Major automotive manufacturers are ramping up production of electric trucks as a key strategy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of their vehicles. Light-duty vehicles, including sedans, SUVs and pickup trucks, are currently responsible for 58% of U.S. transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions. Pickup trucks accounted for 14% of light-duty vehicle sales in the United […]

Over 190 nations have agreed to negotiate a legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution on land and sea, and one that will focus on the entire value chain to create a circular plastics economy. Agreement was also reached on creating a intergovernmental science policy panel to advise on chemical pollution and waste. ‘We still […]

UK-based researchers have found a family of organoborane catalysts that can perform nucleophilic fluorination reactions. While chemists are well-accustomed to the high fluorophilicity of organoboranes, looking more closely into the different degrees by which they exhibit that characteristic affinity reveals that some of them could serve as fluoride phase-transfer catalysts. Fluorine-containing compounds are prevalent in […]

A methylation clock is an empirical construct. There is no understanding of physiology or metabolism built into the process. The clock is engineered to do the best job predicting (in the case of the GRIM-Age clock, for example) future mortality and morbidity based on methylation patterns. The whole process is agnostic about biological mechanism. It […]

Using a novel probe for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), MIT biological engineers have devised a way to monitor individual populations of neurons and reveal how they interact with each other. Similar to how the gears of a clock interact in specific ways to turn the clock’s hands, different parts of the brain interact to […]

Air pollution increases in South East Asia, combined with pollution cuts in Europe, may have had an important influence on European and Asian weather patterns in recent decades, new research has found. Analysis of weather records and climate models by scientists at the University of Reading revealed that changes in air pollution levels in the […]

Use of the drug verapamil to treat Type 1 diabetes continues to show benefits lasting at least two years, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications. Patients taking the oral blood pressure medication not only required less daily insulin two years after first diagnosis of the disease, but also showed evidence of surprising immunomodulatory benefits. Continuing medication was […]

Mummification of the dead probably was more common in prehistory than previously known. This discovery is made at the hunter-gatherer burial sites in the Sado Valley in Portugal, dating to 8 000 years ago. A new study, headed by archaeologists at Uppsala University and Linnaeus University in Sweden and University of Lisbon in Portugal, presents new […]

New research has found that people with mild cognitive impairment may not inevitably develop dementia and, in fact, having higher education and advanced language skills more than doubles their chances of returning to normal. The study, led by researchers at the University of Waterloo, may reassure those with mild cognitive impairment as it contradicts a […]

Australian bull ants have evolved a venom molecule perfectly tuned to target one of their predators – the echidna – that also could have implications for people with long-term pain, University of Queensland researchers say. Dr Sam Robinson and David Eagles from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience found a bull ant venom component that exploits a pain pathway […]