By analyzing more than a decade's worth of information on 55 crops, all dependent on pollinators, scientists have revealed that developed countries are particularly reliant on imported pollinator-dependent crops, while countries that export the majority of these crop types are major drivers of pollinator declines. Their assessment of the "virtual" exchange of pollinator services in the global food trade could help governments and agencies form new policies to preserve crop diversity and tackle biodiversity loss. In today's globalized world, human food consumption largely depends on the trade of crops and the intense use of resources such as water and land. Pollinators such as bees, ...

OSAKA, Japan - The hippocampus is the part of the brain that deals with information associated with spatial navigation and memory. For example, you are driving and despite the changing environment of different cars going at varying speeds, on and off ramps, distracting billboards, etc., you adjust your speed, glance only momentarily at the billboards, and navigate the roads in a smooth and timely manner. This is your hippocampus at work. It takes the input - a continuously changing environment - and helps turn it into the output - using memory of a road map to safely navigate your way. However, little is known about how information is distributed from the hippocampus to other brain regions that results in the output behaviour. A research team led by Lecturer Takuma Kitanishi and Professor ...

Social distancing not only helped slow the spread of COVID-19 -- it also may have prevented the transmission of an outbreak of a rare polio-like syndrome, according to Princeton University researchers. Though uncommon, acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a critical spinal condition that causes weakness in the limbs, seriously diminishes motor function, and can lead to lifelong disabilities. The syndrome was first reported in the United States in 2012 and has been coming back every two years, hinting it could strike again in 2020. Using epidemiological surveillance tools, the researchers showed that an AFM outbreak was ...

Harnessing a predictive algorithm, Sang Woo Park and colleagues have mapped out new trends in the incidence of the respiratory virus enterovirus D68 in the U.S. since 2014. Their epidemiological study supports research that has linked enterovirus D68 to acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a rare and mysterious paralyzing disease, and addresses critical gaps in knowledge of how enterovirus D68 has been spreading in the U.S. The analysis also suggests that social distancing interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic likely lowered the prevalence of AFM in 2020. Cases of the polio-like illness AFM, which rapidly results in ...

Adolescents and young adults may be more susceptible to COVID-19 than previously believed, according to analysis of cases in six U.S. states experiencing surges. INFORMATION: Article Title: Prevalence of COVID-19 in adolescents and youth compared with older adults in states experiencing surges Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared no competing interests exist. Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0242587 ...

Individuals' willingness to engage in COVID-19 control measures is associated with their trust in the government, other citizens, and in particular science, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Stefano Pagliaro of University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, and colleagues. The spread of SARS-CoV-2 since December 2019 has posed a severe public health threat to people around the world. As vaccines are being rolled out, behavioral changes are also necessary to counter the spread of the virus. These actions include both prescribed behaviors such as wearing masks, social distancing, and quarantining, as well as discretionary prosocial behaviors like donating to charities ...

New research conducted at the UNESCO World Heritage listed 'Plain of Jars' in Laos has established the stone jars were likely placed in their final resting position from as early as 1240 to 660 BCE. Sediment samples from beneath stone jars from two of the more than 120 recorded megalithic sites were obtained by a team led Dr Louise Shewan from the University of Melbourne, Associate Professor Dougald O'Reilly from the Australian National University (ANU) and Dr Thonglith Luangkoth from the Lao Department of Heritage. The samples were analysed using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) to determine when sediment grains were ...

A new study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that nitrogen-fixing trees play an underrecognized role in recovering tropical forests by enriching nutrient-poor soils with scarce elements such as phosphorus and molybdenum. Coauthor Sarah Batterman, a tropical forest ecologist at END ...

In previous research, ancient massacre sites found men who died while pitted in battle or discovered executions of targeted families. At other sites, evidence showed killing of members of a migrant community in conflict with previously established communities, and even murders of those who were part of religious rituals. But a more recent discovery by a research team -- that includes two University of Wyoming faculty members -- reveals the oldest documented site of an indiscriminate mass killing 6,200 years ago in what is now Potocani, Croatia. "The DNA, combined with the archaeological and skeletal evidence -- especially that ...

An international research team led by NUST MISIS has developed a new iron-cobalt-nickel nanocomposite with tunable magnetic properties. The nanocomposite could be used to protect money and securities from counterfeiting. The study was published in Nanomaterials. Presently, research on magnetic nanomaterials with controlled magnetic characteristics is one of the most promising fields. Due to their small size, as well as their excellent magnetic and electric properties these materials have a broad range of potential applications from mobile devices to space technologies. The new iron-cobalt-nickel nanocomposite was obtained by chemical precipitation, followed by a reduction process. "This ...

Researchers hope to use an agricultural pest's genetic code against it to prevent billions of dollars in annual losses in the United States. Stable flies, or Stomoxys calcitrans, are spotted, tan-colored flies found around the world. They are easily mistaken for the common housefly but for one notable distinction: They bite. "If you get one in your house and it bites you, it's a stable fly," said Joshua Benoit, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Cincinnati. Stable flies don't bite so much as chomp. They are the scourge of beachgoers in Florida and recreational boaters in upstate New York. According to Thomas Jefferson, they tormented signatories ...

DALLAS - March 10, 2021 - UT Southwestern scientists have identified key genes involved in brain waves that are pivotal for encoding memories. The END ...

Bacteria employ many different strategies to regulate gene expression in response to fluctuating, often stressful, conditions in their environments. One type of regulation involves non-coding RNA molecules called small RNAs (sRNAs), which are found in all domains of life. A new study led by researchers at the University of Illinois describes, for the first time, the impacts of sRNA interactions in individual bacterial cells. Their findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, with the paper selected as an Editors' highlight article. Bacterial sRNAs are often involved in regulating stress responses using mechanisms that involve base-pairing ...

While neurological complications of COVID-19 in children are rare, in contrast to adults, an international expert review of positive neuroimaging findings in children with acute and post-infectious COVID-19 found that the most common abnormalities resembled immune-mediated patterns of disease involving the brain, spine, and nerves. Strokes, which are more commonly reported in adults with COVID-19, were much less frequently encountered in children. The study of 38 children, published in the journal Lancet, was the largest to date of central nervous system imaging manifestations of COVID-19 in children. "Thanks to a major international collaboration, we found that neuroimaging manifestations ...

When we recall a memory, we retrieve specific details about it: where, when, with whom. But we often also experience a vivid feeling of remembering the event, sometimes almost reliving it. Memory researchers call these processes objective and subjective memory, respectively. A new study from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, shows that objective and subjective memory can function independently, involve different parts of the brain, and that people base their decisions on subjective memory -- how they feel about a memory -- more than on its accuracy. "The study distinguishes between ...

Aspirin is an established, safe, and low-cost medication in long-standing common use in prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases, and in the past a pain relief and fever reducing medication. The use of aspirin was very popular during the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic, several decades before in-vitro confirmation of its activity against RNA viruses. Studies showed that aspirin, in addition to its well-known anti-inflammatory effects, could modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses helping the human immune system battle some viral infections. With this information ...

Computer engineers at the world's largest companies and universities are using machines to scan through tomes of written material. The goal? Teach these machines the gift of language. Do that, some even claim, and computers will be able to mimic the human brain. But this impressive compute capability comes with real costs, including perpetuating racism and causing significant environmental damage, according to a new paper, "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? ?" The paper is being presented Wednesday, March 10 at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (ACM FAccT). This is the first exhaustive review of the literature surrounding the risks that come with rapid growth of language-learning technologies, said ...

Effective, specific, with a reversible and non-harmful action: the identikit of the perfect biomaterial seems to correspond to graphene flakes, the subject of a new study carried out by SISSA - International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) of Barcelona and the National Graphene Institute of the University of Manchester, in the framework of the European Graphene Flagship project. This nanomaterial has demonstrated the ability to interact with the functions of the nervous system in vertebrates in a very specific manner, interrupting the building up of a pathological process that leads ...

Healthcare personnel who were infected with COVID-19 had stronger risk factors outside the workplace than in their hospital or healthcare setting. That is the finding of a new study published today in JAMA Network Open conducted by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers, colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and three other universities. The study examined survey data from nearly 25,000 healthcare providers in Baltimore, Atlanta, and Chicago including at University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) hospitals. They found that having a known exposure to someone who tested positive for COVID-19 in the community was the strongest risk factor for testing ...

An international team led by Artem R. Oganov, a Professor at Skoltech and MISIS, and Dr. Ivan Troyan from the Institute of Crystallography of RAS performed theoretical and experimental research on a new high-temperature superconductor, yttrium hydride (YH6). Their findings were published in the journal Advanced Materials. Yttrium hydrides rank among the three highest-temperature superconductors known to date. The leader among the three is a material with an unknown S-C-H composition and superconductivity at 288 K, which is followed by lanthanum hydride, LaH10, superconducting at temperatures up to 259 K), and, finally, yttrium hydrides, YH6 and YH9, with maximum superconductivity temperatures of 224 K and 243 K, respectively. The superconductivity of YH6 ...

Boston - A new study shows that providing a non-acute care space after hospital discharge for patients with COVID-19 who are experiencing homelessness helped reduce hospitalizations and keep inpatient beds available for those requiring acute care. Published in JAMA Network Open and led by researchers at Boston Medical Center's (BMC) Grayken Center for Addiction, the study demonstrates the importance of developing innovative approaches to tackle issues facing people experiencing homelessness, including their inability to isolate, in order to mitigate additional ...

Associations between strong predictors of suicidal behaviors over the life course, such as adverse childhood events (ACEs), remain understudied among youth of color. Although not previously considered high risk, suicide attempts among Black youth increased 73% between 1991 and 2017. Published in the Children and Youth Services Review, University of Minnesota researchers pulled data from the 2016 Minnesota Student Survey (MSS) to examine associations between ACEs, school connectedness and suicide ideation and attempts among Somali, Latino, Hmong and Non-Hispanic ...

Research published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry shows that the presence of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in bald eagle populations is slowly declining. Bald eagles are apex predators that nest and, more importantly, feed along water bodies, making them excellent bioindicators of environmental contaminants that bioaccumulate up the aquatic food web. The findings are both good news for eagles and instructive for regulators tasked with managing surface water quality by setting protective levels for wildlife, as well as fish consumption advisories for humans. Lead author Bill Route from the National ...

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have uncovered mechanisms underlying the activation of the MRN complex-- the cell's DNA scissors. Using purified yeast proteins, they demonstrated that phosphorylation of Ctp1, a homolog of a tumor-suppressor protein, plays a key role in activating MRN complex's DNA clipping activity. Intriguingly, a short segment of yeast Ctp1 or its human counterpart could stimulate endonuclease activity of their respective MRN complexes, suggesting its conserved function across species. DNA functions as a roadmap that guides the identity and functions of cells. A glitch in the DNA ...

BINGHAMTON, NY -- Star employees often get most of the credit when things go right, but also shoulder most of the blame when things go wrong, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York. The study explored the potential risks and rewards of collaborating with stars - individuals who have a reputation for exhibiting exceptional performance - and how individual performance factors into how much credit and blame is shared with collaborators. "Stars are human, and they fail from time to time. We wanted to shift the focus away from stars, and find out what happens to the people who collaborate ...