Until Alfred the Great managed to isolate and contain invaders from Scandinavia, Lyminge, a monastery in Kent, was on the front line of long-running Viking hostility.

Lyminge endured repeated attacks for almost a century through effective defensive strategies, University of Reading archaeologists now say. Despite being in a region of Kent which bore the full brunt of Viking raids in the later 8th and early 9th centuries, they survived. rebuilt, and recovered more completely than historians previously thought. 


The excavation at Lyminge, Kent. Credit: Dr. Gabor Thomas

Stimuli-responsive polymers will bring next-generation small-scale, wirelessly controlled soft-bodied robots.

Even now, these materials have made robots that can walk, swim and jump. Now, a FAIRY can even fly. FAIRY is the nickname of the Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly program at Tampere University. It flies by wind and is controlled by light, using a soft actuator.

"The actuator is made of light-responsive liquid crystalline elastomer, which induces opening or closing actions of the bristles upon visible light excitation,” explains Hao Zeng, group leader of the project.

Since the 1960s, antioxidant supplements have been promoted as a miracle cure and that has never been true - preventing oxidation too much would be as bad as not preventing enough - but luckily few supplements make coenzyme Q bioavailable at all. Evolution created a way for the energy factories of our cells, mitochondria, to be thrown out of balance by pills.

Yet they can be thrown out of balance by nature. Coenzyme Q is entirely natural, and a lack of it leads to mitochondrial diseases like Leigh syndrome. But short of experimentally replacing mitochondrial DNA, it is hard to modify. For anything to change it must pass through the watery cell interior called cytoplasm to the surface of the cells in order to neutralize oxidized lipid species. 

The booster dose of either the BNT162b2 mRNA (Fosun-BioNTech, equivalent to Pfizer-BioNTech outside China) or CoronaVac (Sinovac) COVID-19 vaccine was correlated to a 90 percent reduction in death in people with multiple co-morbidities compared to 2 doses, according to a new study.

Reducing the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV from blood donations is important for public health and the U.S. currently uses time-based deferrals to assess donor eligibility. Now the FDA is proposing individual risk-based questions to reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV similar to policies in place in countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.

Blood donations are important and FDA believes the implementation of the proposed individual risk-based questions will not compromise the safety or availability of the blood supply. The new draft recommendations are based on data from other countries with similar HIV epidemiology that have instituted this approach, as well as ongoing surveillance of the U.S. blood supply.

Food is not medicine, anyone claiming it is medicine is selling you something, like a diet plan, but nutrients can impact cancer cells.

How that applies consistently is unknown so a new tool hopes to create an exploratory method using mice. Mice don't translate well to humans, they are not little people, but they can exclude effects in humans and that has value also.