Dr. Vidhya Rangaraju has been named a recipient of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s “Ben Barres Early Career Acceleration Award,” which will provide her lab with $1.2 million over four years to study dysfunctions of brain energy supply.  Dr. Rangaraju is a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI). With this award, her lab will investigate the causes of disrupted energy supply in neurons that lead to cognitive decline in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).  ...

Transistors — the tiny on-off switches inside microchips — have gotten smaller and smaller over the years, increasing computing power and enabling smaller devices. During that time, the copper wires that connect these switches have likewise shrunk. However, smaller, thinner wires create a big problem, said Daniel Gall, professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “The job of the wire is to conduct electrons — electricity. Imagine a wire as a crowded hallway that the electrons have to get through. The narrower the hallway, the more the electrons bump into things and scatter. We call that resistance,” Gall ...

URBANA, Ill. — Waterhemp, the aggressive weed threatening Corn Belt crop production, is throwing curveballs once again, according to researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The weed has famously developed resistance to not one or two, but seven herbicide sites-of-action classes, nearly exhausting the chemical tools farmers can use to defend their livelihood. In a new Weed Science study, U. of I. researchers show that a single major gene is responsible for waterhemp’s resistance to S-metolachlor ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – People with low education and income levels may have a 10% increased risk of death or being dependent on others to complete daily tasks three months after a stroke compared to people with high education and income levels, according to new research published in the November 8, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that low education and income cause worse outcomes after stroke. It only shows an association. “Compared ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS –  For people with epilepsy, doing yoga may help reduce feelings of stigma about the disease along with reducing seizure frequency and anxiety, according to new research published in the November 8, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “People with epilepsy often face stigma that can cause them to feel different than others due to their own health condition and that can have a significant impact on their quality of life,” said study author ...

Embargoed for release: Wednesday, November 8, 4:00 PM ET Key points: In a randomized trial of the cardiometabolic impacts of workplace interventions designed to reduce work-family conflict, older employees and those at baseline higher risk for cardiometabolic disease saw their risk of developing cardiovascular disease decrease equivalent to five to 10 years of age-related cardiometabolic changes. The study is among the first to assess whether changes to the work environment can affect cardiometabolic risk. Boston, MA—Increasing workplace flexibility may lower employees’ risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a new ...

After conducting the first scoping review of its kind, researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have developed an evidence based interactive mapping tool to assist policymakers as they consider regulating the concentration of THC in cannabis products and as more potent products move into the marketplace. Their review, funded by the State of Colorado, was released today in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH).    “We looked at studies that measured adverse or beneficial effects of high concentration ...

An accountability framework, including independent monitoring of state compliance, is critical for the pandemic agreement's success, according to researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and affiliates at Spark Street Advisors. The paper and findings are published in BMJ Global Health. “Countries signing up to a pandemic agreement is no guarantee of its effective implementation,” said Nina Schwalbe, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Population and Family Health and principal visiting fellow at Columbia Mailman School. “Countries' lack of compliance with ...

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just made a breakthrough discovery in revealing how planets are made. By observing water vapor in protoplanetary disks, Webb confirmed a physical process involving the drifting of ice-coated solids from the outer regions of the disk into the rocky-planet zone. Theories have long proposed that icy pebbles forming in the cold, outer regions of protoplanetary disks — the same area where comets originate in our solar system — should be the fundamental seeds of planet formation. The main requirement of these theories is that pebbles should drift inward toward the star due to friction in the gaseous disk, ...

Carlos Trejo-Pech, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, is a newly appointed editor of the Journal of Food Distribution Research. “It is a great honor and big responsibility to serve as a journal editor of a publication outlet in the agricultural economics and agribusiness discipline,” said Trejo-Pech. “We, the editors, are committed to disseminating the results of high-quality research.” The journal was established in 1969 under the auspices of the Food Distribution Research Society, the only body of scholars and practitioners in the United States dedicated ...

October Consumer Food Insights Report highlights Thanksgiving meal plans WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Nearly eight in 10 Americans will celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with a special meal, according to the October 2023 Consumer Food Insights Report. The survey-based report out of Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainabilityassesses food spending, consumer satisfaction and values, support of agricultural and food policies, and trust in information sources. Purdue ...

Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the most common types of lymphoma in young adults. It is characterized by the presence of enlarged B lymphocytes, which are unusual in that they bear on their surface the identifying markers of many other immune cells – such as those found on phagocytes, dendritic cells, or T cells. Now, a team led by Stephan Mathas from the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC) has explained how these changes take place in the cells and what impact they have. The ECRC is a joint institution of the Max Delbrück Center and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. “Many different ...

Nature has no shortage of patterns, from spots on leopards to stripes on zebras and hexagons on boxfish. But a full explanation for how these patterns form has remained elusive.   Now engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder have shown that the same physical process that helps remove dirt from laundry could play a role in how tropical fish get their colorful stripes and spots. Their findings were published Nov. 8 in the journal Science Advances.    “Many biological questions are fundamentally ...

A new analysis of 14,669 threatened species of plants and animals found in Europe reveals that about one fifth face the risk of extinction, and that agricultural land-use change poses a significant threat to these species. Axel Hochkirch of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Luxembourg, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on November 8, 2023. The variety of species of living things—biodiversity—is declining around the world, as more and more species face the risk of extinction. Many efforts, including some by governments and nonprofit organizations, aim to reduce the loss ...

A new analysis of lice genetic diversity suggests that lice came to the Americas twice – once during the first wave of human migration across the Bering Strait, and again during European colonization. Marina Ascunce, currently at the USDA-ARS, and colleagues, report these findings in a new study published November 8 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The human louse is a wingless, blood-sucking parasite that lives its entire life on its host. It is one of the oldest known parasites to live on humans, and the two species have coevolved ...

A digital detox may not improve wellbeing: social media users who reduced their use for a week saw decreases in positive emotions as well as in negative ones ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293467 Article Title: Restricting social networking site use for one week produces varied effects on mood but does not increase explicit or implicit desires to use SNSs: Findings from an ecological momentary assessment study Author Countries: UK Funding: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research ...

Financial traders may seek better sleep by self-medicating with caffeine and alcohol to balance the effects of the stimulant and the sedative, per micro-longitudinal study ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291675 Article Title: Sleep, alcohol, and caffeine in financial traders Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Neuroscientists have discovered a fascinating connection between the retention of early life memories and brain developmental trajectories associated with autism [Wednesday 8th November 2023].   Most of us remember little of our experiences from before two years of age. This form of memory loss, termed “infantile amnesia” refers to the seemingly complete loss of episodic and autobiographical memories formed during early life. The research team at Trinity College Dublin investigated how infantile amnesia is affected by forms of autism.    The maternal immune response, sparked into life in response to infection during pregnancy, ...

The research, published today in Science Advances, is the first to use a sophisticated human tissue model to explore the interaction between host and pathogen for six common species that cause urinary tract infections. The findings suggest that the ‘one size fits all’ approach to diagnosis and treatment currently used in most healthcare systems is inadequate. Urinary tract infection (UTI) is a growing problem, with around 400 million global cases per year and an estimated 250,000 UTI-related deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance ...

Researchers at Lund University, together with colleagues at the NIST Synchrotron Facility in the USA, have mapped on an atomic level what happens in a virus particle when the temperature is raised. "When the temperature rises, the virus's genetic material changes its form and density, becoming more fluid-like, which leads to its rapid injection into the cell," says Alex Evilevitch a researcher at Lund University who led the study. Viruses lack their own metabolism and the ability to replicate independently; they are entirely dependent on a host cell to multiply. Instead, the virus hijacks the internal machinery of the infected cell ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, partnering with Foresee Pharmaceuticals, a Taiwan and US-based biopharmaceutical company, have tested a synthetic molecule for the treatment of heart failure. The study, funded by FAPESP, was published yesterday (11/07/2023) in the European Heart Journal. The theme was also highlighted in the magazine's editorial. Heart failure is a condition in which the heart muscle cannot pump enough blood to meet the body's needs for blood and oxygen. It causes more deaths worldwide than any other disease, in the sense that other cardiovascular disorders ...

Making decisions is hard. Even when we know what we want, our choice often leaves something else on the table. For a hungry mouse, every morsel counts. But what if the decision is more consequential than choosing between crumbs and cheese? Stanford researchers investigated how mice resolve conflicts between basic needs in a study published in Nature on Nov. 8. They presented mice that were both hungry and thirsty with equal access to food and water and watched to see what happened next. The behavior of the mice surprised the scientists. Some gravitated first ...

The study is based on a new database created by the researchers which combines, for the first time, datasets on distribution and datasets on lifecycles, making it possible to establish the prevalence of different lifecycles around the globe. It uses empirical tools and big data to examine theoretical paradigms about the way in which human disturbance is affecting annual plants and their global distribution. Among other things, it was found that annuals are expected to benefit more with the rise in human population density and due to climate change, which ...

Scientists have engineered a chromosome entirely from scratch that will contribute to the production of the world’s first synthetic yeast. Researchers in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) at The University of Manchester have created the tRNA Neochromosome – a chromosome that is new to nature. It forms part of a wider project (Sc2.0) that has now successfully synthesised all 16 native chromosomes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, common baker’s yeast, and aims to combine ...

A UK-based team of Scientists, led by experts from the University of Nottingham and Imperial College London, have completed construction of a synthetic chromosome as part of a major international project to build the world’s first synthetic yeast genome. The work, which is published in Cell Genomics, represents completion of one of the 16 chromosomes of the yeast genome by the UK team, which is part of the biggest project ever in synthetic biology; the international synthetic yeast genome collaboration. The collaboration, known as 'Sc2.0' has been a 15-year project involving teams from around the world (UK, US, China, Singapore, UK, France and Australia), working together ...