Forest clearance in Southeast Asia is accelerating, leading to unprecedented increases in carbon emissions, according to new research. The findings, revealed by a research team including University of Leeds academics, show that forests are being cut down at increasingly higher altitudes and on steeper slopes in order to make way for agricultural intensification. As a result, more than 400 million metric tons of carbon are released into the atmosphere every year as forests are cleared in the region, with that emissions figure increasing in recent ...

A Sussex team - including university mathematicians - have created a new modelling toolkit which predicts the impact of COVID-19 at a local level with unprecedented accuracy. The details are published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, and are available for other local authorities to use online, just as the UK looks as though it may head into another wave of infections. The study used the local Sussex hospital and healthcare daily COVID-19 situation reports, including admissions, discharges, bed occupancy and deaths. Through the pandemic, the newly-published modelling has been used by local NHS and public ...

Humans can easily identify sweet-tasting foods - and with pleasure. However, many carnivorous animals lack this ability, and whether birds, descendants of meat-eating dinosaurs, can taste sweet was previously unclear. An international team of researchers led by Max Planck Institute for Ornithology including Dr Simon SIN from Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has now shown that songbirds, a group containing over 4,000 species, can sense sweetness regardless of their primary diets. The study highlights a specific event in the songbird ancestors ...

In the vicinity of black holes, space is so warped that even light rays may curve around them several times. This phenomenon may enable us to see multiple versions of the same thing. While this has been known for decades, only now do we have an exact, mathematical expression, thanks to Albert Sneppen, student at the Niels Bohr Institute. The result, which even is more useful in realistic black holes, has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. You have probably heard of black holes -- the marvelous lumps of gravity from which not even light can escape. You may also have heard that space itself and even time behave oddly near black holes; space is warped. In the vicinity of a black hole, space ...

The impact of El Nino on East Asian climate under a warmer climate will be dominated by the change in El Nino decaying pace, according to a new paper published by a research team based in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. The western North Pacific anomalous anticyclone (WNPAC) is a low-level atmospheric circulation system, linking up El Nino events with East Asian -western Pacific summer climate. The WNPAC can persist from El Nino mature phase in boreal winter to the upcoming summer, bringing abundant moisture to enhance the precipitation over East Asia. How the WNPAC will change in the future concerns millions of ...

July 12, New Delhi - Women who received free meals in primary school have children with improved linear growth, according to a new study by researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). India is home to the highest number of undernourished children and the largest school feeding program in the world--the Mid-Day Meal (MDM) scheme--yet long-term program benefits on nutrition are unknown. As school feeding programs target children outside the highest-return "first 1000-days" window spanning from conception until a child's second birthday, they have not been a focal point in the global agenda to address stunting. School meals benefit education and nutrition in participants, but ...

Ecologists from the Conservation Forensics Laboratory of the Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have applied stable isotope techniques to determine whether birds in the pet trade are captive or wild-caught, a key piece of evidence required in many cases to determine whether a trade is legal or not. They have applied this technique to the yellow-crested cockatoo (Cacatua sulphurea, YCC), a critically endangered species from Indonesia/Timor-Leste with a global population of fewer than 2,500, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Threatened by overexploitation for the pet trade, Hong Kong has a sizeable ...

July 12, 2021-- A new study sheds light on how the specter of dementia and chronic pain reduce people's desire to live into older ages. Among Norwegians 60 years of age and older the desire to live into advanced ages was significantly reduced by hypothetical adverse life scenarios with the strongest effect caused by dementia and chronic pain, according to research conducted at the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center based at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. The paper is among the first to study Preferred Life Expectancy (PLE) based on hypothetical health and living conditions. The findings are published ...

A new University of Arizona Health Sciences study found women on hormone therapy were up to 58% less likely to develop neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's disease, and reduction of risk varied by type and route of hormone therapy and duration of use. The findings could lead to the development of a precision medicine approach to preventing neurodegenerative diseases. The study, published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, found that women who underwent menopausal hormone therapy for six years or greater were 79% less likely to ...

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has developed a new experimental and theoretical platform to study how viruses evolve while spreading within an organism. In the study, published in PHYSICAL REVIEW X, the researchers used experimental data and simulations of a phage-bacteria ecosystem to uncover that viral expansions can transition from 'pulled' - where the expansion is led by the pioneering viral particles at the very edge of the population, to 'pushed', where the expansion is driven by viruses arising behind the front and within the infected region. Crucially, pushed waves are known ...

Commonly-used household products should carry a warning that they increase the risk of asthma, according to a new evidence review. New research conducted by Smartline, a research project funded by the European Regional Development Fund, finds evidence that a group of chemicals found in a wide range of products in people's homes increases the risk of asthma. Authors conclude that labelling should reflect this risk, and warn people to ventilate their homes while using them. The research reviewed 12 studies into Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), which are emitted as gases from certain solids or liquids. VOCs are emitted by a wide array of products, including some that are widely used as ingredients in household products. ...

The city park may be an artificial ecosystem but it plays a key role in the environment and our health, the first global assessment of the microbiome in city parks has found. The study, published in END ...

The discovery of iron-based superconductors with a relatively high transition temperature Tc in 2008 opened a new chapter in the development of high-temperature superconductivity. The following decade saw a 'research boom' in superconductivity, with remarkable achievements in the theory, experiments and applications of iron-based superconductors, and in our understanding of the fundamental mechanism of superconductivity. A UOW paper published last month reviews progress on high-pressure studies on properties of iron-based superconductor (ISBC) families. FLEET PhD student Lina Sang (University of Wollongong) was first author on the Materials Today Physics review paper, investigating ...

Movies and television often show romance sparking when two strangers meet. Real-life couples, however, are far more likely to begin as friends. Two-thirds of romantic relationships start out platonically, a new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science finds. This friends-first initiation of romance is often overlooked by researchers. Examining a sample of previous studies on how relationships begin, the authors found that nearly 75 percent focused on the spark of romance between strangers. Only eight percent centered on romance that develops among friends over time. "There are a lot of people ...

Destroying tropical ecosystems and replacing them with soybeans and other crops has immediate and devastating consequences for soybeans, according to new peer-reviewed research in the journal World Development. With 35.8 million hectare currently under soy cultivation in Brazil, extreme heat--which adjacent tropical forests help keep in check--has reduced soybean income by an average of approximately US$100 per hectare per year. The study, Conserving the Cerrado and Amazon biomes of Brazil protects the soy economy from damaging warming, shows that protecting the Amazon and Cerrado can prevent the sort of high temperatures that damages the productivity of crops--estimated to cost the sector US$3.55 billion. Another recent study found annual agricultural losses associated ...

PULLMAN, Wash. - After cutbacks and layoffs, remaining employees were more likely to feel they were treated fairly if the companies invested in them - and morale was less likely to plunge, according to new research. Those investments can include training for workers, team-building exercises or improving company culture. Even keeping workloads manageable after layoffs can help employees' job attitudes, according to the Journal of Organizational Behavior study. "Whenever possible, cost-cutting is best combined with signals that people remain the firm's most prized asset," said Jeff Joireman, the study's co-author and a professor in Washington State University's Carson College of Business. Researchers reviewed 137 previous studies examining job attitudes before, during and after cost-cutting ...

If we pay closer attention to how birds, rabbits and termites transform their local living spaces in response to varying climate conditions, we could become much better at predicting what impact climate change will have on them in future. This is according to a group of researchers* from the Universities of Montana and Wyoming in the United States, the University of Tours in France and Stellenbosch University (SU) in South Africa. They examined how animals' ability to respond to climate change likely depends on how well they modify their habitats, such as the way they build nests and burrows. The findings of their study were published recently in the high-impact journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. "It's crucial that we continuously improve our ability to predict and mitigate the ...

Human Usher syndrome (USH) is the most common form of hereditary deaf-blindness. Sufferers can be deaf from birth, suffer from balance disorders, and eventually lose their eyesight as the disease progresses. For some 25 years now, the research group led by Professor Uwe Wolfrum of the Institute of Molecular Physiology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has been conducting research into Usher syndrome. Working in cooperation with the group headed up by Professor Reinhard Lührmann at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, his team has now identified a novel pathomechanism leading to Usher syndrome. They have discovered that the Usher syndrome type 1G protein SANS plays a crucial role in regulating ...

Turning away from fossil fuels is necessary if we are to avert an environmental crisis due to global warming. Both industry and academia have been focusing heavily on hydrogen as a feasible clean alternative. Hydrogen is practically inexhaustible and when used to generate energy, only produces water vapor. However, to realize a truly eco-friendly hydrogen society, we need to be able to mass-produce hydrogen cleanly in the first place. One way to do that is by splitting water via "artificial photosynthesis," a process in which materials called "photocatalysts" leverage solar energy to produce oxygen and hydrogen from water. However, the available photocatalysts are not yet where they need to be to make solar-powered water splitting economically feasible and scalable. ...

Co-authors Bulat Galimzyanov and Anatolii Mokshin (Department of Computational Physics) have developed a unique model that allows for a universal interpretation of experimental data on viscosity for systems of different types, while also proposing an alternative method for classifying materials based on a unified temperature scale. The publication was funded by Russian Science Foundation's grant 'Theoretical, simulation and experimental studies of physical and mechanical features of amorphous systems with inhomogeneous local viscoelastic properties', guided by Professor Mokshin. Using the developed viscosity model, scientists processed experimental data obtained for thirty different ...

A research group led by Prof. PIAO Hailong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) identified hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) subtypes with distinctive metabolic phenotypes through bioinformatics and machine learning methods, and elucidated the potential mechanisms based on a metabolite-protein interaction network and multi-omics data. The study, published in Advanced Science on July 11, provides insights guiding precise personalized HCC medicine. Metabolic reprogramming, which can promote rapid cell proliferation by regulating energy and nutrient metabolism, is considered to be one hallmark of cancer. It can impact other biological processes through complex metabolite-protein ...

The ubiquitous overuse injuries that nag runners may stem from an unlikely culprit: how far you lean forward. Trunk flexion, the angle at which a runner bends forward from the hip, can range wildly--runners have self-reported angles of approximately -2 degrees to upward of 25. A new study from the END ...

DALLAS, July 12, 2021 -- People of South Asian ancestry have more than double the risk of developing heart disease compared to people of European ancestry, yet clinical risk assessment calculators used to guide decisions about preventing or treating heart disease may fail to account for the increased risk, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association's flagship journal Circulation. About a quarter of the world's population (1.8 billion people) are of South Asian descent, and prior research has shown South Asians experience higher rates of heart disease compared to people of most other ethnicities. To better understand the variables surrounding the heart disease risk for people of South Asian ancestry, researchers evaluated ...

A novel method of gene therapy is helping children born with a rare genetic disorder called AADC deficiency that causes severe physical and developmental disabilities. The study, led by researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and The Ohio State University College of Medicine, offers new hope to those living with incurable genetic and neurodegenerative diseases. Research findings are published online in the journal Nature Communications. This study describes the findings from the targeted delivery of gene therapy to midbrain to treat a rare ...

USC researchers have achieved a better way to identify elusive DNA variants responsible for genetic changes affecting cell functions and diseases. Using computational biology tools, scientists at the university's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences studied "variable-number tandem repeats" (VNTR) in DNA. VNTRs are stretches of DNA made of a short pattern of nucleotides repeated over and over, like a plaid pattern shirt. Though they comprise but 3% of the human genome, the repetitive DNA governs how some genes are encoded and levels of proteins are produced in a cell, and account for most of the structural variation. Current methods do not accurately detect the variations in genes in some repetitive ...