New research from the University of Adelaide has shown that glossy black-cockatoos prefer to feed from trees growing in acidic soils. Glossy black-cockatoos are seed-eating birds that feed almost exclusively on the cones of drooping sheoak trees. However, counterintuitively, they select trees that grow on the poorest soils found on ancient sedimentary rocks. “Sheoak trees are three times more likely to be used as feeding trees if they are growing on non-limestone sedimentary rocks,” says Dr Gay Crowley, from the University of Adelaide’s School of Social Sciences. Dr Crowley compared 6,543 feeding records with 23,484 ...

Autistic youth who were born in underserved neighborhoods are more likely to have greater attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms than those born in communities with more resources. This is one finding of a new study led by researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute.   This is the first time researchers have investigated how neighborhood factors are associated with ADHD in autistic and non-autistic children. The study provides new insights into mental health conditions and has the potential to inform public policy changes to improve health equity. It was published in the journal JCPP Advances. “We found that some neighborhood ...

Content warning: This post contains details of sharing intimate imagery without consent that may be disturbing to some readers. While much attention on sexually explicit “deepfakes” has focused on celebrities, these non-consensual sexual images and videos generated with artificial intelligence harm people both in and out of the limelight. As text-to-image AI models grow more sophisticated and easier to use, the volume of such content is only increasing. The escalating problem led Google to announce last week that it will work to filter out these deepfakes in search results, and the Senate recently passed ...

LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- Utah State University geoscientist Alexis Ault recalls the devastating aftermath of back-to-back 7.8 and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes on Feb. 6, 2023, near the Turkey-Syria border that killed more than 50,000 people and displaced millions. “We witnessed the destruction firsthand, as well as the resilience of the country and population trying to get their footing and rebuild,” says Ault, associate professor in USU’s Department of Geosciences, who traveled to the disaster site about six months after ...

Light is an excellent carrier of information used not only for classical communication technologies but also increasingly for quantum applications such as quantum networking and computing. However, processing light signals is far more complex, compared to working with common electronic signals. An international team of researchers including Dr. Olga Kocharovskaya, a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, has demonstrated a novel way of storing and releasing X-ray pulses at the single photon level — a concept first ...

A new study from UC Davis Health could help to increase the supply of donor kidneys. Researchers have found that transplant patients who receive kidneys infected with the parasite toxoplasma have virtually the same outcomes as those who receive toxoplasma-negative organs. Despite longstanding concerns, those who received kidneys from toxoplasma antibody positive donors (TPDs) had almost identical mortality and rejection rates. The research was published in Transplant International. “Organs from donors who were positive for toxoplasma did ...

Offering patients with concussion a type of brain scan known as diffusion tensor imaging MRI could help identify the one in three people who will experience persistent symptoms that can be life changing, say Cambridge researchers. Around one in 200 people in Europe every year will suffer concussion. In the UK, more than 1 million people attend Emergency Departments annually with a recent head injury. It is the most common form of brain injury worldwide. When a patient in the UK presents at an Emergency Department with head injury, they ...

Experiments conducted by UC Merced researchers find that people who perform good deeds are far more likely to be thought of as religious believers than atheists. Moreover, the psychological bias linking kindness and helpfulness with faith appears to be global in scale. Research on the mental link between moral behavior and religious belief goes back more than a decade. Prior research, however, emphasized the dark side of this equation, with participants asked whether they assumed it was more probable that a serial killer believed in God or was an atheist (people in nations all over the planet thought the latter ...

In September 2023, a megatsunami in remote eastern Greenland sent seismic waves around the world, piquing the interest of the global research community. The event created a week-long oscillating wave in Dickson Fjord, according to a new report in The Seismic Record. Angela Carrillo-Ponce of GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and her colleagues identified two distinct signals in the seismic data from the event: one high-energy signal caused by the massive rockslide that generated the tsunami, and one very long-period (VLP) signal that lasted over a week. Their analysis of the VLP signal—which was detected as far as 5000 kilometers away—suggests ...

Gene therapy could potentially cure genetic diseases but it remains a challenge to package and deliver new genes to specific cells safely and effectively. Existing methods of engineering one of the most commonly used gene-delivery vehicles, adeno-associated viruses (AAV), are often slow and inefficient.  Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a machine-learning approach that promises to speed up AAV engineering for gene therapy. The tool helps researchers engineer the protein shells of AAVs, called capsids, to have multiple desirable ...

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 8, 2024) -- Since the genetic code was first deciphered in the 1960s, our genes seemed like an open book. By reading and decoding our chromosomes as linear strings of letters, like sentences in a novel, we can identify the genes in our genome and learn why changes in a gene’s code affect health. This linear rule of life was thought to govern all forms of life—from humans down to bacteria. But a new study by Columbia researchers shows that bacteria break that rule and can create free-floating and ephemeral genes, raising the possibility that similar genes exist outside ...

STARKVILLE, Miss.—NASA is awarding a Mississippi State University assistant professor a $1.13 million grant to develop a new simulation tool to aid the design of hypersonic vehicles used in space exploration. Vilas Shinde of MSU’s Department of Aerospace Engineering won the grant to develop a new flow stability and transition analysis tool, which will aid researchers and aircraft designers in understanding and predicting changes associated with the boundary layer—air flow in the vicinity of an aircraft’s ...

Houston Methodist researchers have discovered a more accurate and timely way to deliver life-saving drug therapies to the brain, laying the groundwork for more effective treatment of brain tumors and other neurological diseases. In a study published this month in Communications Biology, an open access journal from Nature Portfolio, investigators used an electric field to infuse medicine from a reservoir outside the brain to specific targets inside the brain. This adds a new dimension to the 30-year-old process of injecting therapeutics into the brain through ...

URBANA, Ill. – You’ve probably heard that cultivating gratitude can boost your happiness. But in marriage and families, it’s not just about being more grateful for your loved ones — it’s also important to feel appreciated by them. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have previously explored the positive impact of perceived gratitude from romantic partners for couples’ relationship quality. In a new study, they show the benefits of perceived gratitude ...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with overseeing the safety of the U.S. food supply, setting requirements for nutrition labeling, working with companies on food recalls, and responding to outbreaks of foodborne illness. But when it comes to additives already in our food and the safety of certain ingredients, FDA has taken a hand-off approach, according to a new article in the American Journal of Public Health. The current FDA process allows the food industry to regulate itself when it comes to thousands of added ...

A new artificial intelligence model developed by USC researchers and published in Nature Methods can predict how different proteins may bind to DNA with accuracy across different types of protein, a technological advance that promises to reduce the time required to develop new drugs and other medical treatments. The tool, called Deep Predictor of Binding Specificity (DeepPBS), is a geometric deep learning model designed to predict protein–DNA binding specificity from protein–DNA complex structures. DeepPBS ...

Solid-state electrolytes have been explored for decades for use in energy storage systems and in the pursuit of solid-state batteries. These materials are safer alternatives to the traditional liquid electrolyte—a solution that allows ions to move within the cell—used in batteries today. However, new concepts are needed to push the performance of current solid polymer electrolytes to be viable for next generation materials. Materials science and engineering researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have explored the role of helical secondary structure on the conductivity of solid-state peptide polymer ...

PHILADELPHIA – It has been two years since the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over an outbreak of mpox, a disease endemic to Africa that had spread to scores of countries. Now, in the summer of 2024, a deadlier version of the infectious disease has spread from the Democratic Republic of Congo to other African nations, the strain that originally hit the United States has shown signs of a resurgence, and this week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a new alert on mpox to health care providers. But while the American public quickly learned about the disease during the summer of 2022, as ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A traumatic brain injury, or TBI, is caused by a contusion to the head that may result in injury to the brain. This type of injury combined with the inherited genetic risk factors can result in the accelerated development of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia, or ADRD. TBIs range from mild to severe, with the majority being mild. They are especially common in adolescents engaging in contact sports and in the elderly who tend to fall with greater frequency as they age. Regardless of the source, TBI and how it progresses to ADRD is an understudied area of research. A $3.5 million grant to the University of California, ...

When Katey Walter Anthony heard rumors of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, ballooning under the lawns of fellow Fairbanks residents, she nearly didn’t believe it. “I ignored it for years because I thought ‘I am a limnologist, methane is in lakes,’” she said. But when a local reporter contacted Walter Anthony, who is a research professor at the Institute of Northern Engineering at University of Alaska Fairbanks, to inspect the waterbed-like ground at a nearby golf course, she started to pay attention. Like others in Fairbanks, they lit “turf bubbles” on fire and confirmed the presence of methane ...

Royal Commission for AlUla Collaborates with SETI Institute to Support Development of AlUla Manara Observatory   Experts from SETI Institute will support the advancement of telescope technology and data analysis at AlUla Manara Observatory.  The collaboration will enhance the future observatory's capabilities as it welcomes global scientists, researchers, and tourists interested in astronomy and space science. Ambitions to foster curiosity, knowledge sharing, and upskilling local capabilities in astronomical and space sciences field Mountain View, CA , 8 August 2024 -- The Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and SETI Institute ...

A new UC Riverside study demonstrates that calorie restriction doesn’t deter mice from exercising, challenging the belief that dieting drains workout energy. The study, published in the journal Physiology & Behavior, shows that cutting calories by 20% did not significantly reduce the distance that mice voluntarily chose to run each day.  The researchers set out to understand what happens to mice when the amount of food available to them is reduced.  The findings, they hoped, would be relevant ...

Early-stage trials in Alzheimer’s disease patients and studies in mouse models of the disease have suggested positive impacts on pathology and symptoms from exposure to light and sound presented at the “gamma” band frequency of 40 Hz. A new study zeroes in on how 40Hz sensory stimulation helps to sustain an essential process in which the signal-sending branches of neurons, called axons, are wrapped in a fatty insulation called myelin. Often called the brain’s “white matter,” myelin protects axons and insures better ...

Scientists have recovered the first long section of rocks that originated in the Earth’s mantle, the layer below the crust and the planet’s largest component. The rocks will help unravel the mantle’s role in the origins of life on Earth, the volcanic activity generated when it melts, and how it drives the global cycles of important elements such as carbon and hydrogen, according to the team. The nearly continuous 1,268 metres of mantle rock was recovered from a “tectonic window,” a section ...

Researchers have uncovered a surprising way bacteria defend themselves: when a bacterium is infected, bacterial enzymes that copy genetic information from RNA into DNA synthesize genes whose protein products help shut down cell growth. This prevents further viral spread in the neighboring bacterial population. The results highlight the potential for other “hidden” genes, like the one found here, to be unearthed in different biological contexts. Bacteria defend themselves from viral ...