Climate change impacts, affecting primarily ecosystems' functions and consequently human sectors, have become a crucial topic. Observed and expected variations in climate conditions can in fact undermine the ecosystems' ecological equilibrium: average climate patterns, mainly represented by intra-annual (monthly to seasonal) temperature and precipitation cycle, directly influence the distribution, abundance and interactions of biological species. During the long history of scientific research on the relationships between climate and Earth's communities, ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Use of the diabetes drug metformin -- before a diagnosis of COVID-19 -- is associated with a threefold decrease in mortality in COVID-19 patients with Type 2 diabetes, according to a racially diverse study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Diabetes is a significant comorbidity for COVID-19. "This beneficial effect remained, even after correcting for age, sex, race, obesity, and hypertension or chronic kidney disease and heart failure," said Anath Shalev, M.D., director of UAB's Comprehensive Diabetes Center and leader of the study. "Since similar results have now been obtained in different populations from around the world -- including China, France and a UnitedHealthcare analysis -- this suggests that the ...

Ignoring a colleague's greeting or making a sarcastic comment in the workplace may actually do more harm than intended, according to West Virginia University research. Perceived low-grade forms of workplace mistreatment, such as avoiding eye contact or excluding a coworker from conversation, can amplify suicidal thoughts in employees with mood disorders, based on a study by Kayla Follmer, assistant professor of management, and Jake Follmer, assistant professor of educational psychology. "We know from prior research that minor forms of workplace mistreatment reduce employee engagement," Kayla Follmer said. "But our paper provided an explanation for ...

New York, NY (January 14, 2020) -- Girls who are emotionally neglected or severely sexually abused early in their lives report riskier sexual behaviors during adolescence, Mount Sinai researchers report. The findings highlight the need--and suggest the potential for tailored approaches--to promote healthy sexual development in vulnerable populations. The researchers identified four distinct patterns of neglect and sexual abuse in low-income, predominantly Black and/or Latina girls and young women that led to distinct trajectories of risky sexual behavior during adolescence. Their findings were published in Child Development in January. The study was the first of its kind to identify categories of maltreatment among adolescent girls of color in an urban setting that correspond with measurable ...

The COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 336,000 lives in the United States in 2020, has significantly affected life expectancy, USC and Princeton researchers have found. The researchers project that, due to the pandemic deaths last year, life expectancy at birth for Americans will shorten by 1.13 years to 77.48 years, according to their study published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That is the largest single-year decline in life expectancy in at least 40 years and is the lowest life expectancy estimated since ...

A team of biophysicists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Penn State College of Medicine set out to tackle the long-standing question about the nature of force generation by myosin, the molecular motor responsible for muscle contraction and many other cellular processes. The key question they addressed - one of the most controversial topics in the field - was: how does myosin convert chemical energy, in the form of ATP, into mechanical work? The answer revealed new details into how myosin, the engine of muscle and related motor proteins, transduces energy. In the end, their unprecedented research, meticulously ...

Humans, mammals and birds that live in a particular environment share a common set of behavioral traits, according to a new study, which identifies a local convergence of foraging, reproductive and social behaviors across species. The findings, based on studying more than 300 small-scale human hunter-gatherer populations, support one of the central tenets of human behavioral ecology - that ecological forces select for various behaviors in distinct environments, driving behavioral diversity worldwide. The origin and evolution of human behavior are uncertain and debated. While some suggest ...

The volatile plant hormone ethylene allows plant roots to sense and avoid compacted soils, researchers report. Rendering roots insensitive to ethylene allowed them to penetrate compacted soils more effectively, the same group showed. The findings reveal how plants regulate their growth in response to soil compaction - a growing challenge facing modern agriculture worldwide - and could serve as a pathway for how breeders might select or develop new crops resilient to soil compaction. Driven in part by a growing reliance on heavy machinery and poor soil management practices, soil compaction can lead to declining crop yields by restricting root growth and limiting the availability ...

A large class of mammalian genes is not completely shared throughout sperm development and differentiation, according to a new study of sperm in organisms including mice, macaques and men. The findings provide an explanation to why testis gene expression patterns often appear as an outlier relative to all other tissues. In mammals, spermatogenesis includes a long stage of haploid gene expression, which could lead to variation between individual sperm cells, resulting in sperm-level natural selection and trait inheritance. However, during differentiation, maturing haploid spermatids ...

Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found. The study, published today in Science, shows environmental factors exert a key influence on how foraging human populations and non-human species behave, despite their very different backgrounds. The team of international researchers analysed data from more than 300 locations around the world, observing the behaviours of foraging human populations ...

Scientists have discovered a signal that causes roots to stop growing in hard soils which can be 'switched off' to allow them to punch through compacted soil - a discovery that could help plants to grow in even the most damaged soils. An international research team, led by scientists from the University of Nottingham's Future Food Beacon and Shanghai Jiao Tong University has discovered how the plant signal 'ethylene' causes roots to stop growing in hard soils, but after this signal is disabled, roots are able to push through compacted soil. The research has been published in Science. Hard (compacted) soils represent a major challenge facing modern agriculture that can reduce crop yields over 50% by reducing root growth, causing significant losses annually. Europe has over 33-million-hectares ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- One reason it's so difficult to produce effective vaccines against some viruses, including influenza and HIV, is that these viruses mutate very rapidly. This allows them to evade the antibodies generated by a particular vaccine, through a process known as "viral escape." MIT researchers have now devised a new way to computationally model viral escape, based on models that were originally developed to analyze language. The model can predict which sections of viral surface proteins are more likely to mutate in a way that enables viral escape, and it can also identify sections that are less likely to mutate, making them good targets ...

As the story goes, the Greek mathematician and tinkerer Archimedes came across an invention while traveling through ancient Egypt that would later bear his name. It was a machine consisting of a screw housed inside a hollow tube that trapped and drew water upon rotation. Now, researchers led by Stanford University physicist Benjamin Lev have developed a quantum version of Archimedes' screw that, instead of water, hauls fragile collections of gas atoms to higher and higher energy states without collapsing. Their discovery is detailed in a paper published Jan. 14 in Science. "My expectation for ...

If you asked people which group of animals is the most abundant on earth, hardly anyone would know the right answer. Ants? Fish? No, and not humans either. The answer is nematodes, also known as roundworms. Four out of five animals on earth belong to this group, and the reason hardly anyone is aware of the fact is that they live underground, invisible to us. Together with thousands of other soil organisms, they quietly, discreetly and constantly perform enormously important services for the world above them. The soil is one of the most species-rich habitats in existence. Living under one square meter ...

The human body is like a construction site where hundreds of thousands of different molecular nanomachines, called proteins, are simultaneously at work. Each one of these biomolecules, which are chains of amino acids essential to living organisms, perform a different biological function, often in synergy with other proteins. During their formation (the folding process) or in the performance of their biological functions, proteins change their shape in a very specific way. In many cases it is possible to conduct experiments that provide images of proteins at near atomic resolution, but only when they are in the stable and biologically ...

New research from CU Cancer Center member Jing Hong Wang, MD, PhD, and recent University of Colorado Immunology program graduate Rachel Woolaver, PhD, may help researchers develop more effective personalized immunotherapy for cancer patients. Working within Wang's specialty of cancer immunology and head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCCs), the researchers worked to establish a mouse model that would help them understand why some hosts' immune systems reject tumors easily, while others have a harder time doing so. Their research was published last week in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer. "It's particularly interesting now because the field of cancer treatment has really been going in the direction of immunotherapy, ...

Researchers at the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program (VPRP) assessed the prevalence of exposure to violence, such as robbery or assault, and its impacts on the mental health and social functioning of California adults. Their study, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, shows the far-reaching psychological effects an incident of gun violence can have on victims and those close to them. The study's findings are based on data from 2,558 adults who responded to the 2018 California Safety and Wellbeing Survey (CSaWS). CSaWS is an ongoing survey research project on firearm ownership and the consequences of exposure to violence in California. Responses were weighted to be statistically representative of the state's adult population. These ...

Primer on Carbon Dioxide Removal Provides Vital Resource at Critical Time --By Julie Chao Scientists say that any serious plan to address climate change should include carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and policies, which makes the newly launched CDR Primer an especially vital resource, says Berkeley Lab scientist Margaret Torn, one of about three dozen scientists who contributed to this document. "Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are already 50% over historic natural levels - 270 ppm (parts per million) in pre-industrial times vs 414 ppm today," said Torn. "To slow climate change and avoid its worst impacts, climate scientists tell ...

MADISON, Wis. -- As a new, apparently more transmissible version of the virus that causes COVID-19 has appeared in several countries, new research finds that the transmissibility of viral strains and the population density of a region will play big roles in how vaccination campaigns can help towns and cities return to more normal activities. The findings suggest that directing vaccines toward densely populated counties would help to interrupt transmission of the disease. Current vaccination distribution plans don't take density into account. Tony Ives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Claudio Bozzuto of the independent data research company Wildlife ...

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the University of Milan and Google Research have used machine learning techniques to predict how proteins, particularly those implicated in neurological diseases, completely change their shapes in a matter of microseconds. They found that when amyloid beta, a key protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease, adopts a highly disordered shape, it actually becomes less likely to stick together and form the toxic clusters which lead to the death of brain cells. The results, reported in the journal Nature Computational Science, could aid in the future development of treatments ...

Decades after the industrialized world largely eliminated lead poisoning in children, the potent neurotoxin still lurks in one in three children globally. A new study in Bangladesh by researchers at Stanford University and other institutions finds that a relatively affordable remediation process can almost entirely remove lead left behind by unregulated battery recycling - an industry responsible for much of the lead soil contamination in poor and middle-income countries - and raises troubling questions about how to effectively eliminate the poison from children's bodies. "Once the lead is in the environment, it stays there pretty much indefinitely ...

A new University of Saskatchewan (USask) study has found that stretching is superior to brisk walking for reducing blood pressure in people with high blood pressure or who are at risk of developing elevated blood pressure levels. Walking has long been the prescription of choice for physicians trying to help their patients bring down their blood pressure. High blood pressure (hypertension) is a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease and among the top preventable risk factors affecting overall mortality. This new finding, published December 18, 2020 in the Journal of Physical Activity ...

On a beach on a remote island in eastern Papua New Guinea, a country located in the southwestern Pacific to the north of Australia, garnet sand reveals an important geologic discovery. Similar to messages in bottles that have traveled across the oceans, sediments derived from the erosion of rocks carry information from another time and place. In this case the grains of garnet sand reveal a story of traveling from the surface to deep into the Earth (~75 miles), and then returning to the surface before ending up on a beach as sand grains. Over the course of this geologic journey, the rock type changed as some minerals were changed, and other materials were included (trapped) within the newly formed garnets. The story is preserved ...

An antibacterial peptide that turns on and off The researchers solved the 3D molecular structure of an antibacterial peptide named uperin 3.5, which is secreted on the skin of the Australian toadlet (Uperoleia mjobergii) as part of its immune system. They found that the peptide self-assembles into a unique fibrous structure, which via a sophisticated structural adaptation mechanism can change its form in the presence of bacteria to protect the toadlet from infections. This provides unique atomic-level evidence explaining a regulation mechanism of an antimicrobial ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- It's not just to hide clutter anymore - add "saving the planet" to the reasons you leave the camera off during your next virtual meeting. A new study says that despite a record drop in global carbon emissions in 2020, a pandemic-driven shift to remote work and more at-home entertainment still presents significant environmental impact due to how internet data is stored and transferred around the world. Just one hour of videoconferencing or streaming, for example, emits 150-1,000 grams of carbon dioxide (a gallon of gasoline burned from a car emits about 8,887 grams), requires 2-12 liters of water and demands a land area adding up to about the size of an iPad Mini. But leaving your camera off during a web call can ...