DURHAM, N.C. -- Many of the bacteria that ravage crops and threaten our food supply use a common strategy to cause disease: they inject a cocktail of harmful proteins directly into the plant’s cells. For 25 years, biologist Sheng-Yang He and his senior research associate Kinya Nomura have been puzzling over this set of molecules that plant pathogens use to cause diseases in hundreds of crops worldwide ranging from rice to apple trees. Now, thanks to a team effort between three collaborating research groups, they may finally have an answer to how these molecules make plants sick -- and a way to disarm them. The findings appear Sept. 13 in the journal Nature. Researchers ...

Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that has the potential to not only identify sight-threatening eye diseases but also predict general health, including heart attacks, stroke, and Parkinson’s disease. RETFound, one of the first AI foundation models in healthcare, and the first in ophthalmology, was developed using millions of eye scans from the NHS. The research team are making the system open-source: freely available to use by any institution worldwide, to act as a cornerstone for global efforts to detect and treat blindness using AI. ...

Key takeaways Social determinants of at-risk neighborhoods: Higher proportions of poverty and low per-capita income were most associated with higher rates of shooting incidents. High levels of social stressors: The study found that fatal and non-fatal firearm assaults were clustered in neighborhoods with high levels of social stressors measured with the 2018 version of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). A potential tool for directing anti-violence initiatives: The CDC’s SVI can help policymakers target neighborhoods at ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have discovered that a gene called Rasip1 is intimately involved in the creation of blood cells Tokyo, Japan – Blood has long been a symbol of life and health, so it may be surprising that some aspects of blood production, i.e., hematopoiesis, remain incompletely understood. One such mystery is the role of a protein called SOX17. Blood cells are generated by hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), and SOX17 seems to be important to the development of HSCs because SOX17 is expressed where HSCs first develop. What exactly SOX17 does, however, has remained unclear. Now, a research team at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new type of analysis suggests that droughts in Ohio were more severe from 2000 to 2019 than standard measurements have suggested. Researchers at The Ohio State University developed impacts-based thresholds for drought in Ohio, looking specifically at how corn yield and streamflow were affected by various drought indicators, such as notable changes in soil moisture, crops, and even livestock losses in the state. The results suggest this impacts-based approach could give Ohio farmers earlier and more accurate notice when drought conditions are approaching, said Steven Quiring, co-author of the study and a professor ...

Men ages 50 to 60 have an 80 percent chance of having some degree of bladder outlet obstruction (BOO) due to an enlarged prostate  – which causes multiple symptoms that can  impact their lives physically and psychologically.   The bladder, an incredibly complex organ, has its own electrical system and can change its constituents and geometry through a growth and remodeling process. However, in bladders with BOO, the urethral resistance increases and forces the muscle cells within the bladder to generate larger pressures to void.  Over time, the bladder adapts with a growth and remodeling response that causes changes in bladder size, tissue composition, ...

The EU Horizon 2020 project B-GOOD, aiming at improving honey bee health and beekeeping sustainability, invites participants to the project’s closing conference in Bled, Slovenia this October. The upcoming scientific event will feature oral presentations, poster sessions, and information market stands to provide a comprehensive overview of the results and technologies developed during the project. The attendees will also be able to meet the consortium members of the project, ask questions and exchange ideas. The event will take place on the 2nd of October 2023 immediately before the COLOSS ...

New research suggests that owls in Texas have high rates of anticoagulant rodenticides (AR)—blood thinning rat poisons—in their systems. Jennifer Smith, a professor of integrative biology in the UTSA College of Sciences, co-authored a research article published recently in PLOS ONE, the world’s first multidisciplinary open access journal. Eres Gomez, M.S. ’22, a UTSA graduate who had conducted research in the Smith Wildlife Lab as a student, was the article’s lead author. Heather Prestridge, a curator ...

 Acetone is an essential chemical industry input and is used in the manufacturing of a wide array of products, such as adhesives, antibiotics,  electronic components, solvents and removers, inks and vitamins, among others. Its production is complex and hazardous. To simplify the process and make it safer and cheaper, researchers in Brazil and Germany have developed an innovative method that uses only light and photoactive iron chloride (FeCl3), an inexpensive chemical compound.  An article on the research, which was funded by FAPESP, is published in the ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists studied hot springs on different continents and found similarities in how some microbes adapted despite their geographic diversity. The findings yield clues to the evolution of life and whether some of the hardiest microbes may be harnessed for biotechnology. The study was the first of its kind to sample hot springs on three continents with water temperatures above 65 C (149 F) in the United States, Iceland and Japan. The environments have unique geology and chemistry, almost like a fingerprint, so it was surprising to find highly related microbes separated by thousands of miles, said ORNL’s Mircea Podar, co-lead of the ...

WASHINGTON — Most coastal communities will encounter 100-year floods annually by the end of the century, even under a moderate scenario where carbon dioxide emissions peak by 2040, a new study finds. And as early as 2050, regions worldwide could experience 100-year floods every nine to fifteen years on average. A 100-year flood is an extreme water level that has a 1% chance of being exceeded in any given year and is based on historical data. Despite the name, 100-year floods can strike the same area multiple years in a row or not at all within a century. But a new study finds that those historical trends will no ...

A new study from North Carolina State University and Duke University offers insights into the ways that education, work and motherhood shape the lives of women in the United States. In a longitudinal study of more than 8,100 women, the researchers found seven “pathways” that illustrate the way major life events can have long-term ripple effects. “Our goal here was to examine how family, work and education influence each other in the lives of women, rather than viewing education as a separate process from work and family,” says Anna Manzoni, co-author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of sociology ...

“Cosmologists believe that only about 20% of the total matter is made of regular or ‘baryonic’ matter, which includes stars, galaxies, atoms, and life,” explains first author Dr. Mohamed Abdullah, a researcher at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics-Egypt, Chiba University, Japan. “About 80% is made of dark matter, whose mysterious nature is not yet known but may consist of some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particles.” (Fig. 1)   “The team used a well-proven technique to determine the total amount of matter in the universe, ...

The University of Chicago will launch a pioneering new center aimed at shifting the popular narrative around the physical and cognitive impacts of aging. Headed by leading neuroscientist Emily Rogalski, PhD, the new University of Chicago Healthy Aging & Alzheimer's Research Care (HAARC) Center will focus on building deep multidisciplinary expertise and bridging the gap between scientific disciplines to accelerate breakthroughs in cognitive resilience. “We want to increase awareness and the scientific probability ...

IIASA is proud to announce the launch of its Flagship Report, "Systems Analysis for Sustainable Wellbeing. 50 Years of IIASA Research, 40 Years After the Brundtland Commission, Contributing to the Post-2030 Global Agenda” on Wednesday, 13 September 2023 at an official UN event in the framework of the 78th session of the UN General Assembly and the Sustainable Development Goals mid-term review. The IIASA Flagship Report chronicles the extraordinary 50-year journey of IIASA, a globally renowned institute providing systems analytical expertise on complex global challenges. Co-sponsored by the Permanent Missions of Austria and South Africa ...

Washington, September 13, 2023—The United States has the largest age gap in voter turnout among advanced democracies. Youth voter turnout remained low, at 48 percent, in 2020. Scholars, educators, and policymakers often recommend civic education as a solution to low youth voter turnout. However, new research finds that a commonly used state-mandated civics test policy—the Civics Education Initiative (CEI)—does not improve youth voter turnout, at least in the short term. The study, by Jilli Jung and Maithreyi Gopalan, both at Pennsylvania State University, was published today in Educational ...

Breast cancer research takes a significant stride forward as Professor Semin Lee and his research team from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Ji-Yeon Kim and Professor Young-Hyuck Im from the Division of Hematology-Oncology at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, delves into the exploration of triple negative apocrine carcinoma. This rare breast cancer subtype has garnered attention due to its unique genetic characteristics and improved prognosis when compared to other forms of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Triple negative ...

New research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has found that depression and the risk of depression are linked to different inflammatory proteins in boys and girls.   When inflammation occurs in the body a host of proteins are released into the blood called cytokines. Previous research has shown that higher levels of cytokines are associated with depression in adults, but little is known about this relationship in adolescence. Researchers investigated sex-differences in the relationship between inflammatory proteins and depression. Published in the Journal of ...

Researchers from University of Colorado Denver, Iowa State University, and Arizona State University published a new Journal of Marketing study that examines the stock market effects on these contests and the contest characteristics that may enable such contests to pay off. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “When Do Marketing Ideation Crowdsourcing Contests Create Shareholder Value? The Effect of Contest Design and Marketing Resource Factors” and is authored by Zixia Cao, Hui Feng, and Michael A. Wiles. Crowdsourcing contests for marketing ideas such as new ads, graphics, and products have become quite popular ...

Sitting calmly in their webs, many spiders wait for prey to come to them. Arachnids along lakes and rivers eat aquatic insects, such as dragonflies. But, when these insects live in mercury-contaminated waterways, they can pass the metal along to the spiders that feed on them. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters have demonstrated how some shoreline spiders can move mercury contamination from riverbeds up the food chain to land animals. Most mercury that enters waterways ...

DALLAS, September 13, 2023 — On Tuesday, Sept. 12, the American Heart Association, a global force for healthier lives for all, recognized 19 students, schools and educators for their commitment to end cardiovascular disease, the nation’s no. 1 killer, through the Association’s in-school programs, Kids Heart Challenge™ and American Heart Challenge™.  The annual National Awards Ceremony, held virtually, was joined by program participants from coast to coast and ...

Washington, D.C. — Sept. 13, 2023 — The American Society for Microbiology today released consensus recommendations from a workshop of leading scientists who reviewed the benefits and risks of “gain of function” research, as well as related policies and procedures, and proposed a foundation to guide discussions and improve oversight moving forward. The recommendations – together with a call to action for the scientific community and the general public – are intended to inform assessments of “gain of function research of concern,” which makes up a small fraction of all biological research. ...

New UC Riverside research has revealed COVID’s Achilles heel — its dependence on key human proteins for its replication — which can be used to prevent the virus from making people sick.  In a new paper published in the journal Viruses, the UCR research team describes an important discovery. The protein in COVID that enables the virus to make copies of itself, called N, requires the help of human cells to perform its job.  Genetic instructions in our cells are transcribed from DNA to messenger ...

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) and Embr Labs have created a machine-learning algorithm to predict a hot flash before a person perceives it.   When combined with Embr Labs’ patented wearable device, Embr Wave™, immediate cooling is delivered to mitigate or fully alleviate the event. This first-of-its-kind predictive algorithm is the result of machine learning being applied to the largest data set of digital biomarkers for hot flashes ever collected, which was generated by researchers at UMass Amherst’s Center for Human ...

Research Highlights: The benefits of four measures of socioeconomic status (education, income, employment status and health insurance) on ideal heart health were greater for non-Hispanic white adults compared to Black, Hispanic and Asian adults in the U.S. The new diverse representative study suggests heart disease prevention efforts should address other non-biological factors that drive cardiovascular health and not rely solely on reducing socioeconomic disparities by race or ethnic group. Embargoed until 4 a.m. CT/5 a.m. ET Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023 DALLAS, ...