School restrictive smartphone policies may save a small amount of money for schools, primarily by reducing the amount of time staff spend on managing phone-related behaviors, but they make little difference to pupils' quality of life or mental well-being, finds a health economic analysis, published in the online journal BMJ Mental Health.
A Dartmouth study finds that molecular hitchhikers living within bacteria can make their hosts extra resistant to medical treatment by corralling them into tightly packed groups. The findings introduce a previously unknown avenue through which bacterial infections can become more difficult to treat, the researchers say.
Farmers now have more reasons to consider rotating their crops, University of Alberta research shows. Widely used to restore soil health, the agricultural practice boosts the diversity of bacterial and fungal microbes that benefit soil function, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.
What was the political and economic importance of the ancient city Alexandria on the Tigris? How was the city laid out? And what does the material culture of the international trade hub look like? These are the questions that Stefan Hauser, professor of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Konstanz, and his British colleagues Jane Moon, Robert Killick and Stuart Campbell have been working on since 2016. With the help of modern geophysics methods, thousands of drone images and a systematic surface survey, the researchers concluded that Alexandria on the Tigris had been an impressive metropolis.
If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists call this behavior a strong glass transition, and silica glass is the textbook example. Most polymer glasses behave very differently, and are known as fragile glass formers. Their viscosity rises much more steeply as temperature drops, and therefore they cannot be processed without a mold or very precise temperature control.
Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and sometimes these atoms are slightly heavier than usual. These heavier forms are called isotopes. As water evaporates or moves through the atmosphere, the amount of these isotopes changes in predictable ways. This can act as a fingerprint, allowing researchers to trace the movement of water at global scales.
First names in Western countries today are more diverse than they were before early modern states evolved. This difference started to emerge in the 17th century in response to a change that took place in the naming system in large parts of Europe and the English-speaking world. Societies moved away from attributive last names—based on occupation or appearance like John (the) Short—to inherited surnames.
A new international study reveals the unexpected importance of acoustic communication in the evolution of boxfishes. This discovery offers new perspectives on the role of acoustic communication in the evolutionary history of numerous fish groups. The findings are published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.
A century ago, the section of U.S. federal law governing public health and welfare was relatively small and loosely connected to the rest of the legal system. Today, it is one of the largest and most interconnected parts of the United States Code.
Neural crest cells are a population of stem cells that invade the embryo in early development. They play a big role in what you look like: the pigments of your eyes, of your skin, and the bone structure of your face are all neural crests. Inside your body, the neural crest will form the myelin sheath of your peripheral nervous system and the entire nervous system of your intestine, the so-called "second brain."
