199 articles from MONDAY 12.8.2019

British explorer is first person to complete 4,000-mile Yangtze trek

Ash Dykes, 28, had to overcome a landslide, blizzards and being followed by a pack of wolves A 28-year-old British explorer has become the first person to complete a 4,000-mile (6,437km) trek along the Yangtze River in China.Ash Dykes, from Old Colwyn in north Wales, finished the year-long expedition on Monday, overcoming blizzards, a landslide and temperatures as low as -20C (-4F). Continue...

Bladder cancer survival rates drop after shortage of crucial drug

Bladder cancer survival rates have fallen due to a world-wide shortage of a crucial drug, figures suggest. New Office for National Statistics data shows the chances of living five years beyond diagnosis dropped 2.5 per cent between 2016 and 2017 to 52.6 per cent. It follows a period of limited supplies of Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, an immunotherapy that keeps the cancer at bay and prevents it from...

Ebola now curable after trials of drugs in DRC, say scientists

Congo results show good survival rates for patients treated quickly with antibodies Ebola can no longer be called an incurable disease, scientists have said, after two of four drugs being trialled in the major outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were found to have significantly reduced the death rate.ZMapp, used during the massive Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea,...

Artificial intelligence helps banana growers protect the world's favorite fruit

Artificial intelligence-powered tools are rapidly becoming more accessible, including for people in the more remote corners of the globe. This is good news for smallholder farmers, who can use handheld technologies to run their farms more efficiently, linking them to markets, extension workers, satellite images, and climate information. The technology is also becoming a first line of defense...

A new timeline of Earth's cataclysmic past

Welcome to the early solar system. Just after the planets formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, our cosmic neighborhood was a chaotic place. Waves of comets, asteroids and even proto-planets streamed toward the inner solar system, with some crashing into Earth on their way.

How do atoms vibrate in graphene nanostructures?

In order to understand advanced materials like graphene nanostructures and optimize them for devices in nano-, opto- and quantum-technology it is crucial to understand how phonons—the vibration of atoms in solids—influence the materials' properties. Researchers from the University of Vienna, the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, the company JEOL and La Sapienza University...

Scientists hail promise of first effective Ebola treatments in Congo trial

Scientists are a step closer to finding the first effective treatments for the deadly Ebola haemorrhagic fever after two potential drugs showed encouraging survival results in a clinical trial in Congo. Two experimental drugs - Regeneron's REGN-EB3 and a monoclonal antibody called mAb114 - were both developed using antibodies harvested from survivors of Ebola...

Lawsuit: Negligence caused Legionnaires' outbreak at hotel

A lawsuit filed Monday alleges "negligence in the operation and maintenance of the water systems" caused a Legionnaires' disease outbreak at a downtown Atlanta hotel that killed one person and potentially sickened dozens. State and county health officials are investigating the outbreak among people who stayed at or visited the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel between June 22 and July 15. There have been...

Lung cancer: researchers identify two distinct modes of propagation

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic in the US have identified two distinct pathways for the development of lung adenocarcinoma, the most common form of lung cancer. Statistics from the National Cancer Institute indicate that lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer, accounting for around 4 out of 10 diagnoses. One of the pathways is linked to a gene responsible for cancer, the...

Study gauges trees' potential to slow global warming in the future

Like the eponymous character in Shel Silverstein's classic children's tale, trees are generous with their gifts, cleaning the air we breathe and slowing the ravages of global warming by absorbing about a quarter of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions. But this generosity likely can't last forever in the face of unabated fossil fuel consumption and deforestation. Scientists have long wondered...

Perception biases in social networks

The result of the 2016 US presidential election was, for many, a surprise lesson in social perception bias—peoples' tendency to assume that others think as we do, and to underestimate the size and influence of a minority party.