Procrastination, the deliberate but detrimental deferring of tasks, has many forms. Sahiti Chebolu of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics uses a precise mathematical framework to understand its different patterns and their underlying reasons. Her insights could help tailor individual strategies to tackle the issue. “Why did I not do this when I still had the time?” – Whether it is filing taxes, meeting a deadline at work, or cleaning the apartment before a family visit, most of us have already wondered why we tend to put off certain tasks, even in the face of unpleasant consequences. Why do we make decisions that are harmful to us – against our better ...

Saudi women have obtained their citizenship rights through their own struggle and there is little truth in the widely held idea in the West that their role in the fight for their freedom has been negligible. The finding is part of a new research in the journal Diogenes authored by Zahia Salhi, a professor at Sharjah University’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. The University of Cambridge Press has also posted Prof. Salhi’s research online. “Far from being passive victims of their society, Saudi women are active agents ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Binghamton University, State University of New York Distinguished Professor and Nobel Prize Laureate M. Stanley Whittingham has been named a Knight Bachelor “for his services to research in chemistry.” The honor entitles him to be known as Sir Stanley, or Sir Stanley Whittingham, and was announced as part of King Charles III’s official birthday honours list. In his 30-plus-year career, Whittingham has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019. ...

The injectable antiretroviral drug lenacapavir was safe and 100% effective as long-acting HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) among cisgender women in a Phase 3 clinical trial, according to top-line findings released by Gilead Sciences, Inc., the study sponsor. Lenacapavir is administered every six months, making it the most durable HIV prevention method to have shown efficacy in this population. NIAID applauds the study sponsor, investigators, study staff, and—most importantly—the participants ...

The City University of New York has appointed Joshua C. Brumberg as president of the CUNY Graduate Center, making permanent a post he has held on an interim basis since October 2023. Brumberg, a neurobiologist who has been a faculty member, dean and researcher during his 22-year career at CUNY, will lead the University’s renowned center of graduate education, scholarship and public-interest research. CUNY’s Board of Trustees approved the appointment at its meeting last night. “Dr. Brumberg has played a key role in expanding CUNY’s research enterprise over the past several years,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “A ...

Before a cell commits fully to the process of dividing itself into two new cells, it may ensure the appropriateness of its commitment by staying for many hours—sometimes more than a day—in a reversible intermediate state, according to a discovery by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine. Their revelation of this fundamental feature of biology includes details of its mechanisms and dynamics, which may inform the development of future therapies targeting cancers and other diseases. In their study, published June 26 in Nature, the researchers developed new tools allowing them to track over time the activation state of E2F, a ...

ST. LOUIS, MO, June 26, 2024 – With the goal of reducing the time and cost it takes to bring an improved crop to the marketplace, research conducted in the laboratory of Keith Slotkin, PhD, and his colleagues in the Plant Transformation Facility at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, was recently published in the scientific journal Nature. The publication Transposase-assisted target site integration for efficient plant genome engineering focuses on technology called TATSI (Transposase-Assisted Target Site Integration), which uses transposable elements to integrate custom DNA into specific sites in plant genomes.  The ...

Bacteria populate virtually every habitat on Earth, including within and on our own bodies. Understanding and engineering bacteria can lead to new methods for diagnosing, treating, and preventing infections. Additionally, it presents opportunities to protect crops from disease and create sustainable cell factories for chemical production, reducing environmental impact — just a few of the many benefits to society. To unlock these advantages, scientists need the ability to manipulate the genetic content of these bacteria. However, a longstanding bottleneck in genetically engineering bacteria has been the efficient ...

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will support three innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven science projects as part of the first round of awards from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot. Led by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with DOE and several partners, the NAIRR Pilot aims to provide researchers and students with expanded access to key AI resources and data. NAIRR’s ultimate goal ...

“We wanted to investigate how second pillar pension funds react to financial crises and how to protect them from the crises,” says Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) professor Dr Audrius Kabašinskas, who, together with his team, discovered a way to achieve this goal. The discovery in question is the development of stress tests for pension funds. Lithuanian researchers were the first in the world to come up with such an adaptation of the stress tests. Stress tests are usually carried out on banks or other financial institutions to allow market regulators to determine and assess their ability to withstand adverse economic conditions. According to the professor at ...

About The Study: Multivitamin use was not associated with a mortality benefit in this cohort study of U.S. adults. Still, many adults report using multivitamins to maintain or improve health.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Erikka Loftfield, Ph.D., M.P.H., email erikka.loftfield@nih.gov. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.18729) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, ...

In order to convert sunlight into electricity or other forms of energy as efficiently as possible, the very first step is an efficient light-harvesting system. Ideally, this should be panchromatic, i.e. absorb the entire spectrum of visible light. The light-collecting antennae of plants and bacteria are a model for this. They capture a broad spectrum of light for photosynthesis, but are very complex in structure and require many different dyes to transmit the energy of the absorbed light and focus it on a central point. The light-harvesting systems developed by humans to date also have disadvantages: Although ...

Neuroscientists have discovered how the brain bidirectionally controls sensitivity to threats to initiate and complete escape behaviour in mice. These findings could help unlock new directions for discovering therapies for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study, published today in Current Biology, outlines how researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL studied a region of the brain called the periaqueductal gray (PAG), which is known to be hyperactive in people with anxiety and PTSD. Their ...

Transgender women are still at risk for prostate cancer. A new study led by Cedars-Sinai Cancer investigators, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association, concludes that current screening guidelines could miss early-stage prostate cancer in transgender women on hormone therapy. The prostate, a small gland that helps make semen, also produces a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. Blood levels of PSA tend to be elevated in people who have prostate cancer, and the PSA test, which measures those levels, is a common prostate ...

What: A large analysis of data from nearly 400,000 healthy U.S. adults followed for more than 20 years has found no association between regular multivitamin use and lower risk of death. The study, led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute, was published June 26, 2024, in JAMA Network Open. Many adults in the United States take multivitamins with the hope of improving their health. However, the benefits and harms of regular multivitamin use remain unclear. ...

Work is underway on a wiring diagram of the motor circuits in the central nervous system that control muscles in fruit flies. This connectome, as the wiring diagram is called, is already providing detailed information on how the nerve coordination of leg movements differs from that controlling the wings. Although fruit flies seem like simple creatures, the researchers said that their motor system contains “an unexpected level of complexity.” “A typical fly motor neuron receives thousands of synapses from hundreds ...

As lasers go, those made of Titanium-sapphire (Ti:sapphire) are considered to have “unmatched” performance. They are indispensable in many fields, including cutting-edge quantum optics, spectroscopy, and neuroscience. But that performance comes at a steep price. Ti:sapphire lasers are big, on the order of cubic feet in volume. They are expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each. And they require other high-powered lasers, themselves costing $30,000 each, to supply them with enough energy to function. As a result, Ti:sapphire lasers ...

Across Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Americas, El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) brings variations in winds, weather, and ocean temperature that can cause droughts, floods, crop failures, and food shortages. Recently, the world has experienced a major El Niño event in 2023-2024, dramatically impacting weather, climate, ecosystems, and economies globally. By developing an innovative modeling approach, researchers from the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University ...

A genetic “off switch” that shuts down the process in which legume plants convert atmospheric nitrogen into nutrients has been identified for the first time by a team of international scientists. Legumes like beans, peas and lentils are unique among crops for their ability to interact with soil bacteria to convert or “fix” nitrogen into a usable form of nutrients. However, this energy-intensive biological process is reduced when nitrogen is already abundant in the soil either through natural processes or through the application of synthetic ...

The Frontiers Planet Prize today (26 June) announced its 2024 International Champions. The Prize recognizes and rewards scientists whose groundbreaking research accelerates solutions to help humanity remain safely within the nine planetary boundaries. The three winning scientists, Dr Pedro Jaureguiberry, Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal (Argentina), Prof Dr Peter Haase, Senckenberg Society for Nature Research (Germany), and Prof Jason Rohr, University of Notre Dame (USA), were each awarded 1.1 million (USD) / 1 million (CHF) to support their research.  The International Champions award-winning research ...

Dark energy — a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate — was discovered 26 years ago, and ever since, scientists have been searching for a new and exotic particle causing the expansion. Pushing the boundaries of this search, University of California, Berkeley physicists have now built the most precise experiment yet to look for minor deviations from the accepted theory of gravity that could be evidence for such a particle, which theorists have dubbed a chameleon or symmetron. The experiment, which combines an atom interferometer for precise gravity ...

Key Takeaways  Spanish-speaking patients who suffer traumatic injuries face gaps in their care once they leave the hospital, many with a high need for mental health services.  More than half of the patients studied reported food insecurity, transportation challenges, and needing help with utilities.   A novel care pathway developed by researchers can help connect these patients with needed services.  CHICAGO – Many trauma patients face a myriad of challenges when recovering from a traumatic injury, ...

Promoting active and healthy ageing of citizens through a new mobile application that shows walking routes through green areas in Barcelona with data on geolocation, obstacles, pollution and weather in real time: this is the aim of the citizen science project Every Walk You Take, promoted by a team from the University of Barcelona. This initiative aims to promote physical activity and health among the over-fifty-five population through a new mobile-assisted health intervention (mHealth).   This innovative app, presented in an article published in Sustainability ...

A significant new study published in the Cyborg Bionic Systems journal by Fanli Kong and colleagues sheds light on the intricate relationship between depression and brain activity, particularly focusing on the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in rats. This research offers compelling insights into how depression can alter neural circuits and could pave the way for new treatments. Depression is a debilitating mental health issue affecting millions worldwide and is known for symptoms like persistent sadness, loss of interest in enjoyable activities, and fatigue. While traditional treatments have focused on neurotransmitters in the brain, this study dives deeper into the brain’s structural ...

The recent study by Datao Xu and his team at Ningbo University has unveiled important strategies that can be applied in athletic training and rehabilitation to curb the high rates of lower limb injuries. Their research meticulously analyzes the mechanics of single-leg landings—a common move in various sports—to propose enhanced landing techniques that not only aim to protect athletes but also improve their performance by enabling quicker recovery and continuation in sports activities. One of the study’s most significant contributions is its detailed exploration of the role of ankle dynamics in absorbing landing impacts. ...