China's corruption watchdog has probed 176 hospital heads over the past few weeks during a "sweeping, more vigorous than ever" anti-corruption campaign in the healthcare sector, which experts said aims to eradicate corruption in the field and restore public trust in the healthcare system. Since China started the sweeping anti-corruption drive in the public health sector […]
China has made continuous improvement in ecosystem quality with the most contribution to the global increase in green areas, made world-leading efforts in desertification control with over 300 million mu of desertification control achieved, and made significant achievements in national park construction, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration said on Tuesday. Over the past decade, […]
This past weekend saw continued fighting between Russia and Ukraine on the frontlines and behind the lines. Dozens of battles were reported in frontline areas, while airports, train stations and other targets in both countries were hit. Although the battle is burning its way into Russian territory, neither side has much ability to change the […]
There’s a deadly fungus spreading among snakes in the United States. But don’t cheer. As much as snakes might frighten us, they’re important players in the ecosystem, and we really don’t want to lose them. In 2006, scientists discovered some odd skin infections among snakes in declining populations in New Hampshire. Soon after, fungal infections […]
Call it a T. rex pregnancy test. Chemical analyses of fingernail-sized slivers of bone can reveal whether a Tyrannosaurus rex was expecting, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh and colleagues report March 15 in Scientific Reports. The analyses confirm that T. rex had medullary bone, a type of reproductive tissue found […]
When visiting the center of a galaxy nicknamed J0230, pack a sturdy windproof jacket. There, you will encounter a galactic hurricane with winds whipping at about 200 million kilometers per hour. At that speed, nearly 20 percent of the speed of light, a trip around Earth would take just 0.7 seconds. These are the fastest […]
Joni Mitchell was right: We are stardust. Another one of the essential ingredients for life as we know it might have formed in space and then rained down on a young Earth, researchers suggest in the April 8 Science. The simple sugar ribose — a crucial piece of the molecular machinery inside cells — can […]
Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) use their internal clock and the sun to guide them 4,000 kilometers south on their annual fall migration from eastern North America to central Mexico. Scientists have struggled to determine how butterfly brains combine visual cues from the sun with molecular timekeeping in their antennae to make the epic journey. A […]
SALT LAKE CITY — In the primeval universe, a violent event roiled a dwarf galaxy, leaving an indelible mark on the stars that formed there. Scientists reached that conclusion after finding traces of heavy elements produced by the cataclysm in the ancient dwarf galaxy Reticulum II. “It might be the first time where we can […]
An X-ray space telescope that went silent last month has been officially declared dead. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, announced April 28 that it has stopped trying to communicate with the orbiting observatory ASTRO-H (aka Hitomi) and will now focus on figuring out what went wrong. ASTRO-H launched on February 17 and seemed to be […]