These findings were published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences on 8 June 2021. Huge splicing diversity in the brain The human genome was sequenced around 20 years ago. Since then, the sequence information encoding our proteins is known - at least in principle. However, this information is not continuously stored in the individual genes, but is divided into smaller coding sections. These coding sections, also known as exons, are assembled in a process called splicing. Depending on the gene, different exon combinations are possible, which is why they are referred to as different or ...

With increasing vaccination rates and decreasing numbers of infections, the population's feeling of safety is also rising. As the results of the 37th edition of the BfR-Corona-Monitor, a regular survey conducted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), show, the majority of the population in Germany thinks it can control its risk of an infection well. "62 percent are confident that they can protect themselves from an infection with the coronavirus," says BfR-President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel. "We see that the feeling of safety has increased considerably. ...

Chinese researchers have recently discovered links between reduction in microbial stability and soil carbon loss in the active layer of degraded alpine permafrost on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP). The researchers, headed by Prof. CHEN Shengyun from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and XUE Kai from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, conducted a combined in-depth analysis of soil microbial communities and their co-occurrence networks in the active permafrost layer along an extensive gradient of permafrost degradation. The QTP encompasses the largest extent of high-altitude mountain ...

Greater Helsinki -- Transitioning to low-carbon energy production is the biggest climate challenge to overcome. Many countries are already looking to adopt clean heating solutions more widely, with the International Energy Agency projecting that by 2045 nearly half of global heating will be done with heat pumps. To ensure speedy uptake, governments are likely to offer subsidies to ensure these energy-efficient options actually make their way into homes and offices. A new study from Aalto University assesses the impact of heat pumps on energy consumption as well as how ...

Research published in the journal ACS Materials and Interfaces has provided new understanding of how false-negative results in Lateral Flow Tests occur and provides opportunity for simple improvements to be made. Lateral Flow Devices were introduced late in 2020 on a global scale to help detect novel coronavirus infection in individuals, with test results produced rapidly in half an hour or less. However, their potential has been somewhat hindered by inadequate sensitivity, with a high number of false-negative results. Using X-ray fluorescence imaging from Diamond Light Source, researchers from King's College London ...

Researchers from the University of Kent's School of Psychology have found that when people are presented with the idea of a Covid-19 "immunity passport", they show less willingness to follow social distancing and face covering guidelines. However, this willingness seems to return when people read more cautious information about Covid-19 immunity. PhD students Ricky Green and Mikey Biddlestone and Professor Karen Douglas asked participants from the UK and USA to imagine they had either recovered from Covid-19 or were currently infected. Participants asked to imagine ...

Several different causes of ageing have been discovered, but the question remains whether there are common underlying mechanisms that determine ageing and lifespan. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Ageing research at the University Cologne have now come across folate metabolism in their search for such basic mechanisms. Its regulation underlies many known ageing signalling pathways and leads to longevity. This may provide a new possibility to broadly improve human health during ageing. In recent decades, ...

In an international study published by the journal Environment International, the University of Surrey led an international team of air pollution experts in monitoring pollution hotspots in 10 global cities: Dhaka (Bangladesh); São Paulo (Brazil); Guangzhou (China); Medellín (Colombia); Cairo (Egypt); Addis Ababa (Ethiopia); Chennai (India); Sulaymaniyah (Iraq); Blantyre (Malawi); and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania). Surrey's Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) set out to investigate whether the amount of fine air pollution particles (PM2.5) drivers inhaled is connected to the duration drivers spend in pollution hotspots and socio-economic indicators such ...

2 June 2021, Singapore - The human fetal immune system begins to develop early during gestation, however, factors responsible for fetal immune-priming remain elusive. Using multiple complementary approaches, Dr Florent Ginhoux from A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), Professor Jerry Chan from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Professor Salvatore Albani from the SingHealth Duke-NUS Translational Immunology Institute, with collaborators from Cambridge University explored potential exposure to microbial agents in-utero. The team identified live microbes across fetal organs that stimulate activation of fetal T-cells during the second trimester of gestation. Study published in scientific journal, Cell, on 24 June 2021. The team profiled microbes ...

Do you like the thick brush strokes and soft color palettes of an impressionist painting such as those by Claude Monet? Or do you prefer the bold colors and abstract shapes of a Rothko? Individual art tastes have a certain mystique to them, but now a new Caltech study shows that a simple computer program can accurately predict which paintings a person will like. The new study, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, utilized Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to enlist more than 1,500 volunteers to rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and color field. The volunteers' answers were fed into a computer program and then, after this training period, the computer ...

Chatbots hold promise for dementia patient or caregiver support, but are still in their infancy, finds a paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. None of the interactive digital apps tested by medical researchers and a computer scientist performed well on all testing criteria, and all the apps contained linguistic biases and usability challenges. The authors conclude that until developers produce evidence-based chatbots that have undergone end user evaluation it will be hard to evaluate their potential to adequately educate and support dementia patients and their caregivers. "Dementia care is complex and no two cases of dementia are alike. Chatbots have the potential of providing ...

Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but very high in the atmosphere's "ozone layer," it absorbs damaging ultraviolet radiation. Past studies have examined ozone levels in the Southern Hemisphere, but little is known about levels of the molecule in Antarctica over long periods. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have analyzed more than 25 years of Antarctic data, finding that concentrations near the ground arose from both natural and human-related sources. Ozone gas has a sharp or acrid scent that sometimes accompanies smog or summer storms. It forms when sunlight ...

Microplastic pollution of waterways has become a huge concern, with the tiny pieces of plastic entering food webs and potentially having harmful effects on animals and people. In addition, microplastics can act as breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now, researchers reporting in Environmental Science & Technology have analyzed antibiotic-resistance genes (ARGs) on five types of microplastics at different locations along the Beilun River in China, finding much higher abundances in urban than rural regions. In rivers, major sources of microplastics include textile fibers from laundering, water bottle fragments, and films from bags and wrappers. Also prevalent in ...

An international team of scientists, led by astrophysicists from the University of Bath in the UK, has measured the magnetic field in a far-off Gamma-Ray Burst, confirming for the first time a decades-long theoretical prediction - that the magnetic field in these blast waves becomes scrambled after the ejected material crashes into, and shocks, the surrounding medium. Black holes are formed when massive stars (at least 40 times larger than our Sun) die in a catastrophic explosion that powers a blast wave. These extremely energetic events drive out material at velocities ...

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered a titanic galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole 13.1 billion years ago. This is the earliest-yet-observed example of such a wind to date and is a telltale sign that huge black holes have a profound effect on the growth of galaxies from the very early history of the Universe. At the center of many large galaxies hides a supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Interestingly, the mass of the black hole is roughly proportional to the mass ...

The old cousins of the common woodlice were crawling on Irish land as long as 360 million years ago, according to new analysis of a fossil found in Kilkenny. The research, published today (00.01 Wednesday 16 June) in the science journal Biology Letters, used state-of-the-art modern imaging technology to create a new picture of the Oxyuropoda - a land-based creature larger than the modern woodlice - using a fossil found in Kiltorcan, Co Kilkenny in 1908. Lead researcher Dr Ninon Robin, a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork's (UCC) School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences said that their work advances science's understanding of when land-dwelling species of crustaceans roamed the earth, and what they looked like. Dr Robin said: "Woodlice, ...

Québec produces more strawberries than any other Canadian province. Strawberries are delicate and difficult to keep fresh. In response to this challenge, Monique Lacroix, a professor at at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), and her team have developed a packaging film that can keep strawberries fresh for up to 12 days. The team's findings on how this film protects against mould and certain pathogenic bacteria have been published in Food Hydrocolloids. The innovative film is made of chitosan, a natural molecule found in shellfish shells. This food industry by-product contains key antifungal properties ...

Thirty state-of-the-art IPCC-climate models predict dramatically different climates for the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe. An analysis of the range of responses now reveals that the differences are mostly down to the individual model's simulations of changes to the North Atlantic ocean currents and not only - as normally assumed - atmospheric changes. The work, by Katinka Bellomo, National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and colleagues is published today in Nature Communications and is part of the European ...

A study led by Fernando Colchero, University of Southern Denmark and Susan Alberts, Duke University, North Carolina, that included researchers from 42 institutions across 14 countries, provides new insights into the aging theory "the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis", which states that every species has a relatively fixed rate of aging. - Human death is inevitable. No matter how many vitamins we take, how healthy our environment is or how much we exercise, we will eventually age and die, said Fernando Colchero. He is an expert in applying statistics and mathematics to population biology and an associate professor at Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern Denmark. "We were able to shed light on the invariant rate of ageing hypothesis by combining ...

Teachers play a key role in supporting children's development in early childhood education classrooms such as Head Start. Research shows significant associations between teachers' depressive symptoms and their students' social and emotional development. However, little research has focused on the associations between teachers' depressive symptoms and academic outcomes of preschoolers from low-income families. Specifically, one important pathway that has not been examined is whether teacher depressive symptoms have implications for the quality of family-teacher relationships. This in turn could affect how supportive parents ...

An herbicide widely used in agriculture, forestry and other applications can cause deleterious effects on the reproductive health of a common perennial plant found in forests in British Columbia, Canada. Researchers reported in the journal END ...

Despite rapid development of electric vehicles (EVs), the safety of the lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries remains a concern as they are as a fire and explosion risk. Among the various approaches to tackle this issue, Korean researchers have used semiconductor technology to improve the safety of Li-ion batteries. A research team from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) led by Dr. Joong Kee Lee of the Center for Energy Storage Research has succeeded in inhibiting the growth of dendrites, crystals with multiple branches that cause EV battery fires by forming protective semiconducting passivation layers on the surface of Li electrodes. When ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (6/16/2021) - In unconventional superconductors, electrons often exhibit a tendency towards spatial ordering within their atomic structure. In high-temperature superconductors, this comes in the form of the electronic structure exhibiting a pronounced difference in the lattice-bound directions along which atoms are ordered. Within these materials, this electronic activity in turn breaks the rotational symmetry of the crystal, a phase known as electronic nematicity. Researchers have sought to better understand this novel electronic state, which co-exists with superconductivity. Boston College Associate Professor of Physics Ilija Zeljkovic and an international team of researchers set out to better understand the atomic-scale signature ...

The omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are found in oily fish. Researchers from the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre assessed the effects of high doses of EPA and DHA in lab-grown neurones and then in patients to help clarify how they reduce inflammation and depression. This novel approach allowed the scientists to identify an important molecular mechanism which can help inform the development of potential new treatments involving omega-3 fatty acids for patients with depression. Lead author Dr Alessandra Borsini, NIHR Maudsley BRC Senior Postdoctoral ...

Killer whales have complex social structures including close "friendships", according to a new study that used drones to film the animals. The findings show that killer whales spend more time interacting with certain individuals in their pod, and tend to favour those of the same sex and similar age. The study, led by the University of Exeter and the Center for Whale Research (CWR), also found that the whales become less socially connected as they get older. "Until now, research on killer whale social networks has relied on seeing the whales when they surface, and recording which whales are together," said lead author Dr Michael Weiss, of the University of Exeter. "However, because resident killer whales stay in the social groups into which they're born, how closely related whales ...