Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation — they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through. But hummingbirds can't bend their wing bones during flight, so how do they transit the gaps between leaves and tangled branches? A study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that hummingbirds have evolved their own unique strategies — two of them, in fact. These strategies have not been reported before, likely because hummers maneuver too ...

New survey data from the 7th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (NAP7) published in Anaesthesia (the journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) shows that potentially serious complications occur in one in 18 procedures under the care of an anaesthetist. The risk factors associated with these potentially serious complications include very young age (babies); comorbidities; being male; increased frailty; the urgency and extent of surgery; and surgery taking place at night and/or at weekends. This paper has been produced by a team of authors across ...

Laser epilation, commonly known as laser hair removal, reduced the risk of recurrence in patients with pilonidal disease, an inflammatory, painful, and sometimes chronic or recurring condition, according to research conducted by Peter C. Minneci, M.D., Chair of Surgery at Nemours Children’s Health, Delaware Valley, and published in JAMA Surgery. Pilonidal disease occurs when cysts form between the buttocks. It is believed to be an inflammatory reaction to hair or debris that gets caught in the crease of the buttocks. The disease occurs in 26 to 100 per 100,000 people and is most common in adolescents and young ...

A new study examining the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade's constitutional protection of abortion rights, finds that the American public's support for abortion increased after the decision. The findings were published today in Nature Behaviour. "Our results show the extent to which the Supreme Court is out of step with the American public," says co-author Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab. The study's findings were based on a large, three-wave survey before the leak ...

The next time your friend displays remarkable openness to their opposite political camp’s ideas, you might try pinching them. Okay, we don’t really recommend that.  But new evidence shows that people with increased sensitivity to pain are also more likely to endorse values more common to people of their opposite political persuasion. It doesn’t stop there. They also show stronger support for the other camp’s politicians, and, get this --  more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 if they are liberal, or Joe Biden if they are conservative. Even ...

Critical Path Institute (C-Path) is pleased to announce the release of a new peer-reviewed publication, titled “Transforming Drug Development for Neurological Disorders: Proceedings from a Multi-disease Area Workshop,” now published in Neurotherapeutics, The Journal of the American Society for Experimental Neurotherapeutics. A distinguished team of C-Path scientists and patient-advocates spearheaded by Diane Stephenson, Ph.D., C-Path’s Executive Director of the Critical Path for Parkinson’s Consortium (CPP), has presented its learnings from C-Path’s 2022 Neuroscience Program Annual Workshop. The publication can be accessed in its entirety here. Neurological ...

Over the past decade, AI has permeated nearly every corner of science: Machine learning models have been used to predict protein structures, estimate the fraction of the Amazon rainforest that has been lost to deforestation and even classify faraway galaxies that might be home to exoplanets. But while AI can be used to speed scientific discovery — helping researchers make predictions about phenomena that may be difficult or costly to study in the real world — it can also lead scientists astray. In the same way that chatbots sometimes “hallucinate,” ...

Lasers have become relatively commonplace in everyday life, but they have many uses outside of providing light shows at raves and scanning barcodes on groceries. Lasers are also of great importance in telecommunications and computing as well as biology, chemistry, and physics research. In those latter applications, lasers that can emit extremely short pulses—those on the order of one-trillionth of a second (one picosecond) or shorter—are especially useful. Using lasers operating on such small timescales, researchers can study physical and chemical ...

An analysis of beeswax in managed honeybee hives in New York found a wide variety of pesticide, herbicide and fungicide residues – exposing current and future generations of bees to long-term toxicity. The study, published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, notes that people may be similarly exposed through contaminated honey, pollen and wax in cosmetics. Though the chemicals found in wax are not beneficial to humans, the small amounts in these products are unlikely to ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, partnering with colleagues in Australia, have identified a novel bacterial protein that can keep human cells healthy even when the cells have a heavy bacterial burden. The discovery could lead to new treatments for a wide array of diseases relating to mitochondrial dysfunction, such as cancer and auto-immune disorders. Mitochondria are organelles that supply most of the chemical energy needed to power cells’ biochemical reactions. An article on the study is published in the journal PNAS. The researchers ...

DOWNLOAD PHOTOS AND VIDEO: https://sandiegozoo.box.com/s/x50kzaoukdtyjxsv9mzqgn0fu1m6kddk A binational team of scientists, using creativity and innovation, adorned dozens of endangered thick-billed parrots with tiny solar-powered satellite transmitters to track and reveal their winter migratory nesting sites in the remote treetops of the Sierra Madre Occidental ranges. Their research reveals new critical habitat, 80% of which has no formal protection. In a study published this month in the journal Global ...

Quantum materials hold the key to a future of lightning-speed, energy-efficient information systems. The problem with tapping their transformative potential is that, in solids, the vast number of atoms often drowns out the exotic quantum properties electrons carry. Rice University researchers in the lab of quantum materials scientist Hanyu Zhu found that when they move in circles, atoms can also work wonders: When the atomic lattice in a rare-earth crystal becomes animated with a corkscrew-shaped vibration known as a chiral phonon, the crystal is transformed ...

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team, including astronomer Alexander de la Vega of the University of California, Riverside, has discovered the most distant barred spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way that has been observed to date. Until now it was believed that barred spiral galaxies like the Milky Way could not be observed before the universe, estimated to be 13.8 billion years old, reached half of its current age. The research, published in Nature this week, was led by scientists at the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. “This galaxy, named ceers-2112, formed soon after ...

New experimental evidence suggests that substances known as narrow-spectrum Wnt signaling inhibitors—which could have fewer side effects than other related substances—are capable of suppressing the growth of breast cancer tumors in mice. Aina He of Shanghai Jiaotong University Affiliated Sixth People’s Hospital, China, and colleagues present these findings November 9th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. While certain subtypes of breast cancer can be targeted with special medications, others can only be treated with standard chemotherapy. For some patients, chemotherapy may lead to the growth of stem cell-like cancer cells that are drug resistant. Previous ...

As conceived by Charles Darwin in the 1800s, evolution is a slow, gradual process during which species adaptations are inherited incrementally over generations. However, today biologists can see how evolutionary changes unfold on much more accelerated timescales. Rather than the evocative plants and animals of the Galapagos Islands that Darwin studied in forming his theory of evolution, Postdoctoral Scholar Joshua Borin and Associate Professor Justin Meyer of UC San Diego’s School of Biological Sciences are documenting rapid evolutionary processes in simple laboratory flasks. Borin ...

Although the group’s work has been freely available since its inception in March 2020, the COVID Moonshot Consortium is finally formally reporting their results. The COVID Moonshot – an open-science, crowdsourced, and patent-free drug discovery campaign targeting the SARS-CoV-2 virus – has yielded a wealth of data on the virus’s main protease, including insights that could pave the way for the development of new and better therapeutics. “The lead therapeutics described by [these researchers] may not be ready in time to affect the current pandemic, considering the timelines and challenges of drug approval,” write Brian Shoichet and Charles ...

Setting out to improve a technology that usually requires bulky, bench-top equipment, Quishi Guo and colleagues have shrunk a mode-locked laser (MLL) to the size of an optical chip with an integrated nanophotonic platform. The results show promise for developing ultrafast nanophotonic systems for a wide range of applications. Mode-locked lasers (MLLs) can produce coherent ultrashort pulses of light at extremely fast speeds – on the order of picoseconds and femtoseconds. These devices have enabled numerous technologies in photonics, including extreme nonlinear optics, two-photon microscopy, ...

Drawing on 30 years of data, researchers show that the number of homes within wildfire perimeters in the U.S. has doubled since the 1990s. This increasing risk is driven by both an increase in wildfires and the expansion of new homes into wildfire-prone areas, especially in the wildland-urban interface. Wildfire risks to homes are increasing, particularly in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where houses and wildland vegetation are in close proximity. Over the last 12 years, more than 55,000 homes in the U.S. have been lost to wildfires due to rapid increases ...

Two studies highlight new glass- and ceramic-based passive radiative cooling materials. Unlike passive radiative cooling approaches that rely on polymers, these hard materials are more durable and versatile, making them more attractive for a wide range of outdoor passive cooling applications, including those that could help reduce the need for air conditioning. The energy demand for cooling continues to rise, particularly in regions rapidly warming due to climate change. To make matters worse, the growing carbon footprint of cooling systems further contributes to global warming, exacerbating the need for cooling solutions. Passive radiative cooling (PRC) materials, which ...

UCLA researchers have described a previously unknown step in the complex process by which dietary cholesterol is processed in the intestines before being released into the bloodstream – potentially revealing a new pathway to target in cholesterol treatment. Although an existing drug and statins impact part of the process, an experimental drug being studied in UCLA research labs appears to specifically target the newfound pathway, possibly adding a new approach to the cholesterol management toolbox. “Our results show that certain proteins in the Aster family play a critical role in moving cholesterol through the absorption and uptake process,” said ...

Desert birds lay larger eggs when they have more helpers to feed their chicks, new research shows. White-browed sparrow weavers live in family groups in which only a dominant pair breeds and their grown-up offspring, particularly females, help to feed nestlings. The study, by researchers at the University of Exeter, found that mothers increased the size of their eggs when they had more female helpers on hand. The number of male helpers did not affect egg size, probably because male helpers feed chicks at substantially lower rates than female helpers. “We don’t yet fully understand why helped mothers are laying heavier ...

People are beginning to reconsider their reproductive decisions due to complex concerns about climate change, with many choosing to forego childbearing, or reduce the number of children they have as a result, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The research, published in PLOS Climate, is the first systematic review to explore how and why climate change-related concerns may be impacting reproductive decision-making. The team examined 13 studies, involving 10,788 participants, which were conducted between 2012 and 2022, primarily in Global North countries ...

Lasers are essential tools for observing, detecting, and measuring things in the natural world that we can’t see with the naked eye. But the ability to perform these tasks is often restricted by the need to use expensive and large instruments. In a newly published cover-story paper in the journal Science, researcher Qiushi Guo demonstrates a novel approach for creating high-performance ultrafast lasers on nanophotonic chips. His work centers on miniaturizing mode-lock lasers — a unique laser that emits a train of ultrashort, coherent light pulses in femtosecond intervals, which is an astonishing quadrillionth ...

An international group of 35 scientists is calling out conflicts of interest plaguing global plastic treaty negotiations and that have interfered with timely action on other health and environmental issues. They urge the implementation of strict guidelines to prevent the same problems from affecting the UN’s upcoming Science Policy Panel on chemicals. Their concerns and recommendations are outlined in a featured paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. “From Big Tobacco to Big Oil, powerful industries use the same playbook to manufacture doubt and sow misinformation,” said co-author Bethanie ...

The work of the COVID Moonshot Consortium is being published in the prestigious journal Science on 10 November, revealing their discovery of a potent SARS-CoV-2 antiviral lead compound.  It also reflects on the success of its open science approach in launching a patent-free antiviral discovery program to rapidly develop a differentiated lead in response to a pandemic emergency.   Open science discovery of potent noncovalent SARS-CoV-2 main protease inhibitors ) DOI 10.1126/science.abo7201.    The COVID Moonshot initiative ...