(Press-News.org) This tool is specifically designed to assess how well your initiative aligns with the EU Mission: A Soil Deal for Europe (Mission Soil) criteria for Soil Living Labs and Lighthouses, as further defined by the PREPSOIL taxonomy. Should your initiative meet the necessary criteria, you will be invited to participate in a more detailed assessment developed by the SOILL-Startup project. This next phase will provide an opportunity to join a network of 100 Soil Living Labs and Lighthouses of the Mission Soil and gain access to numerous support services offered by SOILL-Startup.
Beyond the assessment, completing this form provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on your initiative’s current development stage and set a clearer path forward. In the coming weeks, PREPSOIL will also release a Toolkit of Resources for Living Lab Acceleration, designed to help advance your initiative’s maturity. Participate in the Assessment Today!
Representatives from LL and LH initiatives interested in taking the assessment can do so by first registering their initiatives on the PREPSOIL website. We invite them to complete their registration by 30 of April to ensure eligibility for the assessment.
Don’t miss this chance to enhance your initiative’s impact—complete the assessment today and stay tuned for upcoming resources!
END
PREPSOIL launches assessment tool for soil living lab and lighthouse initiatives
The PREPSOIL Assessment Form for Soil Health Living Lab and Lighthouse Initiatives is now live! As part of an ongoing effort to enhance the mapping and development of soil-related Living Labs (LL) and Lighthouses (LH), PREPSOIL is excited to introduce a n
2025-04-22
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Lebanon crisis driving parents to seek unregulated “shadow” education, study shows
2025-04-22
Political and social crisis in Lebanon has forced parents to seek unregulated “shadow” education for their children, a new study shows.
The government’s ongoing neglect of public education is intensifying social inequality, experts have warned.
The current sectarian power-sharing arrangement has led to a diminished focus on schools, fostering privatization.
The study shows how upheavals in Lebanon have exacerbated educational challenges for families across all socioeconomic groups, leading to an increasing reliance on the unregulated shadow education sector, particularly private ...
The AGA Research Foundation awards $2.4 million in digestive health research funding
2025-04-22
Bethesda, MD (April 22, 2025) — The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) is proud to announce the selection of 74 recipients to receive $2.4 million in research funding through the annual AGA Research Foundation Awards Program. AGA also announces today the addition of 10 pilot grants, totaling $400,000 in funding, to the 2026 awards portfolio to ensure that scientific discovery continues despite federal funding cuts.
“Since we established the AGA Research Foundation in 1984, AGA has been unwavering in the commitment to supporting ...
A repurposed anti-inflammatory drug may help treat alcohol use disorder and related pain
2025-04-22
LA JOLLA, CA—A preclinical study from scientists at Scripps Research finds that a drug already FDA-approved for treating inflammatory conditions may help reduce both alcohol intake and pain sensitivity—two issues that commonly co-occur with alcohol use disorder (AUD).
The results, published in JCI Insight on April 22, 2025, suggest that the drug apremilast—a phosphodiesterase-4 (PDE4) inhibitor, or a compound that blocks an enzyme involved in inflammation—could be repurposed as a dual-acting therapy for AUD, particularly in individuals who have pain during and after alcohol use.
AUD ...
Obesity disrupts “reaction time” to starvation in mice
2025-04-22
Researchers led by Keigo Morita and Shinya Kuroda of the University of Tokyo have revealed a temporal disruption in the metabolism of obese mice when adapting to starvation despite no significant structural disruptions in the molecular network. This is a breakthrough discovery as research including the temporal dimension in biology has been notoriously laborious and extracting systematic insight from big data has been difficult. Thus, this study paves the way for further research into more general metabolic processes, such as food intake and disease progression. The findings were published in the journal Science Signaling.
Living beings need to continuously extract energy from “food” ...
Listening to an avatar makes you more likely to gamble
2025-04-22
Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.
In virtual-reality environments, individuals can adopt various forms of avatars, projecting their behaviors into a virtual realm where their interaction partners also appear as avatars. With this shift in ...
Facial expressions of avatars promote risky decision-making
2025-04-22
Highlights
- Humans take more risks when interacting with facial expressions shown on avatars rather than real human faces.
- This shift in risk-taking behavior is linked to activity in the amygdala.
- The findings offer new insights into both the advantages and the cautionary aspects of communication via avatars.
Abstract
A research team led by Dr. TANAKA Toshiko and Dr. HARUNO Masahiko at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki Ph.D.), investigated how avatar-mediated communication affects human decision-making. They ...
PREPSOIL Final Event: Facilitating the deployment of the Mission Soil across European regions
2025-04-22
Monday May 26, 2025, key stakeholders from across Europe will gather in Brussels at the Committee of the Regions for the PREPSOIL Final Event, marking a major step in advancing soil
health policies and practices. The event will bring together policy-makers, researchers, and civil society representatives to discuss how the objectives of the Mission Soil and the proposed Soil
Monitoring Law may be supported and implemented at regional and local scale across EU Member States and the role that regional and local actors can play in promoting ...
Politecnico di Milano: a study in Earth’s future on agrivoltaics reducing the competition between food and energy
2025-04-22
Can agriculture and solar energy work together instead of competing? A study led by Maddalena Curioni, Nikolas Galli, Giampaolo Manzolini and Maria Cristina Rulli, researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Energy at the Politecnico di Milano, sheds new light on the potential of agrivoltaics. Published in the prestigious journal Earth’s Future, the paper analyses how the coexistence of photovoltaic panels and agricultural crops can help solve the global conflict over land use.
With the growing demand for renewable energy and the need to produce increasing amounts of food, the pressure on arable land is intensifying. ...
Listeners use gestures to predict upcoming words
2025-04-22
In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen show that listeners used the avatar’s gestures to predict upcoming speech. Both behavioural and EEG data indicated that hand gestures facilitate language processing, illustrating the multimodal nature of human communication.
People might wiggle their fingers when they talk about typing, depicting a ‘typing’ movement. Seeing meaningful hand movements—also called iconic gestures—helps ...
An AI tool grounded in evidence-based medicine outperformed other AI tools — and most doctors — on USMLE exams
2025-04-22
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A powerful clinical artificial intelligence tool developed by University at Buffalo biomedical informatics researchers has demonstrated remarkable accuracy on all three parts of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (Step exams), according to a paper published today (April 22) in JAMA Network Open.
Achieving higher scores on the USMLE than most physicians and all other AI tools so far, Semantic Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SCAI, pronounced “Sky”) has the potential to become a critical partner for ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
ESC launches guidelines for patients to empower women with cardiovascular disease to make informed pregnancy health decisions
Towards tailor-made heat expansion-free materials for precision technology
New research delves into the potential for AI to improve radiology workflows and healthcare delivery
Rice selected to lead US Space Force Strategic Technology Institute 4
A new clue to how the body detects physical force
Climate projections warn 20% of Colombia’s cocoa-growing areas could be lost by 2050, but adaptation options remain
New poll: American Heart Association most trusted public health source after personal physician
New ethanol-assisted catalyst design dramatically improves low-temperature nitrogen oxide removal
New review highlights overlooked role of soil erosion in the global nitrogen cycle
Biochar type shapes how water moves through phosphorus rich vegetable soils
Why does the body deem some foods safe and others unsafe?
Report examines cancer care access for Native patients
New book examines how COVID-19 crisis entrenched inequality for women around the world
Evolved robots are born to run and refuse to die
Study finds shared genetic roots of MS across diverse ancestries
Endocrine Society elects Wu as 2027-2028 President
Broad pay ranges in job postings linked to fewer female applicants
How to make magnets act like graphene
The hidden cost of ‘bullshit’ corporate speak
Greaux Healthy Day declared in Lake Charles: Pennington Biomedical’s Greaux Healthy Initiative highlights childhood obesity challenge in SWLA
Into the heart of a dynamical neutron star
The weight of stress: Helping parents may protect children from obesity
Cost of physical therapy varies widely from state-to-state
Material previously thought to be quantum is actually new, nonquantum state of matter
Employment of people with disabilities declines in february
Peter WT Pisters, MD, honored with Charles M. Balch, MD, Distinguished Service Award from Society of Surgical Oncology
Rare pancreatic tumor case suggests distinctive calcification patterns in solid pseudopapillary neoplasms
Tubulin prevents toxic protein clumps in the brain, fighting back neurodegeneration
Less trippy, more therapeutic ‘magic mushrooms’
Concrete as a carbon sink
[Press-News.org] PREPSOIL launches assessment tool for soil living lab and lighthouse initiativesThe PREPSOIL Assessment Form for Soil Health Living Lab and Lighthouse Initiatives is now live! As part of an ongoing effort to enhance the mapping and development of soil-related Living Labs (LL) and Lighthouses (LH), PREPSOIL is excited to introduce a n