An impressive body of evidence published this week reveals the answer to a mystery that has puzzled plant scientists for more than 30 years: the role of the molecule suberin in the leaves of some of our most productive crops. This discovery could be the key to engineering better crops and ensuring future food security. Highly productive crops such as sugarcane, sorghum and maize belong to the type of plants that use the more efficient C4 photosynthetic pathway to transform water, sunlight and carbon dioxide (CO2) into sugars. Scientists have known for a long time that one of key factors that makes C4 photosynthesis more efficient is that they have the capacity to ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 1, 2021-- A novel computer algorithm that could create a broadly reactive influenza vaccine for swine flu also offers a path toward a pan-influenza vaccine and possibly a pan-coronavirus vaccine as well, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications. "This work takes us a step closer to a pan-swine flu virus vaccine," said Bette Korber, a computational biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a co-author on the paper. "The hope is to eventually be prepared with an effective and rapid response if another swine flu epidemic begins to spread in humans, but this swine flu vaccine could also be useful in a veterinary setting." The immune responses to the vaccine showed very promising breadth against diverse viral variants. "The same basic principles ...

Nearly everything author Malcolm Gladwell said about how information spreads in his 2000 bestseller "The Tipping Point" is wrong, according to a recent study led by UCLA professor of sociology Gabriel Rossman. "The main point of 'The Tipping Point' is if you want your idea to spread, you find the most popular person in the center of any given network and you sell them on your idea, and then they'll sell the rest of the world on it," Rossman said. But Rossman's latest study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pokes holes in that widely accepted notion ...

Law enforcement seizures of drugs, particularly marijuana and methamphetamine, dropped at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, then increased significantly in the following months--exceeding pre-pandemic seizure rates and providing clues about the impact of the crisis on substance use, according to a new study in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. The research was conducted as part of the National Drug Early Warning System (NDEWS), which uses real-time surveillance to detect early signals of potential drug epidemics. NDEWS is led by a team of researchers at the University of Florida, New York University, and Florida Atlantic University, ...

While natural disasters and economic recessions traditionally unleash an uptick in child abuse, a new study suggests that cases may have declined in the first months of the pandemic, compared with the same timeframe in previous years. In the study, led by UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals and Children's Mercy Kansas City, researchers tracked the number of pediatric inpatients ages 5 and under in 52 children's hospitals nationwide for the first eight months of 2020. They found a steep decline in the number of ER visits and hospital admissions, including those requiring treatment for physical abuse. This started in mid-March - around the time some states issued shelter-in-place ...

A Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich team has shown that slight alterations in transfer-RNA molecules (tRNAs) allow them to self-assemble into a functional unit that can replicate information exponentially. tRNAs are key elements in the evolution of early life-forms. Life as we know it is based on a complex network of interactions, which take place at microscopic scales in biological cells, and involve thousands of distinct molecular species. In our bodies, one fundamental process is repeated countless times every day. In an operation known as replication, proteins duplicate the genetic ...

New research suggests that the ability of green algae to eat bacteria is likely much more widespread than previously thought, a finding that could be crucial to environmental and climate science. The work, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the University of Arizona, found that five strains of single-celled green algae consume bacteria when they are "hungry," and only when those bacteria are alive. The study is published today in The ISME Journal. "Traditionally, we think of green algae as being purely photosynthetic organisms, producing their food by soaking in sunlight," said Eunsoo Kim, an associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History and one of the study's corresponding ...

An international team led by Prof. dr habil. Andrzej Niedzielski, an astronomer from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun (Poland), has discovered yet another three extrasolar planets. These planets revolve around the stars that can be called elder sisters of our Sun. You can read about the astronomers' success in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The prestigious European journal will publish the paper: Tracking Advanced Planetary Systems (TAPAS) with HARPS-N. VII. Elder suns with low-mass companions. Apart from Prof. Andrzej Niedzielski from the NCU Institute of Astronomy, the team which worked on the discovery includes Prof. dr habil. Gracjan Maciejewski, also from the NCU Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics, Prof. Aleksander Wolszczan (Pennsylvania State ...

For several years now, the biofuels that power cars, jet airplanes, ships and big trucks have come primarily from corn and other mass-produced farm crops. Researchers at USC, though, have looked to the ocean for what could be an even better biofuel crop: seaweed. Scientists at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies on Santa Catalina Island, working with private industry, report that a new aquaculture technique on the California coast dramatically increases kelp growth, yielding four times more biomass than natural processes. The technique employs a contraption called the "kelp elevator" ...

Australia's marine World Heritage Sites are among the world's largest stores of carbon dioxide according to a new report from the United Nations, co-authored by an ECU marine science expert. The UNESCO report found Australia's six marine World Heritage Sites hold 40 per cent of the estimated 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide stored in mangrove, seagrass and tidal marsh ecosystems within UNESCO sites. The report quantifies the enormous amounts of so-called blue carbon absorbed and stored by those ecosystems across the world's 50 UNESCO marine World Heritage Sites. Despite covering less ...

Rapid COVID-19 tests are on the rise to deliver results faster to more people, and scientists need an easy, foolproof way to know that these tests work correctly and the results can be trusted. Nanoparticles that pass detection as the novel coronavirus could be just the ticket. Such coronavirus-like nanoparticles, developed by nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego, would serve as something called a positive control for COVID-19 tests. Positive controls are samples that always test positive. They are run and analyzed right alongside patient samples to verify that COVID-19 tests are working consistently and as intended. The positive controls developed at UC San Diego offer several advantages over the ones currently used in COVID-19 testing: ...

Around the world there are currently more than 18 billion internet-connected mobile devices. In the next 10 years, anticipated growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) and in machine-type communication in general, will lead to a world of hundreds of billions of data-connected objects. Such growth poses two very challenging problems: How can we securely connect so many wireless devices to the Internet when the radio-frequency bandwidth has already become very scarce? How can all these devices be powered? Regular, manual charging of all mobile Internet-connected devices will not be feasible, and connection to ...

A Hong Kong Baptist University-led (HKBU) research team has developed a novel drug which has the potential to become a next-generation treatment for cancers associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The peptide-linked drug, which is responsive to the acidic environment found in tumours, is the first known agent to have successfully targeted two viral proteins that are simultaneously produced by EBV. It also offers a new strategy by increasing the uptake of anti-cancer drugs in tumour cells, thus allowing the application of lower drug dosages which helps reduce treatment side effects and health risks. The research results were published in the international academic journal Advanced Science. New drug targets ...

Modern electronics is approaching the limit of its capabilities, which are determined by the fundamental laws of physics. Therefore, the use of classical materials, for example, silicon, is no longer able to meet the requirements for energy efficiency of the devices. Currently, it is necessary to start searching for new materials, new principles of electronic devices' functioning. To solve this problem, researchers of Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) are developing thin films, the elements for biomolecular electronics. Scientists believe that biological macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, amino acids can become a promising material for modern ...

Overview: A research team at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Applied Chemistry and Life Science, and the Electronics-Inspired Interdisciplinary Research Institute (EIIRIS) at Toyohashi University of Technology has developed a lightweight, compact, Bluetooth-low-energy-based wireless neuronal recording system for use in mice. The wireless system weighs END ...

A number of scientists whose work is inspired by natural behavior is constantly growing. The lotus flower, with its ability to self- clean, is commonly described in literature and can be best examples the trend. Researchers started to wonder why the flower behaves in this manner and they decided to study its structure with the use of microscopes. Hence, they could draw the conclusion that the structure is highly hydrophobic, i.e. it maintains water drops on the surface.  Water then collects particles of dust and by flowing down, removes them by flowing down. It means the adhesion forces, those responsible ...

The lists of Earth's endangered animals and plants are getting increasingly longer. But in order to stop this trend, we require more information. It is often difficult to find out exactly where the individual species can be found and how their populations are developing. According to a new overview study published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution by Dr Annegret Grimm-Seyfarth from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and her colleagues, specially trained detection dogs can be indispensable in such cases. With the help of these dogs, the species sought can usually be found faster and more effectively than with other methods. How many otters are there ...

TPU researchers jointly with their colleagues from foreign universities have developed a method that allows for a laser-driven integration of metals into polymers to form electrically conductive composites. The research findings are presented in Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration article Ultra-Robust Flexible Electronics by Laser-Driven Polymer-Nanomaterials Integration, published in Advanced Functional Materials academic journal (Q1, IF 16,836). "Currently developing breakthrough technologies such as the Internet of Things, flexible electronics, brain-computer interfaces will have a great impact on ...

The key are the ultra-fast flashes of light, with which the team led by Dr. Friedrich Roth works at FLASH in Hamburg, the world's first free-electron laser in the X-ray region. "We took advantage of the special properties of this X-ray source and expanded them with time-resolved X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (TR-XPS). This method is based on the external photoelectric effect, for the explanation of which Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. "For the first time, we were able to directly analyze the specific charge separation and subsequent processes when light hits a model system such as an organic solar cell. ...

Research groups at the University of Helsinki uncovered how motor protein myosin, which is responsible for contraction of skeletal muscles, functions also in non-muscle cells to build contractile structures at the inner face of the cell membrane. This is the first time when such 'mini-muscles', also known as stress fibers, have been seen to emerge spontaneously through myosin-driven reorganization of the pre-existing actin filament network in cells. Defects in the assembly of these 'mini-muscles' in cells lead to multiple disorders in humans, and in the most severe cases to cancer progression. A new study published in eLife, drills into the core mechanisms of stress fiber assembly, and reveals how stress fibers can be built directly ...

Okazaki, Japan - Making gametes such as sperm and eggs from pluripotent stem cells, primitive cells that can make all the tissues, greatly contributes to efficient reproduction of livestock animals and future assisted reproductive medicine. Researchers pave the way to achieve this goal using a body of xenogenic animals. The researchers previously developed a method to grow stem cells into an entire organ in the body, so-called blastocyst complementation. The blastocyst is a structure of early embryos. If stem cells are transplanted into the blastocyst obtained from animals that cannot make a certain organ, ...

Advances in hydraulic fracturing technology have enabled discovery of large reserves of natural gas which primarily contains methane, which is mainly burned directly and causing global warming potentially. Upgrading methane to greener energy such as methanol through aerobic oxidation is an ideal way to solve the problem and remain 100% atom economy. Yet the difficulties lie in activating methane and preventing methanol from over-oxidation. Methane takes a stable non-polar tetrahedral structure with high dissociation energy of C-H bond, which requires high energy to be activated. ...

Des Plaines, IL - Initial management with inhaled methoxyflurane in the emergency department did not achieve the prespecified substantial reduction in pain, but was associated with clinically significant lower pain scores compared to standard therapy. That is the conclusion of a study titled Rapid Administration of Methoxyflurane to Patients in the Emergency Department (RAMPED) Study: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Methoxyflurane Versus Standard Care that was published recently in the February 2021 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). According to findings of the controlled randomized trial, secondary outcomes included the pain ...

Northwestern Engineering researchers have developed a theoretical model to design soft materials that demonstrate autonomous oscillating properties that mimic biological functions. The work could advance the design of responsive materials used to deliver therapeutics as well as for robot-like soft materials that operate autonomously. The design and synthesis of materials with biological functions require a delicate balance between structural form and physiological function. During embryonic development, for instance, flat sheets of embryonic cells morph through a series of folds into intricate three-dimensional structures such as branches, tubes, and furrows. These, in turn, become dynamic, three-dimensional building blocks for organs performing vital functions ...

Washington, March 2, 2021--A first-of-its-kind analysis of parents' reviews of U.S. public K-12 schools, posted primarily from 2009 to 2019 on the popular school information site GreatSchools.org, found that most reviews were written by parents at schools in affluent neighborhoods and provided information that correlated strongly with test scores, a measure that closely tracks race and family income. Language associated with school effectiveness, which measures how much students improve in their test scores over time and is less correlated with demographics, was ...