ago. The Earth consisted of one forested super-continent called Pangea and a large ocean called Panthalassa teemed with life.

It wasn't going to last, we know the largest mass extinction ever recorded was om the horizon. Why did it happen? The favorite hypothesis is that a series of massive volcanic eruptions deposited rocks now known as the Siberian Traps, released gases causing planet-wide acid rain showers that damaged the biosphere.

Time-dependent Maxwell's equations in media 

By Robyn Arianrhod, Monash University

It’s hard to imagine life without mobile phones, radio and television. Yet the discovery of the electromagnetic waves that underpin such technologies grew out of an abstract theory that’s 150 years old.

By using spatial analysis software and electronic medical records to identify clusters of under-immunization and vaccine refusal among Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California, researches don't just know where anti-vaccine sentiment is more prominent - that correlates to voting registration and has been well-documented, but now they also know how long the anti-vaccine beliefs have been evident.

Can a penalty kick simultaneously score a goal and miss?

In the realm of quantum mechanics that is certainly be true, because microscopic objects can take different paths at the same time.  Almost 100 years ago physicists Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and Erwin Schrödinger created this new field of physics which would be called quantum mechanics. Objects of the quantum world, according to quantum theory, no longer move along a single well-defined path. Rather, they can simultaneously take different paths and end up at different places at once. Physicists speak of quantum superposition of different paths.  

The publishing giant Elsevier is about to launch a new journal, Reviews in Physics. This will be a fully open-access, peer-reviewed journal which aims at providing short reviews (15 pages maximum) on physics topics at the forefront of research. The web page of the journal is here, and a screenshot is shown below.