On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that have traveled across the oceans, sediments derived from the erosion of rocks carry information from another time and place. In this case the grains of garnet sand reveal a story of traveling from the surface to deep into the Earth (~75 miles), and then returning to the surface before ending up on a beach as sand grains. Over the course of this geologic journey, the rock type changed as some minerals were changed, and other materials were included (trapped) within the newly formed garnets. The story is preserved ...

An antibacterial peptide that turns on and off The researchers solved the 3D molecular structure of an antibacterial peptide named uperin 3.5, which is secreted on the skin of the Australian toadlet (Uperoleia mjobergii) as part of its immune system. They found that the peptide self-assembles into a unique fibrous structure, which via a sophisticated structural adaptation mechanism can change its form in the presence of bacteria to protect the toadlet from infections. This provides unique atomic-level evidence explaining a regulation mechanism of an antimicrobial ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- It's not just to hide clutter anymore - add "saving the planet" to the reasons you leave the camera off during your next virtual meeting. A new study says that despite a record drop in global carbon emissions in 2020, a pandemic-driven shift to remote work and more at-home entertainment still presents significant environmental impact due to how internet data is stored and transferred around the world. Just one hour of videoconferencing or streaming, for example, emits 150-1,000 grams of carbon dioxide (a gallon of gasoline burned from a car emits about 8,887 grams), requires 2-12 liters of water and demands a land area adding up to about the size of an iPad Mini. But leaving your camera off during a web call can ...

January 14, 2021 - Orthopaedic surgeons have traditionally been taught that certain types of knee symptoms indicate damage to specialized structures called the menisci. But these "meniscal" and "mechanical" symptoms do not reflect what surgeons will find at knee arthroscopy, reports a study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer. Both types of symptoms are strongly related to the overall amount of cartilage damage in the knee joint - but not to the presence of meniscal tears, according to the new research ...

In today's economy, American businesses often tap into professional management to grow, but most firms in India and other developing countries are family owned and often shun outside managers. A new study co-authored by Yale economist Michael Peters explores the effects that the absence of outside professional management has on India's businesses and the country's economy. The study, published in the American Economic Review, uses a novel model to compare the relationship between the efficiency of outside managers and firm growth in the United States and India. It shows ...

Genome analysis can provide information on genes and their location on a strand of DNA, but such analysis reveals little about their spatial location in relation to one another within chromosomes -- the highly complex, three-dimensional structures that hold genetic information. Chromosomes resemble a fuzzy "X" in microscopy images and can carry thousands of genes. They are formed when DNA winds around proteins -- called histones -- which are further folded into complexes called chromatin, which make up individual chromosomes. Knowing which genes are located in spatial proximity within the chromatin is important because genes that are near each other generally work together. Now, researchers at the END ...

Computational materials science experts at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory enhanced an algorithm that borrows its approach from the nesting habits of cuckoo birds, reducing the search time for new high-tech alloys from weeks to mere seconds. The scientists are investigating a type of alloys called high-entropy alloys, a novel class of materials that are highly sought after for a host of unusual and potentially beneficial properties. They are lightweight in relation to their strength, fracture-resistant, highly corrosion and oxidation resistant, and stand up well in high-temperature and high-pressure environments -- making them attractive materials for aerospace industry, space exploration, nuclear energy, and defense applications. While the promise of these ...

Researchers from the PTSD Systems Biology Consortium, led by scientists from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, have identified distinct biotypes for post-traumatic stress disorder, the first of their kind for any psychological disorder. "These biotypes can refine the development of screening tools and may explain the varying efficacy of PTSD treatments", said Dr. Marti Jett, leader of the consortium and WRAIR chief scientist. Publishing their work in Molecular Psychiatry in a manuscript first authored by WRAIR's Dr. Ruoting Yang, researchers used blood tests from male, combat-exposed veterans across a three year period to identify two PTSD biotypes, G1--characterized ...

TROY, N.Y. -- As cancer and tumor cells move inside the human body, they impart and are subject to mechanical forces. In order to understand how these actions affect cancer cell growth, spread, and invasion, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is developing new models that mimic aspects of the mechanical environment within the body, providing new insight into how and why tumors develop in certain ways. In research published today in Integrative Biology, a team of engineers from Rensselaer developed an in vitro -- in the lab -- lymphatic vessel model to study the growth of tumor emboli, collections of ...

Superconductivity already has a variety of practical applications, such as medical imaging and levitating transportation like the ever-popular maglev systems. However, to ensure that the benefits of applied superconductors keep spreading further into other technological fields, we need to find ways of not only improving their performance, but also making them more accessible and simpler to fabricate. In this regard, magnesium diboride (MgB2) has attracted the attention of researchers since its discovery as a superconductor with multiple advantages. It is a lightweight, easily processible material made from widely abundant ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (Jan. 14, 2021)-- Exposure to discrimination plays a significant role in the risk of developing anxiety and related disorders, even - in a first - after accounting for potential genetic risks, according to a multidisciplinary team of health researchers led by Tufts University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Researchers determined that even after controlling for genetic risk for anxiety, depression, and neuroticism, greater reports of discrimination experiences remained associated with higher scores of anxiety and related disorders. The findings, recently ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Scientists have found a new species of fleshy verdigris lichen, thanks to DNA analysis of museum specimens. Misidentified by its original collectors, the lichen is only known from 32 specimens collected in North and Central Florida scrubland between 1885 and 1985. Now the hunt is on to find it in the wild - if it still exists. The lichen, named Cora timucua in honor of Florida's Timucua people, is critically endangered, even more so than the federally protected Florida perforate reindeer lichen, and possibly extinct. Researchers are holding out hope that C. timucua may persist in undisturbed pockets of the state's dwindling pine scrub habitat, though recent searches came up empty. "The million-dollar question is 'Where is this lichen?'" said Laurel Kaminsky, a digitization ...

A novel new study suggests that the behavior public officials are now mandating or recommending unequivocally to slow the spread of surging COVID-19--wearing a face covering--should come with a caveat. If not accompanied by proper public education, the practice could lead to more infections. The finding is part of an unique study, just published in JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, that was conducted by a team of health economists and public health faculty at the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine in partnership with public health officials for the state of Vermont. The study combines survey data gathered from adults living in northwestern Vermont with test results that showed whether a subset of them had contracted COVID-19, a dual research ...

Scientists who highlighted the bug-busting properties of bacteria in Northern Irish soil have made another exciting discovery in the quest to discover new antibiotics. The Traditional Medicine Group, an international collaboration of scientists from Swansea University, Brazil and Northern Ireland, have discovered more antibiotic-producing species and believe they may even have identified new varieties of antibiotics with potentially life-saving consequences. Antibiotic resistant superbugs could kill up to 1.3 million people in Europe by 2050 - the World Health Organisation (WHO) describes the problem as "one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today". The search for replacement antibiotics to combat ...

If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs -- how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences -- ecologists can piece together how energy flows through an ecosystem and how stable it is to climate change and other disturbances. Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There's just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record -- and researchers' ability to piece together the food webs from the past. "When things die and get preserved as fossils, all the ...

When three galaxies collide, what happens to the huge black holes at the centers of each? A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes are furiously growing after these galactic smash ups. Astronomers want to learn more about galactic collisions because the subsequent mergers are a key way that galaxies and the giant black holes in their cores grow over cosmic time. "There have been many studies of what happens to supermassive black holes when two galaxies merge," said Adi Foord of Stanford University, who led the study. "Ours is one of the first to systematically look at what happens to ...

The reproductive cycle of viruses requires self-assembly, maturation of virus particles and, after infection, the release of genetic material into a host cell. New physics-based technologies allow scientists to study the dynamics of this cycle and may eventually lead to new treatments. In his role as physical virologist, Wouter Roos, a physicist at the University of Groningen, together with two longtime colleagues, has written a review article on these new technologies, which was published in Nature Reviews Physics on 12 January. 'Physics has been used for a long time to study viruses,' says Roos. 'The laws of ...

In the inaugural issue of the journal Nature Aging a research team led by aging expert Linda P. Fried, MD, MPH, dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, synthesizes converging evidence that the aging-related pathophysiology underpinning the clinical presentation of phenotypic frailty (termed as "physical frailty" here) is a state of lower functioning due to severe dysregulation of the complex dynamics in our bodies that maintains health and resilience. When severity passes a threshold, the clinical syndrome and its phenotype are diagnosable. This paper summarizes the evidence meeting criteria for physical frailty as a product of complex system dysregulation. ...

Astronomers have curated the most complete list of nearby brown dwarfs to date thanks to discoveries made by thousands of volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds citizen science project. The list and 3D map of 525 brown dwarfs -- including 38 reported for the first time -- incorporate observations from a host of astronomical instruments including several NOIRLab facilities. The results confirm that the Sun's neighborhood appears surprisingly diverse relative to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy. Mapping out our own small pocket of the Universe is a time-honored quest within astronomy, and ...

NEW YORK (January 14) -- A new study co-authored by researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Global Conservation Program and the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Forestry introduces a classification called Resistance-Resilience-Transformation (RRT) that enables the assessment of whether and to what extent a management shift toward transformative action is occurring in conservation. The team applied this classification to 104 climate adaptation projects funded by the WCS Climate Adaptation Fund over the past decade and found differential responses toward transformation ...

A wide breadth of behaviors surrounding oral sex may affect the risk of oral HPV infection and of a virus-associated head and neck cancer that can be spread through this route, a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center suggests. These findings add nuance to the connection between oral sex and oropharyngeal cancer -- tumors that occur in the mouth and throat -- and could help inform research and public health efforts aimed at preventing this disease. The findings were reported Jan. 11 in the journal Cancer. In the early 1980s, researchers realized that nearly all cervical cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a DNA virus from the Papillomaviridae family. Although about 90% of HPV infections ...

The higher a person's income, the more likely they were to protect themselves at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Johns Hopkins University economists find. When it comes to adopting behaviors including social distancing and mask wearing, the team detected a striking link to their financial well-being. People who made around $230,000 a year were as much as 54% more likely to increase these types of self-protective behaviors compared to people making about $13,000. "We need to understand these differences because we can wring our hands, and we can blame and shame, but in a way it doesn't matter," said Nick Papageorge, the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics. "Policymakers just need to recognize who is going ...

Physicists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered how to locally add electrical charge to an atomically thin graphene device by layering flakes of another thin material, alpha-RuCl3, on top of it. A paper published in the journal Nano Letters describes the charge transfer process in detail. Gaining control of the flow of electrical current through atomically thin materials is important to potential future applications in photovoltaics or computing. "In my field, where we study van der Waals heterostructures made by custom-stacking atomically ...

ATLANTA--Compared to standard machine learning models, deep learning models are largely superior at discerning patterns and discriminative features in brain imaging, despite being more complex in their architecture, according to a new study in Nature Communications led by Georgia State University. Advanced biomedical technologies such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI and fMRI) or genomic sequencing have produced an enormous volume of data about the human body. By extracting patterns from this information, scientists can glean ...

Philadelphia, January 14, 2021--Based on preclinical studies of an investigational drug to treat peripheral nerve tumors, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as part of the Neurofibromatosis Clinical Trials Consortium have shown that the drug, cabozantinib, reduces tumor volume and pain in patients with the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1). The results of the Phase 2 clinical trial, co-chaired by Michael J. Fisher, MD at CHOP, were published recently in Nature Medicine. "This is the second class of drugs to demonstrate ...