Science
press releases.

Science6 Jul 2023

New study shatters conventional wisdom and unlocks the future of electrochemical devices

A new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge reveals a surprising discovery that could transform the future of electrochemical devices. The findings offer new opportunities for the development of advanced materials and improved performance in fields such as energy storage, brain-like computing, and bioelectronics. Electrochemical devices rely on the movement of charged particles, both ions and electrons, to function properly. However, understanding how these charged particles move together has presented a significant challenge, hindering progress in creating new materials for these devices. In ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Study examines centuries of identity lost because of slavery

Many Americans can trace some lines of their family tree back to the 1600s. However, African Americans descended from enslaved Africans, who began arriving in North America in 1619, lack ancestral information spanning several centuries. A new USC and Stanford study, recently published in Genetics, provides insight into who occupies these missing branches of family trees — and gives a glimpse of how many branches there are. “Slavery was not that many generations ago, so my family still tells stories about our enslaved ancestors, like who they were and, in my case, how we ended up as light as we are,” said first author Jazlyn Mooney, the Gabilan Assistant Professor of Quantitative ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

PLOS to extend accessible data to more articles and repositories

SAN FRANCISCO — PLOS today is announcing that it has extended the scope of its “Accessible Data” experiment, which was first launched in March 2022, with support from a Wellcome Trust grant. The experimental “Accessible Data” feature is designed to increase research data sharing and reuse by highlighting links to select repositories with an eye-catching icon on the article page. We are now expanding from the original three repositories to nine, which together host about three quarters of the outputs linked to from PLOS articles. PLOS began its Accessible Data experiment with two overarching goals. First, to increase reuse of datasets linked to PLOS articles ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

ASBMB weighs in on changes to NIH fellowship review

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology sent feedback in June to the National Institutes of Health about its proposed changes to the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award fellowship application and review process. The proposed changes indicate that the NIH adopted nearly all of the ASBMB’s earlier recommendations (here and here) to reduce institutional and investigator bias and refocus the evaluation on an applicant’s potential and the impact of the ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

How hot is too ‘too hot’ for humans?

Ongoing research by Prof. Lewis Halsey and his team at the University of Roehampton, UK has identified that an upper critical temperature (UCT) exists for humans and is likely to be between 40°C and 50°C. Further research is now underway to explain this rise in metabolic energy costs at high temperatures. Prof. Halsey and his team have found that resting metabolic rate, a measure of how much energy the human body consumes to keep ticking over, can be higher when people are exposed to hot and humid conditions. ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Village dogs match pet dogs in reading human facial expressions

A new study, published in PeerJ Life and Environment, conducted by Dr. Martina Lazzaroni (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Dr Joana Schar (University of Vienna) and colleagues, has shed light on the cognitive abilities of village dogs in understanding human communication. The research, which aimed to explore the impact of the domestication process on dogs' behavior and cognition, has yielded fascinating results, highlighting the importance of studying free-ranging dogs as representatives of the broader dog population. Previous studies examining dogs' cognitive skills in understanding ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Rice U.’s Songtao Chen wins NSF CAREER Award

HOUSTON – (July 6, 2023) – Songtao Chen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, has won a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance the development of quantum networks by leveraging imperfections ⎯ known as point defects ⎯ in silicon material. The grants are awarded each year to a selective cohort of about 500 early career faculty across all disciplines engaged in pathbreaking research and committed to growing their field through outreach and education. Chen ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Asian clams’ spread in Columbia River warns of worse invaders

VANCOUVER, Wash. – The invasive Asian clam is more common in the lower Columbia River than its native habitat of southeast Asia, according to a study of the clam’s abundance in the river. The findings don’t bode well for potential future invasions by the even more destructive quagga and zebra mussels. So far, the Columbia is one of the only major U.S. rivers to remain free of these notorious ecology-destroying, equipment-clogging bivalves. To understand how new invaders might spread, a Washington State University-led ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Researchers grow precise arrays of nanoLEDs

Halide perovskites are a family of materials that have attracted attention for their superior optoelectronic properties and potential applications in devices such as high-performance solar cells, light-emitting diodes, and lasers. These materials have largely been implemented into thin-film or micron-sized device applications. Precisely integrating these materials at the nanoscale could open up even more remarkable applications, like on-chip light sources, photodetectors, and memristors. However, achieving this integration has remained challenging because this delicate material can be damaged by conventional fabrication and patterning ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Pathogens Portal: The new gateway to public pathogen data

EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has launched the Pathogens Portal – an online platform that enables researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to access the most comprehensive collection of biomolecular data about pathogens. The portal features data spanning over 200,000 pathogen species and strains and is set to become a key tool for infection biology and pathogen surveillance. The list of pathogens featured in the portal was collated using the UK’s Health and Safety Executive’s ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Stressed rattlesnakes found to calm down in the company of a nearby ‘friend’

When animals suffer from acute or chronic stress, they produce more hormones causing shifts in the nervous system, immune response, and behavior. Some animals, if they are in the presence of a conspecific, can modulate their response to buffer stress. This is known as social buffering. There is some research suggesting that snakes can exhibit complex social behavior. Nevertheless, social buffering in reptiles, as well as in other asocial organisms and solitary foragers, hasn’t been studied extensively. Now, researchers in the US have examined if rattlesnakes inhabiting Southern California use social buffering to alleviate acute stress. “We showed that when ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

More IVF babies born after egg collection in summer rather than in autumn

The time of year when eggs are collected from women’s ovaries during fertility treatment makes a difference to live birth rates, according to new research published today (Thursday) in Human Reproduction [1], one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals. Researchers in Australia have found that transferring frozen then thawed embryos to women’s wombs from eggs collected in the summer resulted in a 30% higher likelihood of babies born alive, than if the eggs had been retrieved in the autumn. Dr Sebastian Leathersich, an obstetrician, gynaecologist and Fellow in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Fertility Specialists of Western Australia, ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Holograms for life: Improving IVF success

In a world-first, 3D holographic images of an embryo have been developed as part of a collaborative research project between the University of Adelaide and University of St Andrews. The images are created using miniscule amounts of light in a fraction of a second. The team, led by Dr Kylie Dunning, Hospital Research Foundation fellow from the University of Adelaide’s Robinson Research Institute, and Professor Kishan Dholakia from the University of Adelaide and the University of St Andrews, developed an approach to create 3D holographic images of the pre-clinical model of an embryo at various stages ...

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Science6 Jul 2023

Helping adolescents to feel competent and purposeful – not just happy – may improve grades

Encouraging adolescents to feel capable and purposeful – rather than just happy – could improve their academic results as well as their mental health, according to new research which recommends changing how wellbeing is supported in schools. The University of Cambridge study, involving over 600 teenagers from seven English schools, examined two separate aspects of their wellbeing: life satisfaction and ‘eudaimonia’. While life satisfaction roughly equates to how happy a person is, eudaimonia refers to how well that person feels they are functioning. It incorporates feelings of competence, motivation and self-esteem. Researchers ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

A novel peptide ‘T14’ reflects age and photo-aging in human skin

“[...] the results suggest a possible novel approach [for] exploring skin disorders [...]” BUFFALO, NY- July 5, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 12, entitled, “A novel peptide ‘T14’ reflects age and photo-aging in human skin.” T14 is a 14mer peptide derived from the C-terminus of acetylcholinesterase (AChE). Once cleaved, it is independently bioactive of the parent molecule and enhances calcium influx in different cell types, in a range of scenarios: it binds to an allosteric site selectively ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Study shines light on why companies use a variety of dark money strategies

AUSTIN, Texas — As public concerns mount over lack of transparency in political giving, a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin is the first to illuminate how and why corporations choose to legally conceal their lobbying and campaign contributions. U.S. companies are required to disclose the total amount they spend on political activity, but beyond that, the disclosure is incredibly vague, according to Tim Werner, associate professor of business, government and society at the McCombs ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Know your audience: Why data communication needs to pay attention to novice users

AMHERST, Mass. – Computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently found that data-visualization experts have no agreed-upon understanding of who makes up one of their largest audiences—novice users. The work, which recently won a coveted Best Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), is an important first step in ensuring more inclusive data visualizations, and thus data visualization that works for all users. Data visualization is the representation of data in a ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Children’s nature drawings reveal a focus on mammals and birds

When asked to draw their local wildlife, 401 UK schoolchildren aged 7 to 11 most commonly drew mammals and birds, while amphibians and reptiles appeared in the fewest drawings, suggesting imbalances in children’s ecological awareness. Kate Howlett and Edgar Turner of the University of Cambridge, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 5, 2023. Prior research has shown that, overall, European and North American children’s access to green space has declined in recent decades, and they are becoming increasingly disconnected from nature. Access ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

No increase in mortality for most overweight people, study finds

Body mass index (BMI) may not increase mortality independently of other risk factors in adults, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Aayush Visaria and Soko Setoguchi of Rutgers University, US. The prevalence of overweight and obesity has risen dramatically over the last 25 years, and it is well-established that elevated BMI can contribute to several cardio-metabolic conditions. However, studies that have analyzed the association between BMI and all-cause mortality have been inconsistent. Most US studies have used data from the 1960s through 1990s and have included predominantly non-Hispanic White adults. In the new work, the researchers ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Scent of a woman: Hand odor can reveal a person’s sex

The profile of scent compounds from a person’s hand can be used to predict their sex, according to a new study led by Kenneth Furton of Florida International University, publishing July 5 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. In criminal investigations, dogs have long been used to reliably identify and track people based on their odor. But while human scent evidence from the field is well established, researchers have made little progress in analyzing human scent profiles in the lab. In the new study, researchers used an analysis technique called mass spectrometry to analyze ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Treating childhood ADHD with stimulant meds not associated with increased substance use later in life, study finds

PITTSBURGH, July 5, 2023 — Children taking a prescription stimulant to manage symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not have more substance use or substance use disorder (SUD) as adolescents or young adults, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Published today in JAMA Psychiatry, the study may provide some reassurance to parents and clinicians who may be hesitant to prescribe ADHD stimulant medications for fear that they may lay the ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Internet searches for self-managed abortion after Roe v Wade overturned

About The Study: This study used Google Trends data to estimate public interest in self-managed abortions and whether this interest differs depending on the legality of abortion in a state. Authors: Sean D. Young, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2023.2410) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

Cannabis use disorder and perioperative complications

About The Study: Cannabis use disorder was associated with a modest increased risk of perioperative morbidity and mortality after major elective, inpatient, noncardiac surgery. In the context of increasing cannabis use rates, these findings support preoperative screening for cannabis use disorder as a component of perioperative risk stratification. However, further research is needed to quantify the perioperative impact of cannabis use by route and dosage and to inform recommendations for preoperative cannabis cessation. Authors: Paul P. ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

A single molecule upsets symbiosis

A new study on the coexistence of bacteria and fungi shows that a mutually beneficial, functioning symbiosis can be very fragile. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology (Leibniz-HKI) in Jena found out that the bacterial species Mycetohabitans rhizoxinica lives happily in the hyphae of the fungus Rhizopus microsporus only when the bacteria produce a certain protein. In a symbiosis, two organisms join together and benefit from each other; in endosymbiosis, one of ...

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Science5 Jul 2023

First ultraviolet data collected by ESA’s JUICE mission

SAN ANTONIO — July 5, 2023 —The Southwest Research Institute-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) aboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft has successfully completed its initial commissioning following the April 14 launch. The UVS instrument is one of three instrument projects comprising NASA’s contribution to the JUICE mission. The mission’s science goals focus on Jupiter and its system, making multiple flybys of the planet’s large, ocean-bearing satellites with a particular emphasis on investigating Ganymede ...

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