Modern hybrid sugarcane is one of the most harvested crops on the planet, used to make products including sugar, molasses, bioethanol, and bio-based materials. It also has one of the most complex genetic blueprints. Until now, sugarcane’s complicated genetics made it the last major crop without a complete and highly accurate genome. Scientists have developed and combined multiple techniques to successfully map out sugarcane’s genetic code. With that map, they were able to verify the specific location that provides resistance to the impactful brown rust disease ...

WASHINGTON — The Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) Science Team, led by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), captured the development of turbulence as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) interacted with the ambient solar wind in the circumsolar space. This discovery is reported in the Astrophysical Journal. Taking advantage of its unique location inside the Sun’s atmosphere, the NRL-built WISPR telescope on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) mission, operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), captured in unparalleled detail the interaction between ...

Four years after the U.S. shut down in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, research from Rice University suggests undocumented immigrants’ mental health challenges were compounded due to stresses stemming from their unauthorized status. “Implications of Undocumented Status for Latinx Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Call to Action” appears in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology and examines how undocumented immigrants navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. During a series of in-depth interviews with undocumented individuals or those from ...

Planes, trains, boats, automobiles and even feet. During the past decades and centuries, global travel and human migration have made all of us more worldly — from our broadening awareness of the world beyond our birthplaces, to our more sophisticated palates, to our immune systems that are increasingly challenged by unfamiliar bacteria and viruses. In the elderly, these newly imported pathogens can gain the upper hand frighteningly quickly. Unfortunately, however, vaccination in this age group isn’t as effective as it is in younger people. Now a study conducted in mice by Stanford ...

Scientists have uncovered a key step in the wound healing process that becomes disabled in diseases like diabetes and ageing, contributing to a global healthcare cost of managing poorly healing wounds exceeding $250 billion a year. Importantly, the research published in Nature reveals a molecule involved in the healing of tissues that – when injected into animal models – leads to a drastic acceleration of wound closure, up to 2.5 times faster, and 1.6 times more muscle regeneration. Lead researcher, Associate Professor Mikaël Martino, from Monash University’s Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute (ARMI) in Melbourne, Australia, said the discovery ...

It carries more than 100 times as much water as all the world's rivers combined. It reaches from the ocean's surface to its bottom, and measures as much as 2,000 kilometers across. It connects the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and plays a key role in regulating global climate. Continuously swirling around the southernmost continent, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is by far the world's most powerful and consequential mover of water. In recent decades it has been speeding up, but scientists have been unsure whether ...

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets. An international research team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have now used sediments taken from the South Pacific to reconstruct the flow speed in the last 5.3 million years. Their data show that during glacial periods, the current slowed; during interglacials, it accelerated. Consequently, if ...

Researchers at AMOLF, in collaboration with partners from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, have realized a new type of metamaterial through which sound waves flow in an unprecedented fashion. It provides a novel form of amplification of mechanical vibrations, which has the potential to improve sensor technology and information processing devices. This metamaterial is the first instance of a so-called ‘bosonic Kitaev chain’, which gets its special properties from its nature as a topological material. It was realized by making nanomechanical resonators interact with laser light through radiation pressure forces. The discovery, which is published on March ...

March 27, 2024—(BRONX, NY)—Just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that you can’t make long-term memories without DNA damage and brain inflammation. Their surprising findings were published online today in the journal Nature. “Inflammation of brain neurons is usually considered to be a bad thing, since it can lead to neurological problems such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said study leader Jelena Radulovic, M.D., Ph.D., professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and the Sylvia ...

Anastasopoulos Studying Machine Translation For Austronesian Languages  Antonios Anastasopoulos, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, received funding for: "Machine Translation for Austronesian Languages."  He is helping to develop a solution that can automatically translate languages of the southeast Asia and Pacific regions, with a particular focus on languages of lndonesia and the Philippines.  Anastasopoulos received $63,680 from Barron Associates, Inc., on a subaward from the U.S. Department of the Army for this project. Funding began ...

The first comprehensive reference genome for ‘R570’, a widely cultivated modern sugarcane hybrid, has been completed in a landmark advancement for agricultural biotechnology.  Sugarcane contributes $2.2 billion to the Australian economy and accounts for 80 per cent of global sugar supply. The mapping of its genetic blueprint opens opportunities for new tools to enhance breeding programs around the world for this valuable bioenergy and food crop.   It is one of the last major crops to be fully sequenced, due to the fact its genome is almost three times the size of humans’ and far more ...

Super wearable electronics that are lightweight, stretchable and increase sweat permeability by 400-fold have been developed by scientists at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), enabling reliable long-term monitoring of biosignals for biomedical devices. Led by Professor Yu Xinge in CityUHK’s Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), the research team has recently developed a universal method to creating these super wearable electronics that allow gas and sweat permeability, solving the most critical issue facing wearable biomedical devices. Wearable ...

They published their work on Mar. 20, 2024, in Energy Material Advances.   "TR poses a critical safety concern for HED LIBs," said paper author Jiantao Wang, the general manager of National Power Battery Innovation Center, the general manager of China Automotive Battery Research Institute Co., Ltd, professor in General Research Institute for Nonferrous Metals. "It hinders HED LIBs wide application in electric vehicles."   Wang explained that TR can occur during various ...

People who can’t visualise an image in their mind’s eye are less likely to remember the details of important past personal events or to recognise faces, according to a review of nearly ten years of research. People who cannot bring to mind visual imagery are also less likely to experience imagery of other kinds, like imagining music, according to new research by the academic who first discovered the phenomenon. Professor Adam Zeman, of the University of Exeter, first coined the term aphantasia in 2015, to describe those who can’t visualise. ...

From pacemakers to neurostimulators, implantable medical devices rely on batteries to keep the heart on beat and dampen pain. But batteries eventually run low and require invasive surgeries to replace. To address these challenges, researchers in China devised an implantable battery that runs on oxygen in the body. The study, published March 27 in the journal Chem, shows in rats that the proof-of-concept design can deliver stable power and is compatible with the biological system. “When you think about it, oxygen is the source of our life,” says corresponding author Xizheng Liu, who specializes in energy materials and devices at Tianjin University of Technology. “If ...

Researchers Toru Miyamoto, Ko Mochizuki, and Atsushi Kawakita of the University of Tokyo have discovered the first species pollinated by sap beetles in the genus Pandanus, a group of palm-like plants native to the tropics and subtropics of Africa and Eurasia. The discovery overturned the long-held belief that these plants were pollinated by wind. The researchers also found that fragrant screw pines’ male and female flowers produced heat at night stably, making them the first such species in the family Pandanaceae. The findings were published in ...

A new Kaiser Permanente study found that a health coaching intervention successfully reduced sitting time for a group of older adults by just over 30 minutes a day. Study participants also showed meaningful improvements in blood pressure, comparable to the effect of other interventions focused on physical activity.  The study was published March 27 in JAMA Network Open and included 283 Kaiser Permanente Washington members aged 60-89. Older adults typically sit for between 65 and 80 percent of the hours that they are awake, and strong evidence shows that ...

About The Study: Individuals at high genetic risk of obesity needed higher daily step counts to reduce the risk of obesity than those at moderate or low genetic risk in this study of 3,124 adults. Population-based recommendations may underestimate physical activity needed to prevent obesity among those at high genetic risk.  Authors: Evan L. Brittain, M.D., M.Sc., and Douglas M. Ruderfer, Ph.D., of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, are the corresponding authors. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/   (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.3821) Editor’s Note: Please ...

Using patient data from six major U.S. cancer centers, Brigham researchers and collaborators developed a risk prediction model for moderate-to-severe kidney injury after receiving the chemotherapy drug cisplatin in the largest, first generalizable study of its kind Cisplatin is a highly effective chemotherapy that has been used to treat cancer for decades, but it can cause kidney injury that can potentially lead to the discontinuation of life-saving cancer treatments. Investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, with researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and other institutions, ...

About The Study: High prices limit access to newer diabetes medicines in many countries. The findings of this study suggest that robust generic and biosimilar competition could reduce prices to more affordable levels and enable expansion of diabetes treatment globally.  Authors: Melissa J. Barber, Ph.D., of the Yale Collaboration for Regulatory Rigor, Integrity, and Transparency in New Haven, Connecticut, 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/jamanetworkopen.2024.3474) Editor’s ...

Persons with a higher genetic risk of obesity need to work out harder than those of moderate or low genetic risk to avoid becoming obese, according to a Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) paper published in JAMA Network Open.   Study authors used activity, clinical and genetic data from the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program to explore the association of genetic risk of higher body mass index and the level of physical activity needed to reduce incident obesity.   “Physical activity guidelines do not ...

Evanston, IL – The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) is pleased to announce the results of its 2024 election. Lorenz Studer, MD, founding director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and member of the Developmental Biology Program, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, USA, will become the next Vice President. All terms of office for the new leaders will begin on 1 July 2024. The following three members were newly elected to the ISSCR Board of Directors for a three-year term: Jacqueline Barry, PhD, ...

McGill researchers have discovered a safer and more efficient technique for testing new drugs while they are in development. “Because this approach is so much more streamlined, it could help accelerate this step in the drug development process and make it less dangerous, since probing the distribution and fate of a drug in the body is required for any pharmaceutical candidate to be approved,” says Bruce A. Arndtsen, a James McGill Professor who teaches in the Department of Chemistry at McGill and is the senior author on the paper describing the new process, published recently in Nature Chemistry. “This research replaces what can be a days’ long, dangerous and ...

FRANKFURT. In 2022, scientists of the EHT unveiled the first image of Sgr A* – which is approximately 27,000 light-years away from Earth – revealing that the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole looks remarkably similar to M87’s, even though it is more than a thousand times smaller and less massive.  This made scientists wonder whether the two shared common traits outside of their looks. To find out, the team decided to study Sgr A* in polarized light. Previous studies of light around M87* had shown that the magnetic fields around the gigantic black hole allowed it to launch powerful jets of material back into the surrounding environment. ...

Imagine being middle aged and starting to feel that you are off balance a lot and that you are having a hard time coordinating your movements. Those are among the symptoms of Spinocerebellar ataxia type 6, known as SCA6, a rare neurodegenerative disease which typically appears in adulthood and worsens over time. Over time, other problems such as slurred speech and difficulty seeing or seeing double, may also appear. It is estimated that fewer than 5,000 people in the US have the condition, which is the result of genetic mutations in the cerebellum. The disease currently has no cure. But this may change, thanks to a new discovery made by McGill researchers. In ...