Chestnut Hill, Mass. (4/28/2021) -- The vast frozen terrain of Arctic permafrost thawed several times in North America within the past 1 million years when the world's climate was not much warmer than today, researchers from the United States and Canada report in today's edition of Science Advances. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. But the researchers found that the thawings -- which expel stores of carbon dioxide sequestered deep in frozen vegetation -- were not accompanied by increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The surprising finding runs counter to predictions that as the planet ...

About a quarter of a percent of the entire gross domestic product of industrialized countries is estimated to be lost through a single technical issue: the fouling of heat exchanger surfaces by salts and other dissolved minerals. This fouling lowers the efficiency of multiple industrial processes and often requires expensive countermeasures such as water pretreatment. Now, findings from MIT could lead to a new way of reducing such fouling, and potentially even enable turning that deleterious process into a productive one that can yield saleable products. The findings are the result of years of work by recent MIT graduates Samantha McBride PhD '20 and Henri-Louis Girard PhD '20 with professor of mechanical ...

Two teams have created a new generation of highly specific CAR T cells, which safely cleared solid tumors in mice with mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma while outlasting and outperforming conventional CAR T cell designs. The results suggest these cells could minimize the risk of dangerous side effects and address the traditionally poor performance of CAR T cells against solid tumors in the clinic. CAR T cells are genetically modified human T cells and have shown impressive performance in patients with leukemia. However, CAR T cells don't work as well against solid tumors, as these cancers lack molecular targets that the cells can easily recognize. ...

The number of distinctive sources and voices on the internet is proven to be in long-term decline, according to new research. A paper entitled 'Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity' published in the PLOS ONE scientific journal has shown between 60 and 70 percent of all attention on key social media platforms in different market segments is focused towards just 10 popular domains. In stark contrast, new competitors are struggling to survive against such dominant players, with just 3 percent of online domains born in 2015 still active today, compared to nearly 40 percent of those formed back in 2006. The researchers say ...

The subseafloor constitutes one of the largest and most understudied ecosystems on Earth. While it is known that life survives deep down in the fluids, rocks, and sediments that make up the seafloor, scientists know very little about the conditions and energy needed to sustain that life. An interdisciplinary research team, led from ASU and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sought to learn more about this ecosystem and the microbes that exist in the subseafloor. The results of their findings were recently published in Science Advances, with ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration assistant professor and geobiologist ...

Organ development in plants mostly occurs through combinatorial activity of so-called meristems. Meristems are plant cells or tissues that give rise to new organs, similar to stem cells in human - including spikelets. Spikelets are components of the spike and form florets (flowers) themselves, which in turn produce grains after fertilisation. Inflorescence morphogenesis in grasses (Poaceae) is complex and based on a specialised floral meristem, the spikelet meristem, from which all other floral organs arise and which also gives rise to the grain. The fate of the spikelet thus determines not only reproductive success, ...

DETROIT (April 28, 2021) - The results of a large, national heart attack study show that patients with a deadly complication known as cardiogenic shock survived at a significantly higher rate when treated with a protocol developed by cardiologists at Henry Ford Hospital in END ...

Anyone researching the global carbon cycle has to deal with unimaginably large numbers. The Southern Ocean - the world's largest ocean sink region for human-made CO2 - is projected to absorb a total of about 244 billion tons of human-made carbon from the atmosphere over the period from 1850 to 2100 under a high CO2 emissions scenario. But the uptake could possibly be only 204 or up to 309 billion tons. That's how much the projections of the current generation of climate models vary. The reason for this large uncertainty is the complex circulation of the Southern Ocean, which ...

A protein variant common in malignant bladder tumor cells may serve as a new avenue for treating bladder cancer. A multi-institution study led by END ...

Veterinarians, pet owners and breeders often have preconceived notions about each other, but by investigating these biases, experts at the University of Arizona College of Veterinary Medicine hope to improve both human communication and animal care. "Veterinary medicine may require us to treat the patient, but we are unable to improve pet patient outcomes without human client consent and trust. Communication is an essential component of veterinary practice," said Ryane Englar, an associate professor and the director of veterinary skills development for the college. "As an anecdotal example, vets and breeders don't always get along, but there was no research on these subjects. I wondered, what do the groups want and need? If ...

Washington, D.C. - April 28, 2021 - As of April 2021, more than 3 million people worldwide have died of COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, researchers developed accurate diagnostic tests and identified health conditions that correlated with worse outcomes. However, a clinical predictor of who faces the highest risk of being hospitalized, put on a ventilator or dying from the disease has remained largely out of reach. This week in mSphere, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers describe a two-step prognostic test that can help predict a patient's response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. The test combines a disease risk factor score with a test ...

LAWRENCE -- College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place. New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don't return to their universities for a second year in the United States. "We were interested ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Socially just policies aimed at limiting the Earth's human population hold tremendous potential for advancing equity while simultaneously helping to mitigate the effects of climate change, Oregon State University researchers say. In a paper published this week in Sustainability Science, William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of the OSU College of Forestry also note that fertility rates are a dramatically understudied and overlooked aspect of the climate emergency. That's especially true relative to the attention devoted to other climate-related topics including energy, short-lived pollutants and ...

Biologists use the term adaptive radiation to describe a phenomenon in which new species rapidly evolve from an ancestral species, often in response to changes in the local environment that lead to new biological niches becoming available. To understand this process, biologists often turn to the cichlids of Lake Victoria, in which over 500 species of the fish have evolved over the past 14,600 years. As Professor Masato Nikaido of Tokyo Tech explains, "The level of genetic differentiation among species is considered very low due to the short period of time after these different species began evolving, and this limited genetic differentiation provides us with a great opportunity to find candidate genes that have contributed to adaptive ...

Predatory bacteria--bacteria that eat other bacteria--grow faster and consume more resources than non-predators in the same soil, according to a new study out this week from Northern Arizona University. These active predators, which use wolfpack-like behavior, enzymes, and cytoskeletal 'fangs' to hunt and feast on other bacteria, wield important power in determining where soil nutrients go. The results of the study, published in the journal mBio this week, show predation is an important dynamic in the wild microbial realm, and suggest that these predators play an outsized role in how elements are stored in or released from soil. Like every other life form on earth, bacteria belong to intricate food webs in which organisms are connected ...

Constantina Theofanopoulou wanted to study oxytocin. Her graduate work had focused on how the hormone influences human speech development, and now she was preparing to use those findings to investigate how songbirds learn to sing. The problem was that birds do not have oxytocin. Or so she was told. "Everywhere that I looked in the genome," she says, "I was unable to find a gene called oxytocin in birds." Theofanopoulou eventually came across mesotocin, the analogue for oxytocin in birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But as she plumped the literature in Erich Jarvis's lab at Rockefeller, the waters grew muddier. If she and Jarvis wanted to find studies on oxytocin in fish, they ...

Researchers from Erasmus School of Economics, IESE Business School, and New York University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines what business schools do wrong when conducting academic research and what changes they can make so that research contributes to improving society. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective from and for Marketing" and is authored by Stefan Stremersch, Russell Winer, and Nuno Camacho. In February 2020, an article in ...

The flightless kakapo of New Zealand is in trouble. The world's heaviest parrot--representing one of the most ancestral branches of the parrot family tree--is nearly extinct, with barely 200 adults plodding the underbrush of four small islands. Whether the last of the kakapos had the genetic resilience to survive was a question that only high-quality genomic analysis could answer. But a high-quality genome assembly did not exist for the kakapo--nor for most of the 70,000 vertebrate species alive today. Questions about how best to prevent the extinction of species ranging ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Difficult-to-treat, chronic wounds in preclinical models healed with normal scar-free skin after treatment with an acellular product discovered at Mayo Clinic. Derived from platelets, the purified exosomal product, known as PEP, was used to deliver healing messages into cells of preclinical animal models of ischemic wounds. The Mayo Clinic research team documented restoration of skin integrity, hair follicles, sweat glands, skin oils and normal hydration. Ischemic wounds occur when arteries are clogged or blocked, preventing important nutrients and oxygen from reaching the skin to drive repair. This groundbreaking study titled, "TGF-β Donor Exosome Accelerates Ischemic ...

To be more energy efficient, many people have replaced their incandescent lights with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs. However, those currently on the market emit a lot of blue light, which has been linked to eye troubles and sleep disturbances. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a prototype LED that reduces -- instead of masks -- the blue component, while also making colors appear just as they do in natural sunlight. LED light bulbs are popular because of their low energy consumption, long lifespan and ability to turn on and off quickly. Inside the bulb, an LED chip converts electrical current into high-energy light, including invisible ultraviolet (UV), violet ...

The highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant that recently emerged in South Africa, known as B.1.351, has scientists wondering how existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies can be improved to ensure strong protection. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry have used computer modeling to reveal that one of the three mutations that make variant B.1.351 different from the original SARS-CoV-2 reduces the virus' binding to human cells -- but potentially allows it to escape some antibodies. Since the original SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, several new variants have emerged, including ones from the U.K., South Africa and Brazil. Because the new variants appear to be more highly ...

Uncapped, idle oil wells could be leaking millions of kilograms of methane each year into the atmosphere and surface water, according to a study by the University of Cincinnati. Amy Townsend-Small, an associate professor of geology and geography in UC's College of Arts and Sciences, studied 37 wells on private property in the Permian Basin of Texas, the largest oil production region on Earth. She found that seven had methane emissions of as much as 132 grams per hour. The average rate was 6.2 grams per hour. "Some of them were leaking a lot. Most of them were leaking a little or not at all, which is a ...

April 28, 2021 -- Using naturalistic driving data and machine learning techniques, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed highly accurate algorithms for detecting mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers. Naturalistic driving data refer to data captured through in-vehicle recording devices or other technologies in the real-world setting. These data could be processed to measure driving exposure, space and performance in great detail. The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics. The researchers developed random forests models, a statistical technique ...

People of color, those with a higher income and younger individuals are more likely to participate in clinical trials during their cancer treatment according to a new study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Clinical trials are research studies that involve people who volunteer to take part in tests of new drugs, current approved drugs for a new purpose or medical devices. The study analyzed data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, which is an annual national telephone survey designed to collect health-related data from U.S. adults. Survey years selected included the question, "Did you participate in a clinical trial ...

Chocolate is a beloved treat, but sometimes the cocoa beans that go into bars and other sweets have unpleasant flavors or scents, making the final products taste bad. Surprisingly, only a few compounds associated with these stinky odors are known. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have identified the two compounds that cause musty, moldy scents in cocoa -- work that can help chocolatiers ensure the quality of their products. Cocoa beans, when fermented correctly, have a pleasant smell with sweet and floral notes. But they can have an off-putting scent when fermentation goes wrong, or when storage conditions ...