Life in boiling water

Scientists find evolutionary clues while examining microbes in far-flung hot springs

2023-09-13

(Press-News.org) Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists studied hot springs on different continents and found similarities in how some microbes adapted despite their geographic diversity. The findings yield clues to the evolution of life and whether some of the hardiest microbes may be harnessed for biotechnology.

The study was the first of its kind to sample hot springs on three continents with water temperatures above 65 C (149 F) in the United States, Iceland and Japan. The environments have unique geology and chemistry, almost like a fingerprint, so it was surprising to find highly related microbes separated by thousands of miles, said ORNL’s Mircea Podar, co-lead of the study with researchers at Montana State University.

“We found common microbes, but also diversity as the microorganisms adapted to local conditions,” Podar said. The scientists theorize that tectonic conditions and geology of the hot springs are at play, providing new insights into how life and the Earth have co-evolved. —Stephanie Seay

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100-year floods could occur yearly by end of 21st century

2023-09-13

WASHINGTON — Most coastal communities will encounter 100-year floods annually by the end of the century, even under a moderate scenario where carbon dioxide emissions peak by 2040, a new study finds. And as early as 2050, regions worldwide could experience 100-year floods every nine to fifteen years on average. A 100-year flood is an extreme water level that has a 1% chance of being exceeded in any given year and is based on historical data. Despite the name, 100-year floods can strike the same area multiple years in a row or not at all within a century. But a new study finds that those historical trends will no ...

How education, work and motherhood shape women’s life ‘pathways’

2023-09-13

A new study from North Carolina State University and Duke University offers insights into the ways that education, work and motherhood shape the lives of women in the United States. In a longitudinal study of more than 8,100 women, the researchers found seven “pathways” that illustrate the way major life events can have long-term ripple effects. “Our goal here was to examine how family, work and education influence each other in the lives of women, rather than viewing education as a separate process from work and family,” says Anna Manzoni, co-author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of sociology ...

Matter comprises of 31% of the total amount of matter and energy in the universe

2023-09-13

“Cosmologists believe that only about 20% of the total matter is made of regular or ‘baryonic’ matter, which includes stars, galaxies, atoms, and life,” explains first author Dr. Mohamed Abdullah, a researcher at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics-Egypt, Chiba University, Japan. “About 80% is made of dark matter, whose mysterious nature is not yet known but may consist of some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particles.” (Fig. 1) “The team used a well-proven technique to determine the total amount of matter in the universe, ...

Emily Rogalski joins UChicago to lead new center for healthy brain aging, Alzheimer's and related diseases

2023-09-13

The University of Chicago will launch a pioneering new center aimed at shifting the popular narrative around the physical and cognitive impacts of aging. Headed by leading neuroscientist Emily Rogalski, PhD, the new University of Chicago Healthy Aging & Alzheimer's Research Care (HAARC) Center will focus on building deep multidisciplinary expertise and bridging the gap between scientific disciplines to accelerate breakthroughs in cognitive resilience. “We want to increase awareness and the scientific probability ...

Illuminating the path to sustainable wellbeing

2023-09-13

IIASA is proud to announce the launch of its Flagship Report, "Systems Analysis for Sustainable Wellbeing. 50 Years of IIASA Research, 40 Years After the Brundtland Commission, Contributing to the Post-2030 Global Agenda” on Wednesday, 13 September 2023 at an official UN event in the framework of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly and the Sustainable Development Goals mid-term review. The IIASA Flagship Report chronicles the extraordinary 50-year journey of IIASA, a globally renowned institute providing systems analytical expertise on complex global challenges. Co-sponsored by the Permanent Missions of Austria and South Africa ...

Study finds that state-mandated civics test policy does not improve youth voter turnout

2023-09-13

Washington, September 13, 2023—The United States has the largest age gap in voter turnout among advanced democracies. Youth voter turnout remained low, at 48 percent, in 2020. Scholars, educators, and policymakers often recommend civic education as a solution to low youth voter turnout. However, new research finds that a commonly used state-mandated civics test policy—the Civics Education Initiative (CEI)—does not improve youth voter turnout, at least in the short term. The study, by Jilli Jung and Maithreyi Gopalan, both at Pennsylvania State University, was published today in Educational ...

Groundbreaking research unveils genetic characteristics and improved prognosis of triple negative apocrine carcinoma

2023-09-13

Breast cancer research takes a significant stride forward as Professor Semin Lee and his research team from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Ji-Yeon Kim and Professor Young-Hyuck Im from the Division of Hematology-Oncology at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, delves into the exploration of triple negative apocrine carcinoma. This rare breast cancer subtype has garnered attention due to its unique genetic characteristics and improved prognosis when compared to other forms of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Triple negative ...

Inflammatory signs for adolescent depression differ between boys and girls

2023-09-13

New research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has found that depression and the risk of depression are linked to different inflammatory proteins in boys and girls. When inflammation occurs in the body a host of proteins are released into the blood called cytokines. Previous research has shown that higher levels of cytokines are associated with depression in adults, but little is known about this relationship in adolescence. Researchers investigated sex-differences in the relationship between inflammatory proteins and depression. Published in the Journal of ...

The effect of crowdsourcing contests on a company's stock and the idiosyncratic risks they create for investors

2023-09-13

Researchers from University of Colorado Denver, Iowa State University, and Arizona State University published a new Journal of Marketing study that examines the stock market effects on these contests and the contest characteristics that may enable such contests to pay off. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “When Do Marketing Ideation Crowdsourcing Contests Create Shareholder Value? The Effect of Contest Design and Marketing Resource Factors” and is authored by Zixia Cao, Hui Feng, and Michael A. Wiles. Crowdsourcing contests for marketing ideas such as new ads, graphics, and products have become quite popular ...

Some spiders can transfer mercury contamination to land animals, study shows

2023-09-13

Sitting calmly in their webs, many spiders wait for prey to come to them. Arachnids along lakes and rivers eat aquatic insects, such as dragonflies. But, when these insects live in mercury-contaminated waterways, they can pass the metal along to the spiders that feed on them. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters have demonstrated how some shoreline spiders can move mercury contamination from riverbeds up the food chain to land animals. Most mercury that enters waterways ...

Life in boiling water

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