Frontiers | Science News

Science News post list

1,155 news posts in Mind and body

Health

14 Feb 2025

Dangerous bacteria lurk in hospital sink drains, despite rigorous cleaning

Researchers from Spain sampled sink drains from different wards in a single modern university hospital where state-of-the-art cleaning protocols are adhered to. Through culturing and DNA barcoding, they found 67 species of bacteria. These included Klebsiella, Enterobacter, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, notorious for their potential to cause healthcare-associated infections. Several strains detected proved resistant to modern antibiotics, including cephalosporins and carbapenems. Sink drains thus appear to function as reservoirs for known and emerging pathogens of concern.

Life sciences

27 Jan 2025

Drones could be the ‘magic tools’ we need to chase bears away from people

Starting in 2017, Wesley Sarmento was the first prairie-based bear manager at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, a job that regularly put him right in between massive grizzly bears and people. He is also the author of a new Frontiers in Conservation Science article in which he describes the effectiveness of different methods that aimed to deter bears from human settlements, avoid conflicts between wildlife and locals, and help the successful conservation of the species. In the following guest editorial, he describes his seven-year-long search for the most effective hazing method.

Life sciences

16 Dec 2024

Completing the timetree of primates: a new way to map the evolutionary history of life on Earth

In a new article published in Frontiers in Bioinformatics, biologists Dr Jack M Craig, Dr Blair Hedges, and Dr Sudhir Kumar, all at Temple University, have built an evolutionary tree that encompasses 455 primates, every species for which genetic data are available. The tree, the most complete of its kind, shows the evolutionary timescale of the whole order of primates, including monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises, and galagos. In the following guest editorial, Dr Craig describes the steps of obtaining an almost complete timetree for primates and explains the value of such data.

Health

04 Dec 2024

Broken sleep a hallmark sign of living with this common liver disease, scientists find

Researchers from Switzerland have shown that patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) suffer poor sleep due to sleep fragmentation and wakefulness. Patients with the more severe form metabolic dysfunction–associated steatohepatitis (MASH) or with cirrhosis, but not healthy volunteers, experienced similar sleep disturbances. Whether poor sleep causes MASLD or vice versa isn’t yet clear. A single sleep hygiene education session proved insufficient to sustainably improve sleep quality and quantity.