Annual tree-ring growth records from more than 122 species of trees show that trees growing in wetter forests are more sensitive to increasing drought. The findings – which tackle a research question that has yielded contradictory results in the past – suggest that land management and policy focused solely on drought effects in drier regions overestimates the resilience of forests in wetter regions. Forests cover roughly 30% of Earth’s surface and, in addition to providing a host of valuable ecosystem services and harboring huge biodiversity, they play a crucial role in the planet’s carbon cycle, absorbing more atmospheric carbon than all other terrestrial ...

A massive new review of ancient atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels and corresponding temperatures lays out a daunting picture of where the Earth’s climate may be headed. The study covers geologic records spanning the past 66 million years, putting present-day concentrations into context with deep time. Among other things, it indicates that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide consistently reached today’s human-driven levels was 14 million years ago—much longer ago than some existing assessments indicate. It asserts that long-term climate is highly sensitive to greenhouse gas, with cascading effects that may evolve over many millennia. The ...

In many parts of Africa, humans cooperate with a species of wax-eating bird called the greater honeyguide, Indicator indicator, which leads them to wild bees’ nests with a chattering call. By using specialised sounds to communicate with each other, both species can significantly increase their chances of accessing calorie-dense honey and beeswax. Human honey-hunters in different parts of Africa use different calls to communicate with honeyguides. In a new study, researchers have discovered that honeyguide birds in Tanzania and Mozambique discriminate among honey-hunters’ calls, responding much more readily to ...

 Embargoed: Not for Release Until 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time Thursday, Dec. 7 2023. Today atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest level in at least several million years thanks to widespread combustion of fossil fuels by humans over the past couple centuries. But where does 419 parts per million (ppm)—the current concentration of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere—fit in Earth’s history? That’s a question an international community of scientists, featuring key contributions by University of Utah geologists, is sorting out by examining a plethora of markers in the geologic record that offer ...

How heavy can an element be? An international team of researchers has found that ancient stars were capable of producing elements with atomic masses greater than 260, heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth. The finding deepens our understanding of element formation in stars. We are, literally, made of star stuff. Stars are element factories, where elements constantly fuse or break apart to create other lighter or heavier elements. When we refer to light or heavy elements, we’re talking about their atomic mass. Broadly speaking, atomic ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Engineers at Duke University and Harvard Medical School have developed a bio-compatible ink that solidifies into different 3D shapes and structures by absorbing ultrasound waves. Because it responds to sound waves rather than light, the ink can be used in deep tissues for biomedical purposes ranging from bone healing to heart valve repair. This work appears on December 7 in the journal Science. The uses for 3D-printing tools are ever increasing. Printers create prototypes of medical devices, design flexible, ...

For the first time, a team of Princeton physicists have been able to link together individual molecules into special states that are quantum mechanically “entangled.” In these bizarre states, the molecules remain correlated with each other—and can interact simultaneously—even if they are miles apart, or indeed, even if they occupy opposite ends of the universe. This research was recently published in the journal Science. “This is a breakthrough in the world of molecules because of the fundamental importance of quantum entanglement,” said Lawrence Cheuk, assistant professor of physics at Princeton ...

Key takeaways People in parts of Africa communicate with a wild bird, the greater honeyguide, to locate bee colonies and harvest their honey and beeswax. A study by UCLA anthropologist Brian Wood and other authors show how this partnership is maintained and varies across cultures. They demonstrate the bird’s ability to learn distinct vocal signals traditionally used by different honey-hunting communities.​​ In parts of Africa, people communicate with a wild bird — the greater honeyguide — in order to locate bee colonies and harvest their stores of honey and beeswax. It’s a rare example of ...

November 30, 2023 – Ongoing quality improvement data submitted by Board-certified plastic surgeons highlight current trends in surgical technique in cosmetic breast augmentation using implants, reports a study in the December issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  "The findings illustrate evolving trends in breast enhancement over the past 16 years, including factors like the location of the incision and the type and positioning of implants," comments lead author Michael J. Stein, ...

The Chirik Group at the Princeton Department of Chemistry is chipping away at one of the great challenges of metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization with a new method that uses a cobalt catalyst to differentiate between bonds in fluoroarenes, functionalizing them based on their intrinsic electronic properties. In a paper published this week in Science, researchers show they are able to bypass the need for steric control and directing groups to induce cobalt-catalyzed borylation that is meta-selective. The lab’s research ...

Human noroviruses cause acute gastroenteritis, a global health problem for which there are no vaccines or antiviral drugs. Although most healthy patients recover completely from the infection, norovirus can be life-threatening in infants, the elderly and people with underlying diseases. Estimates indicate that human noroviruses cause approximately 684 million illnesses and 212,000 deaths annually. “Human noroviruses are highly diverse,” said first author Dr. Wilhelm Salmen, a graduate student in Dr. B V Venkataram Prasad’s lab while he was working ...

When temperatures drop and roads get slick, rock salt is an important safety precaution used by individuals, businesses, and local and state governments to keep walkers, cyclists, and drivers safe. However, according to a new scientific review paper from a team of researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland, the human demand for salt comes at a cost to the environment. Published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment with researchers Stanley Grant, Megan Rippy, and Shantanu Bhide from Virginia Tech’s Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, ...

An unexpectedly high percentage of children, who were born with HIV and started treatment within 48 hours of life, exhibit biomarkers by 2 years of age that may make them eligible to test for medication-free remission, according to a multinational study published in Lancet HIV. “Moving away from reliance on daily antiretroviral therapy (ART) to control HIV would be a huge improvement to the quality of life of these children,” said Protocol Co-Chair and senior author Ellen Chadwick, MD, former Director of Section ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Modern-day Ciudad Mante, Mexico, could help Tampa, Florida, plan for shifting water and electricity demands due to climate change, according to an international team of researchers. Led by Renee Obringer, assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State, the researchers used utilities data and climate analogs — contemporary cities with climates close to what other cities are predicted to experience in the future — to assess how climate change may impact residential water and electricity use across 46 cities in the United States. Their computationally efficient model projected strong regional differences for future water and electricity ...

The lab of Yongchao C. Ma, PhD, at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago uncovered a novel mechanism that leads to motor neuron degeneration in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). This discovery offers a new target for treatment that overcomes important limitations of gene therapy and other current therapies for SMA. SMA is a genetic disease that disrupts the nerve cells that control voluntary muscle movement. Symptoms of motor neuron degeneration could start at as early as 3 months of ...

Investigators from the Mass General Cancer Center, a part of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, will present research discoveries and outcomes from clinical trials at the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, held December 9-12, 2023 in San Diego. ASH brings together leading experts in classical and malignant blood diseases to share the latest breakthroughs, clinical studies and research impacting the field and patient care. Mass General Cancer Center researchers will cover a wide range of topics, including ...

Recent advancements in AI and more specifically large language models such as ChatGPT have put a strain on data centers. AI models require huge amounts of data to train, and in order to move data between the processing units and memory, efficient communication links become necessary. For long distance communication, fiber optics has already been the go-to solution for decades. For short distance intra-data center communication, the industry is now also starting to adopt fiber optics due to its great performance compared to classical electrical links. Recent technological developments now even enable the switch from electrical to optical interconnect for very small distances, ...

INDIANAPOLIS—An international team of researchers including experts at the Indiana University School of Medicine has identified a protein found in the brains of people with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), discovering a new target for potential treatments for the disease. According to the National Institutes of Health, FTD results from damage to neurons in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. People with this type of dementia typically present symptoms, including unusual behaviors, emotional problems, trouble communicating, difficulty with work or in some cases difficulty with walking, ...

A partnership between ophthalmology researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University expands the understanding of how oxidative stress contributes to the development of choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). To study the roles oxidative stress, a condition in which the body lacks antioxidants, and hypoxia play in the progression of AMD, Johns Hopkins University researchers turned to CellSight, the ocular stem cell and regeneration research program in the CU Department of Ophthalmology, for tools that allow researchers to explore specific conditions ...

BOSTON – Mortality related to end stage liver disease is ranked as the 12th most common cause of death in the U.S. Liver transplantation remains the only treatment for end stage liver disease, but there is a critical shortage of organ donors, necessitating a dire need for new forms of treatment. New research from Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) found evidence that a novel stem cell treatment, using mRNA technology encapsulated into nanoparticles (LNP) that was ...

Published in the 2023 Volume 3 issue of Psychoradiology a team of dedicated researchers from The University of Hong Kong and The University of Electronic Science and Technology of China has conclusively identified the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) as a key input and causal regulator within the subcortical response inhibition nodes. This right-lateralized inhibitory control circuit, characterized by its significant intrinsic connectivity, highlights the crucial role of the rIFG in orchestrating top-down cortical-subcortical control, underscoring the intricate dynamics of brain function in response inhibition. In ...

Although SARS-CoV-2 is no longer a stranger to the immune system, new virus variants still pose a challenge. The working group led by Professor Dr Florian Klein, Director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Cologne and the Faculty of Medicine, has now published two studies investigating how the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 changes over time and how the immune system is preparing itself for new variants with clever strategies. The work has been published under the title ‘Enhanced ...

Sage has launched a tool to empower researchers to discover the real-world impact of their work on policy. Sage Policy Profiles lets researchers easily see specific citations of their work in policy documents and then illustrate and share that work’s impact graphically. The tool is powered by Overton, which hosts an extensive repository of global policy documents, guidelines, think-tank publications, and working papers. The free-of-charge, browser-based tool shows researchers where their work appears in evidence-based policies, offering insights into how policymakers make use of their research. Sage Policy Profiles presents these results ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have released a new, open-source platform called Cascade that can run artificial intelligence models in a way that slashes expenses and energy costs while dramatically improving performance. Cascade is designed for settings like smart traffic intersections, medical diagnostics, equipment servicing using augmented reality, digital agriculture, smart power grids and automatic product inspection during manufacturing – situations where AI models must react within a fraction of a second. With the rise of AI, many companies are eager to leverage new capabilities but worried about the associated computing ...

Maternal inflammation risk factors may be associated with dysregulation in children, according to a study funded by the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program at the National Institutes of Health. “Dysregulation” in this context refers to children’s attention, anxiety and depression, and aggression being measurably different from what is typically expected at their age.  While inflammation is a normal bodily response to injury or infection, ECHO investigators wanted to learn whether factors linked ...