The sharp eyes of an eagle, the extraordinary hearing of an owl - to successfully find food, the eyes and ears of birds have adapted optimally to their living conditions. Until now, the sense of smell has played a rather subordinate role. When meadows are freshly mowed, storks often appear there to search for snails and frogs. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Radolfzell and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have now studied the birds' behavior and discovered that the storks are attracted by the smell of the mown grass. Only storks that were downwind and could thus perceive the smell reacted to the mowing. The scientists also sprayed a meadow with a spray of green leaf scents released during mowing. Storks appeared here as well. This ...

Recall a phone number or directions just recited and your brain will be actively communicating across many regions. It is thought that working memory relies on interactions between these regions, but how these brain areas interact and properly represent memory has remained a mystery. At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Nuo Li, assistant professor of neuroscience and a McNair Scholar, and his colleagues investigated the nature of the communication between brain regions involved in working memory and found evidence that a modular network organization is critical for ...

The function of a protein can depend on its abundance in a cell. So, when investigating the properties of a new protein, it is essential to make sure that the same amount is produced by every cell. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University have found a new way to do just that through the creation of new genetic circuits called Equalizers. The findings, in the current edition of Nature Communications, show how researchers engineered these genetic circuits to buffer protein output from variations in the number of copies of the gene inside the cell, thereby helping to create consistent protein expression. This property is called "gene dosage compensation." The researchers use an analogy of heating ...

 Pure quantum systems can undergo phase transitions analogous to the classical phase transition between the liquid and gaseous states of water. At the quantum level, however, the particle spins in states that emerge from phase transitions display collective entangled behavior. This unexpected observation offers a new avenue for the production of materials with topological properties that are useful in spintronics applications and quantum computing.  The discovery was made by an international collaboration led by Julio Larrea, a professor at the University of São ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- You know your dog gets your gist when you point and say "go find the ball" and he scampers right to it. This knack for understanding human gestures may seem unremarkable, but it's a complex cognitive ability that is rare in the animal kingdom. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, can't do it. And the dogs' closest relative, the wolf, can't either, according to a new Duke University-led study published July 12 in the journal Current Biology. More than 14,000 years of hanging out with us has done a curious thing to the minds of dogs. They have what are known as "theory of mind" abilities, or mental skills allowing them to infer what humans are thinking and feeling in some situations. The study, a comparison of 44 ...

Astronomers have made the rare sighting of two stars spiralling to their doom by spotting the tell-tale signs of a teardrop-shaped star. The tragic shape is caused by a massive nearby white dwarf distorting the star with its intense gravity, which will also be the catalyst for an eventual supernova that will consume both. Found by an international team of astronomers and astrophysicists led by the University of Warwick, it is one of only very small number of star systems that has been discovered that will one day see a white dwarf star reignite its core. New research published by the team today (12 July) in Nature Astronomy confirms that the two stars are ...

Researchers from the Buck Institute and Stanford University have created an inflammatory clock of aging (iAge) which measures inflammatory load and predicts multi-morbidity, frailty, immune health, cardiovascular aging and is also associated with exceptional longevity in centenarians. Utilizing deep learning, a form of AI, in studies of the blood immunome of 1001 people, researchers also identified a modifiable chemokine associated with cardiac aging which can be used for early detection of age-related pathology and provides a target for interventions. Results are published in Nature Aging. "Standard immune metrics which can be used to identify individuals most at risk for developing single or even multiple chronic diseases ...

According to the study, Australia, Indonesia and the USA provide the largest carbon storage potential with their coastal ecosystems. The team also calculated which countries benefit most from the coastal CO2 uptake worldwide. The different ways in which countries are affected by climate change are quantified by using the so-called social costs of carbon. "If we take into account the differences in marginal climate damages that occur in each country, we find that Australia and Indonesia are clearly the largest donors in terms of globally avoided climate damages originating from coastal CO2 uptake, as they themselves derive comparatively little benefit ...

Many exoplanets have opaque atmospheres, obscured by clouds or hazes that make it hard for astronomers to characterize their chemical compositions. A new study shows that haze particles produced under different conditions have a wide range of properties that can determine how clear or hazy a planet's atmosphere is likely to be. Photochemical reactions in the atmospheres of temperate exoplanets lead to the formation of small organic haze particles. Large amounts of these photochemical hazes form in Earth's atmosphere every day, yet our planet has relatively clear skies. The reason has to do with how ...

A diet rich in fermented foods enhances the diversity of gut microbes and decreases molecular signs of inflammation, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine. In a clinical trial, 36 healthy adults were randomly assigned to a 10-week diet that included either fermented or high-fiber foods. The two diets resulted in different effects on the gut microbiome and the immune system. Eating foods such as yogurt, kefir, fermented cottage cheese, kimchi and other fermented vegetables, vegetable brine drinks, and kombucha tea led to an increase in overall microbial diversity, with stronger effects from larger servings. ...

You're as old as your immune system. Investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have built an inflammatory-aging clock that's more accurate than the number of candles on your birthday cake in predicting how strong your immune system is, how soon you'll become frail or whether you have unseen cardiovascular problems that could become clinical headaches a few years down the road. In the process, the scientists fingered a bloodborne substance whose abundance may accelerate cardiovascular aging. The story of the clock's creation will be published July 12 in Nature Aging. "Every year, the calendar tells us we're a year older," said David ...

The cave of Satsurblia was inhabited by humans in different periods of the Paleolithic: Up to date a single human individual dated from 15,000 years ago has been sequenced from that site. No other human remains have been discovered in the older layers of the cave. The innovative approach used by the international team led by Prof. Ron Pinhasi and Pere Gelabert with Susanna Sawyer of the University of Vienna in collaboration with Pontus Skoglund and Anders Bergström of the Francis Crick Institute in London permits the identification of DNA in samples of environmental ...

Boosting the body's own disease-fighting immune pathway could provide answers in the desperate search for new treatments for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis still represents an enormous global disease burden and is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. Led by WEHI's Dr Michael Stutz and Professor Marc Pellegrini and published in Immunity, the study uncovered how cells infected with tuberculosis bacteria can die, and that using new medicines to enhance particular forms of cell death decreased the severity of the disease in a preclinical model. At a glance Researchers were able to demonstrate that cells infected with tuberculosis bacteria have functional ...

Ants are omnipresent, and we often get blisters after an ant bite. But do you know the molecular mechanism behind it? A research team led by Professor Billy K C CHOW from the Research Division for Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with Dr Jerome LEPRINCE from The Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) and Professor Michel TREILHOU from the Institut National Universitaire Champollion in France, have identified and demonstrated a novel small peptide isolated from the ant venom can initiate an immune pathway via a pseudo-allergic receptor MRGPRX2. The study ...

Rather than waiting for certainty in sea-level rise projections, policymakers can plan now for future coastal flooding by addressing existing inequities among the most vulnerable communities in flood zones, according to Stanford research. Using a methodology that incorporates socioeconomic data on neighborhood groups of about 1,500 people, scientists found that several coastal communities in San Mateo County, California - including half the households in East Palo Alto - are at risk of financial instability from existing social factors or anticipated flooding through 2060. Even with coverage from flood insurance, these residents would not be able to pay for damages from flooding, which could lead to homelessness or bankruptcy ...

Led by Professor Robert Read and Dr Jay Laver from the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre and the University of Southampton, the work is the first of its kind. Together they inserted a gene into a harmless type of a bacteria, that allows it to remain in the nose and trigger an immune response. They then introduced these bacteria into the noses of healthy volunteers via nose drops. The results, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, showed a strong immune response against bacteria that cause meningitis. Published in ...

Through a complex, self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, colorectal cancer cells make room for their own expansion by driving surrounding healthy intestinal cells to death - while simultaneously fueling their own growth. This feedback loop is driven by an activator of the innate immune system. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the University of Heidelberg discovered this mechanism in the intestinal tissue of fruit flies. Maintaining the well-functioning state of an organ or tissue requires a balance of cell growth and differentiation on the one hand, and the elimination of defective cells on the other. The intestinal epithelium is a well-studied example of this balance, termed "tissue homeostasis": Stem cells ...

North Carolina State University researchers found that a four-week training course made a substantial difference in helping special education teachers anticipate different ways students with learning disabilities might solve math problems. The findings suggest that the training would help instructors more quickly identify and respond to a student's needs. Published in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, researchers say their findings could help teachers in special education develop strategies to respond to kids' math reasoning and questions in advance. They also say the findings point to the importance of mathematics education preparation for special education teachers - an area where researchers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- As typical social and academic interaction screeched to a halt last year, many young people began experiencing declines in mental health, a problem that appeared to be worse for those whose connections to family and friends weren't as tight, a new study has found. In June 2020, researchers invited participants in an ongoing study of teenage boys and young men in urban and Appalachian Ohio to complete a survey examining changes to mood, anxiety, closeness to family and friends, and other ways the pandemic affected their lives. The study, co-led by researchers at The Ohio State University and Kenyon College, appears in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Nearly a third of the 571 participants reported that their mood ...

Chemotherapy is widely used to treat cancer patients. During the treatment, chemotherapeutic agents affect various biochemical processes to kill or reduce the growth of cancer cells, which divide uncontrollably in patients. However, the cell-damaging effect of chemotherapy affects cancer cells but also in principle many other cell types, including cycling blood cells. This puts the hematopoietic system under severe stress and pushes hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the bone marrow to produce fresh cells and replenish the stable pool of differentiated blood cells in the body. Researchers from the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, together with colleagues from the University of Freiburg, Lyon, Oxford, and St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, now discovered ...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Some LGBTQ+ people want to be part of faith communities. And though they have concerns about inclusion, they hope to find a faith community that feels like a home, based on West Virginia University research. Megan Gandy, BSW program director at the WVU School of Social Work, is a lesbian and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian whose personal experiences told a story that differed from research available in 2015 when she conceptualized her study. Gandy said the existing research either focused on the positive impacts of faith communities (which excluded LGBTQ+ people) ...

LAWRENCE -- Substance use disorder has long been considered a key factor in cases of parental neglect. But new research from the University of Kansas shows that such substance abuse does not happen in a vacuum. When examining whether parents investigated by Child Protective Services engaged in neglectful behaviors over the past year, a picture emerges that suggests case workers should look at substance misuse within the context of other factors, like mental health and social supports, to better prevent child neglect and help families. KU researchers analyzed data of parents investigated ...

Proteomics produces enormous amounts of data, which can be very complex to analyze and interpret. The free software platform MaxQuant has proven to be invaluable for data analysis of shotgun proteomics over the past decade. Now, Jürgen Cox, group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and his team present the new version 2.0. It provides an improved computational workflow for data-independent acquisition (DIA) proteomics, called MaxDIA. MaxDIA includes library-based and library-free DIA proteomics and permits highly sensitive and accurate data analysis. Uniting data-dependent and data-independent acquisition into one world, MaxQuant 2.0 is a big step towards improving applications ...

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from the University of Southern California have performed genetic analysis of a Russian sunflower collection and identified genetic markers that can help predict the oil's fatty acid composition. The research was published in BMC Genomics. Genomic selection, which helps quickly create new crop varieties, has been a much-discussed topic worldwide for the last 10 years. DNA sequencing and extensive genotyping have been applied to obtain genetic profiles of crops. When analyzed and compared to field data, those profiles help identify genetic ...

A study by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found that as the type of COVID-19 misinformation rectified by Singapore's mainstream news media evolved over the course of the pandemic, the role played by the media in debunking those myths became increasingly important to citizens in the nation's fight to manage the outbreak. Out of 2,000 news articles on COVID-19 published between 1 January to 30 April 2020, the NTU team analysed 164 news articles. The team observed that news reports correcting science and health-related COVID-19 misinformation were dominant at the start of the outbreak ...