New research from the University of Pittsburgh explains why metastatic uveal melanoma is resistant to conventional immunotherapies and how adoptive therapy, which involves growing a patient’s T cells outside the body before reinfusing them, can successfully treat this rare and aggressive cancer. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the Pitt researchers also explain how they developed a new clinical tool that predicts which patients will respond to adoptive therapy. The work, supported by UPMC Enterprises, is helping improve personalized therapies and avoid futile treatments for metastatic uveal melanoma. “The dogma was that uveal melanoma is ...

New research from King’s College London has found that spaces with a diverse range of natural features are associated with stronger improvements in our mental wellbeing compared to spaces with less natural diversity. Published in Scientific Reports and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and Wellcome, this citizen science study used the smartphone application Urban Mind to collect real-time reports on mental wellbeing and natural diversity from nearly 2000 participants. Researchers found that environments with ...

For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Synthesis. Scientists have long tried to make single-atom-thick sheets of gold but failed because the metal’s tendency to lump together. But ...

Nineteen out of 34 countries surveyed failed to fully meet their 2020 climate commitments set 15 years ago in Copenhagen, according to a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, compared the actual net carbon emissions of more than 30 nations to their 2009 pledged emission reduction targets set during the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The paper led by researchers at UCL and Tsinghua University is the first effort to comprehensively gauge how well countries were able to meet their Nationally Determined Contribution reduction pledges from COP15. Of the 34 nations analysed in the study, ...

Optical neural networks may provide the high-speed and large-capacity solution necessary to tackle challenging computing tasks. However, tapping their full potential will require further advances. One challenge is the reconfigurability of optical neural networks. A research team in the Stiller Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, in collaboration with the Englund Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has now succeeded in laying the foundation for new reconfigurable neuromorphic building blocks by adding a new dimension to photonic machine learning: sound waves. The researchers use light to create ...

BOSTON, MA – A new study led by the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute has identified that a deficit in the placental expression of the gene insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGFBP1) and low IGFBP1 circulating levels are associated with insulin resistance during pregnancy, highlighting a potential risk factor for the development of gestational diabetes. The study, “Placental IGFBP1 levels during early pregnancy and the risk of insulin resistance and gestational diabetes,” appears in the April 16, 2024 edition of Nature Medicine. Gestational diabetes, a disease that can lead to multiple pregnancy and delivery complications, is the most common pregnancy ...

University of Leeds news  Embargo: Tuesday 16 April, 2024, 10am UK time  Care home staff and residents need ‘family’ bonds to thrive  Care home residents receive much better care when they enjoy ‘family’ bonds with staff – but staff must be empowered to create these bonds, new research has found.  The study, led by the University of Leeds and funded by The National Institute for Health and Care Research, found that when care home staffing is stable and consistent and numbers are sufficient, workers have the capacity to develop ‘familial’ ...

Patients with suspected inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) could benefit from better testing protocols that would reduce the need and lengthy wait for potentially unnecessary colonoscopies, a new study has found. In a paper published in Frontline Gastroenterology, researchers from the Birmingham NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at the University of Birmingham tested a new protocol to improve IBD diagnosis combining clinical history with multiple home stool tests. In the two-year study involving 767 participants, patients were triaged and had repeated faecal calprotectin (FCP) tests and the research team found that the use of serial FCP tests were able to strongly predict possible ...

Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission because it imposes an odd ‘wobbling’ motion on the companion star orbiting it. Data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, putting it at an impressive 33 times that of the Sun. Stellar black holes are formed from the collapse of massive stars and the ones ...

Tuesday 16 April: A new scientific review1 published in Sustainable Production and Consumption explores how best to standardize measurement of the environmental impact of coffee – a commodity increasingly threatened by climate change2. Measurement of green coffee’s carbon footprint has traditionally varied, as is often the case for any agricultural lifecycle assessment. The Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) commissioned the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) to review current methodologies for green coffee, revealing a more precise picture of how to measure the environmental impact of the ...

According to a research team led by palaeontologists from the University of Vienna, the net-like leaf veining typical for today’s flowering plants developed much earlier than previously thought, but died out again several times. Using new methods, the fossilised plant Furcula granulifer was identified as such an early forerunner. The leaves of this seed fern species already exhibited the net-like veining in the late Triassic (around 201 million years ago). The study was recently published in the journal New Phytologist. Mario Coiro and Leyla Seyfullah of the Department of Palaeontology at the University of ...

A new study conducted by Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute has uncovered the staggering economic toll of intimate partner violence experienced by women in Louisiana.  The report, titled "The Costs of Intimate Partner Violence in Louisiana," found that intimate partner violence cost the state $10.1 billion in medical expenses, lost productivity and criminal justice spending in 2022 alone. The monetary costs per survivor amounted to approximately $105,602 annually, or 2.5 times more than the average wage earned by women in Louisiana.  This is the only cost analysis of its kind for a single U.S. state outside ...

New research has given insight into the resilience and recovery of businesses in two South Australian regions following a major bushfire event and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Small businesses in two of the state’s regions affected by a devastating bushfire and a COVID-19 cluster outbreak have been analysed by economics experts at the University of South Australia to determine the best pathways for future disaster recovery in regional areas. Like many SA regional areas heavily reliant on international tourists, Kangaroo ...

The rapid increase in the proportion of cash crops and livestock production in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) has led to commensurate increases in fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Excessive application of chemical fertilizer, organophosphorus pesticides and inappropriate disposal of agricultural waste induced water pollution and potentially threaten green agricultural development. To ensure food security and the food supply capacity of the Yangtze River Basin, it is important to balance green and development, while ensuring the quality of water bodies. Multiple pollutants affect the transfer, adsorption, photolysis and degradation of each other throughout the soil–plant–water system. ...

The transition from vegetative to reproductive stages in plants involves both internal and external cues, with grapevines  (Vitis vinifera L. cv. Pixie) presenting a unique case. Research shows that a mutation in the grapevine's DELLA proteins enhances the conversion of tendrils to inflorescences, diverging from DELLA's typical role in suppressing flowering in annual plants. While DELLA proteins regulate plant growth by interacting with various genes and environmental signals, the specific mechanisms and genes targeted ...

Osaka, Japan – Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are next-generation drugs that can treat disease by blocking the transfer of harmful messages from our genes. In people with cancer, ASOs have the potential to block messages that encourage the growth and spread of the tumor. However, ASOs aren’t used for treating cancer yet. They must first get delivered inside cancer cells, but the cancer cells won’t let them in. Finding an effective ASO delivery system is a major challenge. Cancer cells have gatekeeper molecules that stop unwanted substances from entering. Although investigators have tried many ways of getting ASOs past ...

A research team has unveiled 20 β-galactosidase (BGAL) genes within the longan genome, highlighting their crucial roles in embryogenic development and heat stress adaptation. Particularly, the research team spotlighted DlBGAL9, activated by transcription factors DlAGL61 and DlAGL80, as pivotal in enhancing β-galactosidase activity for cell wall thickening and stress response. These discoveries not only deepen our understanding of BGAL's function in plant development and stress mechanisms but also open pathways for agricultural innovations to improve crop resilience and productivity through genetic ...

The chloroplast (cp) is critical for various biological functions in plants, such as photosynthesis and stress responses, with its genome offering simpler analysis and sequencing due to its size and reduced homologous influence. This genome's stability and unique features have made it essential for species identification and understanding plant phylogeny. In the context of Carya illinoinensis, or pecan, a key nut crop in China, there's an observed pollination deficiency exacerbated by the timing of pollen release in cultivars like 'Pawnee'. Recent research has expanded to include the cp genomes of various C. illinoinensis cultivars, aiding ...

Crowdsourcing efficiently delegates tasks to crowd workers for labeling, though their varying expertise can lead to errors. A key task is estimating worker expertise to infer true labels. However, the noise transition matrix-based methods for modeling worker expertise often overfit annotation noise due to oversimplification or inaccurate estimations. To solve the problems, a research team led by Shao-Yuan LI published their new research on 12 Mar 2024 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature. The team proposed a knowledge distillation-based framework KD-Crowd, which leverages noise-model-free ...

HONG KONG (16 April 2024)—A groundbreaking discovery that appears to confirm the existence of discrete number sense in rats has been announced by a joint research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).   The findings offer a crucial animal model for investigating the neural basis of numerical ability and disability in humans, the Hong Kong-based researchers say.   This innovative study deployed a numerical learning task, brain manipulation techniques and AI modelling to tackle an ongoing debate about whether rats can count, says Professor Yung Wing-ho, Chair Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at CityUHK, who ...

New research into generative AI images shows only over a third of media organisations surveyed at the time of research have an image-specific AI policy in place.   The study, led by RMIT University in collaboration with Washington State University and the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, interviewed 20 photo editors or related roles from 16 leading public and commercial media organisations across Europe, Australia and the US about their perceptions of generative AI technologies in visual journalism.    Lead researcher and RMIT Senior Lecturer, Dr TJ Thomson, said while most staff interviewed ...

Professor Yunje Cho’s research team from the Department of Life Sciences at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH, Republic of Korea) has collaborated with Professor Kwang Pyo Kim’s group from the Department of Applied Chemistry at Kyung Hee University (KHU, ROK), Professor Vsevolod Katritch’s team from the University of Southern California (USC, USA), and Professor Carol V. Robinson from the University of Oxford (UK) to uncover the mysteries surrounding a specific receptor protein associated with hearing. Their findings have recently been published in the online edition of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.   Deep ...

A research team reviews the critical relationship between the accumulation of anthocyanins and organic acids in fruits, highlighting how these factors influence fruit color and consumer appeal through changes in vacuolar pH. The analysis focused on the transcription factors (TFs) responsible for the co-regulation of genes affecting these quality traits, aiming to enhance fruit marketability. By establishing a genetic link and identifying the regulatory mechanisms involved, the team provides a roadmap for breeders to target specific traits for modification. Although progress has been made, the review underlines the ...

Ferroelectric binary oxides thin films are garnering attention for their superior compatibility over traditional perovskite-based ferroelectric materials. Its compatibility and scalability within the CMOS framework make it an ideal candidate for integrating ferroelectric devices into mainstream semiconductor components, including next-generation memory devices and various logic devices such as Ferroelectric Field-effect Transistor, and Negative Capacitance Field-effect Transistor. It has been reported that challenges ...

Citrus is the world’s most economically significant fruit crop, but it faces various environmental adversities that restrict its distribution. Grafting is a crucial factor in enhancing citrus productivity. Current research focuses on selecting genetically uniform rootstocks, such as trifoliate orange for its disease resistance. However, issues such as sensitivity to alkalinity and incompatibility with certain cultivars persist. Addressing these challenges, a study (DOI: 10.48130/frures-0023-0042) published in Fruit Research on 01 February 2024, introduces 'Shuzhen No.1', a novel rootstock ...