New research from scientists at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds a tiny freshwater parasite known to cause health problems in humans defends its colonies with a class of soldiers that cannot reproduce. The discovery, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institutes of Health, vaults this species of parasitic flatworm into the ranks of complex animal societies such as ants, bees and termites, which also have distinct classes of workers and soldiers that have given up reproduction to serve their colony. When it gets into humans, usually via the consumption of raw or undercooked fish, this species ...

For decades, insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor insecticide spraying regimens have been important – and widely successful – treatments against mosquitoes that transmit malaria, a dangerous global disease. Yet these treatments also – for a time – suppressed undesirable household insects like bed bugs, cockroaches and flies. Now, a new North Carolina State University study reviewing the academic literature on indoor pest control shows that as the household insects developed resistance ...

A new study, led by palaeontologists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is helping resolve the evolution and ecology of Odaraia, a taco-shaped marine animal that lived during the Cambrian period. Fossils collected by ROM reveal Odaraia had mandibles. Palaeontologists are finally able to place it as belonging to the mandibulates, ending its long enigmatic classification among the arthropods since it was first discovered in the Burgess Shale over 100 years ago and revealing more about early evolution and diversification. The study The Cambrian Odaraia alata and the colonization of nektonic suspension-feeding niches by early mandibulates was published ...

Butterflies and moths collect so much static electricity whilst in flight, that pollen grains from flowers can be pulled by static electricity across air gaps of several millimetres or centimetres. The finding, published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, suggests that this likely increases their efficiency and effectiveness as pollinators. The University of Bristol team also observed that the amount of static electricity carried by butterflies and moths varies between different species, and that these variations correlate with differences in their ecology, such as whether they visit flowers, are ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass (07/24/2024) – A small but ferocious predator, the male dragonfish will apparently do anything for love. Or at least to find a mate. A new study by researchers at Boston College found the eyes of the male dragonfish grow larger for mate-seeking purposes, making the dragonfish an anomaly in vertebrate evolution, the team reported today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Like many creatures that inhabit the dark depths of the sea, dragonfishes survive thanks to numerous ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been awarded more than 3 million node hours on the nation’s most powerful computers to explore questions around pathogens, climate and energy-efficient microelectronics.   Access to the nation’s supercomputers, granted to Margaret Cheung, Daniel Mejia Rodriguez and Po-Lun Ma, is a coveted prize among scientists. The node hours represent an investment of several million dollars in computing time awarded to PNNL scientists to explore important science questions.   The awards are among 44 projects awarded through ...

New guidance on peri-operative care of transgender and gender-diverse individuals is today published in Anaesthesia (the journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) to guide best practice to ensure the safety and dignity of transgender and gender-diverse people in the peri-operative period. The guidance has been produced by a working group of experts including Dr Stuart Edwardson, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK, and Dr Luke Flower, Victor Philip Dahdaleh Heart and Lung Research Institute, Cambridge, UK, and colleagues. The number of people openly identifying ...

RIVERISDE, Calif. -- We all have some social anxiety. The nervousness we might feel before giving a speech is one example. Some people, however, have more social anxiety than others, and limit their social engagement due to excessive chronic fears of being embarrassed or humiliated. Although such social anxiety is common in both adolescents and adults, it is rarely diagnosed and treated. In a new book titled “Social Anxiety: Hidden Fears and Shame in Teens and Adults,” Thomas E. Brown, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in the University of California, Riverside's School of Medicine , explains ...

An international collaboration seeks to innovate the future of how a mechanical man’s best friend interacts with its owner, using a combination of AI and edge computing called edge intelligence. The project is sponsored through a one-year seed grant from the Institute for Future Technologies (IFT), a partnership between New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).  Assistant Professor Kasthuri Jayarajah in NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing is researching how to design a socially assistive model ...

Earth’s atmosphere holds an ocean of water, enough liquid to fill Utah’s Great Salt Lake 800 times. Extracting some of that moisture is seen as a potential way to provide clean drinking water to billions of people globally who face chronic shortages. Existing technologies for atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) are saddled with numerous downsides associated with size, cost and efficiency. But new research from University of Utah engineering researchers has yielded insights that could improve efficiencies and bring the world one step closer to tapping the air as a culinary water source in arid places. The study unveils the first-of-its-kind ...

Quantum information systems offer faster, more powerful computing methods than standard computers to help solve many of the world’s toughest problems. Yet fulfilling this ultimate promise will require bigger and more interconnected quantum computers than scientists have yet built. Scaling quantum systems up to larger sizes, and connecting multiple systems, has proved challenging. Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have discovered how to combine two powerful technologies—trapped atom arrays and photonic devices—to ...

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are credited in the discovery of 16 of the 118 known elements. Now they’ve completed the crucial first step to potentially create yet another: element 120.  Today, an international team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Heavy Element Group announced that they have made known superheavy element 116 using a titanium beam, a breakthrough that is a key stepping stone towards making element 120. The result was presented today at the Nuclear Structure 2024 conference; the science paper will be posted on the online repository ...

There’s a glaring gap in our knowledge of cell metabolism: in many cases, we still don’t know exactly how nutrients are transported into the cell. Without that understanding, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to develop treatments for the many diseases linked to the protein transporters that drive metabolism. Now, a new study in Nature Genetics presents a tool to map these metabolic gene functions more precisely. The platform, dubbed GeneMAP, has already identified one key gene-metabolite association at the heart of mitochondrial metabolism. GeneMAP was developed in the laboratory of Kivanç Birsoy, ...

iobhan Brady, a professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, has been selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. The prestigious Investigator program, which Brady describes as “life changing,” will provide her with roughly $9 million in research support over a seven-year term, with the option to renew. Brady’s research aims to understand how plants use their roots to respond to environmental stressors, and to use this information to develop plants that are better able to respond to climate ...

Long-acting injectable cabotegravir (CAB-LA) was safe and well tolerated as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) before and during pregnancy in the follow-up phase of a global study among cisgender women. The analysis of outcomes from more than 300 pregnancies and infants will be presented at the 2024 International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2024) in Munich, Germany.  “Cisgender women experience biological changes and social dynamics that can increase their likelihood of acquiring HIV during pregnancy and the postnatal period, and we need to offer them evidence-based options when they may need them most,” said Jeanne Marrazzo, M.D., M.P.H., ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA – One thing that makes large language models (LLMs) so powerful is the diversity of tasks to which they can be applied. The same machine-learning model that can help a graduate student draft an email could also aid a clinician in diagnosing cancer. However, the wide applicability of these models also makes them challenging to evaluate in a systematic way. It would be impossible to create a benchmark dataset to test a model on every type of question it can be asked. In a new paper, MIT researchers took a different approach. They ...

Researchers working at the forefront of an emerging photovoltaic (PV) technology are thinking ahead about how to scale, deploy, and design future solar panels to be easily recyclable. Solar panels made of perovskites may eventually play an important role amid global decarbonization efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the technology emerges from the testing stages, it is a perfect time to think critically about how best to design the solar panels to minimize their impact on the environment decades from now. “When you have a technology in its very early stages, you have the ability to design it better. It’s a cleaner slate,” said Joey Luther, a senior ...

Looking for a Medicare Advantage plan with a five-star quality rating? You’re less likely to find one available to you if you live in a county with higher poverty and unemployment, finds a new study published in JAMA Network Open. These geographic disparities may be contributing to unequal health outcomes and limiting federal funds from reaching the regions most in need, according to the researchers. “What this means is that Medicare beneficiaries living in counties with greater social disadvantage ...

The overarching goal of all carbon capture and storage projects is the same: Keep carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions out of the atmosphere by storing them in the subsurface for good. One way to do that is to inject the CO2 into a reservoir space that’s covered with a big lid – an impermeable caprock that can keep the gas in place and stop any upward flow in its tracks.  That’s the model that petroleum exploration has relied on for decades when searching for oil traps, and it works for both oil and CO2. But according to research led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology, subsurface ...

A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI  10.29026/oea.2024.240036 , discusses sharp temperature reduction for quantum dots in polymer by highly efficient heat dissipation pathways.   Quantum dots (QDs), a kind of luminescent nanocrystals featuring size-tunable emission spectra and superior color purity are widely applied in optoelectronic fields. However, these particles are facing luminous efficiency degradation due to their temperature-sensitive characteristic and the high temperature in optoelectronic ...

A new automated system of monitoring and classifying persistent vibrations at active volcanoes can eliminate the hours of manual effort needed to document them. Graduate student researcher Darren Tan at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute led development of the system, which is based on machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence focused on building systems that learn from data, identify patterns and make decisions with minimal human intervention.  Details about Tan’s automated ...

A new publication from Opto-Electronic Sciences; DOI 10.29026/oes.2024.240013 , discusses highly sensitive and real-simultaneous CH4/C2H2 dual-gas LITES sensor based on Lissajous pattern multi-pass cell.   Trace gases are atmospheric constituents with a volume fraction of less than 1%. Despite their low concentrations, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and sulfides in the atmosphere have a significant impact on the environment, closely related to phenomena such as acid rain, greenhouse effects, and ozone layer depletion. Therefore, race gas detection of is crucial for environmental ...

Genetic diversity is essential to the survival of a species. It’s easy enough to maintain if a species reproduces sexually; an egg and a sperm combine genetic material from two creatures into one, forming a genomically robust offspring with two distinct versions of the species’ genome. Without that combination of different genetic makeups, asexually reproducing species typically suffer from a lack of diversity that can doom them to a limited run on Earth. One such animal should be the clonal raider ant, which produces daughter after genetically identical daughter directly from an unfertilized ovum ...

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys, University of California San Diego and their international collaborators have reported that more types of lung cells can be infected by SARS-CoV-2 than previously thought, including those without known viral receptors. The research team also reported for the first time that the lung is capable of independently mustering an inflammatory antiviral response without help from the immune system when exposed to SARS-CoV-2. This work is especially timely, as cases of COVID-19 are on the rise in the scientists’ hometown of San Diego during a summertime spike. Looking beyond the region, more than half of the states in the country have reported “very ...

WHAT:  Current or previous use of the antiretroviral drug (ARV) abacavir was associated with an elevated risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in people with HIV, according to an exploratory analysis from a large international clinical trial primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There was no elevated MACE risk for the other antiretroviral drugs included in the analysis. The findings will be presented at the 2024 International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2024) in Munich, Germany. The Randomized Trial to Prevent Vascular Events in HIV (REPRIEVE) enrolled 7,769 study participants with HIV from 12 countries that found ...