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Almost 20 years ago, the DAMA/LIBRA experiment operated at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory - LNGS began publishing data showing that it had detected a signal modulation produced by an interaction with the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Dark matter is believed to constitute approximately 27% of the known universe, with ordinary matter accounting for only 4%. The remaining 69% is thought to be made up of dark energy. Because dark matter hardly interacts with normal matter, its presence has [...]

The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the main transmission vector of dengue, Zika, yellow fever and chikungunya in Brazil. It is highly adapted to urban environments and rarely found in forested areas. The mosquito Anopheles cruzii is the primary vector of Plasmodium, the protozoan parasite that causes malaria in humans. It mostly inhabits the countryside and is infrequent in urban areas. Mosquito population control is considered the best strategy for combating these diseases. Understanding mosquito [...]

Nearly 20,000 future doctors will graduate from U.S. medical school this spring, and embark on the residency training that launches their careers. Right now, they're choosing which hospitals and health systems they'd most like to train at. But a new study suggests that their mental health in the crucial first year of training - called internship - may depend a lot on the nature of the program they enter. Writing in the journal Academic Medicine , a team from the University of Michigan and [...]

The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics . This makes the processes described by classical physics irreversible and, by extension, imposes a direction on the flow of time. However, the tendency does not necessarily apply in the microscopic world, which is governed by quantum mechanics. The laws of quantum physics are reversible in time, so in the microscopic [...]

While most developed countries have reduced the construction of large dams for the production of electricity in recent decades, developing countries, including Brazil, have embarked on even more massive hydropower developments. These countries have not accounted for the environmental impacts of large dams, which include deforestation and the loss of biodiversity, or the social consequences, such as the displacement of thousands of people and the economic damages they suffer. These effects [...]

The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record dates to 521 million years ago in the oceans of the Cambrian Period, when the continents were still inhospitable to most life forms. Few groups of animals adapted as successfully as trilobites, which were arthropods that lived on the seabed for 270 million years until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian approximately 252 million years ago. The longer ago organisms lived, the more rare are their fossils and the harder it is to [...]

Rutin, a bioflavonoid (plant pigment) found in certain vegetables and fruits, protects mice against snake venom by minimizing bleeding and inflammation, according to a study performed at the Butantan Institute, a research institution belonging to the government of São Paulo State in Brazil. The research focused on methods to combat the effects of envenomation by the lancehead pit viper Bothrops jararaca, which is responsible for approximately 70% of snakebites in the state, and was conducted [...]

Up to 15 million hectares of tropical rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon could lose protection and be clear-cut because of an article in the country's new Forest Code. The warning comes from Brazilian researchers at the University of São Paulo's Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) and Swedish researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. They recently published a paper on the subject in Nature Sustainability . [...]

A jagged little protein appears to be key to how cancer stem cells differentiate and enable metastasis, according to researchers at Rice University and the Duke University School of Medicine. Rice scientists who have formed several theories on how cancer grows and spreads connected the dots for a more complete picture of tumor mechanics. At the center, they found JAG1, a ligand, or small protein, that interacts with a signaling pathway critical to regulating the fate of cells. Their new paper [...]