Researchers have combined research with real and robotic insects to better understand how they sense forces in their limbs while walking, providing new insights into the biomechanics and neural dynamics of insects and informing new applications for large legged robots. Campaniform sensilla (CS) are force receptors found in the limbs of insects that respond to stress and strain, providing important information for controlling locomotion. Similar force receptors exist in mammals known as Golgi tendon organs, suggesting that understanding the role ...

Obesity risk genes make people feel hungrier and lose control over their eating, but practicing dietary restraint could counteract this. New research by University of Exeter, Exeter Clinical Research Facility, and University of Bristol – funded by the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership and published in the International Journal of Epidemiology - found that those with higher genetic risk of obesity can reduce the effects that are transmitted via hunger and uncontrolled eating by up to half through dietary restraint. Psychology PhD student, Shahina Begum, from the University of Exeter is lead author and said: “At a time when high ...

Researchers have discovered the most distant active supermassive black hole to date with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The galaxy, CEERS 1019, existed about 570 million years after the big bang, and its black hole is less massive than any other yet identified in the early universe. In addition to the black hole in CEERS 1019, the researchers identified two more black holes that are on the smaller side and existed 1 billion and 1.1 billion years after the big bang. JWST also identified eleven galaxies that existed when the universe was 470 million to 675 million years old. The evidence was provided ...

Viruses in man-made environments cause public health concerns, but they are generally less studied than bacteria. A recent study led by environmental scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) provided the first evidence of frequent interactions between viruses and bacteria in man-made environments. It found that viruses can potentially help host bacteria adapt and survive in nutrient-depleted man-made environments through a unique gene insertion. By understanding these virus–bacteria interactions and identifying the possible spread of antibiotic ...

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology sent feedback in June to the National Institutes of Health about its proposed changes to the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award fellowship application and review process. The proposed changes indicate that the NIH adopted nearly all of the ASBMB’s earlier recommendations (here and here) to reduce institutional and investigator bias and refocus the evaluation on an applicant’s potential and the impact of the ...

Wastewater monitoring could act as an early warning system to help countries better prepare for future pandemics, according to a new study. An international collaboration involving Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, Mathematica and the United Kingdom’s Health Security Agency has shed light on how different countries monitor wastewater during infectious diseases outbreaks and where improvements could be made. For the study, samples from treatment plants, rivers, wetlands and open drains were reported ...

All cells have their own power plants, called mitochondria. There are often more than 100 mitochondria per cell and each possesses their own genome, which in turn contains genes responsible for energy production. If errors creep into these genes, this can cause problems in the cell and result in diseases. Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) and the Max Delbrück Center have now discovered that the T cells of the immune system are especially sensitive to genetic disturbances within their mitochondrial power plants. They have published their findings ...

The remarkable level of miniaturization possible in modern electronics has paved the way for realizing healthcare devices previously confined to the realm of science fiction. Wearable sensors are a prominent example of this. As the name suggests, these devices are worn on the body, usually directly on the skin. They can monitor important bodily parameters, including heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle activity. Some wearable sensors can also detect chemicals in bodily fluids. For instance, sweat biosensors ...

How well do children know letters and their corresponding sounds? In Norway, the gender difference on these tasks when children start school is significant. The girls have a clear head start. “We see these differences in all categories – for upper case and lower case letters, for the names of the letters and for their corresponding sounds,” says Hermundur Sigmundsson, a professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Psychology. Girls’ letter-sound knowledge is clearly better than that of boys,’ and girls remain far better readers than boys at age 15. Since reading is key for so many ...

In chemistry, a molecule or ion is said to be chiral if it cannot be superposed on to its mirror image by any combination of rotations, translations, or conformational changes. A chiral molecule or ion exists in two forms, called enantiomers, that are mirror images of each other; they are often distinguished as either ‘right-handed’ or ‘left-handed’ by their absolute configuration. Enantiomers exhibit similar physical and chemical properties, except when interacting with polarized light and reacting with other chiral compounds, ...

New Study Shows Robust Pandemic Preparedness Strongly Linked to Lower COVID-19 Mortality Rates   Preparedness matters: Accounting for age and national capabilities to diagnose COVID-19 deaths reveals that pre-pandemic investments in capacity saved lives—though U.S. remains an outlier.   The vast majority of countries that entered the COVID-19 pandemic with strong capacity to prevent, detect, and respond to disease threats achieved lower pandemic mortality rates than less prepared nations, ...

The 64th Supplement to the American Ornithological Society’s (AOS) Check-list of North American Birds, published today in Ornithology, includes numerous updates to the classification of North American bird species.  A few highlights from this year’s supplement, detailed below, include a species lump for the Western Flycatcher, species status for the goshawk of North America, and species splits in several Caribbean birds leading to five additional species.  The Check-list, published since 1886, is updated annually by the AOS’s North American Classification Committee (NACC), the official authority on the names and classification of the ...

There are more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. In 2019, more than 608,000 individuals were released from prison. It is estimated that up to 55 percent of people released from prison will be re-incarcerated within five years. The cause of high recidivism or re-offense rates in the U.S. is multi-dimensional. Moreover, the relationship between employment and crime is complex. To combat an unstable work history and lack of interpersonal skills, some communities have implemented transitional employment programs, ...

Ongoing research by Prof. Lewis Halsey and his team at the University of Roehampton, UK has identified that an upper critical temperature (UCT) exists for humans and is likely to be between 40°C and 50°C. Further research is now underway to explain this rise in metabolic energy costs at high temperatures. Prof. Halsey and his team have found that resting metabolic rate, a measure of how much energy the human body consumes to keep ticking over, can be higher when people are exposed to hot and humid conditions. ...

Labile expression of sex was frequently reported by empirical observation in a variety of Populus species, but the underlying genetic mechanism remains largely unknown.  This article has been published on Horticulture Research with title: The proposed role of MSL-lncRNAs in causing sex lability of female poplars. In this study, we carried out a systematic study on a maleness promoting gene, MSL, detected in Populus deltoides genome. Our results showed that both strands of MSL contained multiple cis-activating elements, which generated long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) ...

A new study, published in PeerJ Life and Environment, conducted by Dr. Martina Lazzaroni (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Dr Joana Schar (University of Vienna) and colleagues, has shed light on the cognitive abilities of village dogs in understanding human communication. The research, which aimed to explore the impact of the domestication process on dogs' behavior and cognition, has yielded fascinating results, highlighting the importance of studying free-ranging dogs as representatives of the broader dog population.  Previous studies examining dogs' cognitive skills in understanding ...

HOUSTON – (July 6, 2023) – Songtao Chen, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, has won a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award to advance the development of quantum networks by leveraging imperfections ⎯ known as point defects ⎯ in silicon material. The grants are awarded each year to a selective cohort of about 500 early career faculty across all disciplines engaged in pathbreaking research and committed to growing their field through outreach and education. Chen ...

VANCOUVER, Wash. – The invasive Asian clam is more common in the lower Columbia River than its native habitat of southeast Asia, according to a study of the clam’s abundance in the river. The findings don’t bode well for potential future invasions by the even more destructive quagga and zebra mussels. So far, the Columbia is one of the only major U.S. rivers to remain free of these notorious ecology-destroying, equipment-clogging bivalves. To understand how new invaders might spread, a Washington State University-led ...

Karma Nanglu says his favorite animal is whichever one he’s working on. But his latest subject may hold first place status for a while: a 500-million-year-old fossil from the wonderfully weird group of marine invertebrates, the tunicates. “This animal is as exciting a discovery as some of the stuff I found when hanging off a cliffside of a mountain, or jumping out of a helicopter. It’s just as cool,” said Nanglu, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. In a new study in Nature Communications, Nanglu and coauthors describe the new fossil, ...

Halide perovskites are a family of materials that have attracted attention for their superior optoelectronic properties and potential applications in devices such as high-performance solar cells, light-emitting diodes, and lasers. These materials have largely been implemented into thin-film or micron-sized device applications. Precisely integrating these materials at the nanoscale could open up even more remarkable applications, like on-chip light sources, photodetectors, and memristors. However, achieving this integration has remained challenging because this delicate material can be damaged by conventional fabrication and patterning ...

EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has launched the Pathogens Portal – an online platform that enables researchers, clinicians, and policymakers to access the most comprehensive collection of biomolecular data about pathogens. The portal features data spanning over 200,000 pathogen species and strains and is set to become a key tool for infection biology and pathogen surveillance.  The list of pathogens featured in the portal was collated using the UK’s Health and Safety Executive’s ...

When animals suffer from acute or chronic stress, they produce more hormones causing shifts in the nervous system, immune response, and behavior. Some animals, if they are in the presence of a conspecific, can modulate their response to buffer stress. This is known as social buffering. There is some research suggesting that snakes can exhibit complex social behavior. Nevertheless, social buffering in reptiles, as well as in other asocial organisms and solitary foragers, hasn’t been studied extensively. Now, researchers in the US have examined if rattlesnakes inhabiting Southern California use social buffering to alleviate acute stress. “We showed that when ...

Every year in Belgium, 1,600 people wait for a transplant. Of these, in 2021, only 939 received an organ. Thus more than 40% of patients often have to wait more than a year before hoping to receive a transplant. When a transplant is possible, it is essential to ensure its success so as not to “waste” an organ. One of the keys to successful transplants is an anti-rejection drug, tacrolimus, which patients must take for life. But it is extremely difficult to dose this drug correctly, which can lead to significant risks of transplant failure in the event of underdosing and significant side effects in the event of overdosing (diabetes, hirsutism, hair loss, neuropathy or nephrotoxic ...

UCL press release Under embargo until Thursday, 6 July 2023, 00:01 London time   Giant stone artefacts found on rare Ice Age site in Kent Researchers at the UCL Institute of Archaeology have discovered some of the largest early prehistoric stone tools in Britain. The excavations, which took place in Kent and were commissioned in advance of development of the Maritime Academy School in Frindsbury, revealed prehistoric artefacts in deep Ice Age sediments preserved on a hillside above the Medway Valley. The researchers, from UCL Archaeology South-East, discovered 800 stone artefacts thought to be over 300,000 years old, buried in sediments which filled a sinkhole and ...

UNVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new type of ferroelectric polymer that is exceptionally good at converting electrical energy into mechanical strain holds promise as a high-performance motion controller or “actuator” with great potential for applications in medical devices, advanced robotics, and precision positioning systems, according to a team of international researchers led by Penn State.  Mechanical strain, how a material changes shape when force is applied, is an important property for an actuator, which is any material that will change or deform when an external force such as electrical energy is applied. Traditionally, these actuator ...