The AlphaGalileo Blog 07/09/2021
September eNews
Welcome to this month's eNews.
This month we have our Top 5 most read from August, our Editor's choices, and interview with Sabine Louët, the founder and CEO of SciencePOD and our image of the month.
A quick note about the AlphaGalileo app - as we have recently launched our new website which is mobile friendly, we will no longer be supporting the AlphaGalileo app.
If you have any questions, please contact the News Team by emailing news@alphagalileo.org
Top 5 August
1. Upper Paleolithic human remains are found at the Cova Gran de Santa Linya site, published by CENIEH on 6/8/21
CENIEH scientists have participated in the discovery of Linya, a Homo sapiens female who lived 14,000 years ago in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, as shown by the carbon-14 dating of the sediments in the natural receptacle where her remains were discovered
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2. New book investigates the role of monarchy in growing global inequalities, published by Lancaster University on 17/8/21
A new book, ‘Running the Family Firm’, written by Dr Laura Clancy, from Lancaster University’s Department of Sociology, delves beyond the usual representations of monarchy to investigate what’s happening behind the scenes of charity visits, spectacular ceremonies and royal births and marriages. It argues that media representations of the royal family are the ‘frontstage’ of monarchy, whilst backstage and typically hidden from public view, a host of political-economic infrastructures reproduce our ideas of monarchy.
This book exposes a hidden world of wealth and power, from what wealth the monarchy owns, to who works for it, to the ideas about British society that monarchy is invested in.
Read the news
3. New findings on how ketamine prevents depression, published by Karolinska Institutet on 10/8/21
The discovery that the anaesthetic ketamine can help people with severe depression has raised hopes of finding new treatment options for the disease. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now identified novel mechanistic insights how the drug exerts its antidepressant effect. The findings have been published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
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4. COVID-19 vaccine model 'effective' in preventing lung disease, published by Flinders University on 12/8/21
A South Australian-developed SARS-CoV-19 vaccine is preparing to progress to final stages of human clinical trials after early animal testing confirmed its safety and effectiveness in preventing COVID-19 lung infection.
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5. University College Dublin Launches New Quantum Research Centre, published by UCD Research and Innovation on 9/8/21
University College Dublin has announced the launch of C-QuEST, a new research centre for Quantum Engineering, Science, and Technology. The launch highlights the ever-increasing importance of emerging technologies to harness the power of quantum science, and points to a shift in the Irish research and innovation landscape.
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Editor's choices
What If Our History Was Written In Our Grammar? published by University of Zurich on 18/08/2021
Humans have been always on the move, creating a complex history of languages and cultural traditions dispersed over the globe. An international team under UZH’s lead has now traced families of related languages over more than 10,000 years by combining data from genetics, linguistics and musicology using novel digital methods. Their findings: grammar reflects best the common prehistory of a population and therefore mirrors genetics more than any other cultural feature.
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Image Caption: Culture is an important factor for tracing the population history. Utae Ehara playing the mukkuri. (© Utae Ehara)
Bee flight suffers under temperature extremes published by Imperial College London on 16/08/2021
Rising temperatures could help some northern-latitude bees fly better, but more frequent extreme weather events could push them past their limits.
Bees’ flight performance affects their ability to pollinate plants – a crucial service for many of our crops. Now, researchers from Imperial College London have measured the relationship between bumblebee flight performance and surrounding temperature.
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Image caption: Bee in a flight mill. Credit: Danny Kenna / Imperial College London
An interview with Sabine Louët, SciencePOD Founder and CEO
Headquartered in Dublin and created by Sabine Louët, the SciencePOD platform is a one-stop-solution for content creation.
Read our interview with Sabine
Image of the month
Understanding how elephants use their trunk published by Université de Genève on 18/08/2021
The elephant proboscis (trunk) exhibits an extraordinary kinematic versatility as it can manipulate a single blade of grass but also carry loads up to 270 kilograms. Using motion-capture technologies developed for the movie industry, a team of scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, demonstrates that the complex behaviours of the elephant trunk emerge from the combination of a finite set of basic movements such as the propagation of an inward curvature and the formation of pseudo-joints. In addition, the Swiss team demonstrates that the elephant trunk velocity obeys a mathematical law observed in human hand drawing movements. These results are published in the journal Current Biology.
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Image caption: The combination of motion capture experiments and medical imaging reveals how an elephant controls the movements of its trunk. Here, Michel Milinkovitch and one of the elephants used in this study, Bela Bela, South Africa. © Hensman, Sean Full size