If you’ve ever wondered how the monarch butterfly got its spots, University of Georgia researchers may have just found the answer. The new study suggests that the butterflies with more white spots are more successful at reaching their long-distance wintering destination. Although it’s not yet clear how the spots aid the species’ migration, it’s possible that the spots change airflow patterns around their wings. “We undertook this project to learn how such a small animal can make such a successful ...

A new analysis suggests that wild, stray, and feral cats living in areas with higher human population density tend to release—or “shed”—a greater amount of the parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis. The study also draws links between environmental temperature variation and parasite shedding. Sophie Zhu of the University of California Davis, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 21. Toxoplasmosis is a mild-to-severe disease caused by Toxoplasma gondii, which can infect warm-blooded vertebrates, including humans and many wild or domestic animals; for instance, cats, sheep, mice, birds, ...

The capability to reflect on their own mental state and that of others continues to develop throughout adolescence, with mentalizing scores varying by gender and personality traits, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alex Desatnik of University College London, UK, and colleagues. It has been established that the human brain undergoes a number of important changes during adolescence, especially in the “social brain” regions associated with social cognition. One of the key constructs capturing multiple facets of social cognition is ...

### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286921 Article Title: How the monarch got its spots: Long-distance migration selects for larger white spots on monarch butterfly wings Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Approximately one in ten NHS healthcare workers experienced suicidal thoughts during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, finds a new University of Bristol-led study published in PLOS ONE today [21 June]. Concerns were raised about the risk of suicide among healthcare workers during the pandemic after a number of high-profile cases were reported in the media. Researchers from the University of Bristol, King’s College London and UCL (University College London), sought to investigate the prevalence and incidence of suicidal thoughts and behaviour among NHS healthcare workers in England and their relationship with occupational ...

Ruxolitinib, a drug that is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating certain cancers and skin conditions, is effective at inhibiting CaMKII, a protein kinase linked to cardiac arrhythmias. In a new study published June 21, 2023, in Science Translational Medicine, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago invented a new reporting technique to monitor activity of CaMKII while screening the effects of nearly 5,000 FDA approved drugs on human cells that expressed the ...

New global research on child mortality rates in Ethiopia shows while there has been a significant decline in these rates in past three decades, too many children under the age of five are still dying. The analysis found the mortality rate in the under-five demographic decreased by almost 4.5 per cent every year between 1990 and 2019. However, despite the progress, it’s still one of the highest rates in the world with an estimated 190,000 under 5 deaths in 2019 at the rate of 52 deaths per 1000 livebirths. The country’s neonatal mortality rate is 26.6 deaths per 1000 livebirths. Lead author Dr Gizachew Tessema from the Curtin School of Population ...

When a photon interacts with a material, an interaction occurs that causes its atoms to change their quantum state (a description of the physical properties of nature at the atomic level). The resulting state is called, aptly, photoexcitation. These photoexcitations are conventionally assumed to kill one another when they come near each other, radically limiting their density and mobility. This in turn limits how efficient tools that rely on photoexcitation such as solar cells and light-emitting devices can be. But in a study published June 19 in the journal Nature Chemistry, scientists at Northwestern University and Purdue University challenge this assumption ...

Medication-assisted treatment (MAT), such as naltrexone, is a well-documented successful treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). However, there are multiple barriers for clinicians to use MAT, including clinician lack of confidence in using the treatment, their own misconceptions about the patient population, and, until recently, federally required training. Additionally, there is a stigma associated with MAT and the patients who would most benefit from it. Improving access to MAT training and integrating it into clinician programs and curriculums may remove identified barriers, decrease stigma, and enable newly trained clinicians to treat patients. To address these barriers, ...

In a new study titled, “Understanding Feeling ‘High’ and Its Role in Medical Cannabis Patient Outcomes,” published in the journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology, researchers at The University of New Mexico, in collaboration with Releaf App™ found that patients who reported feeling “High” experienced 7.7% greater symptom relief and an increase in reporting of positive side effects such as “Relaxed” and “Peaceful.” However, these benefits must be weighed against a more than 20% increase in negative side effect reporting. Senior author and Associate Professor of Psychology, ...

Screening newborns for severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCID) significantly increases the survival of children after bone marrow transplantation, a new North American study finds. Published today in The Lancet with an accompanying editorial, the retrospective study was co-led by Elie Haddad, an Université de Montréal medical professor and clinician scientist, pediatrician and immunologist at the UdeM-affiliated CHU Sainte-Justine mother-and-child hospital. The research shows that the gradual adoption of newborn screening for SCID since 2008 in North America has boosted the survival rate from 73 per cent between 1982 and 2009 to ...

Specially designed gardens could reduce the amount of a toxic chemical associated with tires entering our waterways by more than 90 per cent, new research shows. Tired toxins The chemical 6PPD-quinone can form when car tires interact with the atmosphere. It enters rivers and streams when rain runs off roads into waterways. It is toxic to coho salmon, rainbow trout and some other fish. “Rain gardens”, or bioretention cells, are gardens engineered to reduce flooding and soak up contaminants when road runoff is directed ...

One of the main reasons plants use water is to allow them to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This means that, in plants, the water and carbon cycles are tightly linked. In a new study, researchers from the University of Missouri and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) used this foundational principle to identify sustainable farming practices aimed at helping staple crops like corn and soybeans thrive during extreme weather conditions that have become more common in the Midwest.  This study examined how farming practices affect crop resilience to climate change by examining water and carbon ...

SAN FRANCISCO — PLOS today is announcing that it will soon launch two new journals: PLOS Mental Health and PLOS Complex Systems. PLOS sees these new journals as an opportunity to give evolving research communities opportunities to forge a new path for research in the field. Whether that means welcoming new ways of sharing research transparently or cementing new policies that enable research to be evaluated and rewarded more fairly, or simply finding a broader audience where research can make a greater real-world impact. PLOS Mental Health provides a dedicated venue for all mental health research, connecting global experts from a broad range of disciplines and addressing challenges ...

A research team led by Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) has identified a molecular compound that activates latent HIV-1 in cells, showing promise for HIV treatments Tokyo, Japan – A multi-institutional research group led by researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) has made a significant and promising step forward in our ability to treat human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), the virus underlying acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). To appreciate their accomplishment, we must first know a little about why HIV-1 is difficult to eliminate. ...

– By Will Ferguson For the first time, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a genome-scale way to map the regulatory role of transcription factors, proteins that play a key role in gene expression and determining a plant’s physiological traits. Their work reveals unprecedented insights into gene regulatory networks and identifies a new library of DNA parts that can be used to optimize genetic engineering efforts in plants. “Transcription factors regulate things like how plants grow, how much fruit they produce, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Fifteen years of archaeological work in the Tam Pa Ling cave in northeastern Laos has yielded a reliable chronology of early human occupation of the site, scientists report in the journal Nature Communications. The team’s excavations through the layers of sediments and bones that gradually washed into the cave and were left untouched for tens of thousands of years reveals that humans lived in the area for at least 70,000 years – and likely even longer. “When we first started excavating the cave, we never expected to find humans in that region,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropology professor Laura Shackelford, who led ...

A new tool for generating microwave signals could help propel advances in wireless communication, imaging, atomic clocks, and more. Frequency combs are photonic devices that produce many equally spaced laser lines, each locked to a specific frequency to produce a comb-like structure. They can be used to generate high-frequency, stable microwave signals and scientists have been attempting to miniaturize the approach so they can be used on microchips. Scientists have been limited in their abilities to tune these microcombs at a rate to make them effective. But a team of researchers ...

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — The amount of data generated by scientists today is massive, thanks to the falling costs of sequencing technology and the increasing amount of available computing power. But parsing through all that data to uncover useful information is like searching for a molecular needle in a haystack. Machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools can dramatically speed up the process of data analysis, but most ML tools are difficult for non-ML experts to access and use. Recently, automated machine learning (AutoML) methods have been developed that can automate the design and deployment ...

An international team of researchers, led by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Yu Zou, is using electric fields to control the motion of material defects. This work has important implications for improving the properties and manufacturing processes of typically brittle ionic and covalent crystals, including semiconductors — a crystalline material that is a central component of electronic chips used for computers and other modern devices.  In a new study published in Nature Materials, researchers from ...

About The Study: This study of 23 undocumented immigrants with kidney failure receiving emergency dialysis found that a peer support group intervention achieved feasibility and acceptability. The findings suggest that a peer support group may be a patient-centered strategy to build camaraderie and provide emotional support in kidney failure, especially for socially marginalized uninsured populations who report limited English proficiency.  Authors: Lilia Cervantes, M.D., of the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, in Aurora, is the corresponding author.  To ...

A gel that combines both stiffness and toughness is a step forward in the bid to create biodegradable implants for joint injuries, according to new UBC research. Mimicking articular cartilage, found in our knee and hip joints, is challenging. This cartilage is key to smooth joint movement, and damage to it can cause pain, reduce function, and lead to arthritis. One potential solution is to implant artificial scaffolds made of proteins that help the cartilage regenerate itself as the scaffold biodegrades. How well the cartilage regenerates is linked to how well a scaffold can mimic the biological properties of cartilage, and to date, researchers have struggled ...

Vanderbilt researchers are part of a team that has developed a cutting-edge method that seeks to make the removal of salt from hypersaline industrial wastewater far more energy-efficient and cost-effective. While desalination through reverse osmosis has made tremendous strides—allowing for salt removal from seawater for less than a penny per gallon—it still falls short in eliminating saline in wastewater from industries like mining, oil and gas and power generation and in inland brackish water. The industrial brines are currently injected into deep geological formations or transferred to a evaporation ponds, and both disposal methods are facing more regulatory and ...

In a new paper published today in Nature, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have outlined the structure and function of a protein complex which is required to repair damaged DNA and protect against cancer. Every time a cell replicates, mistakes can happen in the form of mutations, but specialised proteins exist to repair the damaged DNA. People with mutations in a DNA repair protein called BRCA2 are predisposed to breast, ovarian and prostate cancers, which often develop at a young age. In the clinic, these cancers are treated with a drug that inhibits PARP, ...

The discovery of the quantum Hall effects in the 1980's revealed the existence of novel states of matter called "Laughlin states", in honor of the American Nobel prize winner who successfully characterized them theoretically. These exotic states specifically emerge in 2D materials, at very low temperature and in the presence of an extremely strong magnetic field. In a Laughlin state, electrons form a peculiar liquid, where each electron dances around its congeners while avoiding them as much as possible. Exciting such a quantum liquid generates collective states that physicists associate to fictitious particles, whose ...