Bacteria known to cause oral infections may also be a contributory factor in patients developing potentially life-threatening abscesses on the brain, new research has shown. The study, published in the Journal of Dentistry, investigated brain abscesses and their association with bacteria that occur in the oral cavity. While this type of abscess is relatively uncommon, it can result in significant mortality and morbidity.

Researchers examined the records of 87 patients admitted to hospital with brain abscesses, and used microbiological data obtained from abscess sampling and peripheral cultures.

This allowed them to investigate the presence of oral bacteria in patients’ brain abscesses where a cause of the abscess had either been found, as was the case in just 35 patients, or not...

Different light spectra serve different needs for agrivoltaics. People are increasingly trying to grow both food and clean energy on the same land to help meet the challenges of climate change, drought and a growing global population that just topped 8 billion. This effort includes agrivoltaics, in which crops are grown under the shade of solar panels, ideally with less water.

Now scientists from the University of California, Davis, are investigating how to better harvest ...

On Dec. 11, 2021, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a blast of high-energy light from the outskirts of a galaxy around 1 billion light-years away. The event has rattled scientists’ understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful events in the universe.

For the last few decades, astronomers have generally divided GRBs into two categories...

An international team of researchers are hoping that a new, low-cost battery which holds 4X the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries and is far cheaper to produce will significantly reduce the cost of transitioning to a decarbonised economy.

Led by Dr Shenlong Zhao from the University’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, the battery has been made using sodium-sulphur — a type of molten salt that can be processed from seawater — costing much less to produce than lithium-ion.

Although sodium-sulphur (Na-S) batteries have existed for more than half a century, they have been an inferior alternative and their widespread use has been limited by low energy capacity and short life...