The tiny organisms living in soil may have a greater effect on the yield and pest and disease resistance of crop plants grown in that soil than previously known. Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Kansas have shown that soil microbes - microscopic organisms like viruses, bacteria and fungi found throughout nature - play a role in the phenomenon of heterosis or "hybrid vigor," the superior performance of crossed plant lines, or hybrids, over inbred plant lines. Hybrids are often used by farmers for agricultural production due their superior crop yields. Research into hybrid vigor has generally highlighted the roles of genetic ...

BOSTON - A new study by research, quality improvement and health equity experts at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in The American Journal of Managed Care lays out the challenges of achieving equity for diverse patients in communication at hospital discharge. A survey of 224 recently discharged patients was conducted in five languages just before the COVID-19 pandemic and highlighted challenges, including limited understanding of medications; lack of available professional medical interpreters and translated patient instructions at discharge; and worries about support for at home after hospitalization. Major findings include: Overall, one in four patients were alone at discharge, without a family member ...

In the context of meditation practice, meditators can experience a state of "pure awareness" or "pure consciousness", in which they perceive consciousness itself. This state can be experienced in various ways, but evidently incorporates specific sensations as well as non-specific accompanying perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. These are just some of the findings of the most extensive survey of meditators ever conducted on the experience of pure consciousness. The findings of the survey recently have been published in PLOS ONE. The study was conducted by Professor Thomas Metzinger from the Department of Philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Dr. Alex Gamma from the Psychiatric ...

TORONTO, ON - Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed an innovative tool to aid in the investigation of how we perceive and remember visual experiences. The new tool, referred to as a "scene wheel," will help researchers study how accurately we construct mental representations of visual experiences for later retrieval -- for example, how well an eyewitness recalls details of a crime or accident. "We know that eyewitness testimony is not reliable," says Gaeun Son. "With the new scene wheel, we can start to characterize the specific nature of those memory failures." Son is a PhD student in the Faculty of Arts & Science's Department of Psychology and lead ...

A new study from Oregon State University found that infants born within 3 kilometers of oil and natural gas drilling facilities in Texas had slightly lower birthweights than those born before drilling began in their vicinity. The study, published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that the type of drilling or resource being extracted did not change the result. "Most studies to date focus exclusively on unconventional natural gas drilling, or fracking. That particular process is a small subset of the oil and natural gas industry. ...

In order to win the battle against COVID-19, studies to develop vaccines, drugs, devices and re-purposed drugs are urgently needed. Randomized clinical trials are used to provide evidence of safety and efficacy as well as to better understand this novel and evolving virus. As of July 15, more than 6,180 COVID-19 clinical trials have been registered through ClinicalTrials.gov, the national registry and database for privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world. Knowing which ones are likely to succeed is imperative. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science are the first to model COVID-19 completion versus cessation in clinical trials using machine learning algorithms and ensemble learning. The study, ...

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have found a link between post-cancer treatment frailty and neurocognitive decline in young adult childhood cancer survivors. A paper on this work was published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Though frailty is often associated with the elderly, 8% of young adult childhood cancer survivors meet the criteria for frailty. This study confirms that those who undergo childhood cancer treatment can experience frailty, which can create an early onset of neurocognitive decline in young adults. This study will help with further research to prevent such neurocognitive decline. "We ...

To reach the target of carbon neutral, a transition from fossil energy to renewable energy generation is indispensable. Photovoltaic technology is considered as one of the most prominent sources of renewable energy. For decades, about 90% of global solar cell market has been dominated by silicon solar cells. Although the price of silicon solar panels decreases year by year, it is a big challenge to significantly reduce its manufacturing cost further. Hence, next-generation photovoltaic technologies are in urgent need of new materials and novel techniques. Recently, metal halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have attracted extensive attention from both academia and industry, due to their excellent photoelectric conversion efficiency and great commercial potential. Metal halide perovskite ...

One of the major challenges in modern cancer therapy is the adaptive response of cancer cells to targeted therapies: initially, these therapies are very often effective, then adaptive resistance occurs, allowing the tumor cells to proliferate again. Although this adaptive response is theoretically reversible, such a reversal is hampered by numerous molecular mechanisms that allow the cancer cells to adapt to the treatment. The analysis of these mechanisms is limited by the complexity of cause and effect relationships that are extremely difficult to observe in vivo in tumor samples. In order to overcome this challenge, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) ...

In the United States, climate change is controversial, which makes communicating about the subject a tricky proposition. A recent study by Portland State researchers Brianne Suldovsky, assistant professor of communication, and Daniel Taylor-Rodriguez, assistant professor of statistics, explored how liberals and conservatives in Oregon think about climate science to get a better sense for what communication strategies might be most effective at reaching people with different political ideologies. The study was published in Climatic Change in June. Prior studies have shown that exposing climate change skeptics, ...

Over the past six months, the World Health Organization has categorized four SARS-CoV-2 variants as being "of concern" because they are more transmissible or may escape the immune response. They have been termed the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur, in collaboration with the French National Health Insurance Fund (CNAM), Ipsos and Santé publique France, conducted a nationwide case-control study to evaluate the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines against symptomatic forms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, be that non-variant virus or the Alpha and Beta variants. The results show that the two-dose vaccination regimen of mRNA vaccines provides 88% protection against non-variant virus, 86% against the Alpha variant and 77% against the Beta ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Rice is the world's most commonly grown and consumed crop. It also supports lives and livelihoods, especially in low- and middle-income regions. As such, methods for securing abundant and profitable rice harvests are key in global food security. The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) offers a repeatable, sustainable system for increasing rice yields. It brings together fundamental planting and harvesting techniques such as strategically spacing plants, minimizing water, and transplanting seedlings. These practices can be repeated in varying conditions. While SRI has been around since ...

Since buildings consume 75% of electricity in the U.S., they offer great potential for saving energy and reducing the demands on our rapidly changing electric grid. But how much, where, and through which strategies could better management of building energy use actually impact the electricity system? A comprehensive new study led by researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) answers these questions, quantifying what can be done to make buildings more energy efficient and flexible in granular detail by both time (including time of day and year) and space (looking at regions across the U.S.). The research team, which also included scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), found that ...

Aryl sulfide, an aromatic compound in which sulfur is attached to an aryl (a functional group derived from an aromatic ring), is found in biologically active materials effective against asthma, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. As a result, chemists have shown a lot of interest in synthesizing aryl sulfides. Traditionally, carbon-sulfur (C-S) bond formation reactions between thiols and aryl electrophiles catalyzed by transition metals have been employed for aryl sulfide synthesis because of their high reliability. However, thiols have an unpleasant smell and are toxic. Could there be a way to synthesize aryl sulfides that avoids the ...

A new study of almost 12,000 Australians has found one-third of the adult population has experienced pure cybercrime during their lifetime, with 14% reporting this disruption to network systems in the past 12 months. With all forms of cybercrime already costing trillions every year globally, experts from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) and Flinders University say the crimes involved substantial levels of personal victimisation including direct losses as well as the high cost of preventing future attacks. A pre-COVID-19 snapshot of the cost of 'pure cybercrime' in 2019 has found an approximate ...

Nanomaterials have been used in a variety of emerging applications, such as in targeted pharmaceuticals or to bolster other materials and products such as sensors and energy harvesting and storage devices. A team in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is using nanoparticles as heaters to manipulate the electrical activity of neurons in the brain and of cardiomyocytes in the heart. The findings, published July 3, 2021, in Advanced Materials, have the potential to be translated to other types of excitable cells and serve as a valuable tool in nano-neuroengineering. Srikanth Singamaneni, a materials scientist, and Barani Raman, a biomedical engineer, and their teams collaborated to develop a noninvasive technology that inhibits the electrical ...

It's hard to save what you can't identify. That's been a problem for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse, which is found only in the salty, brackish waters of the San Francisco Bay area. The mouse competes for space with about eight million humans, and more than three-quarters of its habitat has been eaten by development and land conversion. That loss is expected to increase amid rising sea levels. Conserving the population has proven tricky, in part because it looks so much like another mouse in the area--the western harvest mouse--that is abundant throughout western U.S. But scientists from UC Davis have developed a tool, a "decision ...

Researchers from the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, alongside collaborators from Biobot Analytics, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have successfully developed an innovative, open-source molecular detection method that is able to detect and quantify the B.1.1.7 (Alpha) variant of SARS-CoV-2. The breakthrough paves the way for rapid, inexpensive surveillance of other SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater. As the world continues to battle and contain COVID-19, the recent identification of SARS-CoV-2 variants with higher transmissibility and increased severity has made the development ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The parasites that cause severe malaria are well-known for the sinister ways they infect humans, but new research may lead to drugs that could block one of their most reliable weapons: interference with the immune response. In the study, scientists defined the atomic-level architecture of the connection between a protein on the surface of a parasite-infected red blood cell when it binds to a receptor on the surface of an immune cell. When that protein-receptor connection is made under normal circumstances, the infected red blood cell, hijacked by the disease-causing parasite, de-activates the immune cell - meaning the body won't fight the infection. A drug designed to fit into that space could block the interaction, allowing the immune system to get to work clearing ...

LA JOLLA, CA--You can't make a banana split without bananas. And you can't generate stable regulatory T cells without Vitamin C or enzymes called TET proteins, it appears. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) help control inflammation and autoimmunity in the body. Tregs are so important, in fact, that scientists are working to generate stable induced Tregs (iTregs) in vitro for use as treatments for autoimmune diseases as well as rejection to transplanted organs. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find the right molecular ingredients to induce stable iTregs. Now scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology ...

DALLAS, July 21, 2021 -- Babies who were breastfed, even for a few days, had lower blood pressure as toddlers and these differences in blood pressure may translate into improved heart and vascular health as adults, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association. Research has found that cardiovascular disease risk factors, including high blood pressure, can start in childhood. Studies have also confirmed breastfeeding is associated with lower cardiovascular disease risk in adulthood. However, the amount and length of time breastfeeding that is needed ...

DALLAS, July 21, 2021 -- People who made even small increases in their daily physical activity levels after receiving an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) experienced fewer incidences of hospitalization and had a decreased risk of death, according to new research published today in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal. Implantable cardioverter defibrillators, also known as ICDs, are battery-powered devices placed under the skin that can detect abnormal heart rhythms and deliver an electric shock to restore a normal heartbeat. According to American Heart Association's Heart Disease ...

An international collaboration elucidates the mechanisms that facilitate accurate identification of moving images. The findings have been published in Nature Communications Imagine meeting a friend on the street, and imagine that with every step they take, your visual system has to process their image from scratch in order to recognize them. Now imagine if the same thing were to happen for every object and creature that moves around us. We would live in a constant state of uncertainty and inconsistency. Luckily, that is not the case. Our visual system is able to retain information obtained in motion, thereby presenting us with a more consistent picture of our surroundings. These ...

Older adults may be slower to learn actions and behaviours that benefit themselves, but new research shows they are just as capable as younger people of learning behaviours that benefit others. Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford found that youngsters, in contrast, tend to learn much faster when they are making choices that benefit themselves. The study, published in Nature Communications, focused on reinforcement learning - a fundamental type of learning in which we make decisions based on the positive outcomes from earlier choices. It allows us to adapt our choices to our environment by learning the associations between choices and their outcomes. Dr Patricia Lockwood is senior author on ...

Every day, people are exposed to a variety of synthetic chemicals through the products they use or the food they eat. For many of these chemicals, the health effects are unknown. Now END ...