PULLMAN, Wash. — Unlike kids in the United States, hunter-gatherer children in the Congo Basin have often learned how to hunt, identify edible plants and care for babies by the tender age of six or seven. This rapid learning is facilitated by a unique social environment where cultural knowledge is passed down not just from parents but from the broader community, according to a new Washington State University-led study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research helps explain how many cultural traits have been preserved for thousands of years among ...

US Latinos who rely on social media in Spanish for their news are more vulnerable to political misinformation than those who use English-language social media, according to a study. Misinformation swirls on social media in every language, but social media companies struggle to combat disinformation circulating in Spanish on major social media platforms. In a study done in partnership with Jonathan Nagler of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics as part of the group’s Bilingual Election Monitor project, Marisa Abrajano and colleagues surveyed over 1,000 English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant Latino users of ...

A new study led by RMIT University in Australia measuring access to nature for eight major global cities found most still have inadequate canopy cover, despite access to an abundance of trees. Less than 30% of buildings in New York City, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Denver, central Sydney and central Melbourne were in neighbourhoods with adequate canopy cover. New York and Amsterdam both scored almost 0% for canopy cover despite 92% and 50% of buildings having views of at least three trees, respectively. The research, a collaboration with the Technical University of Munich, studied over 2.5 million buildings across ...

Genes aren’t the sole driver instructing cells to build multicellular structures, tissues, and organs. In a new paper published in Nature Communications, USC Stem Cell scientist Leonardo Morsut and Caltech computational biologist Matt Thomson characterize the influence of another important developmental driver: cell density, or how loosely or tightly cells are packed into a given space. In both computational models and laboratory experiments, the team of scientists used cell density as an effective tool for controlling how mouse cells pattern themselves into complex structures.  “This paper represents progress towards our big picture goal of engineering synthetic ...

Bethesda, MD (Nov. 15, 2024) — The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) has released a new clinical guideline on the pharmacological management of moderate-to-severe ulcerative colitis, published today in Gastroenterology. This guideline groups the 12 currently available advanced treatments based on efficacy, to simplify the decision-making process for gastroenterologists and the approximately 1.25 million patients in the U.S. living with ulcerative colitis.  “Since the first biologic ...

Cell-to-cell communication through nanosized particles, working as messengers and carriers, can now be analyzed in a whole new way, thanks to a new method involving CRISPR gene-editing technology. The particles, known as small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), play an important role in the spread of disease and as potential drug carriers. The newly developed system, named CIBER, enables thousands of genes to be studied at once, by labeling sEVs with a kind of RNA “barcode.” With this, researchers hope to find what factors are involved in sEV release from ...

A new study shows land in California’s San Joaquin Valley has been sinking at record-breaking rates over the last two decades as groundwater extraction has outpaced natural recharge.  The researchers found that the average rate of sinking for the entire valley reached nearly an inch per year between 2006 and 2022. Researchers and water managers have known that sinking, technically termed “subsidence,” was occurring over the past 20 years. But the true impact was not fully appreciated because the total subsidence had not been quantified. This was in part due to a gap in data. Satellite radar systems, which provide the most precise measure of elevation changes, ...

LA JOLLA (November 19, 2024)—Deep breath in, slow breath out… Isn’t it odd that we can self-soothe by slowing down our breathing? Humans have long used slow breathing to regulate their emotions, and practices like yoga and mindfulness have even popularized formal techniques like box breathing. Still, there has been little scientific understanding of how the brain consciously controls our breathing and whether this actually has a direct effect on our anxiety and emotional state. Neuroscientists ...

PULLMAN, Wash. – A speed record has been broken using nanoscience, which could lead to a host of new advances, including improved battery charging, biosensing, soft robotics and neuromorphic computing. Scientists at Washington State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered a way to make ions move more than ten times faster in mixed organic ion-electronic conductors. These conductors combine the advantages of the ion signaling used by many biological systems, including the human body, with the electron signaling used by computers. The new development, detailed in the journal ...

Tallinn, Estonia – 19th November 2024, 10 AM CET – Haut.AI, a pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) company for skincare and beauty applications, has published an exciting scientific review—one that explores state-of-the-art developments in skin fluorescence photography and its applications, focusing on combining it with AI algorithms for non-invasive skin diagnostics. The study highlights the power of AI to enhance skin fluorescence photography, allowing early, non-invasive detection of skin conditions. This approach allows skincare experts to diagnose underlying issues ...

A study published today in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters reveals that centimetre-sized plastic fragments are increasing much faster than larger floating plastics in the North Pacific Garbage Patch [NPGP], threatening the local ecosystem and potentially the global carbon cycle.   The research, which draws from not-for-profit The Ocean Cleanup’s systematic surveys of the NPGP between 2015 and 2022, found an unexpected rise in mass concentration of plastic fragments that are ...

A new theory, that explains how light and matter interact at the quantum level has enabled researchers to define for the first time the precise shape of a single photon.  Research at the University of Birmingham, published in Physical Review Letters, explores the nature of photons (individual particles of light) in unprecedented detail to show how they are emitted by atoms or molecules and shaped by their environment.  The nature of this interaction leads to infinite possibilities for light to exist and propagate, or travel, through its surrounding environment. This limitless ...

A new paper in Biology Methods and Protocols, published by Oxford University Press, shows that scientists can train artificial intelligence models to distinguish brain tumors from healthy tissue. AI models can already find brain tumors in MRI images almost as well as a human radiologist. Researchers have made sustained progress in artificial intelligence (AI) for use in medicine. AI is particularly promising in radiology, where waiting for technicians to process medical images can delay patient treatment. Convolutional neural networks are powerful tools that allow researchers to train AI models on large image datasets to recognize ...

TAMEST is pleased to announce Lyda Hill and Lyda Hill Philanthropies as the recipients of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Distinguished Service Award.  TAMEST is recognizing Lyda Hill and her team for empowering and enabling groundbreaking research in science and nature that profoundly impacts society. Lyda Hill, a successful businesswoman and world-renowned philanthropist, believes science can solve many of the world’s most challenging issues and has chosen to donate all of her estate to philanthropy and scientific research.  Aligned with this mission, Lyda Hill is committed to advancing science and public ...

Red river hogs (RRHs) (Potamochoerus porcus), a wild species of Suidae living in Africa, have grabbed much attention as an animal that harbors African swine fever virus (ASFV) as natural hosts. When ASFV infects domestic pigs and wild boars, it proliferates within macrophages, a type of immune cells, and infected pigs rapidly die suffering from symptoms such as fever and hemorrhage. On the other hand, ASFV infection in RRHs is asymptomatic and does not cause death, suggesting that RRH macrophages may have a protective mechanism against ASFV infection.   In vitro cell cultures of porcine macrophages are generally ...

The more lottery tickets you buy, the higher your chances of winning, but spending more than you win is obviously not a wise strategy. Something similar happens in AI powered by deep learning: we know that the larger a neural network is (i.e., the more parameters it has), the better it can learn the task we set for it. However, the strategy of making it infinitely large during training is not only impossible but also extremely inefficient. Scientists have tried to imitate the way biological brains learn, which is highly resource-efficient, by providing machines with a gradual training process that starts with ...

Planned suburban residential neighborhoods in metropolitan areas known as new towns were initially developed in England. The new town movement spread from Europe to East Asia, such as to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In Japan alone, 2,903 New Towns were built, but many experienced rapid population decline and aging in the 40 years after their development. Therefore, they changed into old new towns and had to transform their facilities. Dr. Haruka Kato, a junior associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan ...

A new study from researchers at Kumamoto University sheds light on a potential link between exposure to certain everyday chemicals during pregnancy and the development of asthma in children. The study analyzed data from over 3,500 mother-child pairs as part of the Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS), a large-scale nationwide research project. Key Findings: High levels of butylparaben, a chemical commonly used in personal care products like lotions and shampoos, during early pregnancy were associated with a 1.54-fold increase in the odds of asthma development in children ...

Transparency and effective communication are critical for brands to gain and keep consumer trust according to new research. The University of Adelaide’s Dr Kate Sansome, from the Adelaide Business School has led a study which suggests that consumers want brands to be transparent about topics that impact them. “As sociopolitical issues become topical in the news and social media, brands are expected to be transparent about them; for example, as consumers face cost-of-living pressures, they will expect brands to be transparent about this issue,” says Dr Sansome, who conducted the study with the Professor Jodie Conduit and Dr ...

□ A research team led by Professor Jaedong Lee from the Department of Chemical Physics of DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee) has introduced a novel quantum state and a pioneering mechanism for extracting and controlling quantum information using exciton and Floquet states.   □ Collaborating with Professor Noejung Park from UNIST’s Department of Physics (President Chongrae Park), the team has, for the first time, demonstrated the formation and synthesis process of exciton and Floquet states, which arise from light-matter interactions in two-dimensional semiconductors. This study captures quantum information in real-time as it unfolds through entanglement, offering ...

Images  Climate change is a persistent and growing challenge to plant life on our planet. Changes to the environment that plants are unaccustomed to affect how they grow, putting much at risk. Increasingly, plant scientists are trying to determine how these environmental changes will impact plant life and whether plants will be able to acclimate to a new status quo.     Researchers from the Walker lab at the Michigan State University-U.S. Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, or PRL, are looking at how paper birch trees adapt to changing environments based on how they manage a vital plant process called photorespiration.     “If ...

Over 14 million tonnes of microplastics are estimated to be lying on the ocean floor with the fashion industry among the worst pollutants.    But a new project led by textile experts at Heriot-Watt University in the Scottish Borders, is aiming to make fashion labels and consumers alike, more environmentally aware when manufacturing and buying new clothes.    For four years, a small team headed by Dr Lisa Macintyre, associate professor of textiles at the University’s School of Textiles and Design in the Galashiels campus, has overseen painstaking ...

Working paper | Quantitative data analysis | People Truancy rates have risen faster in developed English-speaking countries since the Covid-19 pandemic than in non-English-speaking countries, according to a new working paper by UCL researchers. Teenage girls are also increasingly more likely to skip school than boys across Anglophone countries. In 2022, 26% of all Year 11 pupils in England reported playing truant at least once in the last fortnight. This represented an increase from 2012 and 2018, the previous data capture points, when the figure was at 18% each time. In the same year (2022), 29% of Year 11 girls in England reported skipping school in the past ...

LA JOLLA (November 14, 2024)—Excess cholesterol is known to form artery-clogging plaques that can lead to stroke, arterial disease, heart attack, and more, making it the focus of many heart health campaigns. Fortunately, this attention to cholesterol has prompted the development of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins and lifestyle interventions like dietary and exercise regimens. But what if there’s more to the picture than just cholesterol? New research from Salk Institute scientists describes how another class of lipids, called sphingolipids, contributes to arterial plaques and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — University at Buffalo neuroscientists have identified the binding site of low-dose ketamine, providing critical insight into how the medication, often described as a wonder drug, alleviates symptoms of major depression in as little as a few hours with effects lasting for several days.   Published in September in Molecular Psychiatry, the UB discovery will also help scientists identify how depression originates in the brain, and will stimulate research into using ketamine and ketamine-like drugs for other ...