One of the physiopathological characteristics of COVID-19 that has most baffled the scientific and medical community is what is known as “silent hypoxemia” or “happy hypoxia”. Patients suffering this phenomenon, the causes of which are still unknown, have severe pneumonia with markedly decreased arterial blood oxygen levels (known as hypoxemia). However, they do not report […]
A long-feared scenario in which global warming causes Arctic permafrost to melt and release enough methane—a potent greenhouse gas–to accelerate warming and cause catastrophe probably won’t happen. That is the conclusion of a study appearing in the journal Science that began more than 20 years ago as a query posed by Jeff Severinghaus, a geoscientist at the Scripps Institution […]
To learn more about one of the largest environmental changes of our lifetimes, Brittany Jones studies clam breath. Jones is a student earning her Ph.D. at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She is an expert on creatures that live in the muck covering the underwater continental shelf off western Alaska. There, sea ice waxes […]
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he largest extinction in Earth’s history marked the end of the Permian period, some 252 million years ago. Long before dinosaurs, our planet was populated with plants and animals that were mostly obliterated after a series of massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia. Fossils in ancient seafloor rocks display a thriving and diverse marine ecosystem, […]
Astronomers have used observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to determine that star formation in the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1 started at an unexpectedly early stage, only 250 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery also represents the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe […]
McMaster researchers have found there is such a thing as too much oxygen for acutely ill adults. Extensive data analyses in a study from the university show that supplemental oxygen, when given liberally to these patients, increases the risk of death without improving other health outcomes. The results were published in The Lancet. “Supplemental oxygen is administered to […]
Several times in the distant past, our home planet has been cleansed of its residents, with the exception of a few plucky survivors. Perhaps the best known and most spectacular extinction was that of the dinosaurs, caused when a meteorite six miles in diameter crashed into Earth about 65 million years ago. There was another […]
UNSW Sydney chemists have invented a new, cheap catalyst for splitting water with an electrical current to efficiently produce clean hydrogen fuel. The technology is based on the creation of ultrathin slices of porous metal-organic complex materials coated onto a foam electrode, which the researchers have unexpectedly shown is highly conductive of electricity and active […]
A new study has found a link between abrupt ocean warming at the end of the last ice age and the sudden onset of low-oxygen, or hypoxic, conditions that led to vast marine dead zones. Results of the research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are published today in the journalNature. “This […]