As Brazil seeks ways to protect its crucial Amazon Forest, a new study shows that excusing private landowners from conserving their precious land has come at a steep cost to global sustainability. In this week’s Nature Communications Earth & Environment, scientists at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (MSU-CSIS) as well as Brazil and the UK found that since 2012 more than half of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has taken place on designated private conservation areas within rural private properties. However, ...

CLEVELAND–By discovering how zebrafish use their hair cells to detect distant movement, a team of Case Western Reserve scientists may have found a path to help explain human hearing loss.   Even though the tiny water creatures and humans would appear to have nothing in common, the structure and function of the hair cells on zebrafish skin are nearly identical to cochlear hair cells found in the human inner ear.   In addition, both the fish and human cell receptors have a type of protein known as an “ion channel,” which converts the waves that the cells detect into electrical impulses that carry useful information.   However, in humans, ...

Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a study published in the journal Ecology Letters reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes. “There’s a fair amount of biodiversity research on fire and plants,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with UC CooperativeExtension who is based at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and is the study’s lead author. Research has shown that in ecosystems where fire is a natural and regular occurrence, there ...

A key source of information underpinning the upcoming National Climate Assessment suggests that heavy precipitation days historically experienced once in a century by Americans could in the future be experienced on several occasions in a lifetime.  Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) report that extremely intense days of rain or snow will be more frequent by the end of this century than previously thought ...

A spin-out company from the graphene innovation ecosystem at The University of Manchester has formed an international partnership that will spearhead an unprecedented scale-up of graphene-based technologies intended “to make a substantial impact on global CO2 emissions”.            UK-based Graphene Innovations Manchester Ltd (GIM), founded by University of Mancheser graduate Dr Vivek Koncherry, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Quazar Investment Company to create a new company in the UAE. Graphene innovation has " This agreement - ...

“ChatGPT is a very impressive tool,” said paper author Zijian Hong, professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, China. “As a computational materials scientist, I’m always eager to embrace new tools, in particular, new tools in computer science and AI. Since the born of the new ChatGPT, I’m just wondering whether such a tool can assist us in computational materials science”   Hong explained that for a computational materials task, there are three main steps: building a model or a structure, writing ...

Three-dimensional simulations shed light on how energy dissipates within non-Newtonian fluids (fluids in which viscosity depend on the shear rate.)  The result is valuable in the context of disaster forecast and management or industrial production.  Elastoviscoplastic (EVP) fluids like mud, concrete, and lava are a type of non-Newtonian fluid that exhibit both solid and fluid-like behavior depending on the forces they are subjected to (i.e., applied stress). Their flow behavior is more complex than that of Newtonian fluids, such as water and air, which have a constant viscosity. In a recent study, researchers ...

Researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California San Diego have revealed that receiving an inhibitory signal (stop signal) associated with negative food conditions can decrease brain dopamine levels in dancing honeybees. The study was published in Current Biology on April 13. Dopamine is known as the feel-good neurotransmitter—a chemical that ferries information between neurons. In multiple animals, dopamine is involved in arousal, cognition, and sensitivity to stimuli. It is also associated with seeking and wanting behavior, particularly ...

About The Study: In this analysis of more than 5 million hospitalizations between 2020 and 2022, health care–associated infection (HAI) occurrence among inpatients without COVID-19 was similar to that during 2019 despite additional pressures for infection control and health care professionals. The findings suggest that patients with COVID-19 may be more susceptible to HAIs and may require additional prevention measures.  Authors: Kenneth E. Sands, M.D., M.P.H., of HCA Healthcare in Nashville, 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.2023.8059) Editor’s ...

About The Study: The findings of this study including more than 3 million patients receiving the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine suggest that retinal vascular occlusion (RVO) diagnosed acutely after vaccination occurs extremely rarely at rates similar to those of two different historically used vaccinations, the influenza and tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (Tdap) vaccines. No evidence suggesting an association between the mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and newly diagnosed RVO was found. Authors: Rishi P. Singh, M.D., of ...

In the run-up to the 2020 election, people appear to have become savvier in spotting misinformation online: clicks onto unreliable websites have declined, according to a new Stanford study published April 13 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. According to prior research, some 44.3 percent of Americans visited websites during the 2016 U.S. election that repeatedly made false or misleading information.  During the 2020 election, Stanford scholars saw that number drop by nearly half to 26.2 percent. While these findings ...

Researchers at Curtin University have identified the genetic signature of pre-malignant liver cells, offering potentially significant implications for the almost 3,000 Australians diagnosed with the deadly cancer each year. The study, published in the prestigious journal Cell Genomics, found that quantifying pre-malignant liver cells in patients with liver disease could help determine their future risk of developing liver cancer. First author Dr Rodrigo Carlessi, from the Curtin Medical School and the Curtin Health Innovation Research Institute, said the discovery had the potential to save lives by changing how chronic liver disease patients ...

Choosing a checkout line in a supermarket might seem like a no-brainer, but it can actually involve a complex series of cerebral computations. Maybe you count the number of shoppers in each line and pick the shortest, or estimate the number of items on each conveyor belt. Perhaps you quickly weigh up both shoppers and items and maybe even the apparent speed of the cashier... In fact, there are a multiplicity of strategies for solving this problem.  So how does the brain know how to make decisions ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- 'Tis the season for hiking now that spring has arrived and temperatures are on the upswing. But with hikes come insect bites and on the increase in North America is babesiosis, a malaria-like disease spread especially between May and October by a tick. Indeed, recent research suggests an increase in the incidence of diseases transmitted by ticks around the world, not just the United States and Canada, due likely to climate change and other environmental factors. Among the tick-borne pathogens, Babesia parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, are considered a serious ...

LA JOLLA, CA— Two prominent origin-of-life chemists have published a new hypothesis for how the first sugars—which were necessary for life to evolve—arose on the early Earth. In a paper that appeared on April 13, 2023, in the journal Chem, the chemists from Scripps Research and the Georgia Institute of Technology propose that key sugars needed for making early life forms could have emerged from reactions involving glyoxylate (C2HO3–), a relatively simple chemical that plausibly existed on the Earth before life evolved. “We show that our new hypothesis has key advantages over the more traditional view ...

Offshore wind farms in the North Sea reduce the population of loons –fish-eating aquatic birds also known as divers – by 94% within a one-kilometre zone, according to new research published in Scientific Reports. The findings highlight the need to minimise the impact of offshore wind farms on seabirds, while balancing this effort with the demand for renewable energy. Previous research has found that different seabird species respond to offshore windfarms differently – they may avoid the area which can lead to habitat displacement or they may be attracted to the area which can increase mortality via collisions with the turbines. However, it is difficult ...

Male bees display a remarkable passion for collecting scents: they deposit scents from various sources in special pockets on their hind legs, thus composing their own fragrance. This behaviour has been known since the 1960s. The reason why they do it has been the subject of much speculation just as long. Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of California at Davis and the University of Florida at Fort Lauderdale, have finally solved the mystery. The bee fragrance serves as a sex attractant and increases the reproductive success of the males, as the team found out after three years ...

A high-throughput single-cell single-mitochondrial genome sequencing technology known as iMiGseq has provided new insights into mutations of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and offers a platform for assessing mtDNA editing strategies and genetic diagnosis of embryos prior to their implantation. An international team of researchers, led by KAUST stem cell biologist Mo Li, has now quantitatively depicted the genetic maps of mtDNA in single human oocytes (immature eggs) and blastoids (stem cell-based synthetic embryos)[1]. This has revealed molecular features of rare mtDNA mutations that cause maternally inherited diseases. Mitochondria, the ...

A multi-state study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) VISION Network confirms that the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine has provided children and adolescents, ages 5-17, with protection against both moderate and severe COVID-19 outcomes. The study found that for 12-17 year olds, vaccine effectiveness was high against the Delta variant but lower during Omicron dominance, including BA.4 and BA.5. Due to the youngest age (5-11) group’s ineligibility for vaccination during Delta predominance, vaccine effectiveness could be estimated for these children only during the Omicron predominant ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [April 13, 2023] — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) and the NCCN Foundation® today announced four winners for the 2023 NCCN Foundation Young Investigator Awards. These annual awards honor up-and-coming leaders in oncology research working to investigate and advance cancer care. The honorees will each receive up to $150,000 in funding for projects that will run over two years. The selection process is overseen by the NCCN Oncology Research Program (ORP) which will also provide oversight. “It is a privilege to support these emerging innovators ...

We are often attracted to others with whom we share an interest, but that attraction may be based on an erroneous belief that such shared interests reflect a deeper and more fundamental similarity—we share an essence—according to research published by the American Psychological Association. “Our attraction to people who share our attributes is aided by the belief that those shared attributes are driven by something deep within us: one’s essence,” said lead author Charles Chu, PhD, an assistant professor at the Boston University Questrom School of Business. “To put it concretely, we like someone who agrees with us on a political issue, shares our music ...

Today the Biophysical Journal is launching a new initiative, the Postdoctoral Reviewer Program. The program provides postdoctoral researchers in biophysics the opportunity to partner with Associate Editors and complete reviews that will be used in deciding whether articles will be accepted for publication. Candidates for this program must be in a postdoctoral position during the 2023–2024 academic year and a member of BPS in good standing. Applications for the new program will be accepted through July 1 for a single-year term beginning in September 2023. Interested candidates can find more information about the program and application process online. “I am extremely ...

Newcastle University researchers have created environmentally-friendly, high-efficiency photovoltaic cells that harness ambient light to power internet of Things (IoT) devices. Led by Dr Marina Freitag, the research group from the from School of Natural and Environmental Sciences (SNES) created dye-sensitized photovoltaic cells based on a copper(II/I) electrolyte, achieving an unprecedented power conversion efficiency of 38% and 1.0V open-circuit voltage at 1,000 lux (fluorescent lamp). The cells are non-toxic and environmentally friendly, setting a new standard for sustainable ...

The iconic image of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87—sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy, orange donut”—has gotten its first official makeover with the help of machine learning. The new image further exposes a central region that is larger and darker, surrounded by the bright accreting gas shaped like a “skinny donut.” The team used the data obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2017 and achieved, for the first time, the full resolution of the array. In 2017, the EHT collaboration used a network of seven pre-existing telescopes ...

By using a new method, precious metals can be efficiently recovered from thin-film solar cells. This is shown by new research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. The method is also more environmentally friendly than previous methods of recycling and paves the way for more flexible and highly efficient solar cells. Today there are two mainstream types of solar cells. The most common is silicon-based and accounts for 90 percent of the market. The other type is called thin-film solar cells which in turn uses three main sub-technologies, one of which is known as CIGS ...