Although autism is a common neurodevelopmental disorder, the multiple factors behind its onset are still not fully understood. Animal models of idiopathic autism*1, especially mice, are often used to help researchers understand the complicated mechanisms behind the disorder, with BTBR/J being the most commonly used mouse model in the world. Now, an international research collaboration including Kobe University’s Professor TAKUMI Toru and Researcher Chia-wen Lin et al. have made new discoveries regarding autism onset in mouse models. In their detailed series of experiments and analyses of BTBR/J mice and the other subspecies BTBR/R, they revealed that endogenous ...

How can people be incentivized to drive more fuel-efficient cars, be more innovative at work, and get to the gym on a regular basis? Uri Gneezy, professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego explains this in his new book “Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work.” In the book, Gneezy, a pioneering behavioral economist, reveals how we can create reward systems that minimize unintended consequences and maximize happiness, health, wealth and success. “Mixed Signals” was recently included in Adam Grant’s ...

American Geophysical Union 9 March 2023 AGU Release No. 23-10 For Immediate Release  This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/the-worlds-atmospheric-rivers-now-have-an-intensity-ranking-like-hurricanes/ AGU press contact: Rebecca Dzombak, +1 (202) 777-7492, news@agu.org (UTC-5 hours) Contact information for the researchers: Bin Guan, University of California Los Angeles and California Institute of Technology, bin.guan@jpl.nasa.gov (UTC-8 hours) WASHINGTON — Atmospheric rivers, which are long, narrow bands of water vapor, are becoming more intense and frequent with climate ...

Passing down shared knowledge from one generation to the next is a hallmark of culture and allows animals to rapidly adapt to a changing environment. While widely evident in species ranging from human infants to naked mole rats or fledgling songbirds, early social learning has now been documented in insects. Publishing in the journal Science, a University of California San Diego researcher and his colleagues uncovered evidence that social learning is fundamental for honey bees. Professor James Nieh of the School of Biological Sciences and his collaborators discovered that the “waggle dance,” which signals the location ...

Social learning plays an important role in a honey bee’s ability to “waggle dance,” report researchers, who observed that honey bees not exposed to the dances of older, more experienced nestmates produced disordered dances full of errors. The findings demonstrate that social learning shapes this complex form of insect communication, just as it does in humans, birds, and other social vertebrate species. The waggle dance is a behavior that honey bee foragers use to communicate spatial information about the precise location of a food source to other nestmates. ...

Island dwarfs and giants are more susceptible to extinction than other species, particularly following the arrival of humans to their insular homes, according to a new analysis of island species over millions of years. The findings highlight the vulnerability of some of Earth’s most unique species and could be used to inform conservation strategies to preserve them. Although they cover less than 7% of the planet’s surface, islands are hotspots of biodiversity. Due to their isolation, islands often contain species ...

Researchers have presented the connectome – or synaptic wiring diagram – of an entire Drosophila larva brain. This first-ever insect whole-brain connectome is larger and more complex than previously reported connectomes and represents a valuable resource for future experimental and theoretical studies of neural circuits and brain function. The brain comprises complex networks of interconnected neurons that communicate through synapses. Understanding the brain’s network architecture is critical to understanding brain function. However, due to technological constraints, imaging entire brains with electron microscopy (EM) and reconstructing ...

To help improve the discovery and characterization of elusive interactions between proteins and metabolites, researchers present MIDAS (Mass spectrometry Integrated with equilibrium Dialysis for the discovery of Allostery Systematically). According to the authors, MIDAS represents a powerful new tool to “identify, understand, and exploit previously unknown modes of metabolic regulation across the protein-metabolite interactome.” The interactions between proteins and small-molecule metabolites are among the most common and fundamental types of biological interaction and play vital ...

Leipzig/Halle. Islands are “laboratories of evolution” and home to animal species with many unique features, including dwarfs that evolved to very small sizes compared to their mainland relatives, and giants that evolved to large sizes. A team of researchers from the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has now found that species that evolved to more extreme body sizes compared to their mainland relatives have a higher risk of extinction than those that evolved to less extreme sizes. Their study, which was published in Science, also shows that extinction rates of mammals ...

In a study published in Science, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California San Diego have shown that honey bees use social signal learning to improve their ability to waggle dance. Social learning shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and several other vertebrate species, according to the researchers. Social learning occurs when one individual learns by observing or interacting with another. Eusocial insects (i.e., insects with an advanced level of social ...

Scientists have called for a legally-binding treaty to ensure Earth’s orbit isn’t irreparably harmed by the future expansion of the global space industry. In the week that nearly 200 countries agreed to a treaty to protect the High Seas after a 20-year process, the experts believe society needs to take the lessons learned from one part of our planet to another.  The number of satellites in orbit is expected to increase from 9,000 today to over 60,000 by 2030, with estimates suggesting there ...

Researchers have built the first ever map showing every single neuron and how they’re wired together in the brain of the fruit fly larva. This huge step forwards in science will ultimately help us understand the basic principles by which signals travel through the brain at the neural level and lead to behaviour and learning.   The map of the 3016 neurons that make up the larva’s brain and the detailed circuitry of neural pathways within it is known as a ‘connectome’. It’s the largest complete brain connectome described yet. Professor Marta Zlatic ...

Researchers have analysed image and genomic data from the UK Biobank to find insights into rare diseases of the human eye. These include retinal dystrophies – a group of inherited disorders affecting the retina – which are also the leading cause of blindness certification in working-age adults. The retina is found at the back of the eye. It’s a layered tissue that receives light and converts it into a signal that can be interpreted by the brain. Each retinal layer comprises different cell types that play a unique role in this light conversion process. For this study published in the journal PLOS Genetics, the researchers focused ...

Dr. Natasha Kekre is this year’s national winner of a “young investigator award” from the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation (north_eastexternal linkCSCI), an organization that represents early career healthcare researchers across the country. An exceptionally motivated scientist, Dr. Kekre is an associate professor at the uOttawa Faculty of Medicine, as well as a scientist and hematologist at The Ottawa Hospital. Dr. Kekre says she’s been “very fortunate” to be in Ottawa’s dynamic medical research hub and benefit from having internationally ...

A phase 3 clinical trial (research study) of a targeted therapy called nirogacestat has found that the drug significantly shrank desmoid tumors in 41% of patients. Desmoid tumors (also known as aggressive fibromatosis) are a rare type of soft tissue tumor, and MSK has a team of doctors who are dedicated to treating them. When Dana Avellino, now 36, first noticed a lump near her groin in the summer of 2018, she thought it was related her recent cesarean section. Her younger daughter was only 2 months old at the time. When a biopsy revealed that the lump was a sarcoma, a type of tumor that ...

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have detected the existence of a charge density wave of electrons that acquires mass as it interacts with the background lattice ions of the material over long distances. This new research, led by assistant professor Fahad Mahmood (Physics, Materials Research Laboratory) and postdoc Soyeun Kim (current postdoc at Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), is a direct measurement of the Anderson-Higgs mechanism (of mass acquisition) and the first known demonstration of a massive phason in a charge ...

New research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and the Sloan Kettering Institute — a hub for basic science and translational research within MSK — offers new proof-of-concept compounds against acute myeloid leukemia; reports results from a phase 1 clinical trial appraising two drugs against low-grade glioma; examines MSK’s first-in-the-nation program integrating herbal medicine into oncology care; and identifies how high-grade histologic patterns ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new biosensor engineered by Penn State researchers offers scientists the first dynamic glimpses of manganese, an elusive metal ion that is essential for life. The researchers engineered the sensor from a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by some of the Penn State researchers involved in the present study. They were able to genetically reprogram the protein to favor manganese over other common transition ...

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. In this case, the “job” is the breakdown of lignin, the structural biopolymer that gives stems, bark and branches their signature woodiness. One of the most abundant terrestrial polymers on Earth, lignin surrounds valuable plant fibers and other molecules that could be converted into biofuels and other commodity chemicals — if we could only get past that rigid plant cell wall. Fortunately, the rather laborious process already occurs in the guts of large herbivores through the actions of anaerobic microbes that cows, goats and sheep rely on to release the nutrients ...

New research from the University of Georgia suggests most people don’t understand the difference between a preprint and a published academic journal article. Preprints are research papers that haven’t undergone peer review, the process by which studies’ findings are validated by experts who weren’t involved with the research themselves. The study found the majority of readers have little to no understanding of what a preprint actually is. That lack of understanding could lead to public distrust in science since findings and how those findings are described can change between the preprint phase and ...

Ontario’s emergency departments are seeing a dramatic rise in visits related to the use of unregulated amphetamines and their street equivalent: crystal meth. In a new paper published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, researchers found that individuals accessing the emergency department (ED) for amphetamine- and methamphetamine-related concerns grew from 233 in 2003 to 4,146 individuals annually by 2020. “That’s a nearly 15-fold increase – pretty dramatic. If we consider ED visits as a crude proxy for how prevalent unregulated amphetamine use is, then the observed trend is highly concerning,” said the paper’s lead author, ...

Glenview, Illinois – Published monthly, the journal CHEST® features peer-reviewed, cutting-edge original research in chest medicine: Pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine and related disciplines. Journal topics include asthma, chest infections, COPD, critical care, diffuse lung disease, education and clinical practice, pulmonary vascular disease, sleep, thoracic oncology and the humanities. The March issue of the CHEST journal contains 44 articles, including clinically relevant research, reviews, case series, commentary and more. Each month, the journal also offers complementary ...

Philadelphia, March 9, 2023 – The Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP), funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, includes Nutrition Incentive (NI) and Produce Prescription (PPR) programs. These programs provide financial incentives for healthy eating by increasing individuals’ purchase and consumption of fruits and vegetables and reducing food insecurity in order to prevent and treat nutrition-related diseases. A study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, explores how nutrition educators work with NI and PPR programs ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—Diversification reduces risk. That’s the spirit of one key takeaway from a new study led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The effective path to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century likely requires a mix of technologies that can pull carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.  Overreliance on any one carbon removal method may bring undue risk, the authors caution. And we’ll likely need them all to remove the necessary amount ...

Study Title: Pharmacologic disruption of mSWI/SNF complex activity restricts SARS-CoV-2 infection Publication: Nature Genetics https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01307-z Dana-Farber Cancer Institute author: Cigall Kadoch, PhD Summary: A new class of oral drugs can inhibit a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 variants, researchers report, potentially identifying new antiviral agents providing broad activity against the constantly emerging new strains of the COVID-19 virus. The researchers discovered that the mammalian SWI/SNF (also called BAF) chromatin remodeling complex, a regulator of gene expression –controls the expression of the ACE2, the ...