The results of coral beaching are obvious -- stark underwater forests of white coral skeletons -- yet the physiological processes of bleaching are not well understood. Now, KAUST researchers show that, long before signs of bleaching appear, prolonged spells of warm water cause heat stress that disrupts the nutrient cycling of the coral and its symbiotic algae. Coral reefs occur in warm low-nutrient waters. Stony corals include the coral animal, which is a cnidarian host that lives in symbiosis with Symbiodiniaceae, single-celled algae that photosynthesize to help "feed" the coral in exchange for the ...

Varying severity of COVID-19 symptoms in patients is reflected by levels of a chemical biomarker in their body which scientists say could be used to better manage treatments and other interventions, including vaccinations. In a new paper in International Journal of Infectious Diseases, medical experts in Italy and Australia examined levels of a chemical called serum amyloid A (SAA), a protein synthesised in the liver which can spike up to 1,000-fold within the first 24-48 hours of an infection. In turn, an increase in SAA can further perpetuate inflammation and cause clot abnormalities and organ damage, researchers say, concluding SAA levels are associated ...

Solid-matrix catalysts called heterogeneous catalysts are among the most widespread industrial applications in reducing toxic gases, unburned fuel, and particulate matter in the exhaust stream from the combustion chamber. They are also used in energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical sectors, i.e., production of biodiesel, polymers, biomass/waste conversion into valuable products, and many others processes. All thanks to their active sites and high surface. Nevertheless, their high efficiency is limited by the astronomic price of noble metals, So, cost-effective substitutes with comparable effectivity seem to be a holy grail for the industry. A recent paper ...

OSAKA, Japan. Look at any piece of machinery and you will see a complex network of moving parts, or actuators, each with its own function, all working together for a common goal. From this perspective, the way most machines differ is in the way their actuators are powered: excavators rely on compressed liquid (hydraulic), the brake system in a car uses compressed air (pneumatic), and a printer has electricity. What if the moving parts of a machine could be powered by light? A machine made up of photoactuators would not need direct contact with the power source to move. Among its many ...

Durham, NC - A study released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine suggests a new way to correct facial atrophy of localized scleroderma (LoS) in patients. It shows how applying grafts made up of the patient's own fat enhanced with adipose?derived stem cells (ADSCs) is a safe, feasible and attractive alternative to conventional fat grafting or fat grafting combined with stromal vascular fraction in treating this condition. LoS is a rare autoimmune disease caused when the body makes too much collagen, which results in the skin becoming stiff and hard. "Presenting mainly as subcutaneous tissue atrophy and hyperpigmentation, this disorder seriously ...

A COVID-19 vaccine that could provide protection against existing and future strains of the COVID-19 coronavirus, and other coronaviruses, and cost about $1 a dose has shown promising results in early animal testing. Vaccines created by UVA Health's Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, and Virginia Tech's Xiang-Jin Meng, MD, PhD, prevented pigs from being becoming ill with a pig model coronavirus, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV). The vaccine was developed using an innovative approach that Zeichner says might one day open the door to a universal vaccine for coronaviruses, ...

A new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business finds a subtle shift in organ donor messaging can lead to a big boost in registration. Organ donation saves countless lives every year, and most people think it's the right thing to do -- but when it comes to people actually registering to donate, the numbers around the world are surprisingly low. This is particularly so in countries that rely on informed consent and require people to learn about organ donation before they opt-in to register as a donor. In fact, in Canada, just 32 per cent of people have registered to become organ donors. Transplant agencies have tried a range of strategies to increase donation levels, including the introduction of in-hospital organ donation coordinators, greater public ...

A forest looks like a hotbed of randomness, with trees and plants scattered in wild and capricious diversity. But appearances can be deceiving, say a trio of complexity researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Underneath that apparent messiness lurk extraordinary regularities, governed by the biological mechanisms that drive universal forces of growth, death, and competition. In a paper published April 9 in the journal PNAS, the SFI group, led by Program Postdoctoral Fellow and now Complexity Science Hub Vienna Postdoctoral Scientist Eddie Lee, describes a new framework that can reproduce those spatial and temporal patterns that emerge in places and ...

The internet seems like the place to go to get into fights. Whether they're with a family member or a complete stranger, these arguments have the potential to destroy important relationships and consume a lot of emotional energy. Researchers at the University of Washington worked with almost 260 people to understand these disagreements and to develop potential design interventions that could make these discussions more productive and centered around relationship-building. The team published these findings this April in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the ACM in Human Computer Interaction Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. "Despite the fact that online spaces are often described as toxic and polarizing, ...

Chronic lower-limb edema (CLE) -- the permanent accumulation of fluid in the leg -- often occurs in elderly people. The condition leads to various physical and mental problems, including difficulty in walking or moving, fatigue and anxiety. One cause of CLE is the lack of physical activity, which is associated with a decrease in muscle pump action. The latter refers to the leg muscle's acting as a blood pump: when contracted, the muscle squeezes veins together, forcing blood to flow. The question whether muscle pump action systematically changes with age has not been thoroughly investigated; now, Junko Sugama from Kanazawa University and colleagues have addressed this issue. In addition, they studied how leg posture affects muscle pump action. For their study, Sugama ...

Osaka, Japan - As humans, we each have a powerful ability to easily recognize our own face. But now, researchers from Japan have uncovered new information about how our cognitive systems enable us to distinguish our own face from those of others, even when the information is presented subliminally. In a study published this month in Cerebral Cortex, researchers from Osaka University have revealed that a central element of the dopamine reward pathway in the brain was activated when participants were subliminally shown images of their face. This provides new clues regarding the underlying processes of the brain involved in self-facial recognition. When we are ...

Southeastern Tibet is one of the most glaciated regions on the Tibetan Plateau both at present and during the Quaternary. Numerical dating of glacial deposits has allowed the establishment of a provisional chronology of Quaternary glacial fluctuations in this region, with the oldest glaciation (Guxiang Glaciation) occurring in marine oxygen isotope stage 6 (MIS-6). However, glaciations predating MIS-6 have been identified at many locations on the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounding mountains, posing the question: as a major glaciation center both at present and during the Quaternary, did a glaciation prior to MIS-6 ever occur in southeastern Tibet? Zhou et al. (2021) provide evidence for a glacier advance in the Bodui Zangbo River ...

Japan -- Next to cat videos, watching small and cuddly rabbits is probably one of the most popular internet pastimes. Plus they appear in literature as well as in traditional folklore spanning numerous cultures, thanks likely to the fact that rabbits reside on every continent except Antarctica. Yet despite their ubiquity, lagomorphs -- including rabbits, hares, and pikas -- are rather limited in their size diversity. Compare this to their evolutionary sisters, the rodents, which vary in size from the four-gram pygmy mouse to capybaras weighing as much as 50 kilograms. So why don't we see rabbits rivaling the sizes of horses? To answer this question, a research team ...

With its more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages, Wikipedia is one of the largest human collaboration efforts in history. One of the main pillars on which this wish to bring together the sum of all knowledge is based is the achievement of a neutral space. However, several studies suggest that the site suffers from a persistent gender bias as regards both content and the composition of its community. An analysis of the gender gap in the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia by an interdisciplinary team at the UOC has revealed that only 11.6% of its registered editors are women. According to the new study, which has been published in the journal PLOS ONE, the difference could be partially due to female editors being less ...

Over the last 200 years, researchers have worked towards understanding the global distribution of species and ecosystems. But so far even the basic knowledge on the global geography of genetic diversity was limited. That now changes with a recent paper from Globe Institute. Professor David Nogues Bravo and his team has spent the last eight years combining data from scientific gene banks with scenarios of future climate and land-use change. The result is the first ever global assessment of how it will impact the genetic diversity of mammals, e.g. when tropical forests are converted to agricultural land. 'Our study ...

Singapore, 19 April, 2021 - Researchers at the Future Urban Mobility (FM) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, have created a synthetic framework known as theory-based residual neural network (TB-ResNet), which combines discrete choice models (DCMs) and deep neural networks (DNNs), also known as deep learning, to improve individual decision-making analysis used in travel behaviour research. In this research paper, Theory-based residual neural networks: A synergy of discrete choice models and deep neural networks, ...

The production of nanomaterials involves self-assembly processes of functionalized (organic) molecules on inorganic surfaces. This combination of organic and inorganic components is essential for applications in organic electronics and other areas of nanotechnology. Until now, certain desired surface properties were often achieved on a trial-and-error basis. Molecules were chemically modified until the best result for the desired surface property was found. However, the processes controlling the self-assembly of molecules at interfaces are so complex ...

Liquid Crystals (LC) are widely deployed in display technology and optical fibres. From smartphones in your pockets to large screen TVs, LCs are everywhere, as this special state of matter has been found in colorful soap bubbles as well as certain living tissues. But LCs are by no means limited to use in gadgets or electronic devices. For quite some time, scientists have been studying the possibility of creating "active nematics", a particular class of active LCs, which consist of self-driven units capable of converting chemical or other forms of energy into motion. When administered the proper stimuli, scientists have found that they can generate a predictable response from different LCs, which allows for design of smart, multifunctional ...

A team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has proven the linkages between ultra-processed foods and reduced bone quality, unveiling the damage of these foods particularly for younger children in their developing years. The study, led by Professor Efrat Monsonego-Ornan and Dr. Janna Zaretsky from the Department of Biochemistry, Food Science and Nutrition at the University's Faculty of Agriculture, was published in the journal Bone Research and serves as the first comprehensive study of the effect of widely-available food products on skeleton development. Ultra-processed foods--aka, junk food--are ...

DALLAS, April 19, 2021 — Gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) was associated with blood pressure changes in both transgender men and women, according to new research published today in Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal. Given the higher burden of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular conditions among transgender men and women, blood pressure screening and monitoring are important, especially after beginning hormone therapies. Although doctors have prescribed gender-affirming hormone therapy to transgender men and women for more than 25 years, researchers and health care professionals know little about rates of hypertension and how the effects on blood ...

Scientists have for the first time captured the complex dynamics of particle movement in granular materials, helping to explain why mixed nuts often see the larger Brazil nuts gather at the top. The findings could have vital impact on industries struggling with the phenomenon, such as pharmaceuticals and mining. Many people will have the experience of dipping their hands into a bag of mixed nuts only to find the Brazil nuts at the top. This effect can also be readily observed with cereal boxes, with the larger items rising to the top. Colloquially, this phenomenon of particles segregating by their size is known as the 'Brazil-nut effect' and also has huge implications for industries where uneven mixing can critically degrade product quality. Now, for the first time, scientists at The ...

Optimal cell function requires a fine balance between the synthesis and degradation of biomolecules. Autophagy is the process by which cells degrade and recycle their own components, helping to clean up and maintain the cell's internal environment and ensure the smooth functioning of cellular processes. Autophagy is strongly induced when cells are subjected to stresses like nutrient deprivation, acting under such conditions to supply nutrients through its breakdown of unneeded cellular material. Autophagy substrates are delivered to vacuoles in yeast or lysosomes in mammals for degradation by double-membrane vesicles called "autophagosomes". While autophagy was originally considered a non-selective process that isolates substrates in the cytoplasm of ...

With alarms sounding about the declining diversity of plants and animals, a related concern with equally profound implications is posed: is the variety of microbial life, including viruses, changing too -- and if so, in which direction and how fast? In a paper published today, David S. Thaler of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Guest Investigator at The Rockefeller University's Programme for the Human Environment (PHE), notes the well-documented, "clearly downwards" trajectory of plant and animal diversity, constituting "a key issue of the Anthropocene." Whether change is underway also in the world of microbes -- the tiniest cogs in planetary functioning -- is "a complete unknown. We have no idea whether global microbial diversity is increasing, decreasing, or staying ...

Anyone sexually active under age 30 should be offered testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea, according to a new guideline from the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Chlamydia and gonorrhea are the most commonly reported sexually transmitted bacterial infections (STIs) in Canada and are treatable with antibiotics. Without treatment, these infections can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, pain and possibly infertility. "If people are under 30 and sexually active, it's a good idea to get tested," says Dr. Ainsley Moore, a family physician and associate clinical professor, Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University, and chair of the task force chlamydia ...

Videoconferences may be less exhausting if participants feel some sense of group belonging, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. As remote work and the use of videoconferences have dramatically increased during the coronavirus pandemic, more people are fatigued from meeting through computer screens instead of in person. In this study, 55 employees in various fields in the United States were surveyed about their feelings about videoconferences. The researchers thought longer meetings and being on video would cause the most fatigue, but their findings surprised them, said lead researcher Andrew Bennett, PhD, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. "We expected that aspects of being on video would be related to fatigue, such ...