A new study by a team of researchers has found that the consolidation of traditional smallholder farms in China has a devastating effect on the biodiversity of wild pollinators in the area. Pollinators play an essential role when it comes to supporting global food production. However, wild pollinators are on the decline for several reasons, including the loss of floral resources and nesting sites. This loss of biodiversity could have far-reaching consequences for global food production in future. "Biodiversity is essential for all life, with pollinators being one of the most important groups," says Dr Yi Zou from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A 17-year study in Oregon, Washington and California found that removal of invasive barred owls arrested the population decline of the northern spotted owl, a native species threatened by invading barred owls and the loss of old-forest habitats. The conservation and management of northern spotted owls became one of the largest and most visible wildlife conservation issues in United States history after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 because of rapid declines in the owl's old-forest habitats. Four years later, the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted and reduced the rate of logging of old-growth forests on federal lands. Despite more ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Scientists from the department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tsukuba created a computer model to simulate the development of complex structures based on the Delta-Notch signaling pathway. This work may lead to a more comprehensive picture of the process that results in the formation of organs and other physiological systems. The development of a tiny embryo consisting of undifferentiated cells into a healthy fetus with spatially defined organs depends on the complex interplay between genetic instructions and signaling molecules. For example, "Notch" genes are ...

Berkeley -- More than 700 imaging satellites are orbiting the earth, and every day they beam vast oceans of information -- including data that reflects climate change, health and poverty -- to databases on the ground. There's just one problem: While the geospatial data could help researchers and policymakers address critical challenges, only those with considerable wealth and expertise can access it. Now, a team based at the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a machine learning system to tap the problem-solving potential of satellite imaging, using low-cost, ...

CATONSVILLE, MD, July 20, 2021 - Uber and Lyft are popular on-demand ways to travel, but does that mean trains and buses are a thing of the past? Travelers prefer different modes of transportation at different times. So how can all these modes co-exist and do so successfully? New research in the INFORMS Journal Transportation Science has created a model and an algorithm to redistribute transit resources based on commuter preferences resulting in millions in savings. "Based on case study experiments in New York City, our optimized transit schedules consistently lead to 0.4%-3% system-wide cost reduction. This amounts to rush hour savings of millions of dollars per day, while simultaneously reducing costs to passengers and transportation service ...

A team of chemists from the Croatian Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI) described a new, easy-to-use method for uninterrupted monitoring of mechanochemical reactions. These reactions are conducted in closed milling devices, so in order to monitor the reaction one has to open the reaction vessel, thus interfering with the process. The new method uses Raman spectroscopy to get deeper insight into solid-state milling reactions, without the usual interruption of the chemical reaction process. Mechanochemical synthesis by milling is used today to prepare all ...

High school students who participated in summer programs about public health increased their interest in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), according to a Rutgers study. Published in the journalPedagogy in Health Promotion, the study explored whether increasing public health awareness would motivate high school students to pursue public health careers. Researchers found that the summer program, Public Health: Outbreaks, Communities, and Urban Studies (PHocus) offered in 2018 and 2019 increased the students' knowledge in public health, epidemiology, urban public health and global public health. "Including interdisciplinary, authentic ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. ? Using data from 9,859 COVID-19 infections, Mayo Clinic researchers have new insights into risk factors for younger populations, some of which differ significantly from their older counterparts. People younger than 45 had a greater than threefold increased risk of severe infection if they had cancer or heart disease, or blood, neurologic or endocrine disorders, the research found. These associations were weaker in older age groups. The study was published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The research team studied people living in a 27-county region of Southeast Minnesota and West Central Wisconsin surrounding Mayo Clinic in Rochester diagnosed with COVID-19 between March and ...

In the largest study of its kind, an investigation by UC San Francisco has found no evidence that moderate coffee consumption can cause cardiac arrhythmia. In fact, each additional daily cup of coffee consumed among several hundred thousand individuals was associated with a 3 percent lower risk of any arrhythmia occurring, including atrial fibrillation, premature ventricular contractions, or other common heart conditions, the researchers report. The study included a four-year follow up. The paper is published July 19, 2021, in JAMA Internal Medicine. "Coffee is the primary source of caffeine for most people, and it has a reputation for causing or exacerbating arrhythmias," said senior and corresponding author Gregory Marcus, MD, professor ...

It is a scenario familiar to anyone who has driven down a crowded, narrow street. Parked cars line both sides, and there isn't enough space for vehicles traveling in both directions to pass each other. One has to duck into a gap in the parked cars or slow and pull over as far as possible for the other to squeeze by. Drivers find a way to negotiate this, but not without close calls and frustration. Programming an autonomous vehicle (AV) to do the same -- without a human behind the wheel or knowledge of what the other driver might do -- presented a unique challenge ...

Wind energy is of outstanding importance to the energy transition in Germany. According to the Federal Statistical Office, its share in total gross electricity production of about 24% is far higher than those of all other renewable energy sources. "To reach our climate goals, it is important to further expand these capacities and to replace as much coal-based power as possible," says Professor Wolf Fichtner from KIT's Institute for Industrial Production (IIP). "However, there is considerable resistance, especially in beautiful landscapes." A team of researchers from KIT, the University of Aberdeen, and the Technical University of Denmark has now calculated what this means for the costs ...

The photovoltaic effect of ferroelectric crystals can be increased by a factor of 1,000 if three different materials are arranged periodically in a lattice. This has been revealed in a study by researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). They achieved this by creating crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate and calcium titanate which they alternately placed on top of one another. Their findings, which could significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells, were published in the journal Science Advances. electric crystals do not require a so-called pn junction to create the photovoltaic effect, in other words, no positively and negatively doped layers. This makes it much easier to produce ...

A study led by D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, director of thoracic oncology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and CU Cancer Center member, has helped to define MET amplification as a rare but potentially actionable driver for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Camidge says many of the major developments in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer have come from defining molecularly specific subsets of the disease for which researchers have been able to develop targeted treatments. Until now, all of these subsets have been based on either genetic mutations or gene rearrangements ...

As multicellular life relies on cell-cell interactions, it is not surprising that this is not always peaceful: cells with higher fitness eliminate cells with lower fitness through cell competition. Cell competition has emerged as a quality control mechanism and occurs when cells differ, genetically or otherwise, from each other. In mammals, the process of cell competition has been observed e.g., in cancer, during organ homeostasis, and during development as a process to select the fittest cells in the embryo and the adult. However, the features that distinguish "winner" from "loser" cells and whether there are key determinants for cell competition in various biological ...

PULLMAN, Wash. - When it comes to craft beer, the flavor doesn't have to be all in the hops. As a panel of amateur beer tasters at Washington State University recently demonstrated, malted barley, the number one ingredient in beer besides water, can have a range of desirable flavors too. Researchers recruited a panel of about 100 craft beer drinkers to taste some so-called SMaSH beers--those brewed with a single barley malt and single hop. All the beers contained the same hop variety, called Tahoma, but each had a malt from a different barley genotype, or genetic makeup. Trained tasters can distinguish these easily, but even the untrained ...

An international group of researchers representing thousands of coral scientists across the globe is calling for new commitments and actions by the world's policymakers to protect and restore coral reefs. In a paper presented July 20 at the International Coral Reef Symposium, the scientists said that the coming decade will likely offer the last chance for policymakers at all levels to prevent coral reefs "from heading towards world-wide collapse." The paper, developed by the International Coral Reef Society, pushes for three strategies to save the reefs: addressing climate change, improving local conditions and actively restoring coral. ...

The female tsetse fly, which gives birth to adult-sized live young, produce weaker offspring as they get older, and when they feed on poor quality blood. The study, carried out by researchers at the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, was designed to measure how tsetse offspring health is influenced by their mothers' age, and how factors such as the mother's nutrition and mating experience might come into play. In many animals, females show signs of reproductive ageing - where offspring health declines with maternal age - but there is huge variation within species in how rapidly this ageing occurs. Scientists found that female tsetse that experience ...

For more than 20 years, Makoto Miyata from Osaka City University has been studying the gliding motility of the parasitic bacterium Mycoplasma mobile (M. mobile). It is a mechanism consisting of an external "grabbing" structure and internal "motor" - the motor having yet to be clarified on a molecular level. In collaboration with Osaka University and Kanazawa University, his research team used electron microscopy and high-speed atomic force microscopy (high-speed AFM) to reveal that the bacteria's molecular motor consists of two ATP synthase-like complexes, suggesting an unexpected evolution of the protein. Their findings were published in mBio. Based on genetic information, researchers have suggested that the ...

Imagine you're a CEO who wants to promote an innovative new product -- a time management app or a fitness program. Should you send the product to Kim Kardashian in the hope that she'll love it and spread the word to her legions of Instagram followers? The answer would be 'yes' if successfully transmitting new ideas or behavior patterns was as simple as showing them to as many people as possible. However, a forthcoming study in the journal Nature Communications finds that as prominent and revered as social influencers seem to be, in fact, they are unlikely to change a person's behavior by example -- and might actually be detrimental to the cause. Why? "When social influencers present ideas that are ...

A new scoping review found that those with chronic health concerns, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and autoimmune conditions, are not only at a higher risk of severe COVID-19 infection, they are also more likely to experience anxiety, depression or substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the review was to address knowledge gaps related to the prevention and management of mental health responses among those with chronic conditions. The findings, recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, were based on a comprehensive review of 67 Chinese and English-language studies. "Levels ...

A recent study in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems shows that the fruits of a type of tomato plant send electrical signals to the rest of the plant when they are infested by caterpillars. Plants have a multitude of chemical and hormonal signaling pathways, which are generally transmitted through the sap (the nutrient-rich water that moves through the plant). In the case of fruits, nutrients flow exclusively to the fruit and there has been little research into whether there is any communication in the opposite direction--i.e. from fruit to plant. "We usually forget that a plant's fruits are living and semiautonomous parts of their mother-plants, far ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - As children made fewer visits to health facilities and engaged in social distancing and other COVID-19 mitigation measures, a smaller number of them also received prescription drugs, a new study suggests. Overall, medications prescribed for children dropped by more than a quarter during the first eight months of the pandemic compared to the previous year, with the steepest declines in infection-related medicines like antibiotics and cough-and-cold drugs. Antibiotic dispensing to children and teens plunged by nearly 56 % ...

An internal transporter that enables us to use the copper we consume in foods like shellfish and nuts to enable a host of vital body functions also has the essential role of protecting the receptor that enables us to grow new blood vessels when ours become diseased, Medical College of Georgia scientists report. The findings published in the journal END ...

The development of an ultrathin magnet that operates at room temperature could lead to new applications in computing and electronics - such as high-density, compact spintronic memory devices - and new tools for the study of quantum physics. The ultrathin magnet, which was recently reported in the journal Nature Communications , could make big advances in next-gen memories, computing, spintronics, and quantum physics. It was discovered by scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley. "We're ...

Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state of the art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, the researchers resolve a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars. Joanna Piotrowska, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, will present the new work today (Tuesday 20 July) at the virtual National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2021). Star formation in galaxies has long been a focal point of astronomy research. Decades of successful observations ...