In the realm of quantum mechanics, the ability to observe and control quantum phenomena at room temperature has long been elusive, especially on a large or “macroscopic” scale. Traditionally, such observations have been confined to environments near absolute zero, where quantum effects are easier to detect. But the requirement for extreme cold has been a major hurdle, limiting practical applications of quantum technologies. Now, a study led by Tobias J. Kippenberg and Nils Johan Engelsen at EPFL, redefines the boundaries of what’s ...

The Amazon rainforest could approach a tipping point, which could lead to a large-scale collapse with serious implications for the global climate system. A new Nature study by an international research team including scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research (PIK) reveals that up to 47 percent of the Amazonian forest is threatened and identifies climatic and land-use thresholds that should not be breached to keep the Amazon resilient. “The Southeastern Amazon has already shifted from a carbon sink to a source –meaning that the current amount of human pressure is too high for the region to maintain its status as a rainforest over the long term. But ...

Nearly 150 years ago, scientists discovered that specialized blood cells serve a vital role in immune system protection against infection and illness. Certain groups of these white blood cells, now known as neutrophils, feature a nucleus that is structured strikingly different than most nuclei. The majority of cells feature round- or oval-shaped nuclei that are rigid, but neutrophils differ in that their nuclei adopt multiple lobular structures akin to that of flower petal arrangements. These unique nuclear shapes permit neutrophils to travel all over the body to identify and combat invading ...

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and research has shown that the human brain does indeed better retain information from images than from text. These days, we are taking in more visual content than ever as we peruse picture-packed news sites and social media platforms. And much of that visual content, according to new Berkeley Haas research published in the journal Nature, is reinforcing powerful gender stereotypes. Through a series of experiments, observations, and the help of large language models, professors Douglas Guilbeault and Solène Delecourt found that female and male gender associations are more extreme among Google Images than within text ...

Like other factors such as age, sex and genetics, smoking has a major impact on immune responses. This is the finding recently made by a team of scientists at the Institut Pasteur using the Milieu Intérieur cohort of 1,000 healthy volunteers, established to understand variability in immune responses. In addition to its short-term impact on immunity, smoking also has long-term consequences. For many years after they have quit the habit, smokers are left with effects on some of their bodies' defense mechanisms acquired while smoking. These findings, which for the first time reveal a long-term memory of the effects of smoking ...

Discovery of a pair of genes that work in perfect harmony to protect male fertility, could provide new insights into some unexplained cases of the most severe form of infertility, research suggests. Genetic analysis of cases of male infertility revealed that rare mutations in a gene, known as SPOCD1, disrupts the formation of healthy sperm during the earliest stages of their development. The gene was also found to work in partnership with a previously unknown gene, C19orf84, to protect the early-stage precursors to sperm, known as germ cells, from damage. The discovery of the essential role of these ...

Recent release of the waste water from Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster stirred apprehension regarding the health implications of radiation exposure. Classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, ionizing radiation has long been associated with various cancers and genetic disorders, as evidenced by survivors and descendants of atomic bombings and the Chernobyl disaster. Despite much smaller amount, we remain consistently exposed to low levels of radiation in everyday life and medical procedures. Radiation, whether in the form of high-energy particles or electromagnetic waves, is conventionally known to break our cellular DNA, leading to cancer ...

In the United States, more than one-fourth of adults over age 40 have an eye disease, including glaucoma, cataracts or age-related macular degeneration, or a chronic health condition that affects the eyes, such as diabetic retinopathy. These conditions are a strain on an individual’s health as well as on the health-care system, yet early diagnosis and management can help to prevent more than 90% of severe vision loss. Chao Zhou, a professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been working to improve optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems that can conduct high-resolution imaging of the ...

Athletes often suffer injuries to ligaments in their knees, particularly to the anterior cruciate ligament or ACL. While surgery to replace these torn ligaments is becoming increasingly common around the world it often needs to be repeated. That’s because it has proved challenging to anchor fibrous, soft and wet ligament grafting material into hard bone.  Now, McGill University researchers have new information from the eggshell membrane in chicken eggs that could help change this picture thanks to the potential it offers for improvements in tissue engineering ...

Today, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) opened a national competition to select up to 30 early career faculty in science to join the 2025 cohort of the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program.   Freeman Hrabowski Scholars are outstanding basic researchers, including physician-scientists, who have strong potential to become leaders in their fields. Scholars are committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion through their mentoring efforts and understanding of systemic exclusion and marginalization in science of trainees from different backgrounds. While pursuing excellence in their own research, Scholars work to create an inclusive lab climate ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is common among U.S. military veterans. It’s also linked with higher risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. A study led by researchers with The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine found that crisis response planning (CRP) can help. This brief intervention quickly reduced suicidal thoughts among patients receiving daily therapy for two weeks for PTSD. This type of therapy is called “cognitive processing therapy,” or CPT. “This study shows that crisis response planning can rapidly reduce suicide risk. It is the first study to prove this technique works when ...

The CRISPR Journal announces the publication of its February 2024 issue. The CRISPR Journal is devoted to publishing outstanding research in CRISPR biology, technology, and genome editing. Chief Editor is Professor Rodolphe Barrangou, PhD (North Carolina State University); Executive Editor is Dr. Kevin Davies. For full-text copies of articles or to arrange interviews with the editors, authors, or members of the editorial board, contact Kathryn Ryan at the Publisher. 1. Warrior spirit: An interview with sickle cell pioneer Victoria Gray,  The gene editing world and the sickle cell disease (SCD) ...

WHAT: Women who receive an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination or booster during pregnancy can provide their infants with strong protection against symptomatic COVID-19 infection for at least six months after birth, according to a study from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. These findings, published in Pediatrics, reinforce the importance of receiving both a COVID-19 vaccine and booster during pregnancy to ensure that infants are born with robust protection that lasts until they are old enough to be vaccinated. COVID-19 is especially dangerous for newborns and young infants, and even healthy infants are vulnerable ...

Skywalker gibbon couples wake up each morning and sing to each other, their voices echoing across the forest canopy of their home. The primate’s endearing love song helped scientists confirm what was formerly a strong hunch: Myanmar has the largest population of endangered Skywalker gibbons on Earth. When Star Wars-loving scientists identified Skywalker gibbons as a distinct species in 2017, fewer than 200 individuals were known to exist, all in southwestern China. A study published today in the International Journal of Primatology is the first in the past century to confirm living Skywalker gibbons in ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 14, 2024 – It was a last-ditch effort. For years doctors had tried to keep a patient’s recurrent drug-resistant bacterial blood infection at bay, but it kept coming back and antibiotics were no longer working. The family agreed to try an experimental treatment that uses viruses to kill bacteria. The patient’s Enterococcus faecium bacterial strain, which had become zombie-like and was almost impossible to treat with currently available antibiotics, was tested against wastewater collected from across the country to find a virus – called a bacteriophage – that scientists theorized would specifically target the drug-resistant bacteria. It worked ...

ETRI’s researchers have developed an AI-powered e-sports analysis platform that provides real-time win rate prediction services by analyzing gameplay screens. This platform was notably applied to the highly popular League of Legends (LoL) during a recent international e-sports tournament, garnering positive feedback. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has developed a technology that recognizes real-time game situations by analyzing play elements extracted from game videos and automatically generates highlights by identifying key play events in the game. Also, this e-sports service platform, based ...

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and the University of California, Davis have reached a new breakthrough in pancreatic cancer research—eight years in the making. It could help slow the disease’s deadly spread. In 2017, as a postdoc in CSHL’s Tuveson lab, Chang-il Hwang and collaborators from the Vakoc lab uncovered a protein essential for jumpstarting metastasis in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Now an assistant professor at UC Davis, Hwang recently reunited with CSHL Professors David Tuveson and Christopher Vakoc. The trio once again set their sights on PDAC. The disease is known for its aggressiveness. ...

While pesticides protect crops from hungry animals, pesky insects, or even microbial infections, they also impact other vital organisms, including bees and earthworms. And today, research published in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters reveals that worms are affected by the relatively small amounts of chemicals that can leach out of pesticide-treated seeds. Exposure to nonlethal amounts of these insecticides and fungicides resulted in poor weight gain and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage in the worms. Pesticide treatment can be introduced at several different ...

In humans, the length of pre-mRNA varies extensively (from 30 to 1,160,411 nucleotides by recent studies). The fundamental mechanism of splicing has been studied with model pre-mRNAs including 158- and 231-nt introns, for historical instance, that are spliced very efficiently in vitro and in vivo. Such an ideal pre-mRNA contains good splicing signal sequences, i.e., the 5′ splice site, the branch-site (BS) sequence, and the polypyrimidine tract (PPT) followed by the 3′ splice site that are recognized by U1 snRNP, U2 snRNP and U2AF2–U2AF1, respectively. Prof. Mayeda says, “Given the diverse lengths ...

Corals searching for food in the cold and dark waters of the deep sea are building higher and higher mountains to get closer to the source of their food. But in doing so, they may find themselves trapped when the climate changes. That is shown in the thesis that theoretical ecologist Anna van der Kaaden of NIOZ in Yerseke and the Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development in Utrecht will defend on Feb. 20 at the University of Groningen. “When the water gets warmer, these creatures prefer to be deeper, but a coral doesn’t just walk down the mountain,” Van der Kaaden said. Deep and dark Unlike the famous, colorful tropical corals, cold-water corals live ...

Surgeons who routinely change surgical gloves and instruments are incurring similar costs to those using the same equipment, a new study has found. The economic evaluation funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) follows a clinical trial conducted at 80 hospitals in Benin, Ghana, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa which established that routine change of gloves and instruments reduces surgical site infections (SSIs) by 13%. The evaluation, published by the Lancet Global ...

Scientists have long thought of the fluid-filled sac around our lungs merely as a cushion from external damage. Turns out, it also houses potent virus-eating cells that rush into the lungs during flu infections. Not to be confused with phages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, these cells are macrophages, immune cells produced in the body.  “The name macrophage means ‘big eater.’ They gobble up bacteria, viruses, cancer cells, and dying cells. Really, anything that looks foreign, they take it up and destroy it,” said UC Riverside virologist Juliet Morrison, who led the discovery team. “We were surprised to find them in the lungs ...

USC, together with Leonard and his late wife Pamela Schaeffer, is launching a new institute with a $59 million gift from the Schaeffers to be anchored in Los Angeles and in the university’s new Capital Campus in Washington, D.C. The mission of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Institute for Public Policy & Government Service is to strengthen democracy by training generations of public leaders and advancing evidence-based research to shape policy that addresses the nation’s most pressing issues, USC President Carol Folt announced ...

  ANN ARBOR—Using social media data and artificial intelligence in a comprehensive national assessment, a new University of Michigan study reveals that nearly 15% of Americans deny that climate change is real. Scientists have long warned that a warming climate will cause communities around the globe to face increasing risks due to unprecedented levels of flooding, wildfires, heat stress, sea-level rise and more. Though the science is sound—even showing that human-induced, climate-related natural disasters are growing in frequency ...

Red nets are better at keeping away a common agricultural insect pest than typical black or white nets, according to a new study. Researchers experimented with the effect of red, white, black and combination-colored nets on deterring onion thrips from eating Kujo leeks, also called Welsh onions. In both lab and field tests, red nets were significantly better at deterring the insect than other colors. Also, in field tests, onion crops which were either partially or fully covered by red netting required 25-50% less insecticide than was needed for a totally uncovered field. Changing agricultural nets from black or white to red could help reduce pesticide ...