Study reveals a diverse cephalopod fauna in the canary current large marine ecosystem

A team led by plant biologists at the Universities of Freiburg and Göttingen in Germany has shown for the first time that mosses have a mechanism to protect them against cold that was previously known only in flowering plants. Professor Ralf Reski at the Cluster of Excellence Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies (CIBSS) at the University of Freiburg and Professor Ivo Feussner at the Center for Molecular Biosciences (GZMB) at the University of Göttingen have also demonstrated that this mechanism has an evolutionarily independent origin - mosses and flowering ...

Every living organism has DNA, and every living organism engages in DNA replication, the process by which DNA makes an exact copy of itself during cell division. While it's a tried-and-true process, problems can arise. Break-induced replication (BIR) is a way to solve those problems. In humans, it is employed chiefly to repair breaks in DNA that cannot be fixed otherwise. Yet BIR itself, through its repairs to DNA and how it conducts those repairs, can introduce or cause genomic rearrangements and mutations contributing to cancer development. "It's kind of a double-edged sword," says Anna Malkova, professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Iowa, who has studied ...

Quantum physics allows to make statements about the behaviour of a wide variety of many-particle systems at the atomic level, from salt crystals to neutron stars. In quantum systems, many parameters do not have concrete values, but are distributed over various values with certain probabilities. Often this distribution takes the form of a simple Gaussian bell curve that is encountered also in classical systems for example the distribution of balls in the Galton box experiment. However, not all quantum systems follow this simple behavior and some might deviate from the Gaussian distribution due to interactions. Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert, who heads a joint research group on theoretical physics at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, argues that once interactions ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Employees feel significantly less job distress if they work at companies that are open and transparent about the firm's finances, including budgets and profits, a new study found. Researchers examining data from the U.K. found that at companies with more financial transparency, workers felt more secure in their jobs, more committed to their employers and - most significantly - said they had better relationships with their managers. The link between greater transparency and lower job distress was strong and stood up even after accounting ...

January 25, 2021 - What care do veterans need when recovering after suicide attempts? The answer may be different for women compared to men veterans, reports a qualitative study in Medical Care, part of a special issue devoted to new research on suicide risk and prevention in women. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "The paths to recovery after a suicide attempt may vary by gender, especially among veterans," according to the new research by Lauren M. Denneson, PhD, of the HSR&D Center to Improve Veteran Involvement in Care (CIVIC) at VA Portland (Ore.) Health Care System. "Our data suggest that women emphasize relatedness whereas men emphasize competence." ...

Our bodies send out hosts of signals - chemicals, electrical pulses, mechanical shifts - that can provide a wealth of information about our health. But electronic sensors that can detect these signals are often made of brittle, inorganic material that prevents them from stretching and bending on our skin or within our bodies. Recent technological advances have made stretchable sensors possible, but their changes in shape can affect the data produced, and many sensors cannot collect and process the body's faintest signals. A new sensor design from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago helps solve that problem. By incorporating a patterned material that optimizes strain distribution among transistors, researchers have created stretchable ...

In the course of deciding whether to keep reading this article, you may change your mind several times. While your final choice will be obvious to an observer - you'll continue to scroll and read, or you'll click on another article - any internal deliberations you had along the way will most likely be inscrutable to anyone but you. That clandestine hesitation is the focus of research, published Jan. 20 in Nature, by Stanford University researchers who study how cognitive deliberations are reflected in neural activity. These scientists and engineers developed a system that read and decoded the ...

URBANA, Ill. - Dairy producers know early nutrition for young calves has far-reaching impacts, both for the long-term health and productivity of the animals and for farm profitability. With the goal of increasing not just body weight but also lean tissue gain, a new University of Illinois study finds enhanced milk replacer with high crude-protein dry starter feed is the winning combination. "Calves fed more protein with the starter had less fat in their body weight gain, and more protein was devoted to the development of the gastrointestinal system, compared with the lower ...

X-rays are usually difficult to direct and guide. X-ray physicists at the University of Göttingen have developed a new method with which the X-rays can be emitted more precisely in one direction. To do this, the scientists use a structure of thin layers of materials with different densities of electrons to simultaneously deflect and focus the generated beams. The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances. To generate X-rays in ordinary X-ray tubes, electrons that have been accelerated by a high voltage, collide with a metal anode. ...

Nature is full of colour. For flowers, displaying colour is primarily a means to attract pollinators. Insects use their colour vision not only to locate the right flowers to feed on but also to find mates. The evolutionary interaction between insects and plants has created complex dependencies that can have surprising outcomes. Casper van der Kooi, a biologist at the University of Groningen, uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the interaction between pollinators and flowers. In January, he was the first author of two review articles on this topic. Bees and other insects visit flowers to feed on nectar and pollen. In exchange for ...