Annapolis, MD; May 26, 2021--A new study has mounted perhaps the most intricate, detailed look ever at the diversity in structure and form of bees, offering new insights in a long-standing debate over how complex social behaviors arose in certain branches of bees' evolutionary tree. Published today in Insect Systematics and Diversity, the report is built on an analysis of nearly 300 morphological traits in bees, how those traits vary across numerous species, and what the variations suggest about the evolutionary relations between bee species. The result offers strong evidence that complex social behavior developed just once in pollen-carrying bees, rather than twice or more, separately, in different evolutionary branches--but ...

Travelling elephants pay close attention to scent trails of dung and urine left by other elephants, new research shows. Scientists monitored well-used pathways and found that wild African savannah elephants - especially those travelling alone - were "highly attentive", sniffing and tracking the trail with their trunks. This suggests these scents act as a "public information resource", according to researchers from the University of Exeter and Elephants for Africa. More research is now needed to find out whether humans can create artificial elephant trails to divert elephants away from farms and villages, where conflict with humans can cause devastation to communities. Alternatively, scent trails could be placed to improve the efficiency of routes ...

HOUSTON - Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered a novel function for the metabolic enzyme medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (MCAD) in glioblastoma (GBM). MCAD prevents toxic lipid buildup, in addition to its normal role in energy production, so targeting MCAD causes irreversible damage and cell death specifically in cancer cells. The study was published today in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Preclinical findings reveal an important new understanding of metabolism in GBM and support the development of MCAD inhibitors as a novel treatment strategy. The researchers currently are working to develop targeted therapies against the enzyme. "With ...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common neurodegenerative disorder in which neurons gradually die off, leading to dementia. The exact mechanism and causes of this disorder have not yet been identified. However, it is known that amyloid plaques form in the brains of patients. Plaques consist of amyloid fibrils, which are special filamentous assemblies formed by amyloid proteins. 'The number of patients with neurodegenerative disorders will continue to grow in the future. Thanks to the success of humanity in the treatment of cancer and cardiovascular diseases, more and more people are living into their 80s. At this age, the risk of developing neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, becomes very high. Unfortunately, no cures for these diseases have yet ...

Killer flies can reach accelerations of over 3g when aerial diving to catch their prey - but at such high speeds they often miss because they can't correct their course. These are the findings of a study by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Lincoln, and Minnesota, published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Killer flies (Coenosia attenuata) perform high-speed aerial dives to attack prey flying beneath them, reaching impressive accelerations of up to 36 m/s2, equivalent to 3.6 times the acceleration due to gravity (or 3.6g). This happens because they beat their wings as they fall, combining the acceleration of powered flight with the acceleration of gravity. This is an impressive feat: diving Falcons, the fastest animals that predate ...

The researchers Juan A. Fernández-Ontiveros, of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Rome and Teo Muñoz-Darias, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have written an article in which they describe the different states of activity of a large sample of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies. They have classified them using the behaviour of their closest "relations", the stellar mass black holes in X-ray binaries. The article has just been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Black holes range in mass from objects which have only a few ...

Mercury pollution is an issue of global concern due to its toxic effects. High levels have already been measured in Arctic organisms - with worrying effects on ecosystems and the food chain. So far, the Greenland Ice Sheet has not been taken into account as a part of the Arctic mercury cycle. Now, researchers led by Jon Hawkings of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and Florida State University show that meltwaters in the southwest of Greenland transport considerable amounts of mercury into the Arctic Ocean. Due to the large quantities detected, the researchers assume that they are of geological origin. They present their measurements in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. Mercury: poison for humans and the environment - ...

LAWRENCE -- For two weeks in June 2020, a massive dust plume from Saharan Africa crept westward across the Atlantic, blanketing the Caribbean and Gulf Coast states in the U.S. The dust storm was so strong, it earned the nickname "Godzilla." Now, researchers from the University of Kansas have published a new study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society parsing the mechanism that transported the dust. Their results explain a phenomenon that could occur more frequently in the years ahead due to climate change, affecting human health and transportation systems. African dust darkened the skies of the Caribbean and American Gulf States thanks to a trio of atmospheric patterns, ...

Mitochondria are the cell's power plants and produce the majority of a cell's energy needs through an electrochemical process called electron transport chain coupled to another process known as oxidative phosphorylation. A number of different proteins in mitochondria facilitate these processes, but it's not fully understood how these proteins are arranged inside mitochondria and the factors that can influence their arrangement. Now, scientists at the University of Copenhagen have used state-of-the-art proteomics technology to shine new light on how mitochondrial proteins gather into electron transport chain complexes, and further into so-called supercomplexes. The research, which is published in Cell Reports, also examined ...

Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects -- as long as they're out in the open. Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a taller order. To do that, a robot would need fingers that were slender enough to penetrate the sand, mobile enough to wriggle free when sand grains jam, and sensitive enough to feel the detailed shape of the buried object. MIT researchers have now designed a sharp-tipped robot finger equipped with tactile sensing to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. In experiments, the aptly named ...

A mathematical model which can predict landslides that occur unexpectantly has been developed by two University of Melbourne scientists, with colleagues from GroundProbe-Orica and the University of Florence. Professors Antoinette Tordesillas and Robin Batterham led the work over five years to develop and test the model SSSAFE (Spatiotemporal Slope Stability Analytics for Failure Estimation), which analyses slope stability over time to predict where and when a landslide or avalanche is likely to occur. In a study published in Scientific Reports, the research team was ...

Discovered by Victor Hess in 1912, cosmic rays, relativisitic particles that shower Earth, contribute a signicant part of the energy density in the universe and carries unambiguous informations on various astrophysical processes . Yet until now, origin of cosmic rays is still a mystery. A key problem in understanding the origin of cosmic rays is the searching for the acceleration site up to or even beyond Ultra-high energy (UHE). Such extreme accelerators are dubbed as PeVatrons. However, composed of subatomic particles, such as protons or atomic nuclei, cosmic rays are charged and lose ...

Using intermittent electric energy to convert excessive CO2 into C2 products, such as ethylene and ethanol, is an effective strategy to mitigate the greenhouse effect. Copper (Cu) is the only single metal catalyst which can converts CO2 into C2 products by electrochemical method, but with undesirable selectivity of C2 product. Therefore, how to improve the conversion efficiency of Cu-based catalysts for reducing CO2 to C2 product has attracted great attention. Recently, a research team led by Prof. Min Liu from Central South University, China designed a Cu-Pd bimetallic electrocatalyst possessing CuPd(100) interface which can lower the energy barrier of C2 product generation. The electrocatalyst was obtained through using ...

WASHINGTON--People who eat too many refined carbs and fatty meats for dinner have a higher risk of heart disease than those who eat a similar diet for breakfast, according to a nationwide study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Cardiovascular diseases like congestive heart failure, heart attack and stroke are the number one cause of death globally, taking an estimated 17.9 million lives each year. Eating lots of saturated fat, processed meats and added sugars can raise your cholesterol and increase your risk of heart disease. Eating a heart-healthy diet with more whole carbohydrates like vegetables and grains and less meat can significantly offset the risk of cardiovascular disease. "Meal timing along with food quality are important factors ...

The farming of livestock to feed the global appetite for animal products greatly contributes to global warming. A new study however shows that emission intensity per unit of animal protein produced from the sector has decreased globally over the past two decades due to greater production efficiency, raising questions around the extent to which methane emissions will change in the future and how we can better manage their negative impacts. Despite what we know about the environmental cost of livestock production, the global appetite for animal products such as meat, eggs, and dairy continues to grow. The livestock sector is in fact the largest source of manmade methane emissions globally, and these emissions are projected ...

A team of international researchers has found that the Tsimane indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon experience less brain atrophy than their American and European peers. The decrease in their brain volumes with age is 70% slower than in Western populations. Accelerated brain volume loss can be a sign of dementia. The study was published May 26, 2021 in the Journal of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences. Although people in industrialized nations have access to modern medical care, they are more sedentary and eat a diet high in saturated fats. In contrast, the Tsimane ...

UC San Francisco researchers have found a way to double doctors' accuracy in detecting the vast majority of complex fetal heart defects in utero - when interventions could either correct them or greatly improve a child's chance of survival - by combining routine ultrasound imaging with machine-learning computer tools. The team, led by UCSF cardiologist Rima Arnaout, MD, trained a group of machine-learning models to mimic the tasks that clinicians follow in diagnosing complex congenital heart disease (CHD). Worldwide, humans detect as few as 30 to 50 percent of these conditions before birth. However, the combination of human-performed ultrasound ...

University of Virginia School of Medicine scientists have developed important new resources that will aid the battle against cancer and advance cutting-edge genomics research. UVA's Chongzhi Zang, PhD, and his colleagues and students have developed a new computational method to map the folding patterns of our chromosomes in three dimensions from experimental data. This is important because the configuration of genetic material inside our chromosomes actually affects how our genes work. In cancer, that configuration can go wrong, so scientists want to understand ...

Hundreds of antibiotic resistant genes found in the gastrointestinal tracts of Danish infants Danish one-year-olds carry several hundred antibiotic resistant genes in their bacterial gut flora according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen. The presence of these genes is partly attributable to antibiotic use among mothers during pregnancy. An estimated 700,000 people die every year from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and diseases. The WHO expects this figure to multiply greatly in coming decades. To study how antibiotic resistance occurs in humans' ...

The Hubble parameter is one of the central parameters in the modern cosmology. Their values inferred from the late-time observations are systematically higher than those from the early-time measurements by about 10%. This is called the "Hubble tension". To come to a robust conclusion, independent probes with accuracy at percent levels are crucial. With the self-calibration by the theory of general relativity, gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence open a completely novel observational window for Hubble parameter determination. Hence, it can shed some light on the Hubble tension. Depends on whether being associated with ...

A new rapid coronavirus test developed by KAUST scientists can deliver highly accurate results in less than 15 minutes. The diagnostic, which brings together electrochemical biosensors with engineered protein constructs, allows clinicians to quickly detect bits of the virus with a precision previously only possible with slower genetic techniques. The entire set-up can work at the point of patient care on unprocessed blood or saliva samples; no laborious sample preparation or centralized diagnostic laboratory is required. "The combination of state-of-the-art ...

Dust storms are often defined as catastrophic weather events where large amounts of dust particles are raised and transported by strong winds, characterized by weak horizontal visibility (< 1 km), suddenness, short duration, and severe destruction. Over the past few decades, the observed dust storms in northern China showed generally decreasing trends (Fig. 2), which could have made the dust storms "out of sight" of the public gradually. Yet a most recent strong dust storm event originated from Mongolia since mid-March this year exerted serious impacts on most areas in northern China, ...

RICHLAND, Wash.--As the Clean Energy Transformation Act drives Washington state toward carbon-free electricity, a new energy landscape is taking shape. Alongside renewable energy sources, a new report finds small modular reactors are poised to play an integral role in the state's emerging clean energy future. The technology could help fill a power source gap soon to be left by carbon-emitting resources like coal and natural gas, which will be phased out in coming years, according to a report composed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Nuclear energy is a reliable source of baseload electricity," said PNNL's ...

Modern genetic research often works with what are known as reference genomes. Such a genome comprises data from DNA sequences that scientists have assembled as a representative example of the genetic makeup of a species. To create the reference genome, researchers generally use DNA sequences from a single or a few individuals, which can poorly represent the complete genomic diversity of individuals or sub-populations. The result is that a reference does not always correspond exactly to the set of genes of a specific individual. Until a few years ago, it was very laborious, expensive and time-consuming to generate ...

Many eye diseases are associated with a restricted blood supply, known as ischaemia, which can lead to blindness. The role of the protein tenascin-C, an extracellular matrix component, in retinal ischaemia was investigated in mice by researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). They showed that tenascin-C plays a crucial role in damaging the cells responsible for vision following ischaemia. The results were published online by the team in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience on 20 May 2021. As part of the research, the team around Dr. Susanne Wiemann and Dr. Jacqueline Reinhard from the Department of Cell Morphology and Molecular Neurobiology at RUB collaborated with Professor Stephanie Joachim's research group from ...