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 ...

A new paper in the Journal of the European Economic Association, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that distrust generated by a 2011 CIA-led vaccination campaign ruse designed to catch Osama Bin Laden resulted in a significant vaccination rate decline in Pakistan. Using a local doctor, the US Central Intelligence Organization planned an immunization plan in Pakistan to obtain DNA samples of children living in a compound in Abbottabad where American authorities suspected Bin Laden was hiding in order to obtain proof of Bin Laden's location (because the presence of close ...

About 42% of rural school districts in the U.S. offered fully in-person instruction as of February, compared with only 17% for urban districts, according to a new RAND Corporation survey of school district leaders. The opposite pattern held for fully remote learning: 29% of urban districts offered fully remote instruction compared with 10% of rural districts and 18% of suburban districts. The choice of in-person versus remote learning has important implications. Over a third of all U.S. school districts offering some form of remote instruction in early 2021 had shortened the school day, and a quarter had reduced instructional minutes. "This survey shows how the choice of remote instruction has ramifications that extend beyond longstanding concerns about ...

Aqueducts are very impressive examples of the art of construction in the Roman Empire. Even today, they still provide us with new insights into aesthetic, practical, and technical aspects of construction and use. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) investigated the longest aqueduct of the time, the 426-kilometer-long Aqueduct of Valens supplying Constantinople, and revealed new insights into how this structure was maintained back in time. It appears that the channels had been cleaned of carbonate deposits just a few decades before the ...

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new material that prevents infections in wounds - a specially designed hydrogel, that works against all types of bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant ones. The new material offers great hope for combating a growing global problem. The World Health Organization describes antibiotic-resistant bacteria as one of the greatest threats to global health. To deal with the problem, there needs to be a shift in the way we use antibiotics, and new, sustainable medical technologies must be developed. "After testing our new hydrogel on different types of bacteria, we observed a high level of effectiveness, including against those ...

In some countries of the WHO European Region, 1 in 3 children aged 6 to 9 years is living with overweight or obesity. Mediterranean countries have the highest rates of obesity, but the situation there is starting to improve. These are some of the findings of a new WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI) report on the fourth round of data collection (2015-2017), presented at this week's European Congress on Obesity (held online this year). The report gives the latest data available on 6- to 9-year-olds in 36 countries in the region. A questionnaire collecting ...

New research presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (held online, 10-13 May) shows that fat around the waist (abdominal obesity) is more important than general obesity as shown by body mass index (BMI) in predicting the severity of chest X-ray results in patients with COVID-19. The study is by Dr Alexis Elias Malavazos, I.R.C.C.S.Policlinico San Donato, San Donato Milanese, Italy, and colleagues. Previous research has established that both chest x-ray (CXR) severity score and obesity are predictive risk factors for COVID-19 hospital admission. However, the relationship between abdominal obesity and CXR severity score is not fully explored. This retrospective cohort study analysed the association of different methods of measuring obesity, ...