At the heart of a far-off galaxy, a supermassive black hole appears to have had a case of the hiccups.  Astronomers from MIT, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have found that a previously quiet black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy about 800 million light years away, has suddenly erupted, giving off plumes of gas every 8.5 days before settling back to its normal, quiet state.  The periodic hiccups are a new behavior that has not been observed in black ...

An overlooked and long-neglected type of forest has vast capacity to rebound, enhancing species diversity and resilience to climate change, according to an international team of forest scientists. According to new research, published today in the peer-reviewed science journal PLOS ONE, there is ample habitat for the Eurasian aspen, and these environments will continue to be suitable for this “keystone species” as the global climate warms. “The Eurasian aspen, and aspen species globally, are home to vast populations of other dependent plants and animals,” said the study’s lead author, Antonin Kusbach, an applied ecologist at Mendel University in ...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (March 27, 2024) — A pair of medications that make malignant cells act as if they have a virus could hold new promise for treating colorectal cancers and other solid tumors, reports a study published today in Science Advances. The preclinical research, led by Van Andel Institute scientists, determined how low doses of a DNMT inhibitor sensitize cancer cells to an EZH2 inhibitor, resulting in a one-two punch that combats cancer cells better than either drug alone. The findings are the foundation for an upcoming Phase I clinical trial to evaluate this combination ...

A new way of imaging the brain with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not directly detect neural activity as originally reported, according to scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute. The method, first described in 2022, generated excitement within the neuroscience community as a potentially transformative approach. But a study from the lab of McGovern associate investigator Alan Jasanoff, reported March 27, 2024, in the journal Science Advances, demonstrates that MRI signals produced by the new method are generated in large part by the imaging process itself, ...

“We find that a more sustainable, flexitarian diet increases the feasibility of the Paris Agreement climate goals in different ways,” says Florian Humpenöder, PIK scientist and co-lead author of the study to be published in Science Advances. “The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions related to dietary shifts, especially methane from ruminant animals raised for their meat and milk, would allow us to extend our current global CO2 budget of 500 gigatons by 125 gigatons and still stay within the limits of 1.5°C with a 50 percent chance,” he adds. Putting a price on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions ...

There are several factors that play an important role in the development of floods: air temperature, soil moisture, snow depth, and the daily precipitation in the days before a flood. In order to better understand how individual factors contribute to flooding, UFZ researchers examined more than 3,500 river basins worldwide and analysed flood events between 1981 and 2020 for each of them. The result: precipitation was the sole determining factor in only around 25% of the almost 125,000 flood events. Soil moisture was the decisive factor in just over 10% of cases, and ...

A systematic review of 35 years of global medical literature finds a spectrum of reasons why people sell kidneys. The study, by Bijaya Shrestha of the Center for Research on Education, Health and Social Science, Kathmandu, Nepal, finds limited efforts toward mitigating the problem as well as a lack of evidence around the impact of policy and biotechnology. It is published in the open access journal PLOS Global Public Health. Demand for kidney donation is higher than supply, and it has become one of the most saleable human ...

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists reversed an aggressive cancer, reverting malignant cells towards a more normal state. Rhabdoid tumors are an aggressive cancer which is missing a key tumor suppressor protein. Findings showed that with the missing tumor suppressor, deleting or degrading the quality control protein DCAF5 reversed the cancer cell state. These results suggest a new approach to curing cancer — returning cancerous cells to an earlier, more normal state rather than killing cancer cells with toxic therapies — may be possible. The results were published today in Nature.   “Rather than making a toxic event that kills rhabdoid ...

SAN ANTONIO — March 27, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute is leading two groundbreaking experiments — on the ground and in the air — to collect astronomical data from the total solar eclipse that will shadow a large swath of the United States on April 8, 2024. SwRI’s Dr. Amir Caspi leads the Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse (CATE) 2024 experiment, a broad scientific outreach initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, that will ...

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and the School of Chemistry have proposed a new approach to designing efficient light-emitting materials in a  paper published this week in Nature (27 March). Light-emitting materials are used in organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) that are now found in the majority of mobile ...

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 ...