EVANSTON, Ill. — When carbon molecules from plants enter the soil, they hit a definitive fork in the road. Either the carbon gets trapped in the soil for days or even years, where it is effectively sequestered from immediately entering the atmosphere. Or it feeds microbes, which then respire carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ever-warming environment. In a new study, Northwestern University researchers determined the factors that could tip plant-based organic matter in one direction or the other.  By combining laboratory experiments and molecular modeling, researchers ...

Climate change is already harming agricultural yields and may one day pose a significant threat to the world’s food supply. Engineering more resilient crops, including those able to thrive in the face of drought or high soil salinity levels, is an increasingly urgent need. A new study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, reveals details about how plants regulate their responses to stress that may prove crucial to those efforts. Researchers found that plants use their circadian clocks to respond to changes in external water and salt levels throughout the day. That same circuitry—an ...

Methods commonly used to measure poverty can lead to vastly different conclusions about who actually lives in poverty, according to a new Stanford University-led study. Based on household surveys in sub-Saharan Africa, the first-of-its-kind analysis, published Feb. 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscores the importance of accurately defining and measuring poverty. Its findings could help inform how governments, nonprofit organizations, and international development agencies allocate resources and evaluate the effectiveness of poverty-alleviation policies around the world. “They say you can’t manage what ...

The workings of the ultrasonic warning sounds produced by the wings of a species of moth have been revealed by researchers at the University of Bristol. Scientists recently discovered that moths of the genus Yponomeuta (so-called ermine moths) have evolved a very special acoustic defence mechanism against their echolocating predators—bats. Ermine moths produce ultrasonic clicking sounds twice per wingbeat cycle using a minute corrugated membrane in their hindwing. Strikingly, these moths lack hearing organs and are therefore not aware of their unique defence mechanism, nor do they have the capability to control it using muscular ...

A new analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the U.S. where jobs are most linked to fossil fuels. The research could help policymakers better identify and support areas affected over time by a switch to renewable energy. While many of the places most potentially affected have intensive drilling and mining operations, the study also measures how areas reliant on other industries, such as heavy manufacturing, could experience changes. The research examines the entire U.S. on a county-by-county level. “Our result ...

  THIS PRESS RELEASE IS EMBARGOED UNTIL FEBRUARY 5, 2024 at 3:00 PM U.S. EASTERN TIME   Many Indigenous peoples and local communities around the world are leading very satisfying lives despite having very little money. This is the conclusion of a study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), which shows that many societies with very low monetary income have remarkably high levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those in wealthy countries.  Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the well-being of people in low-income countries, and ...

Many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are difficult to diagnose before symptoms begin to appear. However, disease-related biomarkers such as aggregated proteins called amyloids could provide important insight much earlier, if they can be readily detected. Researchers publishing in ACS Sensors have developed one such method using an array of sensor molecules that can light up amyloids. The tool could help monitor disease progression or distinguish between different ...

Janelia scientists and longtime collaborators Eric Betzig and Harald Hess will be inducted into the 2024 class of the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their invention of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), a pioneering imaging technology that enables scientists to image live cells in super-resolution to study biological structures and processes in unprecedented detail. Betzig, a senior fellow at Janelia and an HHMI Investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, and Hess, a senior ...

Violence spreads in a contagious way like a disease among members of the Italian mafia, a new study shows. Researchers have found committing violent acts with others increases the likelihood people in these groups will go on to carry out more violent offences in the future. The analysis of the criminal careers of organised crime offenders shows previous violence has a “persistent and long-lasting” impact on their behaviour. Prior violent co-offending has a greater impact than prior violent solo offending on the probability of future violence. Prior violent co-offending increases the probability ...

Petrina Kamya, PhD, Head of AI Platforms and President of Insilico Medicine Canada, will present at the BIO CEO & Investor Conference happening Feb. 26-27 at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City. Dr. Kamya will speak as part of the panel “AI within Biopharma: Separating Value from Hype,” on Feb. 27, 1pm ET along with Michael Nally, CEO of Generate: Biomedicines and Liz Schwarzbach, PhD, CBO of BigHat Biosciences. The session will look at how the latest artificial intelligence (AI) tools – including generative AI and large language models – ...

“[...] fruitful efforts to bring more drugs from bench to bedside could only be possible if we do not leave them ‘midway’!” BUFFALO, NY- February 5, 2024 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on January 24, 2024, entitled, “The fate of drug discovery in academia; dumping in the publication landfill?” In this new editorial, researchers Uzma Saqib, Isaac S. Demaree, Alexander G. Obukhov, Mirza S. Baig, Amiram Ariel, and Krishnan Hajela, from Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore, discuss drug discovery—a tedious process that is time consuming in both divulging whether a molecule is efficacious and specific in hitting ...

In a warming climate, meltwater from Antarctica is expected to contribute significantly to rising seas. For the most part, though, research has been focused on West Antarctica, in places like the Thwaites Glacier, which has seen significant melt in recent decades. In a paper published Jan. 19 in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers at Stanford have shown that the Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica, which holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 10 feet, could be closer to runaway melting than anyone realized. “There hasn’t been much analysis in this region – there’s huge ...

Gastrointestinal cancers (GCs) are among the most common forms of cancer and account for as much as one-third of all cancer deaths worldwide. Early diagnosis is an effective way of reducing the mortality associated with GCs, and endoscopic screening has proved to be an excellent approach for detecting potentially malignant tumors. To extend the benefits of screening programs to as many people as possible, the imaging systems used should be inexpensive to manufacture and operate, yet accurate enough ...

Bariatric surgery is more effective in controlling hypertension rates, or high blood pressure, in people with obesity and uncontrolled high blood pressure compared to blood pressure medication alone, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. People who underwent bariatric surgery had lower BMI and were on fewer medications after five years while maintaining normal blood pressure levels than those who only used antihypertensive medications. According to the CDC, the U.S. obesity and hypertension rates in adults are 41.9% and 45.4%, respectively. Obesity is a known ...

Numerous studies have raised alarms about how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted learning, development and mental health among school-aged children. But few have focused on the effects felt by the 22 million children under age 6 who were not yet in school. Now a study published Feb. 5, 2024, in JAMA Pediatrics, led by researchers at Cincinnati Children’s in collaboration with the Cincinnati Public Schools, documents the pandemic’s harmful effects on kindergarten readiness. The findings are based on data from about 8,000 kindergartners who took ...

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. EAST LANSING, Mich. – As artificial intelligence technology advances, one area lags behind: voice-activated AI. For the more than 80 million people who stutter, voice AI technologies, which are increasingly being used in job hiring practices, can still be impossible to navigate. HeardAI, a multidisciplinary project from Michigan State University, Western Michigan University, and the nonprofit Friends: The National Association of Young People Who Stutter, has advanced to Phase 2 of the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program to ...

Lowder & Foudray Receive Funding For Fairfax County Peer Recovery Services Evaluability Assessment  Evan Marie Lowder, Assistant Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, and Chelsea Foudray, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Criminology, Law and Society, received funding from County of Fairfax for: "Fairfax County Peer Recovery Services Evaluability Assessment."  Lowder and Foudray are laying the groundwork for a formal evaluation of Fairfax County Peer Recovery Services (PRS) programming.   For ...

This work was adapted from articles by Elizabeth Boatman and Emily C. Dooley. Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL),  and UC Davis sheds new light on how to access the sugars locked up in plants to produce petroleum-free fuels, chemicals, and medicines.  Using microbes to convert grasses, weeds, wood, and other plant residues into sustainable products will be key to achieving carbon neutrality and could even help eliminate drug shortages. But cellulose, the tough tissue that makes up a large proportion of herbaceous and woody plant ...

Lin X. Chen, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has received the Senior Prize as part of the two 2023 Mildred Dresselhaus Guest Professorship Awards from the University of Hamburg, Germany. The award recognizes outstanding international women scientists and offers an opportunity for awardees to conduct research at the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging Cluster of Excellence. Chen has held a joint appointment as professor of chemistry at Northwestern University since 2007. “I am very honored ...

Hart Receives Funding For Boot Camp David M. Hart, Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government, received funding for: "2024 Climate-Tech Innovation Policy 'Boot Camp' for Early Career Researchers." Via this effort, Hart will build interpersonal bridges across the gap that separates the policy and research communities, sensitize researchers to the practical considerations that shape energy and climate innovation policy, and create new inter-disciplinary linkages among early-career researchers.  His long-term objective is to shape the research agendas of the participating scholars, so that they contribute as fully as ...

The Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Google deepen their strategic research partnership. With additional financial support from the U.S. IT company, the “Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction and Artificial Intelligence (VIA)”, which was only launched in November 2022 at the MPI in Saarbrücken, is establishing a new research area “Vision and Language Models (VLMs)”, led by Professor Bernt Schiele. This was presented by the Max Planck Directors Bernt Schiele and Christian Theobalt together with Google representatives to Saarland ...

New research is shedding light on food and beverage products linked to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and suggesting potential solutions for protecting the public. PFAS are known to be harmful to health: They can disrupt hormones, weaken bones and increase disease risk. Sometimes called “forever chemicals” because they take so long to break down, PFAS are used in fabrics, furniture and other household items—but they are also hard to get rid of. Recent tests now trace the chemicals to livestock, drinking water and food packaging, but little is known about the extent of that contamination. A new study, funded in part ...

SAN ANTONIO — February 5, 2024 - Southwest Research Institute has launched the latest phase of the transportation industry’s longest running commercial vehicle research consortium. Building on more than 33 years of research and development, the Clean Highly Efficient Decarbonized Engines 9 (CHEDE-9) consortium has expanded its scope from diesel-engine-focused research to a range of internal combustion engines and hybrid solutions. Formerly known as the Clean High-Efficiency Diesel Engine consortium, CHEDE-9 focuses on research of low- and net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) transportation technologies for light-duty passenger vehicles, heavy-duty commercial vehicles and large ...

They published their work on Feb. 2 in Energy Material Advances.   "The development of thin sulfide solid electrolyte layers is imperative" said paper author Xiayin Yao, a professor at the Laboratory of All-solid-state rechargeable battery, Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). "Although sulfide solid electrolyte is easy densified through cold pressing method, the freestanding membrane generally show a thickness greater than 500 μm. The thick and heavy layer of sulfide electrolyte results in less than ...

The production of aluminium generates around 180 million tonnes of toxic red mud every year. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, a centre for iron research, have now shown how green steel can be produced from aluminium production waste in a relatively simple way. In an electric arc furnace similar to those used in the steel industry for decades, they convert the iron oxide contained in the red mud into iron using hydrogen plasma. With this process, almost 700 million tonnes of CO2-free steel could be produced from the four billion tonnes of red ...