The next time you go for a hike, take an extra moment to appreciate the seemingly ordinary life all around you. A house fly, humble yarrow weed and other "generalist" plants and pollinators play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity and may also serve as buffers against some impacts of climate change, finds new University of Colorado Boulder research. The findings, published this month in Ecology, provide valuable insights for prioritizing the conservation of species that contribute to the strength of ecological communities. "A lot of times, conservation efforts are geared toward things that are rare. But oftentimes, species that are common are also in decline and could go extinct, and that could have really big repercussions for maintaining biodiversity," ...

New research is shining light on the importance of farmers' markets' ability to mitigate potential disruptions to distribution networks in the face of system shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. In a recent study, the researchers found the markets' regional characteristics play a key role in the decision to move all or parts of their operations online -- and how that decision can help or hinder its surrounding community. "By building online communities through their social media and website tools, farmers' markets can play a role in keeping the community connected and supporting a sustainable and just food system through the pandemic and beyond," said researcher Josalyn Radcliffe, a PhD student in Waterloo's School of Public Health and ...

Sophia Antipolis - 17 April 2021: Elevated blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes increase the risk of heart disease. But a large study today reveals that in people with these conditions, increasing activity levels is associated with a reduced likelihood of heart events and mortality. The research is presented at ESC Preventive Cardiology 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 Study author Dr. Esmée Bakker of Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands said: "Previous research showed that improvements in physical activity are beneficial to health. However, those studies were performed in the general population. In our study, we were interested to see if there were similar effects in individuals with cardiovascular ...

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Hosei University have discovered a new species of large, tropical centipede of genus Scolopendra in Okinawa and Taiwan. It is only the third amphibious centipede identified in the world, and is the largest in the region, 20 cm long and nearly 2 cm thick. It is also the first new centipede to be identified in Japan in 143 years, testament to the incredible biodiversity of the Ryukyu Archipelago. Scolopendra is a genus of large, tropical centipede, one of the original genera named by the father of modern taxonomy himself, Carl Linnaeus. They are strong predators in any soil ecosystems they inhabit, with around 100 different species found in tropical regions around the world. Of these, only five have been ...

Research shows that a new telescope could detect a potential signature of life on other planets in as little as 60 hours. "What really surprised me about the results is that we may realistically find signs of life on other planets in the next 5 to 10 years," said Caprice Phillips, a graduate student at The Ohio State University, who will share preliminary findings at a END ...

From engineered pandemics to city-toppling cyber attacks to nuclear annihilation, life on Earth could radically change, and soon. Scientists will forecast the fate of the planet at a END ...

Tarantulas are among the most notorious spiders, due in part to their size, vibrant colors and prevalence throughout the world. But one thing most people don't know is that tarantulas are homebodies. Females and their young rarely leave their burrows and only mature males will wander to seek out a mate. How then did such a sedentary spider come to inhabit six out of seven continents? An international team of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University's Saoirse Foley, set out on an ancestry.com-like investigation to find the answer to this question. They looked to the transcriptomes, ...

Faced with the tragic loss of the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico and the often prohibitive cost of satellite missions, astronomers are searching for savvy alternatives to continue answering fundamental questions in physics. At a END ...

JUPITER, FL--Making memories involves more than seeing friends or taking photos. The brain constantly adapts to new information and stores memories by building connections among neurons, called synapses. How neurons do this--reaching out arm-like dendrites to communicate with other neurons--requires a ballet of genes, signaling molecules, cellular scaffolding and protein-building machinery. A new study from scientists at Scripps Research and the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience finds a central role for one signaling molecule, a long, noncoding RNA that the scientists named ADEPTR. Using a variety of technologies, including confocal and two-photon microscopy, they track ADEPTR's moves, watching as it forms, travels, amasses at the ...

AMES, Iowa - A lot is riding on the continued advancement of plant sciences. Take the food supply, for starters. Climate change and population growth will continue to pose challenges in the future, and crop production will require innovation and progress by plant scientists in order to keep pace. It isn't an overstatement to say that populations around the world will go hungry if plant science stagnates, said Gustavo MacIntosh, a professor in the Roy J. Carver Department of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Iowa State University. "At the end of the day, either you eat plants or you eat food that ate plants," MacIntosh said. "Plants are the basis for the food we have." MacIntosh predicts ...

When the Electron Ion Collider received the go-ahead in January 2020, it became the only new major accelerator in the works anywhere in the world. "All the stars aligned," said Elke-Caroline Aschenauer, Brookhaven National Laboratory Staff Scientist and a leader in developing the EIC plans. "We have the technology to build this unique particle accelerator and detector to do the measurements that, together with the underlying theory, can for the first time provide answers to longstanding fundamental questions in nuclear physics." The EIC isn't the only Brookhaven project poised to reshape nuclear and particle physics. Forthcoming data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider could finally detect the elusive chiral magnetic effect. Meanwhile, planned accelerators could run on sustainable ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 16, 2021 -- Large-scale supercomputer simulations at the atomic level show that the dominant G form variant of the COVID-19-causing virus is more infectious partly because of its greater ability to readily bind to its target host receptor in the body, compared to other variants. These research results from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team illuminate the mechanism of both infection by the G form and antibody resistance against it, which could help in future vaccine development. "We found that the interactions among the basic building blocks of the Spike protein become ...

Researchers within the Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University have made a breakthrough in understanding the role played by high-risk immune genes associated with the development of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The findings, published in Science Immunology, were the result of a seven-year collaboration led by Monash University, involving Janssen Research and Development, USA and the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Certain immune system genes, called Human Leukocyte antigen (HLA)-DR4, cause an increased susceptibility to RA. In this study, using mice genetically ...

The social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitment as crucial drivers of segregation. Researchers at Linköping University and ESADE, Ramon Llull University now show that this view must be revised. In their Science Advances article, they call attention to a previously unidentified factor, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which shows that network-based recruitment can reduce rather than increase segregation levels. The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is an important source of socio-economic inequalities. Therefore, the understanding the mechanisms that drive segregation ...

Science Advances publishes proteomics technology from Oblique Therapeutics AB with a potential to bring several novel antibody medicines to large patient populations in multiple disease areas Gothenburg, Sweden, April 16th, 2021 - Oblique Therapeutics AB, a Sweden-based biotech company, in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden), Gothenburg University (Sweden) and several local biotechs published promising research results in the highly-acclaimed scientific journal Science Advances (AAAS) entitled: Rational Antibody design for Undruggable Targets using Kinetically Controlled Biomolecular ...

New Haven, Conn. -- It is well established that autism occurs much more frequently in boys than in girls, and that girls seem to have a greater resilience to developing the condition. It has been unclear, however, why that is. In a new Yale-led study, researchers find that autism may develop in different regions of the brain in girls than boys and that girls with autism have a larger number of genetic mutations than boys, suggesting that they require a larger "genetic hit" to develop the disorder. The findings appear in the April 16 edition of the journal ...

 Aging entails a loss of muscle mass and strength, which in some cases impairs mobility, hinders walking or performance of day-to-day tasks, and exposes the elderly to the risk of falls and hospitalizations. In clinical practice, handgrip measurement is the most widely used method to identify loss of overall muscular strength in older people. Values below 26 kg for men and 16 kg for women have for some time been considered an indication of risk-associated weakness, but these parameters are being revised. Researchers at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, collaborating with colleagues at other institutions in the same state such as the University of São Paulo's Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP), Nursing School ...

Although antibodies induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection are largely protective, they do not completely protect against reinfection in young people, as evidenced through a longitudinal, prospective study of more than 3,000 young, healthy members of the US Marines Corps conducted by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Naval Medical Research Center, published April 15 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. "Our findings indicate that reinfection by SARS-CoV-2 in health young adults is common" says Stuart Sealfon, MD, the Sara B. and Seth M. Glickenhaus Professor of Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and senior author of the paper. "Despite a prior COVID-19 infection, young people can catch the virus ...

In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface temperatures between 2400 and 3700 K (over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun), and masses between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses. In this context, a team of researchers led by Borja Toledo Padrón, a Severo Ochoa-La Caixa doctoral student at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), specializing in the search for planets around this type of stars, has discovered a super-Earth orbiting the star GJ 740, a red dwarf star situated some 36 light years from the Earth. The planet orbits its star with a period of 2.4 days and its mass is around 3 ...

One of the most comprehensive statistical analyses of drivers of food insecurity across 65 countries has concluded that household income consistently explains more discrepancy in food security than any other factor, including agricultural land resources and production. The Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth study, "Cross-national analysis of food security drivers: comparing results based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale and Global Food Security Index," was recently published by the peer-reviewed journal Food Security. Given the persistent issue of food insecurity--one of the United Nation's sustainable development goals is to achieve zero hunger--the study's results are vital in determining how best to tackle the complex problem. "We're ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Volcanologists' ability to estimate eruption risks is largely reliant on knowing where pools of magma are stored, deep in the Earth's crust. But what happens if the magma can't be spotted? Shane Rooyakkers, a postdoctoral scholar at GNS Science in New Zealand, grew up in the shadow of Mount Taranaki on the country's North Island, hiking on the island's many volcanoes. Today, his research is revealing hidden dangers that may have been beneath his feet all along. A new study, published yesterday in Geology, explores a threat volcanologists discovered only recently: surprisingly shallow magma pools that are too small to be detected with common volcano monitoring equipment. Such a magma body was ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - April 16, 2021 - Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have identified a set of human genes that fight SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus that causes COVID-19. Knowing which genes help control viral infection can greatly assist researchers' understanding of factors that affect disease severity and also suggest possible therapeutic options. The genes in question are related to interferons, the body's frontline virus fighters. The study was published in the journal Molecular Cell. "We wanted to gain a better understanding of the cellular response to SARS-CoV-2, including what drives a strong or weak response to infection," says Sumit K. Chanda, Ph.D., professor and director of the Immunity and Pathogenesis Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys and lead ...

Scientists have figured out how to modify CRISPR's basic architecture to extend its reach beyond the genome and into what's known as the epigenome -- proteins and small molecules that latch onto DNA and control when and where genes are switched on or off. In a paper published April 9, 2021, in the journal Cell, researchers at UC San Francisco and the Whitehead Institute describe a novel CRISPR-based tool called "CRISPRoff," which allows scientists to switch off almost any gene in human cells without making a single edit to the genetic code. The researchers also show that once a gene is switched off, it remains inert in the cell's descendants for hundreds of generations, unless ...

Look deep inside the brain of someone with Alzheimer's disease, most forms of dementia or the concussion-related syndrome known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and you'll find a common suspected culprit: stringy, hairball-like tangles of a protein called tau. Such conditions, collectively known as "tauopathies" strike scores of people across the globe, with Alzheimer's alone affecting six million people in the United States. But more than a century after German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer discovered tau tangles, scientists still have much to ...

What The Study Did: The fitted filtration efficiency of commonly available masks worn singly, doubled or in combinations was evaluated in this study. Authors: Emily E. Sickbert-Bennett, Ph.D., M.S., of the UNC Medical Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2033) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of ...