Baltimore, MD—New work led by Carnegie’s Phillip Cleves uses cutting-edge CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing tools to reveal a gene that’s critical to stony corals’ ability to build their reef architectures. It is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Stony corals are marine invertebrates that build large skeletons, which form the basis of reef ecosystems. These biodiversity hotspots are home to about a quarter of known marine species. “Coral reefs have ...

Human influences have the potential to reduce the effectivity of communication in bees adding further stress to struggling colonies, according to new analysis. Scientists at the University of Bristol studying honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees found that variation in communication strategies are explained by differences in the habitats that bees inhabit and differences in the social lifestyle such colony size and nesting habits. The findings, published today in PNAS, reveal that anthropogenic change, such as habitat conversion, climate change and the use of agrochemicals, are altering the world bees occupy, and it is becoming increasingly clearer that this affects communication ...

·  Regulating cell mechanics stimulates hair growth in mice ·  Next step will be testing if delivering microRNA via nanoparticles grows hair ·  Potential for human hair growth   CHICAGO --- Just as people’s joints can get stiff as they age and make it harder for them to move around, hair follicle stem cells also get stiff, making it harder for them to grow hair, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.  But if the hair follicle’s stem cells are softened, ...

McKinney, TX., June  5, 2023 - The Cure Mito Foundation, a parent-led organization dedicated to advancing research and treatments for Leigh syndrome, has launched the first-of-its-kind online resource about Leigh syndrome,  the  most common type of pediatric mitochondrial disease.  The free resource, “About Leigh Syndrome” (https://www.aboutleighsyndrome.com), serves as a central place where patients, caregivers and doctors can find information on Leigh syndrome, including its symptoms, diagnosis, treatment options, and more. Translation ...

Risk assessment instruments (RAIs) are widely used to inform high-stakes decision making in the criminal justice system and other areas, such as health care and child welfare. These tools typically assume a relation between predictors and outcomes that does not vary with time. But because societies change, this assumption may not hold in all settings, generating what a new study calls cohort bias—a bias resulting from cohort-wide influences not experienced by past or future cohorts. The study, by researchers ...

An innovative and sustainable chemistry developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory for capturing carbon dioxide from air has been licensed to Holocene, a Knoxville-based startup focused on designing and building plants that remove carbon dioxide from atmospheric air. “ORNL is tackling climate change by developing numerous technologies that reduce or eliminate emissions,” said Susan Hubbard, ORNL deputy for science and technology. “But with billions ...

Music, mice, and microscopic imaging combine to provide new insight into the effects of environmental chemicals on hearing loss. Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology found that early exposure to an environmental chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, made it more difficult for mice to recover from sound-related trauma sustained later in life. Their paper appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. PCBs are carcinogenic compounds formerly used in industrial and consumer products. Although they were banned in the United States in 1979 and haven’t seen industrial use in decades, their highly ...

Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a “bitstring guessing game.”  They managed strings up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible, by effectively suppressing errors typically seen at this scale. (A bit is a binary number that is either zero or one). Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the ...

A common cause of myocardial infarction and stroke is the rupture of atherosclerotic plaques. The exact location of plaque ruptures has previously been unknown, but now researchers at Lund University have mapped this. The research team has also identified an enzyme, a marker, that they hope will help predict who is at risk of having a myocardial infarction or a stroke due to a ruptured atherosclerotic plaque.  In atherosclerosis , fat  is accumulated in the artery walls creating atherosclerotic ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth – the most distant galaxy in which these molecules are now known to exist. Thanks to the capabilities of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and careful analyses from the research team, a new study lends critical insight into the complex chemical interactions that occur in the first galaxies in the early universe. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Joaquin Vieira and graduate student Kedar Phadke collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M ...

As the Co-Editors-in-Chief of Zoonoses, Dr. Lynn Soong (University of Texas Medical Branch, TX, USA) and Dr. Xiaoping Dong (Chinese Center for Disease Control & Prevention, Beijing, China) extend a warm welcome to Dr. Fernando Rosado Spilki, new Executive Editor-in-Chief (Vector Biology/Epidemiology) of Zoonoses.   Dr. Spilki is currently a Professor in the Institute of Health Sciences at Feevale University, Novo Hamburgo, Brazil. He received B.S. in Veterinary Medicine (2001), M.S. in Veterinary Sciences/Animal Virology (2004) both from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and his Ph.D. in Genetics & Molecular ...

Fungi stores a third of carbon from fossil fuel emissions and could be essential to reaching net zero, new study reveals Mycorrhizal fungi are responsible for holding up to 36 per cent of yearly global fossil fuel emissions below ground - more than China emits each year The fungi make up a vast underground network all over the planet underneath grasslands and forests, as well as roads, gardens, and houses on every continent on Earth It is not only crucial to storing carbon and keeping the planet cooler, but are also essential to global biodiversity  Researchers ...

Industrialised nations responsible for excessive levels of carbon dioxide emissions could be liable to pay a total of $170 trillion in compensation or reparations by 2050 to ensure climate change targets are met, say researchers.  This money, which amounts to nearly $6 trillion per year or about 7% of annual global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), would be distributed as compensation to low-emitting countries that must decarbonise their economies far more rapidly than would otherwise be required.  Financial redress for the losses and damages that climate-vulnerable countries face due to the excessive CO2 emissions of others is seen as an increasingly important ...

Kim Kaplan 301-588-5314 Kim.Kaplan@usda.gov   BRIDGEcereal: Self-Teaching Web App Improves Speed, Accuracy of Classifying DNA Variations Among Cereal Varieties PULLMAN, WA, June 5, 2023—Agricultural Research Service and Washington State University scientists have developed an innovative web app called BRIDGEcereal [https://bridgecereal.scinet.usda.gov/] that can quickly and accurately analyze the vast amount of genomic data now available for cereal crops and organize the material into intuitive charts that identify patterns locating genes of interest. With the rapid advancements in ...

About The Study: This survey study found that 28% of youth-serving U.S. mental health facilities offered LGBTQ-specific mental health services in 2020. Although some states had relatively high levels of LGBTQ service availability as a percentage of facilities, many of these states had few facilities available to children per capita. Public mental health facilities were less likely to offer LGBTQ-specific mental health services, a concern given that the cost of care is a barrier to services. The findings suggest a need to expand availability of LGBTQ services ...

New research has revealed being active could lower the risk of type 2 diabetes, even in people with a high genetic risk of developing the medical condition. The University of Sydney-led study found higher levels of total physical activity, especially moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity, had a strong association with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The findings were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The researchers say the study demonstrates higher levels of physical activity should be promoted as a major strategy for type 2 diabetes ...

Researchers who lead the world’s first comprehensive sequencing program for newborn infants have published the next chapter in the ongoing study of the BabySeq Project, with new findings on infants and families who have been followed for 3-5 years. In a study published today in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers from Mass General Brigham and Boston Children’s Hospital reported that over 10 percent of the first 159 infants to undergo screening through DNA sequencing were discovered ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Tirzepatide, a drug approved for diabetes and on the fast track for approval as a weight loss therapy, works through a unique ability to activate two different mechanisms the body uses to control insulin secretion and energy balance, Duke Health researchers report.   The finding, reported June 5 in the journal Nature Metabolism, is the first study to use cells from human donors to demonstrate how tirzepatide stimulates insulin secretion, an important action utilized by this drug to lower blood glucose in patients with type 2 diabetes.    “Understanding the potential of drugs ...

CHICAGO – Patients with early relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma had significantly improved overall survival when treated with the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel) when compared to the current standard-of-care chemoimmunotherapy, according to results of the Phase III ZUMA-7 trial reported by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Data from the study were presented today by Jason Westin, M.D., director of clinical research in the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma, at the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting and published concurrently in ...

Women have long searched for remedies for the bothersome hot flashes that often come with menopause.  In a novel investigation, researchers at UC San Francisco tested the benefits of continuously wearing a nitroglycerin patch – an established treatment for chest pain from coronary artery disease – for menopausal women experiencing at least seven hot flashes a day. Unlike most treatments for hot flashes that target brain mechanisms, nitroglycerin works on blood vessels throughout the body.  The results were mixed. While ...

The assembly of the volant bird body plan from the ancestral bulky dinosaurian condition is an enduring topic of evolutionary biology. The body plan of volant birds demonstrates a pronounced decrease in body size and proportionate elongation of the forelimbs. Given the scaling relationship between limb and body size, changes to the former were likely clouded by changes to the entire body size. Since changes to individual limb elements provides the direct basis for natural selection, they are essential to comprehending branch- and lineage-specific evolutionary patterns across the transition from terrestrial to ...

How do today’s indigenous communities of South America trace back to the history of human migration and contact in the continent? An international team has worked to reconstruct the legacy of Chile’s largest indigenous community, the Mapuche, in a quest to strengthen their representation in the history of the continent. It appears the Mapuche long lived in relative isolation but do bear some influences from other populations of the Central Andes and the far south of Chile. South America was the last continent ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. – June 5, 2023 – Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys, collaborating with scientists from Eli Lilly and Company, have revealed the structure and function of a drug called LY3361237, which can reduce the harmful activity of the immune system to help treat autoimmune diseases. Their work laid the foundation for a new treatment that’s currently in a Phase 2 clinical trial for lupus, an autoimmune disease affecting multiple organs in the body. The study is published in Structure, a Cell Press journal. The ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a method involving artificial intelligence to visualize and track changes in the strength of synapses — the connection points through which nerve cells in the brain communicate — in live animals. The technique, described in Nature Methods, should lead, the scientists say, to a better understanding of how such connections in human brains change with learning, aging, injury and disease. “If you want to learn more about how an orchestra plays, you have to watch individual players over time, and this ...

Two new discoveries from the Dudley lab at UVA Cancer Center highlight the different roles of blood vessels in solid tumors  – and the findings could help prevent breast cancer from spreading and enhance the effectiveness of one of the most important new cancer treatments in many years. In one new scientific paper, researcher Andrew C. Dudley, PhD, and his team report that the effectiveness of immunotherapy drugs called immune check blockade is enhanced when blood vessels are targeted in a specific way. (Immunotherapy enhances the power of the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases.) In another paper, published ...