Staying on long-term antidepressants reduces risk of relapse

When people stop taking antidepressants after a long period of use, just over half (56%) experience a relapse within a year, compared to 39% of those who stay on medication, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The researchers say their findings, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, can help doctors and patients […]

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UK to ease restrictions on gene editing in crops and livestock

The UK government plans to ease restrictions on gene-editing with a view to accelerating research and enabling gene-edited crops and animals to be brought to market. Current regulations, inherited from the EU, class all gene-edited products as genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). This means that minor edits like gene deletions or single base-pair substitutions made to an […]

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Solving a 50-year-old mystery involving 2 billion-year-old rock

Geologists have been baffled by perforations in an Australian quartzite (rock), identical in shape to burrows made in sands by crustaceans; the original sandy sediment is a billion years older than the oldest known animals. An international team of scientists has now resolved the mystery. When animals move, they leave traces, such as dinosaur footprints […]

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New tool predicts changes that may make COVID variants more infectious

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, new variants are expected to arise that may have an increased ability to infect their hosts and evade the hosts’ immune systems. The first key step in infection is when the virus’ spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on human cells. Researchers at Penn State have created a novel […]

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Methane: Potential of an overlooked climate change solution

Earlier this month, President Biden urged other countries to join the U.S. and European Union in a commitment to slashing methane emissions. Two new Stanford-led studies could help pave the way by laying out a blueprint for coordinating research on methane removal technologies, and modeling how the approach could have an outsized effect on reducing […]

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Becoming an exoskeleton expert

Exoskeleton devices work, researchers say, for a variety of uses such as speeding up our walking or making running easier. Yet they don’t know what exactly makes exoskeletons effective. What is the benefit of customization, for example? And how much does simply getting used to the exoskeleton matter? Researchers in the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory at Stanford University examined these questions […]

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More evidence of how COVID-19 changed Americans’ values, activities

A new UCLA-led study decisively confirms findings of research published earlier this year, which found that American values, attitudes and activities had changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. The earlier study, published in February, was based on an analysis of online behavior — Google searches and phrases posted on Twitter, blogs and internet forums. The latest research, […]

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Does an ally against climate change lie beneath our feet?

By enhancing soil’s ability to store carbon, the ground we walk on could play an essential role in keeping carbon dioxide out of the air. If we’re going to fight the effects of climate change, we’re going to have to get our hands dirty. ‘With a huge potential to act as a carbon sink, the […]

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Peptide superstructures speed up Michael reaction

Supramolecular assemblies of simple tripeptides accelerate an asymmetric reaction, researchers have discovered. ‘These [tripeptides] self-assemble into fibrils, supramolecular structures that… speed up a Michael reaction,’ explains Armando Carlone, from University of L’Aquila, Italy, who led the study. Carlone’s group started studying organocatalysis a few years ago. ‘We were inspired by molecular machines and supramolecular structures, […]

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