HOUSTON - (Feb. 25, 2021) - Low-income livestock farmers in developing countries are often faced with a difficult dilemma: protect their animals from endangered predators, or spare the threatened species at the expense of their livestock and livelihood. A new paper by Rice University economist Ted Loch-Temzelides examines such circumstances faced by farmers in Pakistan. "Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard" outlines a plan under which farmers can protect themselves from crippling financial losses while ...

While the amazing regenerative power of the liver has been known since ancient times, the cells responsible for maintaining and replenishing the liver have remained a mystery. Now, research from the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) has identified the cells responsible for liver maintenance and regeneration while also pinpointing where they reside in the liver. These findings, reported today in Science, could help scientists answer important questions about liver maintenance, liver damage (such as from fatty liver or alcoholic liver disease), and liver cancer. The liver performs vital functions, including chemical detoxification, blood protein production, bile excretion, and regulation of energy metabolism. Structurally, the liver ...

Paleo-ecologists from The University of New Mexico and at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have demonstrated that the offspring of enormous carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex may have fundamentally re-shaped their communities by out-competing smaller rival species. The study, released this week in the journal Science, is the first to examine community-scale dinosaur diversity while treating juveniles as their own ecological entity. "Dinosaur communities were like shopping malls on a Saturday afternoon ? jam-packed with teenagers" explained Kat Schroeder, a graduate student in the UNM Department of Biology who led the study. "They made up a significant portion of the individuals in a species and would have had a very real impact ...

An international team of scientists has developed a system that can generate random numbers over a hundred times faster than current technologies, paving the way towards faster, cheaper, and more secure data encryption in today's digitally connected world. The random generator system was jointly developed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Yale University, and Trinity College Dublin, and made in NTU. Random numbers are used for a variety of purposes, such as generating data encryption keys and one-time ...

As Covid-19 impacts lives around the world- a new skeleton study is reconstructing ancient pandemics to assess human's evolutionary ability to fight off leprosy, tuberculosis and treponematoses with help from declining rates of transmission when the germs became widespread. The researchers state the germs mutated to infect ancient humans so they could replicate- hopping across to as many new hosts as possible- but the severity of the diseases reduced as a result. The analysis by Adjunct Professor in Archaeology Maciej Henneberg and Dr Teghan Lucas at Flinders ...

In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced the first draft of the human genome reference sequence. The Human Genome Project, as it was called, had taken more than eleven years of work and involved more than 1000 scientists from 40 countries. This reference, however, did not represent a single individual but instead is a composite of humans that could not accurately capture the complexity of human genetic variation. Building on this, scientists have carried out many sequencing projects over the last 20 years to identify and catalog genetic differences between an individual and the reference genome. Those differences usually ...

A chemical reaction can be understood in detail at the quantum state-resolved level, through a combined study of molecular crossed beam experiments and theoretical quantum molecular reaction dynamics simulations. At a single collision condition, the molecular crossed beam apparatus is able to detect the scattering angle-resolved product with rotational state-resolution. Whereas, with accurate global potential energy surface, quantum reactive scattering theory is able to predict the corresponding reactive scattering information. In previous studies, the chemical reaction dynamics was revealed only with the product rotational state-resolution. And the investigation of a reaction ...

Although the value of vaccines for COVID-19 may seem obvious, government action and investment in vaccines have not been commensurate with the enormous scale of benefits they offer, argue Juan Camilo Castillo and colleagues in this Policy Forum. Since even one extra month of exposure to COVID-19 kills hundreds of thousands, reduces global gross domestic product (GDP) by hundreds of billions of dollars, and generates large losses to human capital by harming education and health, expanding vaccine capacity even further would generate substantial global benefits. Castillo et al. report results of two related exercises: estimating the global benefits from vaccine capacity already in place, and estimating the benefits ...

The pandemic has made clear the threat that some viruses pose to people. But viruses can also infect life-sustaining bacteria and a Johns Hopkins University-led team has developed a test to determine if bacteria are sick, similar to the one used to test humans for COVID-19. "If there was a COVID-like pandemic occurring in important bacterial populations it would be difficult to tell, because before this study, we lacked the affordable and accurate tools necessary to study viral infections in uncultured bacterial populations," said study corresponding author Sarah ...

Bladder cancer is more aggressive and more advanced in South Texas residents ­than in many parts of the country, a study by the Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson, indicates. The disease is also deadlier in Latinos and women, regardless of where they live nationwide, according to the research. The team from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio), which includes the Mays Cancer Center, compared bladder cancer cases in the Texas Cancer Registry with cases in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. SEER, which collects data on cancer cases from various locations and sources across the U.S., does not include Texas statistics. Cases covered the years ...

A Skoltech researcher has developed a theoretical model of wave formation in straits and channels that accounts for nonlinear effects in the presence of a coastline. This research can improve wave prediction, making maritime travel safer and protecting coastline infrastructure. The paper was published in the journal Ocean Dynamics. Predicting surface weather at sea has always been a challenging task with very high stakes; for instance, over 4,000 people died due to rough seas during Operation Overlord at Normandy in June 1944, an allied incursion where poor forecasting altered the course of the operation quite significantly. Current wave forecasting models used, for example, by NOAA in the US, are imperfect, but they have many tunable parameters to ensure a reasonably good prediction. However, ...

Low blood levels of immune cells called lymphocytes, in combination with higher levels of inflammation on PET/CT scans, are indicators of active sarcoidosis -- an inflammatory disease that attacks multiple organs, particularly the lungs and lymph nodes -- which disproportionately affects African Americans. The discovery by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago could help guide disease treatment. Their findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. The researchers were looking for biomarkers -- both in the blood and in PET/CT scan findings -- ...

Large carnivores are generally sensitive to ecosystem changes because their specialized diet and position at the top of the trophic pyramid is associated with small population sizes. This in turn leads to lower genetic diversity in top predators compared to animals lower down the food chain. Genetic diversity is very important for a species' ability to survive and adapt to future changes. Extraordinary genetic diversity in an extraordinary cat In this study, the researchers sequenced the complete genome of 53 African leopards and compared them to the Amur leopards and other big cat species. To their surprise, the researchers found that the genetic diversity of African leopards is extremely high: Almost four times ...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a class of man-made chemical compounds and a current, emerging concern to environmental health. PFAS substances have unique characteristics-resistance to heat, water, oil and stains-that make them useful in a variety of industrial applications and popular in consumer goods. Many PFAS are stable and long-lasting in the environment, acquiring the name "forever chemicals." Industrial use of some of these compounds has been halted; however, many derivatives are still in commerce and more are under development. PFAS are now found in many compartments of the environment. In ...

On January 14, 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) submitted notice to the Federal Register that it would issue practice guidelines that exempt physicians from the requirement to apply for a waiver to prescribe buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder (OUD) in up to 30 patients at one time. This exemption has been placed on hold by the Biden administration and may require legislative change to implement. An exemption to the X-waiver has the potential to help reverse the morbidity and mortality associated with the opioid overdose epidemic, although without accompanying changes and attention it will not be enough. The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic fueled by high-potency synthetic ...

Dr. Felix-Martin Werner, working at the Euro Academy Pößneck in Germany and Prof. Rafael Coveñas, working at the Institute of Neurosciences of Castilla and León, Salamanca in Spain, have been working on neurological and psychiatric disease for over ten years. In their most recent review, published in Current Pharmaceutical Design (Bentham Science Publishers) Werner and Coveñas cover information about the risk genes in schizophrenia and explain the importance of examining their single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP's). In schizophrenia, 260 risk genes ...

A computer network closely modelled on part of the human brain is enabling new insights into the way our brains process moving images - and explains some perplexing optical illusions. By using decades' worth of data from human motion perception studies, researchers have trained an artificial neural network to estimate the speed and direction of image sequences. The new system, called MotionNet, is designed to closely match the motion-processing structures inside a human brain. This has allowed the researchers to explore features of human visual processing that cannot be directly measured in the brain. Their study, published in the Journal of Vision, uses the artificial system ...

Over many decades now, traditional drug discovery methods have steadily improved at keeping diseases at bay and cancer in remission. And for the most part, it's worked well. But it hasn't worked perfectly. A lab on UNLV's campus has been a hub of activity in recent years, playing a significant role in a new realm of drug discovery -- one that could potentially provide a solution for patients who have run out of options. "It's starting to get to the point where we've kind of taken traditional drug discovery as far as we can, and we really need something new," said UNLV biochemist Gary Kleiger. Traditional drug discovery involves what is called the small molecule approach. To attack a protein that's causing disease in a cancer cell, for instance, ...

With COVID-19 making it vital for people to keep their distance from one another, the city of Toronto undertook the largest one-year expansion of its cycling network in 2020, adding about 25 kilometres of temporary bikeways. Yet, the benefits of helping people get around on two wheels go far beyond facilitating physical distancing, according to a recent study by three University of Toronto researchers that was published in the journal Transport Findings. University of Toronto Engineering PhD candidate Bo Lin, as well as professors Shoshanna Saxe and Timothy Chan used ...

Ithaca, NY--Famous for their uncanny ability to imitate other birds and even mechanical devices, researchers find that Australia's Superb Lyrebird also uses that skill in a totally unexpected way. Lyrebirds imitate the panicked alarm calls of a mixed-species flock of birds while males are courting and even while mating with a female. These findings are published in the journal Current Biology. "The male Superb Lyrebird creates a remarkable acoustic illusion," says Anastasia Dalziell, currently a Cornell Lab of Ornithology Associate and recent Cornell Lab Rose Postdoctoral Fellow, now at the ...

URBANA, Ill. - Food waste is a major problem in the U.S., and young adults are among the worst culprits. Many of them attend college or university and live on campus, making dining halls a prime target for waste reduction efforts. And a simple intervention can make a big difference, a University of Illinois study shows. Shifting from round to oval plates with a smaller surface area can significantly reduce food waste in dining halls, says Brenna Ellison, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) and co-author on the study. "Americans waste about 31% of the food that is available at the retail and consumer levels," Ellison says. "All-you-can-eat ...

West Virginia University scientists used MRI scans to show what happens when ultrasound waves target a specific area of Alzheimer's patient's brains. They concluded that this treatment may induce an immunological healing response, a potential breakthrough for a disease that accounts for up to 80% of all dementia cases. Rashi Mehta, a researcher with the WVU School of Medicine and Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, led the study that appears in the journal Radiology. "Focused ultrasound is an innovative technique and new way of approaching brain diseases, including Alzheimer's disease," said Mehta, an associate professor ...

New research in mice published today in the journal Scientific Reports strengthens the growing scientific consensus regarding the role of the gut microbiome in neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease. The study, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, found a correlation between the composition of the gut microbiome and the behavioral and cognitive performance of mice carrying genes associated with Alzheimer's. The mice carried the human amyloid precursor protein gene with dominant Alzheimer's mutations generated by scientists in Japan. The study further suggests a relationship between microbes in the digestive tract ...

A widespread field search for a rare Australian native bee not recorded for almost a century has found it's been there all along - but is probably under increasing pressure to survive. Only six individual were ever found, with the last published record of this Australian endemic bee species, Pharohylaeus lactiferus (Colletidae: Hylaeinae), from 1923 in Queensland. "This is concerning because it is the only Australian species in the Pharohylaeus genus and nothing was known of its biology," Flinders University researcher James Dorey says in a new scientific paper in the journal Journal of Hymenoptera Research. The ...

Immunologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have mapped the previously unknown biological machinery by which the immune system generates T cells that kill bacteria, viruses and tumor cells. The findings have multiple implications for how the adaptive immune system responds to infections to generate such memory T cells. The experiments revealed mechanisms that inhibit development of the long-lived memory T cells that continually renew to protect the body over time. Blocking these inhibitory mechanisms with pharmacological or genetic approaches could boost protective immunity against infection and cancers. The researchers also discovered a subtype of memory T cells that they named terminal effector prime cells. Mapping the pathway that controls these cells raises the possibility ...