At the heart of clouds are ice crystals. And at the heart of ice crystals, often, are aerosol particles - dust in the atmosphere onto which ice can form more easily than in the open air. It's a bit mysterious how this happens, though, because ice crystals are orderly structures of molecules, while aerosols are often disorganized chunks. New research by Valeria Molinero, distinguished professor of chemistry, and Atanu K. Metya, now at the Indian Institute of Technology Patna, shows how crystals of organic molecules, a common component of aerosols, can get the ...

Observations of groups of wild bonobos, reported in Scientific Reports, suggest that two infants may have been adopted by adult females belonging to different social groups. The findings may represent the first report of cross-group adoption in wild bonobos, and potentially also the first cases of cross-group adoption in wild apes. Bonobos form social groups of multiple males and females that sometimes temporarily associate with one another. Nahoko Tokuyama and colleagues observed four groups of wild bonobos between April 2019 and March 2020 in the Luo Scientific Reserve in Wamba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. The authors identified two infants whom ...

Newly excavated skeletal remains of an ankylosaurid -- a large armoured herbivore that lived during the Cretaceous Period -- may indicate that members of this family of dinosaurs were able to dig, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The specimen, known as MPC-D 100/1359, may further our understanding of ankylosaurid behaviour during the Late Cretaceous (84-72 million years ago). Yuong-Nam Lee and colleagues excavated the skeletal elements of MPC-D 100/1359 from a deposit of the Baruungoyot Formation in the southern Gobi Desert, Mongolia, ...

UC Santa Cruz researchers published a new study--in collaboration with UC Water and the Sierra Nevada Research Institute at UC Merced--that suggests covering California's 6,350 km network of public water delivery canals with solar panels could be an economically feasible means of advancing both renewable energy and water conservation. The concept of "solar canals" has been gaining momentum around the world as climate change increases the risk of drought in many regions. Solar panels can shade canals to help prevent water loss through evaporation, and some types of solar panels also work better over canals, because the cooler environment keeps them from overheating. ...

Training neural networks to perform tasks, such as recognizing images or navigating self-driving cars, could one day require less computing power and hardware thanks to a new artificial neuron device developed by researchers at the University of California San Diego. The device can run neural network computations using 100 to 1000 times less energy and area than existing CMOS-based hardware. Researchers report their work in a paper published Mar. 18 in Nature Nanotechnology. Neural networks are a series of connected layers of artificial neurons, where the output of one layer provides the ...

From swallowing pills to injecting insulin, patients frequently administer their own medication. But they don't always get it right. Improper adherence to doctors' orders is commonplace, accounting for thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in medical costs annually. MIT researchers have developed a system to reduce those numbers for some types of medications. The new technology pairs wireless sensing with artificial intelligence to determine when a patient is using an insulin pen or inhaler, and flags potential errors in the patient's administration method. "Some past work reports that up to 70% of patients do not ...

A study by Monash University has uncovered that liver metabolism is disrupted in people with obesity-related type 2 diabetes, which contributes to high blood sugar and muscle loss - also known as skeletal muscle atrophy. Using human trials as well as mouse models, collaborative research led by Dr Adam Rose at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute has found the liver metabolism of the amino acid alanine is altered in people with obesity-related type 2 diabetes. By selectively silencing enzymes that break down alanine in liver cells, high blood sugar and muscle loss can be reversed by the restoration of skeletal muscle protein synthesis, a critical determinant of muscle size and strength. The research, published today in Nature Metabolism, has shown the altered liver metabolism ...

Scientists have witnessed bonobo apes adopting infants who were born outside of their social group for the first time in the wild. Researchers, including psychologists at Durham University, UK, twice saw the unusual occurrence among bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in central Africa. They say their findings give us greater insight into the parental instincts of one of humans' closest relatives and could help to explain the emotional reason behind why people readily adopt children who they have had no previous connection with. The research, led by Kyoto University, in Japan, is published in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers observed a number of bonobo groups over several years in the Wamba area of ...

Researchers at Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology and their collaborators looked at the electronic health records of nearly 630,000 patients who were tested for SARS-CoV-2, and found stark disparities in COVID-19 outcomes -- odds of infection, hospitalization, and in-hospital mortality -- between White and non-White minority racial and ethnic groups. The work was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. The team looked at sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of patients who were part of the Providence healthcare system in Washington, Oregon and California. These ...

Metformin, a drug used to treat type-2 diabetes, could help reduce chronic inflammation in people living with HIV (PLWH) who are being treated with antiretroviral therapy (ART), according to researchers at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM). Although ART has helped improved the health of PLWH, they are nevertheless at greater risk of developing complications related to chronic inflammation, such as cardiovascular disease. These health problems are mainly due to the persistence of HIV reservoirs in the patients' long-lived memory T cells and to the constant activation of their immune system. In a pilot study published recently in ...

MADISON, Wis. -- Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a way to use a cell's own recycling machinery to destroy disease-causing proteins, a technology that could produce entirely new kinds of drugs. Some cancers, for instance, are associated with abnormal proteins or an excess of normally harmless proteins. By eliminating them, researchers believe they can treat the underlying cause of disease and restore a healthy balance in cells. The new technique builds on an earlier strategy by researchers and pharmaceutical companies to remove proteins residing inside of a cell, and expands on this system to include proteins ...

For the first time, scientists have documented biofluorescence in an Arctic fish species. The study, led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History who spent hours in the icy waters off of Greenland where the red-and-green-glowing snailfish was found, is published today in the American Museum Novitates. "Overall, we found marine fluorescence to be quite rare in the Arctic, in both invertebrate and vertebrate lineages," said John Sparks, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Department of Ichthyology and one of the authors of the ...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic changed the higher education experience for students across the United States, with more than 90 percent of institutions reporting a shift in education delivery with the arrival of COVID-19. The rapid transition to remote study came with its own learning curve for students and faculty alike. But for many students with disabilities, the shift offered new educational modalities as well as challenges - and the hope that some changes will continue after the threat of the virus subsides. "This was a really unique, historical moment," says Nicholas Gelbar '06 (ED), '07 MEd, '13 Ph.D., an associate research professor with the Neag School of Education. "Remote learning, ...

Millions of children weighing less than 15kg are currently denied access to Ivermectin treatment due to insufficient safety data being available to support a change to the current label indication. The WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN)'s new meta-analysis published today provides evidence that supports removing this barrier and improving treatment equity. ...

DURHAM, N.H.-- Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that more than 50% of children in high-risk populations in the United States are not receiving behavioral health services that could improve their developmental outcomes when it comes to mental and physical health problems. In their END ...

HOUSTON - (March 18, 2021) - If you're looking for one technique to maximize photon output from plasmons, stop. It takes two to wrangle. Rice University physicists came across a phenomenon that boosts the light from a nanoscale device more than 1,000 times greater than they anticipated. When looking at light coming from a plasmonic junction, a microscopic gap between two gold nanowires, there are conditions in which applying optical or electrical energy individually prompted only a modest amount of light emission. Applying both together, however, caused a burst of light that far exceeded ...

When it comes to recreational crabbing--one of the most iconic pastimes along Maryland's shores--the current estimate of 8% of "total male commercial harvest" runs just a little too low. Biologists, with local community support, found stronger evidence for the underestimate in the END ...

As one of the founding members of the International Rye Genome Sequencing Group (IRGSG), the University of Maryland (UMD) co-published the first full reference genome sequence for rye in Nature Genetics. UMD and international collaborators saw the need for a reference genome of this robust small grain to allow for the tracking of its useful genes and fulfill its potential for crop improvement across all major varieties of small grains, including wheat, barley, triticale (a cross between wheat and rye that is gaining popularity), and rye. Following the model of international collaboration used ...

Wheat stripe rust is one of the most important wheat diseases and is caused by the plant-pathogenic fungi Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst). Though Pst is known to be highly host-specific, it is interestingly able to infect two unrelated host plants, wheat and barberry, at different spore stages. Pst infects wheat through its urediniospores and infects barberry with its basidiospores. "This complex life cycle poses interesting questions on the co-evolution between the pathogen and the hosts, as well the different mechanisms of pathogenesis underlying the infection of ...

The Journal of Anthropological Research has just published a new article on the development of linguistic documentation among heritage language speakers: "Articulating Lingual Life Histories and Language Ideological Assemblages: Indigenous Activists within the North Fork Mono and Village of Tewa Communities." Specifically, it focuses on the biographical information of individual speakers, and the significance they place on the language in question. Author Paul V. Kroskrity focused his research on two specific communities - the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians in California and the Village of Tewa, First Mesa, Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona ...

In a study aimed at investigating the mechanism responsible for exacerbating rheumatoid arthritis in smokers, researchers at the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases (CRID), linked to the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, discovered a novel path in the inflammatory process associated with the bone damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis. The discovery opens up opportunities for new therapeutic interventions to mitigate the effects of the disease, for which there is no specific treatment at this time. An article on the study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. for both men and women. While risk for this disease can be influenced by environmental and lifestyle factors like smoking, studies estimate that 18% of lung cancer cases are due to inherited genetic variants. New research led by Baylor College of Medicine investigates how genetic variants contribute to increased risk of lung cancer. The researchers performed whole exome sequencing on germline (inherited) DNA from eight large-scale datasets, including 1,045 patients with a family history of lung cancer or early-onset cancer. Those groups are more likely to harbor genetic risk variants. The analysis ...

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have debunked the decade-old myth of metals being useless in photonics - the science and technology of light - with their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, expected to lead to many applications in the field of nanophotonics. "We broke the record for the resonance quality factor (Q-factor) of a periodic array of metal nanoparticles by one order of magnitude compared to previous reports," said senior author Dr. Ksenia Dolgaleva, Canada Research Chair in Integrated Photonics (Tier 2) and ...

Medical cannabis is a subject of much debate. There is still a lot we do not know about cannabis, but researchers from the Department of Neuroscience at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences have made a new discovery that may prove vital to future research into and treatment with medical cannabis. Cannabinoids are compounds found in cannabis and in the central nervous system. Using a mouse model, the researchers have demonstrated that a specific synthetic cannabinoid (cannabinoid WIN55,212-2) reduces essential tremor by activating the support cells of the spinal cord and brain, known as astrocytes. Previous research into medical cannabis has focussed on the ...

LOS ANGELES (March 18, 2021) -- COVID-19 disproportionately affects men compared with women, raising the possibility that a hormone like progesterone may improve clinical outcomes for certain hospitalized men with the disease. New research from Cedars-Sinai published online in the journal Chest supports this hypothesis. The pilot clinical trial, involving 40 men, is believed to be the first published study to use progesterone to treat male COVID-19 patients whose lung functions have been compromised by the coronavirus. While the findings are promising, larger clinical trials are needed to establish the potential of this experimental therapy, the investigators said. The study was prompted ...