Butterflies, bees, ants and flies are the most widely referenced arthropods in a sample of almost 4,000 haiku - which commonly describe their color, flight and ecology

Might your personality affect how you move? Runners classified as Myers-Briggs "Sensing" types have a more grounded running style in experiments than those classified as "Intuition" types ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0300108 Article Title: Mind to move: Differences in running biomechanics between sensing and intuition shod runners Author Countries: France, Switzerland, Belgium Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

The earliest dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, but so did many of the other animals living alongside them, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kristina Curry Rogers of Macalester College, Minnesota and colleagues. Dinosaurs grew up fast, a feature that likely set them apart from many other animals in their Mesozoic (252 to 66 million years ago) ecosystems. Some researchers have proposed that these elevated growth rates were key to the global success of dinosaurs, but little is known about the growth strategies of the earliest dinosaurs. In this study, Rogers and colleagues performed histological analysis, examining patterns of bone ...

The hours you work earlier in life may be associated with worse health years later, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Wen-Jui Han from New York University, US. Studies have consistently shown that nonstandard work schedules—working outside the traditional nine-to-five workday—can negatively impact physical and mental health as well as social and family life. The current study uses a life-course approach to provide a longer-term perspective on how work schedule ...

A recent study led by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the non-profit conservation organization Re:wild shows that the threat of mining to the great ape population in Africa has been greatly underestimated. Their results have been published in Science Advances. The rising demand for critical minerals, such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements required for the large-scale transition to cleaner energy is causing a surge of mining in Africa, where a large share of those mineral resources is still unexploited. ...

Tourism to Yellowstone National Park produces more than a billion kilos of CO2 emissions annually, with 90% arising through travel to and from the park, especially from visitors arriving by plane. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000391 Article Title: Quantifying and evaluating strategies to decrease carbon dioxide emissions generated from tourism to Yellowstone National Park Author Countries: United States Funding: This work was supported by the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station (Project ...

During the pandemic, University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) researchers, including those from the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), teamed up with the Mary Cariola Center to study ways to prevent COVID infection among children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), a particularly vulnerable population. Together, they found that good airflow and filtration in schools may help these children and their teachers avoid COVID infections. The COVID pandemic was a particularly difficult balancing act for children with IDDs and their ...

In humans, the exact same mutation in a specific gene can produce widely different outcomes. It’s a bit like adding the same amount of salt to different recipes—the effect on the finished dish can be quite different, depending on the mix of other ingredients. Now, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) have developed a powerful platform to study the reasons behind these varying mutation outcomes. The work, published today in Science Advances, not only provides new opportunities for uncovering targets for therapeutic interventions but also represents a significant step forward in addressing the critical need ...

Alzheimer’s disease starts with a sticky protein called amyloid beta that builds up into plaques in the brain, setting off a chain of events that results in brain atrophy and cognitive decline. The new generation of Alzheimer’s drugs — the first proven to change the course of the disease — work by tagging amyloid for clearance by the brain’s immune cells. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a different and promising way to remove the noxious plaques: by directly mobilizing immune cells to consume ...

A genomic study of human and selected nonhuman primate centromeres has revealed their unimaginable diversity and speed of evolutionary change. In cell genetics, a centromere is the spot where two sister chromatids attach. A chromatid is one-half of a duplicated chromosome. United pairs of chromosomes have identifiable shapes because centromeres are not in a uniform position. As a cell prepares to divide, the machinery to separate and segregate chromosomes goes into action at each centromere location. Unless the genetic material ...

Proteins binding to RNA are important in many processes in the cell and can mediate a range of biological functions. A specialized structure in both DNA and RNA, the G-quadruplex, are regulatory elements involved in gene expression in both DNA and RNA. In the present work the researchers use theoretical predictions and molecular biology experiments to show that many chromatin-binding proteins bind to RNA G-quadruplexes. With this information they can classify proteins based on their potential to bind RNA G-quadruplexes. The study uses a combination of experimental identification of RNA G-quadruplex-binding proteins and computational methods to build a prediction tool that identify the probability ...