Curated News: Staff Picks

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Irvine, Calif., June 21, 2022 — If you are skilled at playing puzzles on your smartphone or tablet, what does it say about how fast you learn new puzzles, or more broadly, how well can you focus in school or at work? In the language of psychologists, does “near transfer” predict “far transfer”? A team of psychologists from the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, Riverside reports in Nature Human Behavior that people who show near transfer are more likely to show far transfer.

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Whether it’s sports practice, music lessons or a casual catch up with friends, when children are involved in after-school activities, they’re more likely to feel happier and healthier than their counterparts who are glued to a screen.

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Rabies virus kills a shocking 59,000 people each year, many of them children. In a new study, researchers from La Jolla Institute for Immunology and Institut Pasteur share a promising path to better vaccine design.

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UC San Diego researchers report significant decrease in national cases of Kawasaki disease during COVID-19 pandemic; findings hint at origins of disease.

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A team of U.S. and Chinese scientists mapping oil pollution across the Earth’s oceans has found that more than 90% of chronic oil slicks come from human sources, a much higher proportion than previously estimated. Their research, published in Science, is a major update from previous investigations into marine oil pollution, which estimated that about half came from human sources and half from natural sources.

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Many disease-linked variants are declining in frequency in breeds regularly screened for the marker.

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A team of researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center were the first to generate a bona fide mouse model of a Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare and potentially aggressive form of skin cancer. The study outlining these results appeared in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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Researchers at the University of Oklahoma have found that the warming climate is decreasing microbial diversity, which is essential for soil health

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June 16 is World Sea Turtle Day, an occasion to consider the role these creatures play in the marine ecosystem. Florida State University Associate Professor Mariana Fuentes researches sea turtles and looks for ways to help turtles and humans coexist. She answered five questions about her work and how science can help inform public policy.

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Valproic acid (VPA) keeps nervous system cells from growing and dividing correctly, researchers discovered.

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A new study by the University of Georgia found Florida panthers are the No. 1 cause of mortality for white-tailed deer in Southwest Florida.

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A world-first study from the University of South Australia could make this a reality as new genetic research shows a direct link between dementia and a lack of vitamin D.

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The more a person stares at themselves while talking with a partner in an online chat, the more their mood degrades over the course of the conversation, a new study finds. Alcohol use appears to worsen this effect.

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For the first time in the last 30 years, the consumption of ultra-processed foods among teenagers in the United States declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study presented at ENDO 2022, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Ga.

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Scientists have been warning for quite some time that monarch butterflies were headed for extinction. But to misquote Mark Twain, rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated. A new study found that growth in the summer population has compensated for losses during the winter.

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McMaster University scientists who compared respiratory vaccine-delivery systems have confirmed that inhaled aerosol vaccines provide far better protection and stronger immunity than nasal sprays.

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Princeton geneticist Stephen Gaughran recently confirmed that 'Fernanda' comes from the same species as a tortoise collected from Fernandina Island more than a century ago, and those two are genetically distinct from all other Galápagos tortoises.

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Marine predation intensifies in warmer waters; could reshape ocean communities as climate changes.