Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281468 Article Title: B.Y.O. Bees: Managing wild bee biodiversity in urban greenspaces Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283861 Article Title: Characteristics and impact of physical activity interventions during substance use disorder treatment excluding tobacco: A systematic review Author Countries: Canada Funding: F.P. was supported by a Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Santé doctoral fellowship and she received funding from CICC (Centre international de criminologie comparé) for the translation of the article. The two funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

The non-invasive FLASH system, inspired by lizard skin, electronically stimulates key hunger hormone Nature is the greatest teacher. A bizarre-looking lizard with intimidating spikes covering its body helped a team of investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and New York University, develop an innovative ingestible capsule that can modify ghrelin, a hunger-regulating hormone, in pigs. Their results, published in Science Robotics, showed for the first time that the ingestible electronic fluid-wicking capsule for active stimulation and hormone modulation (FLASH) ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Hormones released by the stomach, such as ghrelin, play a key role in stimulating appetite. These hormones are produced by endocrine cells that are part of the enteric nervous system, which controls hunger, nausea, and feelings of fullness. MIT engineers have now shown that they can stimulate these endocrine cells to produce ghrelin, using an ingestible capsule that delivers an electrical current to the cells. This approach could prove useful for treating diseases that involve nausea or loss of appetite, such as cachexia (loss of body mass that can occur in patients with cancer or other chronic diseases). In ...

The world’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. Aging can lead to various types of cognitive decline, posing a serious burden to families and society. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective interventions to promote healthy aging. One promising approach is musical training, which is accessible to the majority of the population. Besides the musically rewarding and aesthetic experience of musical training, it also provides potential benefits to the brain, especially for the elderly. In a study published as a cover story in Science Advances, a research team led by Dr. DU Yi from the Institute ...

Why do some animals regenerate lost tissues after injury while others don’t? Researchers from the lab of Kerstin Bartscherer (Osnabrück University and formerly Hubrecht Institute) and Ashley Seifert (University of Kentucky) studied spiny mice, which have a remarkable regenerative capacity, to answer this question. They compared and modulated the injury responses of these mice and common laboratory mice, that show scarring upon injury. This revealed that ERK signalling is a crucial molecular switch between scarring and regeneration. The results of this study will be published on April 26th in the scientific journal Science Advances and imply that ...

Ikoma, Japan – Cell membranes play a critical role by serving as containment units and separating the inner cellular space from the extracellular environment. Proteins with distinct functional units play a key role in facilitating protein-membrane interactions. For instance, “Bin-Amphiphysin-Rvs” (“BAR”) domain proteins are involved in regulating cell membrane curvature. This physical bending of cell membranes helps cells carry out various biologically important processes such as endocytosis and cell motility. Although BAR proteins drive membrane curvature ...

Philadelphia, April 26, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Princeton University have discovered a novel genetic disorder associated with neurodevelopmental differences. The discovery identified the disorder in 21 families from all over the world. The findings were published today in Science Advances. The as-yet unnamed disorder is the result of a series of rare variants in the MAP4K4 gene, which is involved in many signaling pathways, including the RAS pathway ...

Almost one in three adults aged 45 and older who had both TB and COVID-19 died during a pandemic cohort study in NYC between March 2020 and June 2022.  #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001758 Article Title: Cohort study of the mortality among patients in New York City with tuberculosis and COVID-19, March 2020 to June 2022 Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) are using nanoparticles to develop new sources of light that will allow us to “peel back the curtain” into the world of extremely small objects – thousands of times smaller than a human hair – with major gains for medical and other technologies.  The findings, published in Science Advances, could have major implications for medical science by offering an affordable and effective solution to analyse tiny objects that are too small for microscopes to see, let alone the human eye. The work could also be beneficial for the semiconductor industry ...

Keeping tree diversity intact in Canada’s many forests over the long term can help increase carbon capture and mitigate climate change, according to a new University of Alberta study.  The study, published in Nature, is the first of its kind to show the sustained benefits of tree diversity on a large spatial scale, in terms of storing carbon and nitrogen in the soil. It reinforces the importance of biodiversity conservation in forests, says Xinli Chen, lead author on the paper and postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Agricultural, ...

Andy Weir’s bestselling 2011 book, The Martian, features botanist Mark Watney’s efforts to grow food on Mars after he becomes stranded there. While Watney’s initial efforts focus on growing potatoes, new research presented at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by a team of interdisciplinary researchers from the U of A suggests future Martian botanists like Watney may have a better option: growing rice. As outlined in the team’s abstract, Rice Can Grow and Survive in Martian ...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- New research from a multidisciplinary team helps to illuminate the mechanisms behind circadian rhythms, offering new hope for dealing with jet lag, insomnia and other sleep disorders. Using innovative cryo-electron microscopy techniques, the researchers have identified the structure of the circadian rhythm photosensor and its target in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), one of the major organisms used to study circadian rhythms. The research, “Cryptochrome-Timeless Structure Reveals Circadian Clock Timing ...

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging announces that Ashley Webb, PhD, will join its faculty as an associate professor on August 1, 2023. Webb’s research is focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying stem cells and brain aging.  She joins the Buck from Brown University, where she is currently an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry. Webb uses a combination of mouse models, cell culture approaches and genomics technologies to investigate the epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms that preserve healthy ...

    Preserving the diversity of forests assures their productivity and potentially increases the accumulation of carbon and nitrogen in the soil, which helps to sustain soil fertility and mitigate global climate change.   That's the main takeaway from a new study that analyzed data from hundreds of plots in Canada's National Forest Inventory to investigate the relationship between tree diversity and changes in soil carbon and nitrogen in natural forests.   Numerous biodiversity-manipulation experiments have collectively suggested that ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identify a novel mechanism by which cells adhere more strongly to their surrounding matrix in response to stress Tokyo, Japan – The DNA molecules in our cells can be damaged by various extrinsic and intrinsic factors called genotoxic stressors; persistent and unchecked damage can lead to developing diseases like cancer. Fortunately, our cells don’t sit idly by and let this happen. In a recent article published in Cell Death & Disease, a team ...

Researchers have established that biological sex plays a role in determining an individual’s risk of brain disorders. For example, boys are more likely to be diagnosed with behavioral conditions like autism or attention deficit disorder, whereas women are more likely to suffer from anxiety disorders, depression, or migraines. However, experts do not fully understand how sex contributes to brain development, particularly in the context of these diseases. They think, in part, it may have something to do with the differing sizes of certain brain regions. University ...

HA NOI, Viet Nam (April 26, 2023) – A new study led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) identified a viral hotspot in Viet Nam where bat roosting sites, bat guano harvesting, and pig farms are all in close proximity. The findings of this collaborative One Health study, described in the latest issue of the journal Viruses, have important implications for public health and wildlife conservation. The authors say that the collection of guano – commonly used as a fertilizer – if not stopped ...

New research has found that it is possible to capture the impact of a meal on metabolism outside of a lab environment. Published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition and led by researchers at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, England, the study evaluated Lumen, which the manufacturers claim is the first device to allow people to monitor metabolic fuel use at home. The research – the first applied study to investigate the practical use of this handheld breath device – was split into ...

In crop-breeding, plant phenotyping is the detailed study of a plant’s characteristic ‘visible’ or phenotypic features. It includes counting the number of plants generated by a crossing experiment and grading the features displayed by the offspring or progeny. The progeny with the desirable traits is then crossed to produce the next generation of crops, and the process is repeated to enhance the crop variety. Conventional methods for plant phenotyping typically lack scalability, accuracy, and are immensely labor-intensive. This imposes a certain bottleneck on crop-breeding programs. However, with technological ...

A University of Houston professor and her research team are seeking to improve the lives and education of bilingual children across the country through their research on developmental language disorder. Anny Castilla-Earls, professor of communication sciences and disorders, was awarded $3.27 million for five years by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to investigate the relationship between a child’s proficiency in English or Spanish and the language in which they receive treatment for developmental language disorder. Developmental language disorder, or ...

An international team of scientists led by Dr. LU Rusen from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has used new millimeter-wavelength observations to produce an image that shows, for the first time, both the ring-like accretion structure around a black hole, where matter falls into the black hole, and the black hole's associated powerful relativistic jet. The source of the images was the central black hole of the prominent radio galaxy Messier 87. The study was published in Nature on April 26. The image underlines for the first time the connection between the accretion flow near the central supermassive black hole and the origin ...

Our genetic code includes over 15,000 specific sections that can be made into molecules called lincRNAs. Some of these sections can occur in coiled-up sections of our genome called TADs. LincRNAs derived from TADs appear to act as markers indicating the specific kind of tissue they are within. When something is wrong in these tissues, the markers could help with targeted medical interventions. The team that discovered this novel feature has outlined a way to apply this idea to different diseases and demonstrated it with a heart disease known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Diseases can affect very specific ...

Fungal spores found in dung have revealed that large animals went extinct in two “waves” in the Colombian Andes. Spores of coprophilous fungi pass through the guts of megafauna (animals over 45kg) as part of their life cycle, so the presence of the spores in sediment samples shows large animals lived in a certain place and time. The study, by the University of Exeter, found that large animals became locally extinct at Pantano de Monquentiva about 23,000 years ago, and again about 11,000 years ago – with major impacts on ecosystems. The study used ...

More than 45,000 Americans died by suicide in 2020, a 30% increase over 2000, making it the 12th leading cause of death in the U.S. Studies have shown that the social and environmental factors where people live, like exposure to violence and crime, access to quality health care, food insecurity, job opportunities, and air pollution, are connected to suicide rates. Now, a new research study from the University of Chicago provides more statistical evidence that social determinants of health are tightly linked to suicide risk. The study, published ...