Better grades thanks to your fellow students? A study conducted by the University of Zurich's Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics has revealed that not only the grade point average, gender and nationality peers can influence your own academic achievement, but so can their personalities. Intensive contact and interaction with persistent fellow students improve your own performance, and...

An extra 290,000 pounds a year for lighting and cleaning because smog darkens and pollutes everything: with this cost estimate for the industrial city of Manchester, the English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou once founded the theory of environmental taxation. In the classic "The Economics of Welfare," the first edition of which was published as early as 1920, he proved that by allowing such...

When humans first domesticated maize some 9,000 years ago, those early breeding efforts led to an increase in harmful mutations to the crop's genome compared to their wild relatives, which more recent modern breeding has helped to correct.

Researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili's (Tarragona/Spain) research group TecnATox have optimized the website FishChoice, which helps to consume fish and seafood in a sustainable fashion and not just maximize benefits and minimize risks. The tool has been developed in the framework of a project funded by the European Commission's program H2020.

Giant ambush-predator worms, possible ancestors of the 'bobbit worm', may have colonized the seafloor of the Eurasian continent around 20 million years ago. The findings, based on the reconstruction of large, L-shaped burrows from layers of seafloor dating back to the Miocene (23 million to 5.3 million years ago) of northeast Taiwan, are reported in Scientific Reports this week.

Imagine the texture of a plant. Many may come to mind—the smooth rubberiness of many tropical houseplants, the impossibly soft lamb's ear, the sharp spines of cacti, or the roughness of tree bark. But stickiness, in the flypaper-stick-to-your-fingers sense, probably isn't at the top of your list.

On January 5, 2021, the day before the world watched in horror as the U.S. Capitol was assaulted, the Trump administration laid siege to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The revision is a major blow to conservation efforts, lifting penalties for industries that accidentally cause harm to birds protected under the act.

A robot inspired by the shape and delicate underwater movements of a jellyfish, allowing it to safely explore endangered coral reefs, was unveiled by British scientists on Wednesday.

There are significant disparities in South Africa's education system. Schools are divided into quintiles, from one to five; the poorest, in quintile one, struggle enormously with a lack of resources and support. They also tend to have poorer educational outcomes. That has a direct effect on university admission and outcomes.

In non-pandemic times, a person goes missing every 90 seconds in the UK, either intentionally, accidentally or because they are forced to. While many missing people are found quickly or return voluntarily, some do come to emotional, physical and sexual harm, including self-harm.

Salivary assay, emerging as a non-invasive alternative to blood assay in clinic analysis, holds great promise for early-stage cancer diagnostics with advantages of low cost, easy collection and facile processing. Therefore, point-of-care (POC) detection of tumor markers in the saliva is urgently demanded.

Most legume species have compound leaves with multiple joined units termed leaflets, and the geometry of leaflets (the spatial structure and organization of leaflets) largely determines the compound leaf shape, which has been broadly recognized in model compound-leafed species.

Yield, purity and integrity, of microbial DNA extracted from digesta samples is crucial for downstream analysis of amplicon sequencing. These markers of quality are influenced by chemical and mechanical lysis. However, contributions of chemical and mechanical lysis have not been investigated in DNA extraction methodology.

Macrophages—immune cells that both fight infections and fix the damage they cause—are often placed into two categories: those that increase inflammation (known as "M1") to attack, and those that decrease inflammation to begin the healing process ("M2").

Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the largest planetary satellite in the solar system. It's also one of the most intriguing: Ganymede is the only moon with its own magnetic field, it is the most differentiated of all moons, and it likely possesses a subsurface ocean of liquid water. It was studied by the early Jupiter flybys made by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, but our understanding today rests...

Real-world materials are usually messier than the idealized scenarios found in textbooks. Imperfections can add complications and even limit a material's usefulness. To get around this, scientists routinely strive to remove defects and dirt entirely, pushing materials closer to perfection. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have turned this problem around and shown...

Scientists at ETH Zurich have leveraged big data from recruitment platforms and machine learning to study hiring discrimination. They show that discrimination against immigrants depends, among other things, on the time of day; and that both men and women face discrimination.

Lake heatwaves—periods of extreme warm surface water temperature in lakes—may become hotter and longer by the end of the 21st century, according to a study published in Nature, increasing the link between climate change and extreme events.

The 10,000th paper published by Diamond Light Source could fundamentally change the technology landscape by enabling a new generation of devices. This study presents a new way of looking at chirality in thin polymer films that are important for electronics. It presents disruptive insights into chiral polymer films, which emit and absorb circularly polarized light, and offers the promise of...

An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Netherlands has discovered a whirlwind of dust and debris in orbit around a young star. It is possible that a planet is forming within the debris. The scientists made the discovery during the time that designers and developers of an astronomical instrument get as a reward for their work. They will soon publish their findings in the...

Pathogenic bacteria in humans are developing resistance to antibiotics much faster than expected. Now, computational research at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows that one reason could be significant genetic transfer between bacteria in our ecosystems and to humans. This work has also led to new tools for resistance researchers.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men. Patients are determined to have prostate cancer primarily based on PSA, a cancer factor in blood. However, as diagnostic accuracy is as low as 30%, a considerable number of patients undergo additional invasive biopsy and thus suffer from resultant side effects, such as bleeding and pain.

The rotting carcass of a nearly 14-metre (46-foot) whale washed up Thursday on Bali beach popular with tourists.

Just like us, many insects need a decent night's sleep to function properly, but this might not be possible if they have been exposed to neonicotinoid insecticides, the most common form of insecticide used worldwide, suggests research by academics at the University of Bristol.