The project, supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and UK Tea & Infusions Association (UKTIA), aims to improve tea production standards and create data and resources that can benefit the whole industry. The project is co-led and managed by Dr Helen Saini, Head of R&D Sustainable Agriculture at LIPTON Teas and Infusions, and Andrew Thompson, Professor of Molecular Plant Science and Head of Soil, Agrifood and Biosciences at Cranfield University. Tea has the second lowest carbon footprint after tap water but about a quarter of its total greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to fertiliser use. In addition, climate change ...

Malta, July 5, 2024 - The program for the highly anticipated world conference on Targeting Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) has been released. The event, organized by the World Mitochondria Society and the International Society of Microbiota, is scheduled to take place on October 17-18, 2024, at the Corinthia Palace in Malta. Exploring Strategic Questions at Targeting EVs 2024 The Targeting EVs 2024 conference promises to explore the multifaceted roles of EVs, with a special focus on their interactions with mitochondria and microbiota. The scientific ...

Smoking may be among the most important lifestyle factors affecting how quickly our cognitive skills decline as we age, suggests a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in Nature Communications, analysed data from 32,000 adults aged 50 or over from 14 European countries who responded to surveys over 10 years. The researchers investigated how rates of cognitive decline might differ among cognitively-healthy older adults with different combinations of health-related behaviours, including smoking, ...

Limited impact of current movement restrictions highlights need for enhanced strategies, says study.  In a recent study published in the Journal of Dairy Science, researchers from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH), the University of Copenhagen, and SEGES have shown that despite stringent movement restrictions among Danish cattle farms Salmonella Dublin continues to propagate, indicating that current strategies are insufficient to curb the spread of the disease. "We analyzed 11 years of data, including detailed information about ...

A new study led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital reveals that military women and female family members face significantly higher risks of chronic pain  Active-duty servicewomen who served during periods of heightened combat deployments (2006-2013) face a significantly heightened risk of chronic pain compared to those serving at other times, according to a new study from researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. The study also found that female dependents of military personnel serving ...

About The Study: Glucagon-like peptide receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) were associated with lower risks of specific types of obesity-associated cancers compared with insulins or metformin in patients with type 2 diabetes in this study. These findings provide preliminary evidence of the potential benefit of GLP-1RAs for cancer prevention in high-risk populations and support further preclinical and clinical studies for the prevention of certain obesity-associated cancers. Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Nathan A. Berger, M.D. (nab@case.edu) and Rong Xu, Ph.D. (rxx@case.edu). To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: The findings of this cross-sectional study indicate that Medicare eligibility was not associated with consistently greater improvements in health insurance coverage and access to care among LGBTQI+ individuals compared with heterosexual and/or cisgender individuals. However, among sexual minority individuals, Medicare may be associated with closing gaps in self-reported health status, and among states with the highest disparities, it may improve health insurance coverage, access to care, and self-reported health status.  Corresponding Author: To contact ...

This study is led by Dr.Jian Yang and Dr. Kaili Zhong (State Key Laboratory for Managing Biotic and Chemical Threats to the Quality and Safety of Agro-products, Ningbo University). Their findings reveal a strategy that plants use to protect themselves from viral infection by regulating deacetylase function. In this work, the team found CWMV infection induced H3K9ac and H3K79ac in wheat. Histone deacetylase TaSRT2 is demonstrated to deacetylate H3K9ac and H3K79ac since the levels of H3K9ac and H3K79ac were significantly reduced in TaSRT2 transgenic lines L6 and L8 plants but increased in virus-induced TaSRT2-silenced ...

This study is led by Dr. Shuai Chen (Model Animal Research Center, School of Medicine, Nanjing University, China) and Dr. Hong-Yu Wang (Model Animal Research Center, School of Medicine, Nanjing University, China). Metabolic and immune pathways are highly regulated and interwoven by multiple mechanisms to govern metabolic health. Dysregulation of these pathways underlies the development of metabolic diseases such as obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D), which have become prevalent worldwide in recent years. Thus far, the molecular mechanisms ...

His journey from a technical officer at ICI Petrochemicals to becoming the Regius Professor of Chemistry at Cardiff University is marked by numerous achievements and accolades, including being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009. The Ertl Lecture Award, a tribute to the legacy of Gerhard Ertl, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 2007, is an annual accolade that highlights the exceptional work of researchers in the field of catalysis. Sponsored by BASF and established in 2008 by the three Berlin universities (Humboldt University, Technical ...

Young, naïve starlings are looking for their wintering grounds independently of experienced conspecifics. Starlings are highly social birds throughout the year, but this does not mean that they copy the migration route from each other. By revisiting a classic ‘displacement’ experiment and by adding new data, a team of researchers at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and the Swiss Ornithological Institute (Vogelwarte Sempach) have settled a long-lasting debate. Their findings are now published in the scientific journal Biology Letters. The question of how migratory birds locate their migration ...

Osteoporosis is a common disorder, especially in the elderly, characterized by bone loss and increased fracture risk. Treatments target abnormal osteoclast activity but face adherence issues. The disease disrupts the balance between bone resorption and formation. Key factors like Wnt signaling and mitochondrial health influence osteoblast differentiation. However, WIF1's role in regulating mitophagy and osteoblast differentiation remains unclear. This research investigated the role of WIF1 in controlling the osteogenic differentiation stage of the OB precursor cell line (MC3T3-E1 cells) and assessed ...

This study was led by Kezhong Chen (Department of Thoracic Surgery, Peking University People’s Hospital & Peking University People’s Hospital Thoracic Oncology Institute). In clinical practice, traditional tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging had difficulty achieving accuracy in prognosis stratification at the individual patient level. Researchers therefore proposed to introduce blood minimal residual disease (MRD) status and proposed a new tumor-node-metastasis-blood (TNMB) staging system to more accurately and individually define the postoperative status of lung cancer patients (Fig. 1). LB, well known for its noninvasiveness, easy accessibility, ...

An international panel of experts led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the “la Caixa” Foundation, under the umbrella of the Alzheimer's Association International Society to Advance Alzheimer's Research and Treatment, has produced a consensus statement on sex and gender disparities in resilience to Alzheimer's disease and call for incorporating these differences in future research. The work has been published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. Women make up the majority of people with Alzheimer's ...

One of the key metrics for climate modelling is radiative forcing. Most climate models, including the general circulation models (GCMs), focus on the effects of different atmospheric factors on radiative forcing. However, there are still large uncertainties in satellite observations and multi-model simulations associated with some atmospheric factors. Among them, clouds are a known source of uncertainty in GCMs, leading to radiative biases. However, another possible source of radiative uncertainty is associated with precipitation. In principle, precipitating particles affect radiative forcing by disrupting incoming shortwave and outgoing longwave radiations. ...

Insilico Medicine(“Insilico”), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, has successfully delivered the second preclinical candidate compound (PCC) in its collaboration with Fosun Pharma in June 2024, a potential innovative therapeutic using synthetic lethal strategy for the treatment of solid tumors. Insilico expects to submit the pre-IND application for this candidate with the CDE in 2024 Q4. When initiating the collaboration, Fosun Pharma proposed four targets of interest, and the target of the PCC nominated in this program is one of them and plays a critical role in DNA damage repair mechanisms. Insilico’s ...

After three years of meticulous study, an international team of researchers has announced the discovery of a fossilised giant basal tetrapod in Namibia's arid heartland in Nature. A basal tetrapod is an early four-legged vertebrate with fingers and toes, which lived during the transition from water to land. These ancient carnivores are among the earliest ancestors of all modern animals. This nearly complete 3-meter-long skeleton of an adult, unearthed in the Ugab River valley in Damaraland, is the largest ever discovered. This discovery is significant because it challenges previous assumptions that these early four-legged vertebrates, which lived during ...

An ongoing research project into the impact of offshore windfarm electromagnetic fields on shark development reveals that the alternating electric currents produced by underwater windfarm cables seems not to disrupt the growth or survival of sharks. Offshore windfarms are one of the most common marine renewable energy (MRE) producers, and are seen as a pivotal technology in the global transition towards renewable energy and away from fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. However, their proliferation in marine environments raises new questions about their impacts on wildlife. Energy operators and ...

To perform quantum computations, quantum bits (qubits) must be cooled down to temperatures in the millikelvin range (close to -273 Celsius), to slow down atomic motion and minimize noise. However, the electronics used to manage these quantum circuits generate heat, which is difficult to remove at such low temperatures. Most current technologies must therefore separate quantum circuits from their electronic components, causing noise and inefficiencies that hinder the realization of larger quantum systems beyond the lab. Researchers in EPFL’s Laboratory of ...

Microbes that are used for health, agricultural, or other applications need to be able to withstand extreme conditions, and ideally the manufacturing processes used to make tablets for long-term storage. MIT researchers have now developed a new way to make microbes hardy enough to withstand these extreme conditions. Their method involves mixing bacteria with food and drug additives from a list of compounds that the FDA classifies as “generally regarded as safe.” The researchers identified formulations that help to stabilize several different types ...

Agroecology—a science, practice, and movement which seeks social, political, economic, and environmental sustainability in the global food system—is gaining momentum in the U.S., according to a new Dartmouth-led commentary in Nature Food. As the co-authors report, the approach requires coordination between scientists, farmers, and activists. "When it comes to sustainable food and agriculture, people in the U.S. tend to be more familiar with organic farming, the production of food without synthetic inputs, and regenerative agriculture, which primarily strives to restore soil health," says lead author Theresa Ong, an assistant professor of environmental studies ...

A mysterious remnant from a rare type of supernova recorded in 1181 has been explained for the first time. Two white dwarf stars collided, creating a temporary “guest star,” now labeled supernova (SN) 1181, which was recorded in historical documents in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. However, after the star dimmed, its location and structure remained a mystery until a team pinpointed its location in 2021. Now, through computer modeling and observational analysis, researchers have recreated the structure of the remnant white dwarf, a rare occurrence, explaining its ...

The Negev desert of southern Israel is renowned for its unique rock art. Since at least the third millennium BCE, the hunters, shepherds, and merchants who roamed the Negev have left thousands of carvings (‘petroglyphs’) on the rocks. These figures are mostly cut into ‘desert varnish’: a thin black coating on limestone rock, which forms naturally. Many represent animals such as ibexes, goats, horses, donkeys, and domestic camels, but abstract forms also occur. Now, a study published in Frontiers in Fungal ...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa – an environmental bacteria that can cause devastating multidrug-resistant infections, particularly in people with underlying lung conditions – evolved rapidly and then spread globally over the last 200 years, probably driven by changes in human behaviour, a new study has found. P. aeruginosa is responsible for over 500,000 deaths per year around the world, of which over 300,000 are associated with antimicrobial resistance (AMR). People with conditions such as COPD (smoking-related lung damage), cystic fibrosis (CF), and non-CF bronchiectasis, are particularly susceptible. How P. aeruginosa evolved from an environmental organism into a ...

An aerogel made from gelatin and DNA surpasses 100% solar reflectance, yielding exceptional radiative cooling, a new study reports. It is also biodegradable. The novel approach paves the way for high-performance next-generation radiative cooling materials, promoting environmentally friendly advancements in the field. Sustainable, energy-efficient, and environmentally conscious cooling technologies are crucial for adapting to our rapidly warming world. Compared to traditional refrigeration systems, passive radiative cooling technologies consume less energy and emit fewer greenhouse gasses, making them ...