Gut Bacteria May Impact Severity Of COVID-19 Infections
It’s becoming increasingly well-understood that the gut microbiome plays a key role in the body’s immune system. In a new study, researchers have found that people who become severely ill and are hospitalized with COVID-19 have a different make-up of bacteria in their guts compared to healthy people, suggesting a person’s gut microbiome may affect the immune system’s response to COVID-19.
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Ability Of Living Cells To Sense Magnetic Fields Verified For The First Time
In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), scientists from Japan observed "live, unaltered cells responding to a magnetic field in real time." The findings could help us understand how many animals can utilize magnetic fields for navigation, and whether such fields may also play a role in human health.
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Embryos From World’s Last Two Northern White Rhinos Ready To be Implanted Into Surrogates
In excellent news, conservationists have announced there are now five viable embryos from the world’s last remaining two northern white rhinos, which means the next step of selecting southern white rhinos as surrogates is about to begin. It could be as soon as this year, while the world waits with bated breath to see if we can pull this species back from the brink of extinction.
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Dire Wolves Were Not Actually Wolves At All, Surprising Study Reveals
Research on dire wolf ancestry has been sparse. Now, a large international team has compared dire wolf DNA from five locations, dating back as far as 50,000 years ago, with that of modern canid species. The results, published in the journal Nature, were surprising. It turns out dire wolves have no close living relatives. Instead, they separated from the line that includes gray wolves, dogs, and coyotes about the same time Eurasian jackals did.
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Astronomers Find The Most Distant Quasar Ever Discovered, And It’s A Beast
Quasars are some of the most distant and luminous objects known to science. They are extremely active astronomical objects found at the center of some galaxies, powered by black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The detection of the quasar J0313-1806 comes just three years after the previous record-holder, ULAS J1342+0928, and continues to challenge our understanding of how galaxies and their supermassive black holes form.
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