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Science20 Jan 2021

Protected areas vulnerable to growing emphasis on food security

Protected areas are critical to mitigating extinction of species; however, they may also be in conflict with efforts to feed the growing human population. A new study shows that 6% of all global terrestrial protected areas are already made up of cropland, a heavily modified habitat that is often not suitable for supporting wildlife. Worse, 22% of this cropland occurs in areas supposedly enjoying the strictest levels of protection, the keystone of global biodiversity protection efforts. This finding was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental ...

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Science20 Jan 2021

Exploration of toxic Tiger Rattlesnake venom advances use of genetic science techniques

The Tiger Rattlesnake possesses the simplest, yet most toxic venom of any rattlesnake species, and now new research from a team lead by a University of South Florida biologist can explain the genetics behind the predator's fearsome bite. Published in the new edition of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," USF Department of Integrative Biology Assistant Professor Mark Margres and colleagues across the southeastern United States have sequenced the genome of the Tiger Rattlesnake to understand the genotype of the venom trait. Despite the simplicity of the Tiger Rattlesnake's venom, Margres says it is roughly 40 times more toxic than the venom of the Eastern Diamondback ...

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Medicine20 Jan 2021

Rush researchers demonstrate success with new therapy for COVID-19

A new therapy developed by researchers at Rush University Medical Center is showing success as a way to prevent COVID-19 symptoms in mice. In a study published in the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology, mouse models with COVID-19 showed positive results when a small peptide was introduced nasally. The peptide proved effective in reducing fever, protecting the lungs, improving heart function and reversing cytokine storm -- a condition in which an infection triggers the immune system to flood the bloodstream with inflammatory proteins. The researchers also report success in preventing the disease from progression. "This ...

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Science19 Jan 2021

Worker safety goes beyond human error

Disasters in high-risk industries can have catastrophic environmental, financial and human safety consequences. One way these industries help prevent and mitigate disasters is formal procedures designed to standardize how work is done. These procedures typically come in the form of a written document workers use while performing a task. Camille Peres, associate professor at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, said that there are two models of safety companies usually follow to varying degrees, whether they realize it or not. Safety model one "is very much a control paradigm," Peres said. "The idea the company has is that if they control absolutely everything that's going on, then they will be safe." This ...

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Technology19 Jan 2021

How to train a robot (using AI and supercomputers)

Before he joined the University of Texas at Arlington as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and founded the Robotic Vision Laboratory there, William Beksi interned at iRobot, the world's largest producer of consumer robots (mainly through its Roomba robotic vacuum). To navigate built environments, robots must be able to sense and make decisions about how to interact with their locale. Researchers at the company were interested in using machine and deep learning to train their robots to learn about objects, but doing so requires a large dataset of images. While there are millions of photos and videos of rooms, none were shot from the vantage point of a robotic vacuum. Efforts to train using images with human-centric perspectives failed. Beksi's ...

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Engineering19 Jan 2021

Constructing termite turrets without a blueprint

Following a series of studies on termite mound physiology and morphogenesis over the past decade, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have now developed a mathematical model to help explain how termites construct their intricate mounds. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Termite mounds are amongst the greatest examples of animal architecture on our planet," said L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and ...

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Physics19 Jan 2021

Do simulations represent the real world at the atomic scale?

Computer simulations hold tremendous promise to accelerate the molecular engineering of green energy technologies, such as new systems for electrical energy storage and solar energy usage, as well as carbon dioxide capture from the environment. However, the predictive power of these simulations depends on having a means to confirm that they do indeed describe the real world. Such confirmation is no simple task. Many assumptions enter the setup of these simulations. As a result, the simulations must be carefully checked by using an appropriate "validation protocol" involving experimental measurements. "We focused on a solid/liquid interface because interfaces are ubiquitous in materials, and those between oxides and water are key in many energy applications." -- Giulia Galli, theorist ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Genome editing to treat human retinal degeneration

New Rochelle, NY, January 19, 2021--Gene editing therapies, including CRISPR-Cas systems, offer the potential to correct mutations causing inherited retinal degenerations, a leading cause of blindness. Technological advances in gene editing, continuing safety concerns, and strategies to overcome these challenges are highlighted in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Human Gene Therapy website. "Currently, the field is undergoing rapid development with a number of competing gene editing strategies, including allele-specific knock-down, base editing, prime editing, and RNA editing, are under investigation. Each offers a ...

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Social Science19 Jan 2021

Appearance, social norms keep students off Zoom cameras

ITHACA, N.Y. - When the semester shifted online amid the COVID-19 pandemic last spring, Cornell University instructor Mark Sarvary, and his teaching staff decided to encourage - but not require - students to switch on their cameras. It didn't turn out as they'd hoped. "Most of our students had their cameras off," said Sarvary, director of the Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). "Students enjoy seeing each other when they work in groups. And instructors like seeing students, because it's a way to assess whether or not they understand the material," Sarvary said. "When we switched to online learning, that component got lost. We wanted to investigate the reasons ...

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Environment19 Jan 2021

NASA explores solar wind with new view of small sun structures

Scientists have combined NASA data and cutting-edge image processing to gain new insight into the solar structures that create the Sun's flow of high-speed solar wind, detailed in new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal. This first look at relatively small features, dubbed "plumelets," could help scientists understand how and why disturbances form in the solar wind. The Sun's magnetic influence stretches billions of miles, far past the orbit of Pluto and the planets, defined by a driving force: the solar wind. This constant outflow of solar material carries the Sun's magnetic field out into space, where it shapes the environments around Earth, other worlds, and in the reaches of deep space. Changes in the solar wind ...

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Space19 Jan 2021

Astronomers dissect the anatomy of planetary nebulae using Hubble Space Telescope images

Images of two iconic planetary nebulae taken by the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing new information about how they develop their dramatic features. Researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology and Green Bank Observatory presented new findings about the Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302) and the Jewel Bug Nebula (NGC 7027) at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Friday, Jan. 15. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the nebulae in 2019 and early 2020 using its full, panchromatic capabilities, and the astronomers involved in the project ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Unlocking 'the shape of water' in mechanisms of antibiotic resistance

New high-resolution structures of the bacterial ribosome determined by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago show that a single water molecule may be the cause -- and possible solution -- of antibiotic resistance. The findings of the new UIC study are published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Pathogenic germs become resistant to antibiotics when they develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. Each year in the U.S., millions of people suffer from antibiotic-resistant infections, and thousands of people die as a result. Developing new drugs is a key way the scientific community is trying to reduce the impact of antibiotic resistance. "The first thing we need to do to make improved drugs is to better understand how antibiotics work and how 'bad ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Heart attack patients in England 'fearful' of seeking medical help amid COVID crisis

Data analysis is revealing a second sharp drop in the number of people admitted to hospital in England with acute heart failure or a heart attack. The decline began in October as the numbers of COVID-19 infections began to surge ahead of the second lockdown, which came into force in early November. The findings, from a research group led by the University of Leeds, have been revealed in a letter to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The decline - 41 percent fewer people attending with heart failure and 34 percent with a heart attack compared to pre-pandemic levels ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Brain cell network supplies neurons with energy

The human brain has about as many neurons as glial cells. These are divided into four major groups: the microglia, the astrocytes, the NG2 glial cells, and the oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes function primarily as a type of cellular insulating tape: They form long tendrils, which consist largely of fat-like substances and do not conduct electricity. These wrap around the axons, which are the extensions through which the nerve cells send their electrical impulses. This prevents short circuits and accelerates signal forwarding. Astrocytes, on the other hand, supply the nerve cells with energy: Through their appendages they come into contact with blood vessels and absorb glucose from these. ...

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Technology19 Jan 2021

Light-controlled Higgs modes found in superconductors; potential sensor, computing uses

AMES, Iowa - Even if you weren't a physics major, you've probably heard something about the Higgs boson. There was the title of a 1993 book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that dubbed the Higgs "The God Particle." There was the search for the Higgs particle that launched after 2009's first collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. There was the 2013 announcement that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently theorizing in 1964 that a fundamental particle - the Higgs - is the source of mass in subatomic ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

New COVID-19 model shows little benefit in vaccinating high-risk individuals first

BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - The World Health Organization END ...

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Science19 Jan 2021

Fastener with microscopic mushroom design holds promise

WASHINGTON, January 19, 2021 -- A Velcro-like fastener with a microscopic design that looks like tiny mushrooms could mean advances for everyday consumers and scientific fields like robotics. In Biointerphases, published by AIP Publishing, researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands show how the design can use softer materials and still be strong enough to work. Probabilistic fasteners work, because they are designed with a tiny pattern on one surface that interlocks with features on the other surface. Currently available fasteners, like Velcro and 3M, are called hook and loop fasteners. That design requires harder, stiff material, which ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Individual and organizational capacity to change can reduce health care workforce burnout

Even prior to the pandemic, burnout among health care professionals was a pervasive public health concern, with END ...

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Science19 Jan 2021

Land deals meant to improve food security may have hurt

Large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors, intended to improve global food security, had little to no benefit, increasing crop production in some areas while simultaneously threatening local food security in others, according to researchers who studied their effects. The END ...

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Science19 Jan 2021

Even a small amount of gender bias in hiring can be costly to employers

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Tiny amounts of gender bias in employee hiring decisions contribute to concerning rates of discrimination and productivity losses that together represent significant costs, financial and otherwise, for employers, a new study from Oregon State University has found. Gender bias is a subtle, unintentional preference for one gender over the other. Despite significant efforts to reduce bias in hiring over the last several decades, it continues to persist and pose potential problems for companies, said Jay Hardy, an assistant professor of management in OSU's College ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Disease threatens to decimate western bats

BOZEMAN, Montana (January 19, 2021) - A four-year study recently published in Ecology and Evolution concludes that the fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, poses a severe threat to many western North American bats. Since it was first detected in 2006, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats in eastern and central North America. The spread of the fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome in hibernating bats has reached several western U.S. states, mostly likely through bat-to-bat spread, and is presently threatening western species. Bats with white-nose syndrome have fungus growing on their nose and wings, as the name implies, but the fungal infection also triggers a higher frequency of arousals from hibernation. ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

Where do our minds wander? Brain waves can point the way

Anyone who has tried and failed to meditate knows that our minds are rarely still. But where do they roam? New research led by UC Berkeley has come up with a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people performed mundane attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that reveal when the mind is not focused on the task at hand or aimlessly wandering, especially after concentrating on an assignment. Specifically, increased alpha brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of ...

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Space19 Jan 2021

Counting elephants from space

For the first time, scientists have successfully used satellite cameras coupled with deep learning to count animals in complex geographical landscapes, taking conservationists an important step forward in monitoring populations of endangered species. For this research, the satellite Worldview 3 used high-resolution imagery to capture African elephants moving through forests and grasslands. The automated system detected animals with the same accuracy as humans are able to achieve. The algorithm that enabled the detection process was created by Dr Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath in the UK. The project was a collaboration with the UK's University of Oxford and the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Dr ...

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Medicine19 Jan 2021

5G doesn't cause COVID-19, but the rumor it does spread like a virus

People's fear of 5G technology is rational. Such technology does emit radiation, even if it's at low levels. But 5G isn't all that different from 4G, and it certainly doesn't cause COVID-19 despite such rumors having spread rapidly across the globe. Researchers need to better understand how misinformation like this spreads in order to hone their intervention efforts and prevent misinformed perspectives from taking root. In society's virtual world, preventing technological misinformation, in particular, is important now more than ever. A research team led by Elaine Nsoesie, a Hariri Institute Faculty Fellow, investigated how COVID-19 misinformation proliferated using ...

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Science19 Jan 2021

Study in twins identifies fecal microbiome differences in food allergies

A new study out of the University of Chicago and Stanford University on pairs of twins with and without food allergies has identified potential microbial players in this condition. The results were published on Jan. 19 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study grew out of prior research in the Nagler laboratory at UChicago on the fecal microbiota in infants. By transplanting fecal microbes from healthy and food-allergic infants to germ-free mice (who do not possess a microbiome), investigators found that the healthy infant microbiota was protective against the development ...

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