(Press-News.org) In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002952
Article title: Chloramphenicol and gentamicin reduce the evolution of resistance to phage ΦX174 by suppressing a subset of E. coli LPS mutants
Author countries: Germany
Funding: This work was generously supported by funds from the Max Planck Society (L.P.-F.B.). L.P. was supported by the International Max Planck Research School for Evolutionary Biology (IMPRS EvolBio). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
END
Antibiotics modulate E. coli’s resistance to phages
2025-01-21
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Building sentence structure may be language-specific
2025-01-21
Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders Institute and Radboud University in Nijmegen recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based on a strategy for predicting what comes next rather than a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, showing that strategies may differ across languages.
While listening to spoken language, people need to link ‘abstract’ knowledge of grammar to ...
Biotin may shield brain from manganese-induced damage, study finds
2025-01-21
While manganese is an essential mineral involved in many bodily functions, both deficiency and excessive exposure can cause health issues. Maintaining a balanced diet typically provides sufficient manganese for most individuals; however, high levels of exposure can be toxic, particularly to the central nervous system. Chronic manganese exposure may result in a condition known as manganism, characterized by symptoms resembling Parkinson's disease, including tremors, muscle stiffness, and cognitive disturbances.
New research published in Science Signaling employs model systems and human nerve cells to show the mechanisms by which manganese inflicts damage ...
Treatment for children with obesity has lasting effect
2025-01-21
When children with obesity undergo weight-loss treatment, the effects have repercussions later in life and the risk of serious health problems and premature death is lower as they reach young adulthood. However, this is not the case for depression and anxiety, a study from Karolinska Institutet published in JAMA Pediatrics reports.
The study shows that children and adolescents who respond well to obesity treatment are less likely to develop obesity-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidaemia (abnormally high levels of fat in the blood) as young adults.
The treatment studied ...
Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5,000 years
2025-01-21
A spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) has been found in South Eastern Egypt: the first recorded instance of the creature in this region for thousands of years.
The lone individual was caught and killed by people around 30km from the border with Sudan, a paper in De Gruyter’s Mammalia reports.
“My first reaction was disbelief until I checked the photos and videos of the remains,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Adbullah Nagy from Al-Azhar University, Egypt. “Seeing the evidence, I was completely taken aback. It was beyond anything we had expected to find in Egypt.”
The sighting took place some 500km north of the known range of spotted ...
SignGPT – Project awarded £8.45m to build a sign language AI model for the Deaf community
2025-01-21
A large-language model (LLM) built to meet the needs of the Deaf community, translating between signed and spoken language, is the aim of a new project led by the University of Surrey.
SignGPT: Building Generative Predictive Transformers for Sign Language has been awarded £8.45m from the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council. The five-year project will build tools to allow spoken language to be automatically translated into photo-realistic sign language and video of sign language to be translated into spoken language – a complex translation problem that is yet to be solved.
Surrey ...
Garden ponds: Hidden gems of urban biodiversity conservation
2025-01-21
Urbanisation is rapidly transforming landscapes worldwide, becoming a key driver of global biodiversity loss. It often impacts biodiversity negatively by creating selective environments that limit species diversity in urban compared to natural habitats. Amidst this challenge, understanding and enhancing urban blue-green infrastructure is critical. Garden ponds are small yet significant water features that are increasingly common in urban areas. They offer numerous ecosystem services, like aesthetic purposes, microclimate regulation, and habitats for ornamental species. However, their role in supporting ...
Epigenetic aging and DNA-methylation as tumor markers for breast cancer
2025-01-21
“Our study contributes to the development of a DNAm biomarker that integrates conventional BC risk factors to better reflect the risk for BC subtypes, promoting epigenetically targeted preventive interventions tailored to aged individuals with high risk.”
BUFFALO, NY- January 21, 2025 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) on December 5, 2024, Volume 16, ...
Salt deposit ring inside your pasta pan?
2025-01-21
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21, 2025 – If you’ve ever tossed a generous pinch of salt into your pasta pan’s water for flavor or as an attempt to make it boil faster, you’ve likely ended up with a whitish ring of deposits inside the pan.
A group of scientists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE), inspired by this observation during an evening of board games and pasta dinner, wondered what it ...
First fast radio burst traced to old, dead, elliptical galaxy
2025-01-21
For the first time, astronomers have traced a fast radio burst (FRB) to the outskirts of an ancient, dead, elliptical galaxy — an unprecedented home for a phenomenon previously associated with much younger galaxies.
Detailed in two complementary studies led by Northwestern University and McGill University, the discovery shatters assumptions that FRBs solely emanate from regions of active star formation. The new observational evidence, instead, hints that the origins of these mysterious cosmic events might be more diverse than ...
We can make fertilizer more efficiently under the surface of the Earth
2025-01-21
Instead of relying on energy-hungry reactors to generate high temperatures and pressure, researchers are looking underground at Earth’s natural heat and forces to cook up ammonia for fertilizer. In a proof-of-concept study, published January 21 in the Cell Press journal Joule, researchers generated ammonia by mixing nitrogen-laced water with iron-rich rocks—without any energy input or CO2 emission. This new recipe may lead to a more sustainable alternative to current methods, theoretically churning out enough ammonia for 2.42 million years.
The idea stems from an unusual geological phenomenon observed in the 1980s in Mali, West Africa. Locals discovered a well ...