At the close of 2023, Defra asked the British Ecological Society to bring together nearly 40 experts, to collate expert opinion on freshwater policy and set out a list of priorities for the biodiversity evidence programme to focus on. Published today, the new report sets out priorities for restoring England’s polluted fresh waters.  We know that England’s rivers, and the life they support, are in a desperate state. The River Trust’s annual State of Our Rivers report found that a mere 15% of rivers in England were classed as being in good ecological health and no ...

NASA’s BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the universe’s most powerful explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station. The spacecraft travels aboard SpaceX’s 30th Commercial Resupply Services mission, which lifted off at 4:55 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 21, from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After arriving at the station, BurstCube will be unpacked and later released into orbit, where it will detect, locate, and study short gamma-ray ...

Women experience disruptions in their sleep patterns and report heightened feelings of anger in the days leading up to their period, according to new research.  The study sheds new light on the intricate relationship between women's menstrual cycles, emotions, and sleep patterns.   Co-author Dr Jo Bower, of the University of East Anglia’s School of Psychology, said: “Our research provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between menstrual cycles, emotions, ...

Milan, Italy: Patients with breast cancer that has started to spread to the lymph nodes in the armpit can safely avoid extensive removal of the lymph nodes if their treatment is tailored to their response to cancer-killing therapies such as chemotherapy before surgery.   In a presentation to the 14th European Breast Cancer Conference today (Friday) in Milan, Annemiek Van Hemert, a doctor and PhD student in the Surgical Oncology Department of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek-Netherlands Cancer Institute (AVL-NKI) in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), said: “If we are able to predict the response based on the removal of ...

*This is an early press release from the European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2024) Venice 12-15 May. Please credit the Congress if using this material* New research being presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Venice, Italy (12-15 May), suggests that replacing sugar-sweetened food and drinks with low/no energy sweetened products can help weight control for at least one year after rapid weight loss in adults, without increasing the risk of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease. The findings of a year-long randomised controlled trial involving adults with overweight and obesity and children in the overweight range from Northern, Central and ...

BOSTON (MA), March 21, 2024 – This July, the 13th annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) returns to Boston, where leaders from the commercial sector, U.S. government agencies, and academic communities will assemble to highlight innovations and opportunities through our nation’s orbiting outpost. ISSRDC will take place July 30-August 1, 2024, at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston. Early registration is now open until May 24, 2024. Booking during early ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. –Twelve accomplished science and health journalists have been awarded a highly competitive fellowship in the Logan Science Journalism Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Now in its 37th year, the Logan Science Journalism Program provides journalists with immersive, hands-on research training, giving them invaluable insight into the practice of science as well as some of the major news stories of today. The program, which offers a Biomedical course and an Environmental course, will run May 13-23 in Woods Hole. Biographies for the 2024 Logan Science Journalism Fellows are here. They are: Biomedical Fellows Pakinam Amer, Independent ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Physicians and biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a method to visualize the growth of a placenta throughout a mouse’s pregnancy. By coupling an implantable window with ultrafast imaging tools, the approach provides the first opportunity to track placental development to better understand how the organ functions during pregnancy. This new perspective gives researchers a precise way to examine how lifestyle factors like alcohol consumption and health complications like inflammation can affect the placenta and potentially lead to adverse pregnancy outcomes. The research appears March 20 as the cover ...

The American Meteorological Society continuously publishes research on climate, weather, and water in its 12 journals. Many of these articles are available for early online access–they are peer-reviewed, but not yet in their final published form. Below is a selection of articles published early online recently. To view full article text, members of the media can contact kpflaumer@ametsoc.org for press login credentials. Observed Changes in Extreme Precipitation Associated with United States Tropical Cyclones Journal of Climate Rainfall ...

URBANA, Ill. – Agricultural occupations are  hazardous with one of the highest rates of workplace injuries and fatalities in the U.S. The manual and often strenuous nature of the work, combined with the use of machinery and exposure to environmental hazards create a challenging work environment. Understanding the nature and causes of injuries can help improve safety guidelines and policy measures. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of injuries is hindered by the absence of a central reporting system. Two ...

In a mouse study, UCLA researchers tested a vaccine against the bacterium that causes melioidosis and found it was highly protective against the disease, which is endemic in many tropical areas, causing approximately 165,000 cases with 89,000 fatalities around the world each year.  The bacterium, called Burkholderia pseudomallei, is spread through contact with contaminated soil and water through inhalation, ingestion or broken skin. It is so dangerous that it is categorized as a Tier 1 Select Agent of bioterrorism, and it can cause ...

The ability to simulate the behavior of systems at the atomic level represents a powerful tool for everything from drug design to materials discovery. A team led by Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers has developed machine learning interatomic potentials that predict molecular energies and forces acting on atoms, enabling simulations that save time and expense compared with existing computational methods. “Machine learning potentials increasingly offer an effective alternative to computationally ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of engineers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and including colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced in the journal Nature Communications that they had successfully built a tissue-like bioelectronic mesh system integrated with an array of atom-thin graphene sensors that can simultaneously measure both the electrical signal and the physical movement of cells in lab-grown human cardiac tissue. In a research first, this tissue-like mesh can grow along with the cardiac cells, ...

The solar energy world is ready for a revolution. Scientists are racing to develop a new type of solar cell using materials that can convert electricity more efficiently than today’s panels.  In a new paper published February 26 in the journal Nature Energy, a University of Colorado Boulder researcher and his international collaborators unveiled an innovative method to manufacture the new solar cells, known as perovskite cells, an achievement critical for the commercialization of what ...

The City University of New York (CUNY) Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) and the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH), in collaboration with Pfizer, are initiating a critical two-year prospective epidemiologic study in the spring of 2024 to track acute respiratory infections across the United States. Project PROTECTS (Prospective Respiratory Outcomes from Tracking and Evaluating Community-based TeSting) builds on the CHASING COVID Cohort Study, which has monitored SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and ...

UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center is hosting its 47th annual scientific symposium, “Pancreatic Cancer: From Discovery to the Clinic,” on May 21-22 at the Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The symposium is free and will feature 15 talks on the latest in pancreatic cancer basic, translational and clinical research by faculty at the University of North Carolina, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of Michigan ...

Many important medicines, such as antibiotics and anticancer drugs, are derived from natural products from Bacteria. The enzyme complexes that produce these active ingredients have a modular design that makes them ideal tools for synthetic biology. By exploring protein evolution, a team led by Helge Bode from the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, has found new "fusion sites" that enable faster and more targeted drug development. Industry often follows the assembly line principle: components are systematically assembled into complex products, with different production lines yielding different products. However, not humans are the ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 2020, a line of severe thunderstorms unleashed powerful winds that caused billions in damages across the Midwest United States. A technique developed by Penn State scientists that incorporates satellite data could improve forecasts — including where the most powerful winds will occur — for similar severe weather events. The researchers reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that adding microwave data collected by low-Earth-orbiting satellites to existing computer weather forecast models produced more accurate forecasts of surface gusts in a case study of the 2020 Midwest ...

A new study has shown that overall and cause-specific mortality rates in individuals in the U.S. with low-risk differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) are low. The study is published in the peer-reviewed journal Thyroid®, the official journal of the American Thyroid Association® (ATA®). Click here to read the article now. Cari Kitahara, PhD, from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and coauthors identified 51,854 individuals diagnosed with first primary DTC at low risk ...

Thanks to an unusual application of game theory and machine learning technology, a large team of scientists led by experts at Cincinnati Children’s has published the world’s most detailed “atlas” of the many types of stem cells and early progenitors involved in producing human blood from diverse donors. The team has identified more than 80 distinct subsets of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) – early-stage cells that kick off production of mature red cells, white cells ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As climate change worsens global drought conditions, hindering crop production, the search for ways to capture and store atmospheric carbon causing the phenomenon has intensified. Penn State researchers have developed a new high-tech tool that could spur changes in how crops withstand drought, acquire nitrogen and store carbon deeper in soil. In findings published in the January issue of Crop Science, they describe a process in which the depth of plant roots can be accurately estimated by scanning leaves with ...

Ammonia is one of the most widely produced chemicals in the world, and is used in a great many manufacturing and service industries. The conventional production technology is the Haber-Bosch process, which combines nitrogen gas (N2) and hydrogen gas (H2) in a reactor in the presence of a catalyst. This process requires high levels of temperature and pressure, resulting in substantial power consumption. Indeed, ammonia production is estimated to consume 1%-2% of the world’s electricity and to account for about 3% of global carbon emissions. In pursuit of more sustainable alternatives, researchers affiliated with the Center for Development of Functional Materials (CDMF) ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Forests and streams are separate but linked ecosystems, existing side by side, with energy and nutrients crossing their porous borders and flowing back and forth between them. For example, leaves fall from trees, enter streams, decay and feed aquatic insects. Those insects emerge from the waters and are eaten by birds and bats. An international team led by Penn State researchers has now found that these ecosystems appear to keep the energy exchanges in balance — a finding that the scientists called surprising. Scientists ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A product used to control pest slugs on farms in multiple countries is deadly to least one type of native woodland snail endemic to the Pacific Northwest, according to scientists who say more study is needed before the product gains approval in the United States. Dee Denver of the Oregon State University College of Science led a 10-week laboratory project that showed the effect of a biotool marketed as Nemaslug on the Pacific sideband snail. The study was published today in PLOS One. Nemaslug is based on the organism Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, a species of tiny, parasitic worm known as a nematode. The ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Blood vessels engineered from stem cells could help solve several research and clinical problems, from potentially providing a more comprehensive platform to screen if drug candidates can cross from the blood stream into the brain to developing lab-grown vascular tissue to support heart transplants, according to Penn State researchers. Led by Xiaojun “Lance” Lian, associate professor of biomedical engineering and of biology, the team discovered the specific molecular signals that can efficiently mature nascent stem cells into the endothelial cells that comprise the vessels and regulate exchanges to and ...