Oregon Health & Science University researchers showed that consuming THC while pregnant could potentially affect development of the fetus and lead to life-long health impacts for offspring. The preclinical study was published today in the journal Clinical Epigenetics. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, a substance growing in popularity and availability in the United States. The prevalence of cannabis use in pregnancy is also rapidly increasing, especially during the first trimester — a time when the fetus is most vulnerable to environmental exposures — ...

Every time a stem cell divides, one daughter cell remains a stem cell while the other takes off on its own developmental journey. But both daughter cells require specific and different cellular materials to fulfill their destinies. Animal stem cells use the cytoskeleton – a transient network of structural tubules – to physically pull the correct materials from the parent cell into each daughter cell during the split. Plants also have stem cells that need to distribute different materials ...

New Haven, Conn. — Cancer cells with extra chromosomes depend on those chromosomes for tumor growth, a new Yale study reveals, and eliminating them prevents the cells from forming tumors. The findings, said the researchers, suggest that selectively targeting extra chromosomes may offer a new route for treating cancer.   The study was published July 6 in the journal Science.   Human cells typically have 23 pairs of chromosomes; extra chromosomes are an anomaly known as aneuploidy.   “If you look at normal skin or normal lung tissue, for example, 99.9% of the cells will have the right number of chromosomes,” said ...

While mathematics is a fundamental skill crucial to daily life, U.S. parents today see math education as boring, outdated, and disconnected from the real world. (1) At the national level, short and long-term achievement trends paint a disconcerting picture of the need for innovative math education strategies: Math scores among eighth graders dropped in 2022, to the lowest score since 20031 Math scores declined for students regardless of racial and ethnic group, gender, parental education, or disability status1 The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated declines in math achievement; the median school district lost about ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Mobile phone data are increasingly used in public health management and disease outbreak response, as demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic when location data were used as a proxy for human movement and contacts and informed exposure notification apps. However, a new study led by researchers at Penn State revealed that phone data may not accurately reflect under-resourced or particularly vulnerable populations, who are often underrepresented in other data as well.  If this bias is not acknowledged or complemented with additional ...

Hand tremors and slowed movements are two of the most widely recognized hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease, and for many sufferers the first indication that something is amiss. But by the time these symptoms manifest, those patients have already lost 50–80 percent of their dopamine neurons—a mass die-off that causes the neurodegenerative disease. Malfunctions in dopamine-dependent areas of the brain are responsible for many of the symptoms, which differ from person to person in an unpredictable way. A diagnosis at an early age, typically before age 50, can stave off the most severe symptoms for years; when the disease is identified later, its trajectory is often swift ...

For women over the age of 65 who have never had a high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) test, a “catch up” HPV screening intervention may improve cervical cancer prevention by detecting more cervical pre-cancer lesions as compared to women not offered screening. That is the conclusion of a new study publishing July 6th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Mette Tranberg, University Research Clinic for Cancer Screening, Randers Regional Hospital, Denmark, and colleagues. High-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) test is replacing cytology as the primary cervical cancer screening test in most countries, but many women over 65 years have never had an HPV ...

How temperate and boreal trees’ leaves respond to climate change remains uncertain. Now, a new study of northern forests reports that while early-season climate warming – that occurring before the summer solstice – tends to be associated with earlier autumn leaf senescence, late-season warming (after the summer solstice) has the opposite impact, delaying onset of leaf senescence in fall. “Improved models of plant development and growth under climate change will need to incorporate the reversal of warming effects after the summer solstice,” write Constantin Zohner and colleagues, authors of the study. Climate change ...

In two separate studies, researchers present novel methods that enable the fabrication of high-performance perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells with power conversion efficiencies exceeding 30%. Silicon solar cells – the most commonly deployed photovoltaic (PV) technology – are rapidly approaching their theoretical power conversion efficiency (PCE) limit of 29%. One way to increase the efficiency of a solar cell is to optimize the spectrum of sunlight for conversion into energy. This can be done by stacking two or more interconnected photoactive materials into a singular device, improving ...

A new study helps explain why rates of species exchange are at least twice as high from west to east than in the opposite direction across Wallace’s Line. The study included an analysis of more than 20,000 species belonging to all 227 families of terrestrial vertebrates present in the Indo-Australian archipelago. As tectonic plates merge, once disparate continents can connect and create new opportunities for biotic exchange. Species movement across newly connected continents millions of years ago continues to shape assemblages of flora and fauna today. One of the most well-known ...

A new study with direct implications for one of the most important unresolved questions in physics – the imbalance of matter and antimatter in our universe – reports “the most precise measurement yet” of the size of the electron’s permanent electric dipole moment. The imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe can be explained via the breaking of charge parity symmetry. The standard model (SM) of particle physics predicts a slight breaking of this symmetry, but it is insufficient to explain the imbalance actually observed. Many extensions to the standard ...

Incorporating animal welfare into policymaking may improve policy and practice, according to Rutgers research. The article, published in Science, notes that animal welfare rarely is considered during policymaking, explains why current tools make it difficult to incorporate the well-being of animals into public policy and identifies methods for remedying these issues.  “Animal welfare is often ignored in policymaking, despite its relevance across many domains ranging from food systems to biomedical research to climate policy,” said Mark ...

Ask anyone what first springs to mind when they think of Australia and they’ll most likely say a kangaroo; the marsupial is ingrained in our national identity. But have you ever wondered why kangaroos never ventured beyond our shores?  A major study led by biologists at The Australian National University (ANU) and ETH Zurich in Switzerland provides a new explanation for why you won’t find kangaroos, koalas and other Aussie marsupials in Indonesia, but you will find many groups of animals that originated in Asia, such as goannas, ...

Solid electrolytes with high lithium-ion conductivity can be designed for millimeter-thick battery electrodes by increasing the complexity of their composite superionic crystals, report researchers from Tokyo Tech. This new design rule enables the synthesis of high-entropy active materials while preserving their superionic conduction.   As the world transitions towards a greener and more sustainable energy economy, reliance on lithium (Li)-ion batteries is expected to rise. Scientists from across the globe are working towards designing smaller yet efficient batteries that can keep up with the ever-increasing demand for energy ...

If you travel to Bali, you won’t see a cockatoo, but if you go to the neighbouring island of Lombok, you will. The situation is similar with marsupials: Australia is home to numerous marsupial species, such as the kangaroo and the koala. The further west you go, the sparser they become. While you will find just two representatives of these typically Australian mammals on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, you will search in vain for them on neighbouring Borneo. Australia, on the other hand, is not home to mammals that you will typically find in Asia, such as bears, tigers ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- When your laptop or smartphone heats up, it’s due to energy that’s lost in translation. The same goes for power lines that transmit electricity between cities. In fact, around 10 percent of the generated energy is lost in the transmission of electricity. That’s because the electrons that carry electric charge do so as free agents, bumping and grazing against other electrons as they move collectively through power cords and transmission lines. All this jostling generates friction, and, ultimately, heat.   But when electrons pair up, they can rise above the fray and glide through a material without ...

Sara Clasen is the 2023 winner of the NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize for her work in illuminating how “silent flagellins” from commensal microbiota evade a host’s innate immunity. The NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize aims to reward innovative research from young investigators working on the functional attributes of the microbiota of any organism that has potential to contribute to our understanding of health and disease, or to guide novel therapeutic interventions. Strong adaptive immune responses require activation of innate immunity. To do this, innate ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed the first fiber laser that can produce femtosecond pulses in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Fiber lasers producing ultrashort, bright visible-wavelength pulses could be useful for a variety of biomedical applications as well as other areas such as material processing. Visible femtosecond pulses are usually obtained using complex and inherently inefficient setups. Although fiber lasers represent a very promising alternative due to their ruggedness/reliability, small footprint, efficiency, lower cost and high brightness, it hasn’t been possible, until now, to produce visible pulses with durations in the femtosecond ...

URBANA, Ill. — Winter cover crops could cut nitrogen pollution in Illinois’ agricultural drainage water up to 30%, according to recent research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But how will future climate change affect nitrogen loss, and will cover crops still be up to the job? A new study investigating near- and far-term climate change in Illinois suggests cover crops will still be beneficial, but not to the same degree. The report also forecasts corn ...

(Boston) – U.S. Black women have a disproportionately higher burden of both preeclamptic pregnancy and stroke compared with white women, but virtually all existing evidence on the association between the two medical conditions has come from studies of white women.   A newly published study focuses on data gathered over 25 years from 59,000 Black women in the Black Women’s Health Study (BWHS) and is led by researchers from Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Slone Epidemiology Center. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine Evidence, ...

By conserving and replanting forests, the world buys time until it brings other climate and sustainability solutions online. As a critical step toward this goal, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) received a $12 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund to support GEO-TREES. This international consortium is the first worldwide system to independently ensure the accuracy of satellite monitoring of forest biomass—a way to measure carbon stored in trees—in all forest types and conditions. The GEO-TREES alliance offers a freely accessible database that integrates ...

In 985, Viking explorer Erik the Red led a group of Icelandic farmers to Greenland, where they established a settlement on the west coast. Archaeological evidence suggests that the settlement existed for over 400 years, but the impact of the settlement lasted much longer. It is little recognised today that the hope of finding the descendants of the settlers dominated European and American perspectives on Greenland for centuries In his new book The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, Associate Professor Robert Rix argues that the lost Norse settlement played a decisive ...

The highest status individual in ancient Copper Age society in Iberia, was a woman and not a man as previously thought, according to peptide analysis reported in Scientific Reports. The individual, now re-dubbed the 'Ivory Lady', was buried in a tomb filled with the largest collection of rare and valuable items in the region, including ivory tusks, high-quality flint, ostrich eggshell, amber, and a rock crystal dagger. These findings reveal the high status women could hold in this ancient society. In 2008, an individual was discovered in a tomb in Valencia, Spain dating to the Copper Age between 3,200 and 2,200 years ago. As well as being a rare example of a single occupancy ...

As a psychiatric disorder with onset in adulthood, schizophrenia is thought to be triggered by some combination of environmental factors and genetics, although the exact cause is still not fully understood. In a study published in the journal Cell Genomics on July 6, researchers find a correlation between schizophrenia and somatic copy-number variants, a type of mutation that occurs early in development but after genetic material is inherited. This study is one of the first to rigorously describe the relationship between somatic—not inherited—genetic mutations and schizophrenia risk. “We originally thought of genetics as the study of inheritance. But now we ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In an advance that will help scientists track coronavirus variants in wild and domesticated animals, researchers report they can now detect exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in any animal species. Most coronavirus antibody tests require specialized chemical reagents to detect host antibody responses against the virus in each species tested, impeding research across species. The virus that causes COVID-19 in humans also infects a variety of animals, said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign pathobiology professor and virologist Ying Fang, who led the new research. So far, ...