Lichen communities may take decades -- and in some cases up to a century -- to fully return to chaparral ecosystems after wildfire, finds a study from the University of California, Davis, and Stanford University. The study, published today in the journal Diversity and Distributions, is the most comprehensive to date of long-term lichen recolonization after fire. Unlike conifer forests, chaparral systems in California are historically adapted to high-intensity fires -- they burn hot, fast and tend to regenerate quickly. However, with more frequent fires predicted under a drier, warming climate ...

In order for metal nanomaterials to deliver on their promise to energy and electronics, they need to shape up -- literally. To deliver reliable mechanical and electric properties, nanomaterials must have consistent, predictable shapes and surfaces, as well as scalable production techniques. UC Riverside engineers are solving this problem by vaporizing metals within a magnetic field to direct the reassembly of metal atoms into predictable shapes. The research is published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Nanomaterials, which are made of particles measuring 1-100 nanometers, are typically ...

Almost half (47.5%) of women with babies aged six months or younger met the threshold for postnatal depression during the first COVID-19 lockdown, more than double average rates for Europe before the pandemic (23%), finds a new study led by UCL researchers. Women described feelings of isolation, exhaustion, worry, inadequacy, guilt, and increased stress. Many grieved for what they felt were lost opportunities for them and their baby, and worried about the developmental impact of social isolation on their new little one. Those whose partners were unable or unavailable to help with parenting and domestic ...

Air quality in Spain temporarily improved during the first wave of COVID-19, largely as a result of mobility restrictions. Until recently, however, the effect of this improvement on the health of the population was poorly understood. A new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, together with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), has estimated that this improvement in air quality prevented around 150 premature deaths in Spain's provincial capital cities. Several analyses have estimated the mortality reduction from improved ...

The tightly defined ratios of metals in MOFs makes them ideal starting materials for novel catalyst creation. Heating bimetallic metal organic frameworks (MOFs) until their porous structure collapses into nanoparticles can be a highly effective way to make catalysts. This novel approach to catalyst design has now been used by KAUST and Spanish researchers to make a robust catalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into carbon monoxide (CO) gas with unprecedented selectivity. The benefit of this method pioneered at KAUST is that it can generate mixed metal catalytic nanoparticles that have proven challenging or impossible to make by conventional means. Capturing ...

Published today in Nature Communications, the team from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), Alfred Health and Monash University sought to understand which patients would recover quickly from influenza and which would become severely ill. The four-year project took samples from patients hospitalised with influenza at up to five time points during their hospital stay, and 30 days after discharge. They analysed the breadth of the immune response, enabling them to describe the specific roles of several different types of immune cells, including killer and helper T cells, B cells and innate cells. University of Melbourne Dr Oanh Nguyen, Research Fellow at the Doherty Institute, said two significant findings of the research include understanding ...

A group of researchers from Osaka University developed a quadruped robot platform that can reproduce the neuromuscular dynamics of animals (Figure 1), discovering that a steady gait and experimental behaviors of walking cats emerged from the reflex circuit in walking experiments on this robot. Their research results were published in Frontiers in Neurorobotics. It was thought that a steady gait in animals is generated by complex nerve systems in the brain and spinal marrow; however, recent research shows that a steady gait is produced by the reflex circuit alone. Scientists discovered a candidate of reflex circuit to generate the steady walking motion ...

Dr. HAN Fangpu's group from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences reports the identification and functional study of the maize Knl1 gene in an article published online in PNAS. The gene is a major component of the KMN network that links centromeric DNA and the plus-ends of spindle microtubules. It also plays an important role in kinetochore protein recruitment. The kinetochore complex that assembles on the centromeres mediates the proper partitioning of chromosomes to daughter cells during the cell cycle. However, kinetochore proteins undergo frequent mutations and coevolve with their interaction partners, leading to great diversity in kinetochore composition in eukaryotes. Functional ...

A team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has recently introduced a new class of magnetic materials for spin caloritronics. Published in the February 2021 issue of Nature Communications, the demonstrated STE applications of a new class of magnets will pave the way for versatile recycling of ubiquitous waste heat. This breakthrough has been led by Professor Jung-Woo Yoo and his research team in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST. Spin thermoelectrics is an emerging thermoelectric technology that offers energy harvesting from waste heat. ...

Like many around the world, the lab of Professor Mriganka Sur in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT has embraced the young technology of cerebral organoids, or "minibrains," for studying human brain development in health and disease. By making a surprising finding about a common practice in the process of growing the complex tissue cultures, the lab has produced both new guidance that can make the technology better, and also new insight into the important roles a prevalent enzyme takes in natural brain development. To make organoids, scientists take skin cells from a donor, induce them to become stem cells and then culture those in a bioreactor, guiding their development with the addition of growth ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - People are more persuaded by the actual messages contained in social media posts than they are by how many others viewed the posts, a new study suggests. Researchers found that when people watched YouTube videos either for or against e-cigarette use, their level of persuasion wasn't directly affected by whether the video said it was viewed by more than a million people versus by fewer than 20. What mattered for persuasion was viewers' perception of the message as truthful and believable. "There wasn't a bandwagon effect in which people were persuaded by a video just because ...

An international team of researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a gene therapy that successfully treated 48 out of 50 children with a form of severe combined immunodeficiency that leaves them without an immune system. Severe combined immunodeficiency due to adenosine deaminase deficiency, also known as ADA-SCID, is a rare, life-threatening disease that prevents children from living a normal life. It is caused by mutations in the gene that creates the enzyme adenosine deaminase, which is essential to a functioning immune system. Children with ADA-SCID have no immune system and, if left untreated, the condition can be fatal within the first two years of life. Day-to-day activities ...

An experimental form of gene therapy developed by a team of researchers from UCLA and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London has successfully treated 48 of 50 children born with a rare and deadly inherited disorder that leaves them without an immune system. Severe combined immunodeficiency due to adenosine deaminase deficiency, or ADA-SCID, is caused by mutations in the ADA gene that creates the enzyme adenosine deaminase, which is essential to a functioning immune system. For children with the condition, even day-to-day activities like going to school or playing with friends can lead to dangerous, life-threatening infections. If untreated, ADA-SCID can be fatal within the first two years of life. The investigational gene therapy method involves first collecting ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- In early 2020, a few months after the Covid-19 pandemic began, scientists were able to sequence the full genome of the virus that causes the infection, SARS-CoV-2. While many of its genes were already known at that point, the full complement of protein-coding genes was unresolved. Now, after performing an extensive comparative genomics study, MIT researchers have generated what they describe as the most accurate and complete gene annotation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. In their study, which appears today in Nature Communications, they confirmed ...

A receptor that helps conserve energy when food is scarce may be the key to a safer approach to treating diet-induced obesity, research led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has revealed. In a study using experimental models and fat tissue biopsies from obese individuals, the team revealed that blocking a specific receptor of the molecule neuropeptide Y (NPY), which helps our body regulate its heat production, could increase fat metabolism and prevent weight gain. "The Y1 receptor acts as a 'brake' for heat generation in the body. In our study, we found that blocking this receptor in fat tissues transformed the 'energy-storing' fat into 'energy-burning' fat, which ...

The first comprehensive comparison of 'degrowth' scenarios with established pathways to limit climate change highlights the risk of over-reliance on carbon dioxide removal, renewable energy and energy efficiency to support continued global growth - which is assumed in established global climate modelling. Degrowth focuses on the global North and is defined as an equitable, democratic reduction in energy and material use while maintaining wellbeing. A decline in GDP is accepted as a likely outcome of this transition. The new modelling by the University of Sydney and ETH Zürich includes high growth/technological change and scenarios summarised ...

Diamonds are sometimes described as messengers from the deep earth; scientists study them closely for insights into the otherwise inaccessible depths from which they come. But the messages are often hard to read. Now, a team has come up with a way to solve two longstanding puzzles: the ages of individual fluid-bearing diamonds, and the chemistry of their parent material. The research has allowed them to sketch out geologic events going back more than a billion years--a potential breakthrough not only in the study of diamonds, but of planetary evolution. Gem-quality diamonds are nearly pure lattices of carbon. This elemental purity ...

Saw-toothed grain beetles live in a symbiotic association with bacteria. Their bacterial partners provide important building blocks for the formation of the insect's exoskeleton, which protects the beetles from their enemies as well as from desiccation. In a new study, a team of scientists from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan demonstrates that glyphosate inhibits the symbiotic bacteria of the grain beetle. Beetles exposed to the weedkiller no longer receive the building blocks they need from the bacteria. The study shows that glyphosate has the potential to harm insects indirectly by targeting their bacterial partners ...

When horseradish flea beetles feed on their host plants, they take up not only nutrients but also mustard oil glucosides, the characteristic defense compounds of horseradish and other brassicaceous plants. Using these mustard oil glucosides, the beetles turn themselves into a "mustard oil bomb" and so deter predators. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, has now been able to demonstrate how the beetle regulates the accumulation of mustard oil glucosides in its body. The beetles have special transporters in the excretory system that prevent the excretion of mustard ...

Inks containing metal nanoparticles are among the most commonly-used conductive materials for printed electronics. Ink-jetting layers of MNP materials allows for unpreceded design flexibility, rapid processing and 3D printing of functional electronic devices such as sensors, solar panels, LED displays, transistors and smart textiles. Inkjet 3D printing of metals typically form a solid printed object via a two-step process: solvent evaporation upon printing (pinning) and subsequent low-temperature consolidation of nanoparticles (sintering). The low temperature is important as in many applications the nanoparticles are co-printed with ...

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have laid the groundwork for a potential new type of gene therapy using novel CRISPR-based techniques. Working in fruit flies and human cells, research led by UC San Diego Postdoctoral Scholar Zhiqian Li in Division of Biological Sciences Professor Ethan Bier's laboratory demonstrates that new DNA repair mechanisms could be designed to address the effects of debilitating diseases and damaged cell conditions. The scientists developed a novel genetic sensor called a "CopyCatcher," which capitalizes on CRISPR-based gene drive technology, to detect instances in which a genetic element is copied precisely from one chromosome to another throughout cells in ...

Researchers at the University of Bristol have discovered how microbes responsible for human African sleeping sickness produce sex cells. In these single-celled parasites, known as trypanosomes, each reproductive cell splits off in turn from the parental germline cell, which is responsible for passing on genes. Conventional germline cells divide twice to produce all four sex cells - or gametes - simultaneously. In humans four sperms are produced from a single germline cell. So, these strange parasite cells are doing their own thing rather than sticking to ...

Every high-school physics student learns that sound and light travel at very different speeds. If the brain did not account for this difference, it would be much harder for us to tell where sounds came from, and how they are related to what we see. Instead, the brain allows us to make better sense of our world by playing tricks, so that a visual and a sound created at the same time are perceived as synchronous, even though they reach the brain and are processed by neural circuits at different speeds. One of the brain's tricks is temporal recalibration: ...

A novel technique for studying vortices in quantum fluids has been developed by Lancaster physicists. Andrew Guthrie, Sergey Kafanov, Theo Noble, Yuri Pashkin, George Pickett and Viktor Tsepelin, in collaboration with scientists from Moscow State University, used tiny mechanical resonators to detect individual quantum vortices in superfluid helium. Their work is published in the current volume of Nature Communications. This research into quantum turbulence is simpler than turbulence in the real world, which is observed in everyday phenomena such as surf, fast flowing rivers, billowing storm clouds, or chimney smoke. Despite ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CBM-CSIC-UAM) have discovered that the nitric oxide (NO) pathway is overactivated in the aortas of mice and patients with Marfan Syndrome and that the activity of this pathway causes the aortic aneurysms that characterize this disease. The results of the study, published today in Nature Communications, reveal the essential role played by NO in Marfan Syndrome aortic disease and identify new therapeutic targets and markers of NO pathway activation that could be used to monitor disease status and progression. Aortic aneurysm ...