A new study has provided fresh insights into how animals such as the woolly mammoth, musk ox and arctic fox evolved to survive the cold during the ice age. A team of palaeontologists and palaegeneticists studied ancient fossil and DNA evidence for the nature and timing of changes animals and plants in the Northern Hemisphere. They have shown that cold-adapted animals started to evolve 2.6 million years ago when the permanent ice at the poles became more prevalent. There followed a time when the continental ice sheets expanded and contracted and around 700,000 years ago the cold periods doubled in…

Clarivate will no longer include citations to and from retracted papers when calculating journal impact factors, the company announced today.  The change comes after some have wondered over the years whether citations to retracted papers should count toward a journal’s impact factor, a controversial yet closely watched metric that measures how often others cite papers from that journal. For many institutions, impact factors have become a proxy for the importance of their faculty’s research. Retractions are relatively rare and represent only 0.04% of papers indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, according to the announcement. But the overall retraction rate has…

Imagine trying to cope with a pandemic like COVID-19 in a world where microscopic life was unknown. Prior to the 17th century, people were limited by what they could see with their own two eyes. But then a Dutch cloth merchant changed everything. His name was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and he lived from 1632 to 1723. Although untrained in science, Leeuwenhoek became the greatest lens-maker of his day, discovered microscopic life forms and is known today as the “father of microbiology.” Visualizing ‘animalcules’ with a ‘small see-er’ Leeuwenhoek opened the door to a vast, previously unseen world. J. Verolje/Wellcome Collection,…

The expression of symptoms of viral infections is a byproduct of complex virus-host molecular pathways. These remain largely unknown, especially in the case of fungus-virus pathogen systems. Fungal antiviral responses involve three known mechanisms: RNA interference (RNAi), a post-transcriptional mechanism that inhibits viral replication; transcriptional reprogramming; and recognition of self versus non-self, which limits cell-to-cell transmission of viruses within fungi. While many fungal viruses (mycoviruses) cause asymptomatic infections in their hosts, the mechanisms underlying the induction or suppression of symptoms are not well understood. Several genetic studies have attempted to explore the fungal factors involved in antiviral responses, but the…

Spaced repetition is a memory hack. We know that spacing out your study is more effective than cramming, but using an app you can tailor your own spaced repetition schedule, allowing you to efficiently create reliable memories for any material you like. Michael Nielsen, has a nice thread on his use of spaced repetition on twitter: The use of spaced repetition memory systems has changed my life over the past couple of years. Here\’s a few things I\’ve found helpful: — Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) January 28, 2018 He covers how he chooses what to put into his review system, what…