The Arctic is warming at approximately twice the global rate. A new study led by researchers from McGill University finds that cold-adapted Arctic species, like the thick-billed murre, are especially vulnerable to heat stress caused by climate change. "We discovered that murres have the lowest cooling efficiency ever reported in birds, which means they have an extremely poor ability to dissipate or lose heat," says lead author Emily Choy, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Natural Resource Sciences Department at McGill University. Following reports of the seabirds dying in their nests on sunny days, the researchers trekked the cliffs ...

Data from nine cities in Mexico confirms that identifying dengue fever “hot spots” can provide a predictive map for future outbreaks of Zika and chikungunya. All three of these viral diseases are spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Lancet Planetary Health published the research, led by Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, associate professor in Emory University’s Department of Environmental Sciences. The study provides a risk-stratification method to more effectively guide the control of diseases spread by Aedes aegypti. “Our results can help public health officials to do targeted, proactive interventions ...

Prostate cancer is the most diagnosed cancer and a leading cause of death by cancer in Australian men. Early detection is key to successful treatment but men often dodge the doctor, avoiding diagnosis tests until it's too late. Now an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed at RMIT University could catch the disease earlier, allowing for incidental detection through routine computed tomography (CT) scans. The tech, developed in collaboration with clinicians at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne, works by analysing CT scans for tell-tale signs of prostate ...

Phosphinoylazidation of alkenes is a direct method to build nitrogen- and phosphorus-containing compounds from feedstock chemicals. Notwithstanding the advances in other phosphinyl radical related difunctionalization of alkenes, catalytic phosphinoylazidation of alkenes has not yet been reported. Thus, efficient access to organic nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, and making the azido group transfer more feasible to further render this step more competitive remain challenging. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Hongli Bao from Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) reported the first iron-catalyzed phosphinoylazidation of alkenes under ...

The growing rate of ice melt in the Arctic due to rising global temperatures has opened up the Northwest Passage (NWP) to more ship traffic, increasing the potential risk of an oil spill and other environmental disasters. A new study published in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that an oil spill in the Canadian Arctic could be devastating--especially for vulnerable indigenous communities. "Infrastructure along the NWP in Canada's Arctic is almost non-existent. This presents major challenges to any response efforts in the case of a natural disaster," says Mawuli Afenyo, lead author, University of Manitoba researcher, and expert on the risks of Arctic shipping. Afenyo and his colleagues have developed a new ...

(Boston)--High-risk neuroblastoma is an aggressive childhood cancer with poor treatment outcomes. Despite intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy, less than 50 percent of these children survive for five years. While the genetics of human neuroblastoma have been extensively studied, actionable therapeutics are limited. Now researchers in the Feng lab at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), in collaboration with scientists in the Simon lab at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), have not only discovered why this cancer is so aggressive but also reveal a promising therapeutic approach to treat these patients. These findings appear online in the journal Cancer Research, a journal ...

An international research team has found that despite being the world's leading cause of pain, disability and healthcare expenditure, the prevention and management of musculoskeletal health, including conditions such as low back pain, fractures, arthritis and osteoporosis, is globally under-prioritised and have devised an action plan to address this gap. Project lead, Professor Andrew Briggs from Curtin University said more than 1.5 billion people lived with a musculoskeletal condition in 2019, which was 84 per cent more than in 1990, and despite many 'calls to action' and an ever-increasing ageing population, health systems continue to ...

Screens may be larger on smartphones now, but nearly every other component is designed to be thinner, flatter and tinier than ever before. The engineering requires a shift from shapely, and bulky lenses to the development of miniaturized, two-dimensional metalenses. They might look better, but do they work better? A team of Japan-based researchers says yes, thanks to a solution they published on July 7th in Applied Physics Express, a journal of the Japan Society of Applied Physics. The researchers previously developed a low-reflection metasurface -- an ultra-thin interface that can manipulate electromagnetic ...

Researchers from IDIBELL and the University of Barcelona (UB) have described that neurons derived from Parkinson's patients show impairments in their transmission before neurodegeneration. For this study, it has been used dopaminergic neurons differentiated from patient stem cells as a model. Parkinson's is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by the death of dopaminergic neurons. This neuronal death leads to a series of motor manifestations characteristic of the disease, such as tremors, rigidity, slowness of movement, or postural instability. In most cases, the cause of the disease is unknown, however, mutations in the LRRK2 gene are responsible for 5% of cases. Current therapies against Parkinson's are focus on alleviating the symptoms but do not stop its progression. It ...

Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered that changes in Earth's orbit may have allowed complex life to emerge and thrive during the most hostile climate episode the planet has ever experienced. The researchers - working with colleagues in the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Curtin University, University of Hong Kong, and the University of Tübingen - studied a succession of rocks laid down when most of Earth's surface was covered in ice during a severe glaciation, dubbed 'Snowball Earth', that lasted over 50 million years. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Communications. "One ...

By combining two distinct approaches into an integrated workflow, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) researchers have developed a novel automated process for designing and fabricating customised soft robots. Their method, published in Advanced Materials Technologies, can be applied to other kinds of soft robots--allowing their mechanical properties to be tailored in an accessible manner. Though robots are often depicted as stiff, metallic structures, an emerging class of pliable machines known as soft robots is rapidly gaining traction. ...

Despite having been formalized as a species in 1936, Wolbachia pipientis remains an elusive microbe. The reason why relates to the relationship it establishes with its hosts. Wolbachia lives inside the cells of 40% of the arthropods, in their majority insects, intertwined in a symbiosis so complex that it can no longer survive on its own. "Guessing what it takes to grow and manipulate it outside the host might not be possible", says Luís Teixeira, IGC principal investigator. And, so far, despite countless attempts, no one has succeeded in culturing this bacterium or modifying its genetic sequence. Before joining the team led by Luís Teixeira, Elves Duarte was interested in studying the symbiosis between ...

East Hanover, NJ. July 7, 2021. A team of researchers identified nine meaningful reasons that prevent people with disabilities from seeking employment. Their findings provide a much-needed understanding of this population's motives for remaining unemployed, which can inform programs and policies that promote labor force participation of people with disabilities. The article, "Understanding Persons with Disabilities' Reasons for Not Seeking Employment" (doi: 10.1177/00343552211006773) was published in Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin on April 15, 2021. The authors are Denise C. Fyffe, PhD, Anthony H. Lequerica, PhD, and John O'Neill, PhD, of Kessler Foundation; Courtney Ward-Sutton, PhD, and Natalie F. Williams, PhD, of Langston University; and Vidya Sundar, OT, PhD, ...

Palo Alto, CA--Dehydrated plant seeds can lay dormant for long periods--over 1,000 years in some species--before the availability of water can trigger germination. This protects the embryonic plant inside from a variety of environmental stresses until conditions are favorable for growth and survival. However, the mechanism by which the baby plant senses water and reactivates cellular activity has remained a mystery until now. New work jointly led by Carnegie's Yanniv Dorone and Sue Rhee and Stanford University's Steven Boeynaems and Aaron Gitler discovered a protein that plays a critical "go, or no-go" role in this process--halting germination if the soil's hydrological conditions are ...

The principle that form follows function does not only apply to design and architecture. It also applies to biology. Every organism is a universe that lives thanks to the activities of tens of thousands of nanomachines, whose functions depend on their forms. Biologists say macromolecular complexes instead of nanomachines and structure instead of form, but the idea is the same: know the form and you will understand the function. Now, a group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has helped determine the structure of a nanomachine essential for the functioning of another, mTOR, which plays fundamental roles in ...

A team led by researchers from Queen Mary University of London has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that is able to automatically measure the amount of fat around the heart from MRI scan images. Using the new tool, the team was able to show that a larger amount of fat around the heart is associated with significantly greater odds of diabetes, independent of a person's age, sex, and body mass index. The research is published in the journal Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and is the result of funding from the CAP-AI programme, which is led by Barts Life Sciences, a research and innovation partnership between Queen Mary University of London and Barts Health NHS Trust. The distribution of fat in the body can influence a person's ...

Many people instinctively associate mucus with something disgusting, but in fact, it has incredibly many valuable functions for our health. It keeps track of our important intestinal flora and feeds the bacteria. It covers all internal surfaces of our body, and, as a barrier to the outside world, it helps us protect ourselves from infectious diseases. This is because mucus acts as a filter that keeps the bacteria in or out, and the bacteria feed on the sugars in the mucus between meals. So, if we can produce the mucus that is already present in the body with the right sugars, it might be used in brand new medical treatments. Now, researchers from the DNRF Centre ...

Physicists of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have taken spectacular pictures that allow the ignition process of plasma under water to be viewed and tracked in real time. Dr. Katharina Grosse has provided the first data sets with ultra-high temporal resolution, supporting a new hypothesis on the ignition of these plasmas: In the nanosecond range, there is not enough time to form a gas environment. Electrons generated by field effects lead to the propagation of the plasma. The nanosecond plasma ignites directly in the liquid, regardless of the polarity of the voltage. The report from the Collaborative Research Centre 1316 "Transient Atmospheric Pressure Plasmas: from Plasma to Liquids to Solids" has been published in the Journal of Applied Physics and Rubin, the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Female vampire bats establish an egalitarian community within a roost rather than a society based on a clear hierarchy of dominance that is often seen in animal groups, a new study suggests. Researchers observed more than 1,000 competitions for food among a colony of 33 adult female bats and juveniles living in captivity, assigning a rank to each bat based on a calculation of wins and losses in those contests. The team found that, unlike in many mammal societies, the higher-ranking animal didn't necessarily win every bout over food, and there was a randomness to the ranking order - no specific quality they measured gave a bat a better chance at dominance, so any adult female had an equal opportunity to rank very high or very low on a scale of ...

Environmental education provision needs greater investment and innovation if future generations are to be able to respond fully to the climate emergency, experts have said. The deepening environmental crisis will continue to worsen if there is not significant support and investment in environmental and science education, researchers have warned. Reforms would help young people to address the complex, interlinked and dynamic issues of our contemporary situation. The experts argue Governments and other organisations must direct more funding to education innovation in response to consistent warnings from scientists about trends in the deteriorating state of ecosystems, biodiversity and climate, amongst other environmental issues. Writing in Environmental Education ...

In mosquitofish, of the genus Gambusia, male fish are smaller than females - sometimes only half the size. Biologists had previously assumed that smaller male mosquitofish had at least some reproductive advantages. Researchers from the transregional collaborative research centre NC³ at Bielefeld University have shown in a systematic review and meta-analysis that larger mosquitofish are actually more successful at reproduction: they can, for instance, better challenge their rivals; they produce more sperm; and they are preferred by female fish. The re-searchers are presenting their findings today (07.07.2021) in the Journal of Animal Ecology. Mosquitofish are small fish with nondescript coloring of the genus Gambusia, which contains some 45 species. ...

There are some large shield volcanoes in the world's oceans where the lava is usually not ejected from the crater in violent explosions, but flows slowly out of the ground from long fissures. In the recent eruption of the Sierra Negra volcano in the Galapagos Islands, which lie just under a thousand kilometres off South America in the Pacific Ocean, one of these fissures was fed through a curved pathway in June 2018. This 15 kilometre-long pathway, including the kink, was created by the interaction of three different forces in the subsurface, Timothy Davis and Eleonora Rivalta from the GFZ German ...

Driving through a tunnel is a challenging and risky task. Drivers need to lower their speed and adapt to poor light, while the enclosed space may make them anxious. Preventing accidents is a public health challenge that uses insights from engineering, psychology, physiology, and neuroscience. Here, in a virtual reality (VR) study in Frontiers in Psychology, scientists from China, Canada, and the USA show that playback of slow music inside tunnels can reduce tension and fatigue in drivers, making them less prone to speeding and overtaking. These results imply that well-chosen background music can help improve road safety. "When drivers go through a tunnel, they need to process a large amount ...

How do predators know to avoid brightly-coloured toxic prey? A collaboration of researchers has put social information theory to the test in a reliable real-world system to find the answer - by copying what others do, or do not, eat. An international team of researchers from Finland, New Zealand, Colombia and the U.K. have provided the first evidence that wild birds can learn to avoid distasteful prey by observing what others eat. "We've known for a long time that predators, like birds, associate brightly coloured warning signals with the danger of eating certain prey types. However, ...

Imagine a dust particle in a storm cloud, and you can get an idea of a neutron's insignificance compared to the magnitude of the molecule it inhabits. But just as a dust mote might affect a cloud's track, a neutron can influence the energy of its molecule despite being less than one-millionth its size. And now physicists at MIT and elsewhere have successfully measured a neutron's tiny effect in a radioactive molecule. The team has developed a new technique to produce and study short-lived radioactive molecules with neutron numbers they can precisely control. They hand-picked several isotopes of the same molecule, each with one more neutron than the next. When they measured each molecule's energy, they were able to detect small, nearly imperceptible changes of the nuclear ...