As gatherings to observe whooping cranes join the ranks of online-only events this year, a new study offers insight into how the endangered bird is faring on a landscape increasingly dotted with wind turbines. The paper, published this week in Ecological Applications, reports that whooping cranes migrating through the U.S. Great Plains avoid "rest stop" sites that are within 5 km of wind-energy infrastructure. Avoidance of wind turbines can decrease collision mortality for birds, but can also make it more difficult and time-consuming for migrating flocks to find safe and suitable rest and refueling locations. The study's insights into migratory behavior ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Overweight low-income mothers of young kids ate fewer fast-food meals and high-fat snacks after participating in a study - not because researchers told them what not to eat, but because the lifestyle intervention being evaluated helped lower the moms' stress, research suggests. The 16-week program was aimed at preventing weight gain by promoting stress management, healthy eating and physical activity. The methods to get there were simple steps tucked into lessons on time management and prioritizing, many demonstrated in a series ...

In the field of robotics, metals offer advantages like strength, durability, and electrical conductivity. But, they are heavy and rigid--properties that are undesirable in soft and flexible systems for wearable computing and human-machine interfaces. Hydrogels, on the other hand, are lightweight, stretchable, and biocompatible, making them excellent materials for contact lenses and tissue engineering scaffolding. They are, however, poor at conducting electricity, which is needed for digital circuits and bioelectronics applications. Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Soft Machines Lab have developed a unique silver-hydrogel composite that has high electrical ...

Crabs are living the meme life on social media lately. The memes joke that everything will eventually look like a crab. But it's actually based in some truth. The crab shape has evolved so many times the evolutionary biologist L.A. Borradaile coined the term carcinization in 1916 to describe the convergent evolution process in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form. Crabs are decapod crustaceans of the infraorder Brachyura and are considered "true crabs", most of which are carcinized. "False crabs" are of the ...

As experts nationwide point to a mental health crisis among teens and young adults, a pilot program teaching mindfulness and coping techniques to students at the University of Washington has helped lower stress and improve emotional well-being. New studies by the psychology researchers who created the program find that the strategies, offered first in residence halls and later through classes and other organized campus groups, have provided participants with successful methods for coping with stress, managing their emotions and learning self-compassion. Researchers say the results show the potential for preventive mental health services offered in an accessible, peer-group environment. "This program is not a substitute ...

In Brazil, a study conducted by researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and collaborators showed that deforestation in the Amazon causes an increase in the diversity of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An article on the study, published in Soil Biology and Biochemistry, compares the microorganisms that live in the soil of native forest with those found in pasture and croplands. The researchers found a far larger number of genes considered markers of antibiotic resistance in deforested than forested areas. “Bacteria produce substances with which to attack each other in a competition for resources that’s ...

URBANA, Ill. ¬- As the global population grows, the demand for food increases while arable land shrinks. A new University of Illinois study investigates how rice production in India can meet future needs by adapting to changing climate conditions and water availability. "Rice is the primary crop in India, China, and other countries in Southeast Asia. Rice consumption is also growing in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world," says Prasanta Kalita, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at U of I and lead author on the study. "If you look at where they traditionally grow rice, it is countries that have ...

New research released in Bioscience found that a remote region of North America's largest temperate rainforest is experiencing changes to its ecosystem due to climate change. Brian Buma, a researcher and professor of integrated biology at University of Colorado Denver, co-leads the research network that outlined the changes in a new paper. North America's largest remaining temperate rainforest, located in Southeast Alaska, is one of the most pristine and intact ecosystems. The entire ecosystem stretches well over 2,000 km from north to south and stores more carbon ...

New research by the National Institutes of Health found that unbalanced progesterone signals may cause some pregnant women to experience preterm labor or prolonged labor. The study in mice -- published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- provides novel insights for developing treatments. During pregnancy, the hormone progesterone helps to prevent the uterus from contracting and going into labor prematurely. This occurs through molecular signaling involving progesterone receptor types A and B, referred to as PGR-A and PGR-B. In this ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 11, 2021--A long-time question in astrophysics appears to finally be answered, thanks to a collection of large, high-tech water tanks on a mountainside in Mexico. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) data shows that the highest-energy cosmic rays come not from supernovae, but from star clusters. "The origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays in the galaxy has been an open question in astrophysics for more than 60 years," said Patrick Harding, a Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist doing research using HAWC. "Very few regions of the galaxy have both the power to produce high-energy ...

Black women have 80% higher risk of preterm birth between 32 and 33 weeks of pregnancy if a Black person who lives in their neighborhood is killed by police during the pregnancy, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. The study by scientists at the UCSF California Preterm Birth Initiative (PTBI-CA) and UC Berkeley School of Public Health, studied the records of 3.8 million pregnant women to assess whether fatal police violence occurring in their neighborhood during pregnancy was associated with extremely early, early, moderate or late preterm delivery. "Our findings suggest that deaths due to police violence, which already differentially affect Black and Brown communities, adversely affect the health of mothers and babies ...

BOSTON - As COVID-19 infection rates continue to fall, Massachusetts officials are signaling it's almost time to end remote learning and send all school-aged children back to the classroom. While emerging data suggest young children and schools have not been primary drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence to guide best practices to prevent the spread of the virus in the school setting has been limited and, as a result, national and international recommendations are inconsistent. A study led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) physician-researchers provides new, much-needed data about the optimal physical ...

Climate change is affecting the water balance of our planet: depending on the region and the time of year, this can influence the amount of water in rivers potentially resulting in more flooding or drought. River flow is an important indicator of water resources available to humans and the environment. The amount of available water also depends on further factors, such as direct interventions in the water cycle or land use change: if, for example, water is diverted for irrigation or regulated via reservoirs, or forests are cleared and monocultures grown in their place, this can have an impact on river flow. However, how river flow ...

Using the same principles that make polarized sunglasses possible, a team of researchers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have developed a technique that will help better defend against asteroids on a collision course with Earth. A new study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal found a better way to interpret radar signals bounced off asteroids' surfaces. The data can better tell us if an asteroid is porous, fluffy or rocky, which matters because there are hundreds of near-Earth asteroids that could potentially hit the planet. "Learning more about the physical properties of asteroids is crucial in Planetary Defense," says Dylan Hickson the lead author and a research scientist at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. "A porous, fluffy asteroid does ...

The planet GJ 1132 b appears to have begun life as a gaseous world with a thick blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times the radius of Earth, this so-called "sub-Neptune" quickly lost its primordial hydrogen and helium atmosphere, which was stripped away by the intense radiation from its hot, young star. In a short period of time, it was reduced to a bare core about the size of Earth. To the surprise of astronomers, new observations from Hubble [1] have uncovered a secondary atmosphere that has replaced the planet's first atmosphere. It is rich in hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane and ammonia, and also has a hydrocarbon haze. Astronomers theorise that hydrogen from the original atmosphere was absorbed into the planet's molten magma mantle and is now being slowly released ...

Breast cancer is harmful enough on its own, but when cancer cells start to metastasize -- or spread into the body from their original location -- the disease becomes even more fatal and difficult to treat. Thanks to new research published in Oncogene from the lab of University of Colorado Cancer Center associate director of basic research Heide Ford, PhD, in collaboration with Michael Lewis, PhD, from Baylor College of Medicine, doctors may soon have a better understanding of one mechanism by which metastasis happens, and of potential ways to slow it down. "Metastasis is a huge problem nobody's tackled very well," says Ford, who ...

The universe is filled with magnetic fields. Understanding how magnetic fields are generated and amplified in plasmas is essential to studying how large structures in the universe were formed and how energy is divided throughout the cosmos. An international collaboration, co-led by researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of Oxford, and the University of Chicago, conducted experiments that captured for the first time in a laboratory setting the time history of the growth of magnetic fields by the turbulent dynamo, a physical mechanism thought to be responsible for generating ...

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM), a new hybrid imaging technique, allows us to listen to the sound of light and see the color of biological tissue itself. It can be used for live, multicontrast functional imaging, but the limited wavelength choice of most commercial lasers and the limitations of the existing scanning methods have meant that OR-PAM can obtain only one or two different types of contrast in a single scan. These limitations have made multicontrast functional imaging time-consuming, and it's been difficult to capture the ...

Ann Arbor, March 11, 2020 - Black and Hispanic people experience a higher risk for COVID-19 and severe illness, influenced by factors such as discrimination, housing, and healthcare access and utilization. Now, a END ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The chronic stress of living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence and poverty alters gene activity in immune cells, according to a new study of low-income single Black mothers on the South Side of Chicago. The changes in stress-related gene expression reflect the body's "hunker down" response to long-term threat, a physiological strategy for lying low and considering new actions rather than launching an immediate "fight-or-flight" response. This has implications for health outcomes in communities of color and other marginalized populations, said researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators at the University of Kentucky and UCLA. The researchers published the study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. "The ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The showy colors of some butterflies could advertise their speed and nimbleness, much like a coat of bright yellow paint on a sports car. A new study shows birds can learn to recognize these visual cues, avoiding not only butterflies they've failed to nab in the past but similar-looking species as well. The research provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the idea of evasive mimicry, a strategy in which animals protect themselves from predators by matching the colors or patterns of agile relatives. First proposed more than 60 years ago, the hypothesis has been a challenge to test. But in an experimental setting, ...

SAN ANTONIO -- Surgically opening the windpipe, or trachea, within the first seven days of the start of mechanical ventilation decreases the time patients spend on ventilators, shortens their ICU stay and lowers their risk of ventilator-associated pneumonia, according to a systematic review published Thursday (March 11) in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. "We analyzed the existing medical literature to unravel a question that is very pertinent to adult critical care," said senior author Alvaro Moreira, MD, MSc, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San ...

The global battle against antibiotic resistance can only succeed if local contexts are taken into account. "A tailored approach is needed in each country," says Heiman Wertheim of Radboud university medical center. "There is no "one-size-fits-all' solution." This was the main finding of a study on antibiotic resistance in African and Asian countries funded by the British Wellcome Trust. Wertheim is the lead investigator of a large group of international researchers who recently published an article on this study in The Lancet Global Health. Antibiotics are powerful treatments for bacterial infections. They are indispensable for controlling infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, or blood poisoning (sepsis) caused by bacteria. But they are ineffective for treating ...

Sugar has been called "evil," "toxic," and "poison." But the body needs sugars, too. Sugar molecules help cells recognize and fight viruses and bacteria, shuttle proteins from cell to cell, and make sure those proteins function. Too much or too little can contribute to a range of maladies, including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, inflammation, diabetes, and even cancer. About 85 percent of proteins, including those associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, are beyond the reach of current drugs. One critical and abundant sugar (O-GlcNAc, pronounced o-glick-nack) is found on over 5,000 proteins, often those considered "undruggable." But now, researchers at Harvard University ...

Boston, MA - Vaccinating adults age 26 and older against the human papillomavirus (HPV)--the virus that causes more than 90% of cervical cancers as well as several other cancers--may not be cost-effective, according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health. "Our study found that the added health benefit of increasing the vaccination age limit beyond 26 years is minimal, and that the cost-effectiveness is much lower than in pre-adolescents, the target age group for the HPV vaccine," said Jane Kim, K.T. Li Professor of Health Economics and lead author of the study. The study will be published March 11, 2021, in PLOS Medicine. HPV vaccines have been shown to be highly effective in preventing ...