When a severe drought hit California in 1977, the state ordered citizens to drastically reduce domestic water usage. Water restrictions put in place occurred after a heady mix of prosperity and radical urban planning had resulted in the construction of more than 150,000 private swimming pools in California in the 1960s. The result was a ubiquitous new landscape feature: empty concrete pools. Ulf Büntgen and colleagues document how this novel geographic resource inspired surfers to develop professional vertical skateboarding in Los Angeles and environs. Other causal factors included the development of polyurethane ...

Why did professional skateboarding arise in southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence, or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors? It’s fairly well-known that a drought in southern California in the mid-1970s led to a ban on filling backyard swimming pools, and these empty pools became playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the greater Los Angeles area. But a new cross-disciplinary study from the University of Cambridge shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s. The authors say that professional ...

It may soon be time to wake up and smell the lab-grown coffee made from cultured plant cells. But it’s not clear whether drinks from this product replicate coffee beans’ complex flavors. Now, a study in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found that some of the comforting aromas and tastes of a conventional cup of coffee could be reproduced by roasting and brewing coffee cell cultures. Coffee is one of the most popular beverages worldwide. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 23 billion pounds of beans are expected to be produced during the 2023­­–24 growing ...

In a Perspective, a biophysical chemist, Kenneth J. Breslauer, and his brother, a political scientist, George W. Breslauer, explore the parallelisms between the concept of stability as it is used in their respective fields. The workings of a cell or molecule are generally understood to be reducible to physics, but social and political events are thought to be structured by human agency and a generous helping of chance. However, both molecular systems and socio-political organizations can be said to exhibit stability, instability, or so-called “metastability,” a state of precarious and kinetic stability. For example, a chemical system can be metastable when molecules ...

UTSA has received a two-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish the National DigiFoundry (NDF), a consortium that has the potential to redefine the management of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies. To develop the NDF, UTSA will create a new Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a national organization that promotes engagement and collaboration between the public and private sectors. At a time when digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, have surpassed a trillion dollars in market value, this collaboration is paramount, according to John Huggins, interim executive director of UTSA’s National ...

Every year in the Christmas season it becomes clear again that some people are amazingly skilled singers, like Mariah Carey and George Michael. Their singing can stir strong emotions. Singing involves probably the most complex, and mostly hidden, movements humans and animal can make. To become a good singer, you need to learn how to coordinate the movements of hundreds of muscles in your body with extreme precision. Therefore, you need a lot of talent, and practice. We all know that athletes invest a lot of time exercising their limb ...

A new paper in Biology Methods & Protocols, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that researchers in Germany have developed a new system to display epitopes in mammal cells for immunization studies. They believe that this method can help scientists greatly in immunization efforts. Promoting blood cells to produce antibodies against a specific viral protein is an important step in developing vaccines for human use. This can be challenging for researchers because whether the subjects develop antibodies depends on how scientists design ...

Osaka, Japan – Patients with rare diseases have traditionally been the subjects of medical research. However, in recent years, their role has begun to shift from ‘research participants’ to ‘experts with a lived experience’, with some being involved in study planning, design and interpretation. Additionally they may soon be involved in helping pick the most important areas to prioritize for research. In a study published last month in the journal Research Involvement and Engagement, researchers from Osaka University created an online space, referred to as the ‘Evidence-generating Commons’, for conversation, collaboration and ...

Osaka, Japan – When you look up at the sky and see clouds of wondrous shapes, or struggle to peer through dense, hazy fog, you’re seeing the results of ‘Mie scattering’, which is what happens with light interacts with particles of a certain size. There is a growing body of research that aims to manipulate this phenomenon and make possible an array of exciting technologies. Now, in a study recently published in Nature Communications, a multi-institutional research team including Osaka University has overcome what were thought to be fundamental limitations of how to enhance the efficiency of Mie scattering. Researchers in the field ...

Dr. Dewi Langlet, a scientist at the Evolution, Cell Biology and Symbiosis Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), studies foraminifera, single-cell organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate. He and his collaborators have shown for the first time that the burrowing of single-celled organisms in marine ecosystems affects oxygen distribution and bacterial diversity in sea sediments. Their findings have been published in the journal Biogeosciences.  Foraminifera are mostly marine organisms ...

The exchange of energy and environment is inevitable in any physical system, so non-Hermitian systems that can be described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians are ubiquitous. There are two kinds of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, describing nonreciprocal systems with anisotropic coupling, also referred to as nonreciprocal coupling, and gain-loss systems. Three physicists won the Nobel physics prize for their discovery of topological phases and transitions in 2016. Recently, an emerging interplay of topological photonics and non-Hermitian photonics has ...

DOWNOADABLE VIDEO MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023 AT 8:45 P.M. ET) – Researchers conducting a Phase 2 clinical trial at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine say a new combination of antibody therapies produced a ‘surprisingly high’ response rate in patients with high-risk follicular lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Based on these initial findings – reported in an oral presentation at the 65th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition in San Diego, California, Dec. 9-12 – the research team plans to expand the number of trial participants ...

DOWNLOADABLE VIDEO IS AVAILABLE HERE MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023, AT 8:45 PM ET) – CAR-T cell therapy is a safe and effective treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), even for patients regarded as high risk due to comorbidities. That’s the conclusion of a five-year analysis of results from the U.S. Lymphoma CAR-T Cell Consortium, a group of 17 academic cancer centers in the U.S. Their findings will be presented at the American Society of Hematology’s 2023 annual meeting in San Diego, Dec. 9-12. “CAR-T has caused a paradigm shift in the treatment of patients with diffuse large B-cell ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — It’s official: The ketogenic diet proved to be effective at controlling polycystic kidney disease (PKD) in the first randomized controlled clinical trial of ketogenic metabolic therapy for PKD.   “I’m really happy about these clinical trial results,” said UC Santa Barbara biologist Thomas Weimbs, whose lab was part of an international collaboration to investigate the effect of the fasting response known as ketosis on the cysts that are the hallmark of the disease. “We now have the first evidence in humans that the cysts really don’t like ...

SAN DIEGO – Non-Hispanic Black patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are living longer, now that new therapies are available, according to a study presented by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center at the 65th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition (Abstract 955). In the past, the standard treatment for AML, a cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow, was intensive chemotherapy. Unfortunately, many older patients were ineligible ...

Ukraine may have lost about 20% of its scientific research capacity — time directly spent by scientists on research activities — as a consequence of the Russia-Ukraine war. The findings, published in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, also suggest that over 17% of scientists who were research active in Ukraine before the war may have left the scientific research sector by December 2022. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, there has been disruption to many sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including the Ukrainian scientific research sector. However, it has so far proved difficult to quantify many of the key impacts of the ...

Until the early morning of February 24th, 2022, Ukrainian scientist Olena Iarmosh did not believe there would be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iarmosh grew up and had settled in Kharkiv, her beloved city in Eastern Ukraine and only 40 km away from the Russian border, where she worked for more than 16 years as a lecturer in higher education before fleeing to Switzerland. At approximately 5AM, she awoke to the sounds of bombing, hoping that they were merely the loud sounds of technical maintenance at the local power plant. “My city looks worse now after the bombing than after two occupations by German troops,” ...

A striking and extremely rare half female, half male bird has been spotted by a University of Otago zoologist.   Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professor Hamish Spencer was holidaying in Colombia when an amateur ornithologist John Murillo pointed out a wild Green Honeycreeper with distinct half green, or female, and half blue, male, plumage.   “Many birdwatchers could go their whole lives and not see a bilateral gynandromorph in any species of bird. The phenomenon is extremely rare in birds, I know of no examples from New Zealand ever.   “It is very striking, I was very privileged to see it,” Professor Spencer says.   Photographs of the bird make ...

URBANA, Ill. – Nutrient runoff from agricultural production is a significant source of water pollution in the U.S., and climate change that produces extreme weather events is likely to exacerbate the problem. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at how extreme rainfall impacts runoff and suggests possible mitigation strategies. “We look at more than a decade of precipitation events in the state of Wisconsin and quantify the increase in nutrient runoff right around the event and at the end of the growing season. Climate ...

Peer-reviewed / Observational study / People The Lancet Oncology: Risk of dying from cancer in some poorer districts of England over 70% higher than wealthy districts, study suggests Analysis of the risk of dying from the most cancers with the largest death toll across the 314 districts in England finds that in 2019 the highest risks were in northern cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Hull and Newcastle, and in coastal areas to the east of London. The risk of dying from cancer before 80 years of age ranged from one in ten in Westminster to one in six in Manchester for women, and from one in eight in Harrow to one in five in Manchester ...

A spacecraft the size of a cereal box has collected precise measurements of the atmospheres of large and puffy planets called “hot Jupiters.” The findings, led by a team from the University of Colorado Boulder, could help reveal how the atmospheres around these and a host of other worlds are escaping into space. The observations are the first results to come from a hard-working NASA spacecraft known as the Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE).  Kevin France, principal investigator for the mission, will present the group’s results at a media availability Monday, Dec. 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the 2023 meeting of the American ...

DOWNLOADABLE VIDEO MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023 @ 7 P.M. ET) – In a study led by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, patients recently diagnosed with a common and aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia reported having improved quality of life when a newly approved drug was part of the treatment plan. Study results will be released during an oral presentation at the 65th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, the American Society of Hematology’s conference taking place in San Diego, California, Dec. 9-12. The ...

UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 00:01 AM (UK TIME) ON TUESDAY 12TH DECEMBER 2023   A rare roofed theatre, markets, warehouses, a river port and other startling discoveries made by a Cambridge-led team of archaeologists challenge major assumptions about the decline of Roman Italy. New findings from Interamna Lirenas, traditionally written off as a failed backwater in Central Italy, change our understanding of Roman history, its excavators believe. Their thirteen-year study – published today in the edited volume Roman Urbanism in Italy ...

Living through a historic pandemic while handling the stress of the first year of college sent one-third of students in a new study into clinical depression. That’s double the percentage seen in previous years of the same study. And while certain genetic factors appeared to shield first-year students in pre-pandemic years from depression, even students with these protective factors found themselves developing symptoms in the pandemic years. In fact, much of the overall rise in student depression during the pandemic was among young women with this kind of “genetic resilience.” But ...

On December 11, 2023, UC San Diego Health successfully completed the purchase of Alvarado Hospital Medical Center from Prime Healthcare. The acquisition of the 302-bed medical facility greatly expands the university’s growing network of clinics and hospitals to better serve patients with safe, timely and equitable access to high-quality health care.  “We are grateful to all the teams who contributed to this milestone merger with UC San Diego Health. Together, we start a new chapter to expand access to needed medical and surgical care in eastern ...