(Credit: Artemida-psy/Shutterstock)
In 2008, gastroenterologist Colleen Kelly had a patient with a recurring and debilitating infection of the gut with a microbe called Clostridioides difficile. Nothing Kelly did could ease the woman’s severe abdominal cramping and diarrhea.
So Kelly — at her patient’s urging — decided to try something highly experimental: transplanting a fecal sample from a healthy donor into the large intestine. And it worked.
Kelly, of Brown ...read more
It has long been believed that the manatee is a solitary animal with a very simple communication system that primarily serves one purpose: to keep mom and a calf in contact. However, in recent years, these assumptions have been questioned, based on new research indicating that manatees may not be that solitary after all and that their communication system might be more complex than we previously realized.
Manatees clearly cannot compete with other marine mammals in terms of vocal complexity ...read more
A reconstructed Homo naledi skeleton made from the bones of multiple individuals. (Credit: Lee Roger Berger research team)
In 2013 a couple of spelunkers, caving 100 feet underground in South Africa, wriggled down a narrow vertical chute. They dropped into an uncharted chamber and in the flickers of their headlamps saw human-like bones scattered across the ground. It was a new species of hominin.
The fortuitous discovery in the Rising Star Cave system led to one of the most spectacular an ...read more
New research uses wildfire smoke as a natural experiment for testing nuclear winter theory, but uncertainties remain
An animation of GOES-16 weather satellite imagery reveals thick palls of smoke billowing up from wildfires in British Columbia on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017. The smoke rose into the stratosphere and ultimately circled the globe. Eight months later, some was still visible to satellites. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA)
Raging wildfires lofting huge amounts of smoke high into the atmosphere ha ...read more
Beijing commuters drive through a layer of "severe" air pollution in this 2014 photo. A new analysis says that human-caused climate change will lead to thousands of additional deaths across Chinese cities in the decades ahead. (Credit: Hung Chung Chih/Shutterstock)
As Europe’s latest heat wave showed, climate change is scorching the Earth. The World Meteorological Organization suspects the period from 2015 to 2019 will be the warmest five years on record. China is particularly in troubl ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine