Photosynthesis, the process by which plants and other organisms convert sunlight into chemical energy, has been a major player during the evolution of life and our planet's atmosphere. Although most of the ins and outs of photosynthesis are understood, how the necessary mechanisms evolved is still a topic of debate. The answer to this question, however, may actually lie buried in the mineral world. In a recent study published in Earth Science Frontiers (10.13745/j.esf.sf.2020.12.3), scientists from Peking University, China, shifted the focus in photosynthesis research from plants and bacteria one step further back to rocks and substances found in what's ...

UK government plans to widen the roll out of the Innova lateral flow test without supporting evidence risks serious harm, warn experts in The BMJ today. More than £1 billion have been spent on purchasing lateral flow tests, but Professor Jon Deeks and colleagues argue that the public is being misled about their accuracy, as well as the risks and implications of false negative results, and they call on the government urgently to change course. Mass testing may be helpful and necessary in certain circumstances if delivered to high quality, they explain, but the Innova lateral flow test is not fit for this purpose. For example, in the Liverpool pilot study, 60% of infected symptomless people went undetected, including 33% of those with ...

Scientists from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA have developed a technique that will enable researchers to more efficiently isolate and identify rare T cells that are capable of targeting viruses, cancer and other diseases. The approach could increase scientists' understanding of how these critical immune cells respond to a wide range of illnesses and advance the development of T cell therapies. This includes immunotherapies that aim to boost the function and quantity of cancer or virus-targeting T cells and therapies ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Jan. 12, 2020 -- Insufficient interactions with academic advisors and peers and financial problems are derailing career aspirations of women and minority groups pursing graduate degrees in the nation's highest-funded chemistry programs. The challenges, tied to systemic gender and racial inequities, emerged from a deep analysis of data compiled in a 2013 American Chemical Society survey of 1,375 chemistry graduate students in the top 100 university chemistry departments in terms of research funding reported by the National Science Foundation. The findings are detailed in a study, led by University of Oregon researchers, publishing this ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Wild bees are more affected by climate change than by disturbances to their habitats, according to a team of researchers led by Penn State. The findings suggest that addressing land-use issues alone will not be sufficient to protecting these important pollinators. "Our study found that the most critical factor influencing wild bee abundance and species diversity was the weather, particularly temperature and precipitation," said Christina Grozinger, Distinguished Professor of Entomology and director of the Center for Pollinator Research, Penn State. "In the Northeastern United States, past trends and future predictions show a changing climate with warmer winters, more intense precipitation ...

A major risk of being hospitalised is catching a bacterial infection. Hospitals, especially areas including intensive care units and surgical wards, are teeming with bacteria, some of which are resistant to antibiotics - they are infamously known as 'superbugs'. Superbug infections are difficult and expensive to treat, and can often lead to dire consequences for the patient. Now, new research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Microbiology has discovered how to revert antibiotic-resistance in one of the most dangerous superbugs. The strategy involves ...

Producing clean energy and reducing the power consumption of illumination and personal devices are key challenges to reduce the impact of modern civilization on the environment. As a result, the surging demand for solar cells and light-emitting devices is driving scientists to explore new semiconductor materials and improve their performances, while lowering the production costs. Semiconductor nanocrystals (materials with sizes about 10 nanometers, which is approximately 10,000 times thinner than our hair) hold great promise for these applications: they are cheap to produce, can be easily integrated in these devices and possess exceptionally enhanced properties upon interaction with ...

Curtin University researchers have used ancient crystals from eroded rocks found in stream sediments in Greenland to successfully test the theory that portions of Earth's ancient crust acted as 'seeds' from which later generations of crust grew. The findings not only advance an understanding of the production of the Earth's crust through deep time, along with its structure and composition, but reveal a planet-wide crustal growth spurt three billion years ago when mantle temperatures peaked. Lead author Professor Chris Kirkland, from Curtin University's Timescales of Mineral Systems ...

You are likely familiar with the serious consequences of anorexia for those who experience it, but you might not be aware that the disorder may not be purely psychological. A recent review from researchers at the University of Oxford in the open-access journal END ...

Highlights: Severe cases of COVID-19 often include GI symptoms Chronic diseases associated with severe COVID-19 are also associated with altered gut microbiota A growing body of evidence suggests poor gut health adversely affects prognosis If studies do empirically demonstrate a connection between the gut microbiota and COVID-19 severity, then interventions like probiotics or fecal transplants may help patients Washington, D.C. - January 12, 2021 - People infected with COVID-19 experience a wide range of symptoms and severities, the most commonly reported including high fevers ...

PHILADELPHIA -- (Jan. 12, 2021) -- Scientists at The Wistar Institute have created an advanced humanized immune system mouse model that allows them to examine resistance to immune checkpoint blockade therapies in melanoma. It has revealed a central role for mast cells. These findings were published today in the journal Nature Communications. Checkpoint inhibitors revolutionized therapeutic options for advanced melanoma. However, only a fraction of patients respond to this treatment and some relapse due to reemergence of therapy-resistant lesions. "To better understand why some cancers do not respond or become resistant to checkpoint therapies, ...

Imagine you gave the exact same art pieces to two different groups of people and asked them to curate an art show. The art is radical and new. The groups never speak with one another, and they organize and plan all the installations independently. On opening night, imagine your surprise when the two art shows are nearly identical. How did these groups categorize and organize all the art the same way when they never spoke with one another? The dominant hypothesis is that people are born with categories already in their brains, but a study from the Network Dynamics Group (NDG) at the Annenberg School for Communication has discovered a novel explanation. In an experiment in which people were asked to categorize unfamiliar shapes, individuals and small groups created ...

New research has found as climate change causes the world's oceans to warm, baby sharks are born smaller, exhausted, undernourished and into environments that are already difficult for them to survive in. Lead author of the study Carolyn Wheeler is a PhD candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU) and the University of Massachusetts. She examined the effects of increased temperatures on the growth, development and physiological performance of epaulette sharks--an egg-laying species found only ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An unfortunate truth about the use of mechanical ventilation to save the lives of patients in respiratory distress is that the pressure used to inflate the lungs is likely to cause further lung damage. In a new study, scientists identified a molecule that is produced by immune cells during mechanical ventilation to try to decrease inflammation, but isn't able to completely prevent ventilator-induced injury to the lungs. The team is working on exploiting that natural process in pursuit of a therapy that could lower the chances for lung damage in patients on ventilators. Delivering high levels of the helpful molecule with a nanoparticle was effective ...

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, January 12, 2020: New research from NYU Abu Dhabi's Laboratory of Neural Systems and Behavior for the first time used an animal model to demonstrate how abnormal sleep architecture can be a predictor of stress vulnerability. These important findings have the potential to inform the development of sleep tests that can help identify who may be susceptible -- or resilient -- to future stress. In the study, Abnormal Sleep Signals Vulnerability to Chronic Social Defeat Stress, which appears in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, NYUAD Assistant Professor of Biology Dipesh Chaudhury and Research Associate Basma Radwan describe their development of a mouse ...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A new national survey by the Orlando Health Heart & Vascular Institute finds many Americans would delay doctor's appointments and even emergency care when COVID-19 rates are high. The survey found 67 percent of Americans are more concerned about going to medical appointments when COVID-19 rates are high in their area and nearly three in five (57 percent) are hesitant to go to the hospital even for an emergency. In a time when every trip out of the house and every person we come in contact with poses a threat of contracting COVID-19, ...

WASHINGTON - Computer-based artificial intelligence can function more like human intelligence when programmed to use a much faster technique for learning new objects, say two neuroscientists who designed such a model that was designed to mirror human visual learning. In the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Maximilian Riesenhuber, PhD, professor of neuroscience, at Georgetown University Medical Center, and Joshua Rule, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, explain how the new approach vastly improves the ability of AI software to quickly learn new visual ...

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has announced that the research team led by Dr. Kim Kyoung-Whan at the Center for Spintronics has proposed a new principle about spin memory devices, which are next-generation memory devices. This breakthrough presents new applicability that is different from the existing paradigm. Conventional memory devices are classified into volatile memories, such as RAM, that can read and write data quickly, and non-volatile memories, such as hard-disk, on which data are maintained even when the power is off. In recent years, related academic and industrial fields have been combining their advantages to accelerate the development of next-generation memory that is fast and capable of maintaining data even when the power is off. A spin memory ...

The leaf vasculature of plants plays a key role in transporting solutes from where they are made - for example from the plant cells driving photosynthesis - to where they are stored or used. Sugars and amino acids are transported from the leaves to the roots and the seeds via the conductive pathways of the phloem. Phloem is the part of the tissue in vascular plants that comprises the sieve elements - where actual translocation takes place - and the companion cells as well as the phloem parenchyma cells. The leaf veins consist of at least seven distinct cell types, with specific roles in transport, metabolism and signalling. Little is known about ...

A team of HIV researchers, cellular biologists, and biophysicists who banded together to support COVID-19 science determined the atomic structure of a coronavirus protein thought to help the pathogen evade and dampen response from human immune cells. The structural map - which is now published in the journal PNAS, but has been open-access for the scientific community since August - has laid the groundwork for new antiviral treatments tailored specifically to SARS-CoV-2, and enabled further investigations into how the newly emerged virus ravages the human body. "Using X-ray crystallography, we built an ...

A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found a 25% increase in food insufficiency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Food insufficiency, the most extreme form of food insecurity, occurs when families do not have enough food to eat. Among the nationally representative sample of 63,674 adults in the US, Black and Latino Americans had over twice the risk of food insufficiency compared to White Americans. "People of color are disproportionately affected by both food insufficiency and COVID-19," said Jason Nagata, MD, MSc, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco and lead author on the study. "Many of these individuals have experienced job loss and higher rates of poverty during the ...

During April 2020, while the UK was in full lockdown, there was a drop of more than a third in the number of people seeking help for mental illness or self-harm according to research involving 14 million people registered at general practices across the four nations of the UK which was published today in The Lancet Public Health*. The research, 'Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on primary care-recorded mental illness and self-harm episodes in the UK: a population-based cohort study', was conducted by the National Institute for Health Research Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (NIHR GM PSTRC). The Centre is a partnership between The University of Manchester and Salford Royal NHS Foundation ...

In a surprising discovery, Princeton physicists have observed an unexpected quantum behavior in an insulator made from a material called tungsten ditelluride. This phenomenon, known as quantum oscillation, is typically observed in metals rather than insulators, and its discovery offers new insights into our understanding of the quantum world. The findings also hint at the existence of an entirely new type of quantum particle. The discovery challenges a long-held distinction between metals and insulators, because in the established quantum theory of materials, insulators were not thought to be able to ...

Reston, Virginia--Physicians who follow artificial intelligence (AI) advice may be considered less liable for medical malpractice than is commonly thought, according to a new study of potential jury candidates in the U.S. Published in the January issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM). The study provides the first data related to physicians' potential liability for using AI in personalized medicine, which can often deviate from standard care. "New AI tools can assist physicians in treatment recommendations and diagnostics, including the interpretation of medical images," remarked Kevin Tobia, JD, PhD, ...

TORONTO, ON - New research led by researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Northwestern University employs machine learning to craft the best building blocks in the assembly of framework materials for use in a targeted application. The findings, published today in Nature Machine Intelligence, demonstrated that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches can help in proposing novel materials for diverse applications. One example is the separation of carbon dioxide from industrial combustion processes. AI approaches promise the acceleration of the design cycle for materials. With the objective of improving the separation of chemicals in industrial processes, the team of researchers - including collaborators from ...