Over the past few decades, it has become obvious that climate change, and consequent extreme weather events, can wreak havoc on crop yields. Concerningly, there is a large disparity in agricultural vulnerability between developed and developing countries. In a new study, researchers have looked at major food grains in India to understand the long- and short-term effects of climate change on crop yields. “Most studies that measure the effects of climate change are looking at year-to-year changes, which are representative of variations in weather and not climate,” said Madhu Khanna (CABBI), a professor of agriculture ...

Plant diseases pose a significant threat to nations across the globe, owing to the financial burden they impose and the impact they have on food security. Healthy crops sustain millions of livelihoods, and accurate diagnosis of plant diseases allows for timely interventions to ensure sufficient crop production with minimal yield loss. Traditional approaches to disease recognition typically follow two paths. The first relies on crop inspection by trained experts, while the second leverages neural networks ...

Researchers have developed a new method to distinguish between cancerous and healthy stem cells and progenitor cells from samples of patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a disease driven by malignant blood stem cells that have historically been difficult to identify. The findings, published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, pave the way for the development of new techniques to predict whether patients will respond to chemotherapy. AML is a type of cancer characterised by the rapid growth and accumulation of abnormal white blood cells. ...

Kamaljeet Sanghera, Executive Director, Institute for Digital InnovAtion (IDIA), Research and Innovation Initiatives; Professor, Information Sciences and Technology, received funding to design and deliver a pilot of a summer, hands-on experience for 20 high school students.  Sanghera will leverage IBM artificial intelligence (AI) kits to help the students gain technical skills, knowledge, and abilities in AI and an understanding of its ethical and social impact.  Sanghera received $150,000 from Trenchant Analytics, LLC, on a subaward from the ...

(Toronto, April 24, 2023) JMIR Publications and the Society of Digital Psychiatry (SODP) have announced a new partnership aimed at advancing research in the field of digital mental health. This collaboration will focus on supporting education and knowledge sharing in the fast moving world of digital psychiatry and establishing priorities for the space, including identifying current gaps in knowledge and determining areas for future study, with particular emphasis on addressing disparities in access to care.  The partnership brings together JMIR Publications, a leading open-access publisher of scholarly journals on digital health, ...

Exploring the upstream transcription factors or proteins interacting with MdMYB10 is an important way to enrich the complex network of anthocyanin synthesis. In this study, the upstream regulatory gene MdNAC1 of MdMYB10 was selected through yeast one hybridization experiments, and EMSA and LUC experiments showed that MdNAC1 can transcriptionally activate MdMYB10. The transformation experiments in apple callus and apple fruit showed that MdNAC1 significantly promoted the accumulation of anthocyanins. At the same time, researchers have found that MdNAC1 can interact with MdbZIP23 ...

Problems with the brain’s ability to ‘prune’ itself of unnecessary connections may underlie a wide range of mental health disorders that begin during adolescence, according to research published today. The findings, from an international collaboration, led by researchers in the UK, China and Germany, may help explain why people are often affected by more than one mental health disorder, and may in future help identify those at greatest risk. One in seven adolescents (aged 10-19 years old) worldwide experiences mental health disorders, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Depression, anxiety and behavioural disorders, such as ...

About The Study: In this study that included 167,000 non-hospitalized patients, neutralizing monoclonal antibody (nMAb) treatment for COVID-19 was safe and associated with reductions in emergency department visits, hospitalization, and death, although it was not associated with reduced risk of hospitalization during the Omicron BA.1 epoch. These findings suggest that targeted risk stratification strategies may help optimize future nMAb treatment decisions.  Authors: Brian Anderson, M.D., of the MITRE Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website ...

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have investigated how preterm birth and foetal growth are related to the risk of atrial fibrillation up to middle-age. The study, which is published in JAMA Pediatrics, shows that being born preterm or large for gestational age was associated with increased risks of atrial fibrillation later in life. Being small for gestational age at birth was only associated with an increased risk of atrial fibrillation up to the age of 18.  The incidence of atrial fibrillation in the young has increased over the past few decades, from low levels. “Atrial fibrillation at a young age may involve a heavy socioeconomic burden for the affected ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Getting vaccines to people who need them isn’t always easy. Many vaccines require cold storage, making it difficult to ship them to remote areas that don’t have the necessary infrastructure. MIT researchers have come up with a possible solution to this problem: a mobile vaccine printer that could be scaled up to produce hundreds of vaccine doses in a day. This kind of printer, which can fit on a tabletop, could be deployed anywhere vaccines are needed, the researchers say. “We could someday ...

A team of physicists has illuminated certain properties of quantum systems by observing how their fluctuations spread over time. The research offers an intricate understanding of a complex phenomenon that is foundational to quantum computing—a method that can perform certain calculations significantly more efficiently than conventional computing.  “In an era of quantum computing it’s vital to generate a precise characterization of the systems we are building,” explains Dries Sels, an assistant ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – During the last ice age, massive icebergs periodically broke off from an ice sheet covering a large swath of North America and discharged rapidly melting ice into the North Atlantic Ocean around Greenland, triggering abrupt climate change impacts across the globe. These sudden episodes, called Heinrich Events, occurred between 16,000 and 60,000 years ago. They altered the circulation of the world’s oceans, spurring cooling in the North Atlantic and impacting monsoon rainfall around the world. But ...

Researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Janssen Biotech, Inc. have shown in early tests that a bioengineered drug candidate can counter infection with Staphylococcus aureus – a bacterial species widely resistant to antibiotics and a major cause of death in hospitalized patients. Experiments demonstrated that SM1B74, an antibacterial biologic agent, was superior to a standard antibiotic drug at treating mice infected with S. aureus, including its treatment-resistant form known as MRSA. Published ...

GAO Caixia's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a new genome editing technology that achieves efficient and precise targeted insertion of large DNA segments in plants. The new technology, called prime editing-mediated recombination of opportune targets (PrimeRoot), combines an optimized dual-ePPE editor protein previously published by the group with a highly efficient tyrosine site-specific recombinase, Cre. It can achieve ...

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center identified a novel cell signaling pathway that potentially could be targeted in therapy for patients with aggressive pancreatic cancers.  In laboratory studies with human pancreatic cancer cell lines and genetically engineered mouse models of pancreatic cancer, the investigators discovered that the High Mobility Group A1 (HMGA1) protein functions as a “molecular switch” that “flips on” genes required by tumor cells to grow in an uncontrolled fashion and form invasive tumors. One of these genes activated ...

Tokyo, Japan – We are all aware of the importance of eating healthy food, especially during pregnancy. A high-fat diet has dramatic consequences on the metabolism. It can lead to obesity, diabetes, chronic liver disease, and possibly cancer. Previous works have demonstrated that eating high amounts of fat during pregnancy affects the taste preference and metabolism in offspring. In most households, children and parents eat the same food. In other words, mums eating a high-fat diet will likely feed their children fatty foods. What are the consequences of maternal ...

DALLAS, April 24, 2023 — The American Heart Association and the National Football League (NFL), in collaboration with its 32 NFL clubs, are challenging kids to move more with an NFL PLAY 60 Fitness Break for the NFL Draft happening later this week. The free program on Wednesday, April 26 at 1 p.m. ET/ 12 p.m. CT/ 10 a.m. PT will offer a 15-minute synchronous broadcast to help students learn how to add movement to their day leading up to the live Draft coverage from Kansas City. Rooted in American Heart Association science, the Fitness Break broadcast helps students learn more about how physical activity supports ...

The Haber-Bosch process is the industrial approach for NH3 production today, which must be operated at energy-intensive high temperatures and pressures. The reduction of dinitrogen (N2) by electrocatalysis offers an alternative way for NH3 production at ambient conditions and a variety of electrocatalysts have been studied over the past few years. However, even the best catalytic system reported could only get unsatisfied performance (such as the selectivity and production rate of NH3) due to the ...

In the early 1990s, scientists who were studying the development of a roundworm identified a small RNA molecule that regulated the expression of specific genes. This marked the discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs), which are now known to be present across all forms of life. As it turns out, these molecules play essential roles in many biological processes. A few years later, researchers realized that diseases could dysregulate the expression of miRNAs, highlighting their potential as biomarkers. In fact, abnormal miRNA expression is a hallmark of all tumor-related diseases. Thus, miRNA detection techniques ...

Brain tumors located in regions that control speech, vision and motor function present additional challenges to neurosurgeons, as damaging the surrounding tissue can cause severe loss of those abilities.. Because of this, these regions are known as “eloquent brain areas” and require special attention and approaches to limit damage and deficits. The University of Cincinnati’s Paolo Palmisciano, MD, was part of a research team that examined how well a minimally invasive approach worked to limit vision and hearing loss in patients following brain tumor surgery. The research was published in the journal Brain Sciences, and the ...

The report, “Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics: Risks, Potential Benefits, and Ethical Responsibility,” produced by The Hastings Center, a bioethics institute, provides direction for research and communications in this area of study with both significant social risks and potential benefits. It is  accompanied by an article that describes a fledgling effort to integrate community perspectives on the ethics of this research. A webinar to launch the consensus report will take place today at 3 PM EST. Register here. Research on genetic variants and human social and behavioral characteristics, or phenotypes, including anxiety, subjective well-being, ...

The objective of this study is to identify these loci and decipher the polygenic architecture of malic acid content in tomato fruit. The authors carried out a GWAS using six milestone models with two-environment repeats. A series of associated SNP variations were identified from GWAS, and 15 high-confidence annotated genes were obtained based on the lead SNPs and the malic acid accumulation. The optimal allelic combination of the 15 loci was presented for tastier tomato. ...

A severe windstorm that battered the UK more than a century ago produced some of the strongest winds[OS1]  that Britain has ever seen, a team of scientists have found after recovering old weather records.  Old weather measurements, first recorded on paper after Storm Ulysses hit the UK in February 1903, have shed new light on what was one of the most severe storms to have hit the British Isles. By turning hand-written weather data into digital records, the research team has laid the way to better understand other historical storms, ...

The steady decline in cultivable land owing to the rapidly increasing global population has necessitated the use of efficient plant breeding methods that could be used to improve agricultural yields. However, in addition to genetic methods, we need approaches to control and improve complex crop traits. To this end, plant scientists make use of various cutting-edge imaging techniques that quantify crop traits (height, leaf shape, leaf color, etc.). Traditional imaging methods, however, are tedious, destructive, and non-sustainable. ...

Lehigh University materials science and engineering (MSE) professor Masashi Watanabe is the 2023 recipient of the Microanalysis Society Presidential Science Award, which recognizes a senior scientist for “outstanding technical contributions to the field of microanalysis over a sustained period of time.” Watanabe is a Fellow of the Microanalysis Society and a former MAS president. The career achievement honor highlights his work in advancing quantitative analysis in scanning transmission ...