It’s challenging to sustain a pregnancy when food is short, or conditions are otherwise tough. That’s why many mammalian embryos can postpone their growth to get through periods of environmental stress and then re-enter development when conditions improve. This stalling of development is known as embryonic diapause, and understanding the mechanisms behind it might help improve infertility treatments, such as embryo freezing. Now, researchers at the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, have discovered how nutrient depletion is sensed by embryos growing in hungry mouse mums to induce diapause. ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Most disease-causing bacteria are known for their speed: In mere minutes, they can double their population, quickly making a person sick. But just as dangerous as this rapid growth can be a bacterium’s resting state, which helps the pathogen evade antibiotics and contributes to severe chronic infections in the lungs and blood, within wounds, and on the surfaces of medical devices. Now, Scripps Research scientists have discovered how long chains of molecules called polyphosphates (polyP) are needed for bacteria to slow down movements within cells and let them enter this resting ...

SAN ANTONIO, April 10, 2024 – The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) has appointed Anthony Francis, a renowned leader in translating research to market opportunity, as associate vice president for innovation and development in the Office of the Vice President for Research. He joins the institution from the University of California San Francisco, where he was executive director of the Office of Technology Management and Advancement. Francis is credited with transforming ...

Researchers from the International Blast Injury Research Network at the University of Southampton conducted a survey to understand how the mental health of displaced Ukrainians has been affected by the ongoing war. Their findings, published in PLOS Global Public Health, describe high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized anxiety among both refugees and people displaced within Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, at least 13 million people have been displaced from their homes. Both exposure ...

Image-based artificial intelligence spots parasitic worm infections in children's stool samples, particularly light intensity infections that may be missed by manual microscopy. ##### Article URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0012041 Article Title: Diagnosis of soil-transmitted helminth infections with digital mobile microscopy and artificial intelligence in a resource-limited setting Author Countries: Finland, Kenya, Sweden Funding: This research was financially supported by The Erling-Persson Foundation (grant number 2021 0110) JL, Vetenskapsrådet (grant number 2021-04811) JL, Finska Läkaresällskapet ...

What if changes in a person’s stress levels could be detected while they sleep using wearable devices? A new study by University of Vermont researchers published today in PLOS Digital Health is the first to find changes in perceived stress levels reflected in sleep data—an important step towards identifying biomarkers that may help flag individuals in need of support.  Given how critical sleep is to physical and mental health, the research team suspected signals might exist in sleep data, says Laura Bloomfield, a research assistant professor of mathematics and statistics and lead author of the study. “Changes in stress are visible.” When parsing baseline sleep ...

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate. “When doing background reading, ...

Shedding light on why some massive stars have magnetic fields even though these stars’ interiors layers don’t undergo convection, researchers report observational evidence that magnetic fields form in some such stars through stellar mergers. The magnetic fields of low-mass stars, like the Sun, are produced by a dynamo generated in the convective layers of the star’s interior. Massive stars – those 8 or more solar masses at formation – do not have the convective interiors required to sustain magnetic fields in ...

Thin oil films absorbed onto the surface of water droplets lead to anomalously stable, surfactant-free oil and water mixtures, according to a new study. The findings demonstrate a mechanism for stabilizing water droplets in a water-oil emulsification without the need for a surfactant, which could have important technological applications, including the creation of very pure and controlled materials. Oil and water cannot form homogenous mixtures. Instead, when combined, droplets of one fluid will disperse inside the other, forming ...

New US federal legislation sets aside nearly $14 billion for 574 federally recognized indigenous nations and villages, which can be used to support tribal climate responsiveness and energy sovereignty. In a Policy Forum, Kimberly Yazzie and colleagues present a roadmap for designing, implementing, and funding projects and people to accelerate the renewable energy transition while also benefiting the indigenous entities involved. According to the authors, this opportunity positions indigenous communities to develop their economies and energy projects ...

A nitrogen-fixing bacterial endosymbiont of marine algae is evolving into a nitrogen-fixing organelle, or nitroplast, according to a new study, thereby expanding a function that was thought to be exclusively carried out by prokaryotic cells to eukaryotes. Eukaryotic cells are remarkably complex and contain various organelles, which are specialized structures within a living cell that have specific biological functions. Two organelles, mitochondria and chloroplasts, play a key role in energy metabolism and ...

Picture in your mind a traditional “landline” telephone with a coiled cord connecting the handset to the phone. The coiled telephone cord and the DNA double helix that stores the genetic material in every cell in the body have one thing in common; they both supercoil, or coil about themselves, and tangle in ways that can be difficult to undo. In the case of DNA, if this overwinding is not dealt with, essential processes such as copying DNA and cell division grind to a halt. Fortunately, cells have an ingenious solution to carefully regulate DNA supercoiling. In this study published in the journal Science, researchers ...

Aya Takeoka at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan and colleagues have discovered the neural circuitry in the spinal cord that allows brain-independent motor learning. Published in Science on April 11, the study found two critical groups of spinal cord neurons, one necessary for new adaptive learning, and another for recalling adaptations once they have been learned. The findings could help scientists develop ways to assist motor recovery after spinal cord injury. Scientists have known for some time that motor output from the spinal cord can be adjusted through practice ...

Soil carbon usually refers only to the organic matter component of soils, known as soil organic carbon (SOC). However, soil carbon also has an inorganic component, known as soil inorganic carbon (SIC). Solid SIC, often calcium carbonate, tends to accumulate more in arid regions with infertile soils, which has led many to believe it is not important. In a study published in Science, researchers led by Prof. HUANG Yuanyuan from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Prof. ZHANG Ganlin from the Institute of Soil Science of CAS, together ...

Leuven (Belgium), 11 April 2024 — The role of the spinal cord is often simplified to that of a simple relay station, carrying messages between the brain and the body. However, the spinal cord can actually learn and remember movements on its own. A team of researchers at the Leuven-based Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF) details how two different neuronal populations enable the spinal cord to adapt and recall learned behavior in a way that is completely independent of the brain. These remarkable ...

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, to prepare for missions and to entertain themselves, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes. Deeply immersive and fully interactive, holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language: the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the holodeck. Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a ...

Salt marsh restoration can mitigate flood risk and bolster community resilience to climate change in our local waterways, according to a recent study published in Nature by a postdoctoral fellow with UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience (CCCR).  The study, titled “The value of marsh restoration for flood risk reduction in an urban estuary,” explores the social and economic advantages of marsh restoration amidst the growing threats of sea level rise and storm-driven flooding. Climate change will put many communities at risk. In California, some of the study co-authors from the U.S. Geological ...

In recent years, cancer immunotherapy, exemplified by PD-1 and its ligand PD-L1 blockade, has made remarkable advances. But while immunotherapy drugs offer new treatment possibilities, only about 20% to 40% of patients respond to these treatments. The majority either don't respond or develop drug resistance. Researchers are now looking for ways to enhance the scope of tumor immunotherapy in order to benefit a wider range of patients.  One such avenue is through the protein tyrosine phosphatase non-receptor type 2 (PTPN2) and its close superfamily member, PTPN1, identified in previous research as crucial modulators involved in the regulation ...

A new study in JAMA Network Open led by researchers from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy observed 28,322 park users across 54 neighborhood parks and found a clear association between park renovation and park use in low-income neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). As the global trend toward urbanization continues, two thirds of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities by 2050. Amid the noise, stress, and crowding of city life, urban parks have the potential to provide opportunities for physical activity, mitigate heat and pollution, lower stress, and improve mental and social well-being, all of which can decrease the prevalence ...

Adding one simple rule to an idealized game of billiards leads to a wealth of intriguing mathematical questions, as well as applications in the physics of living organisms. This week, researchers from the University of Amsterdam, including two master students as first authors – have published a paper in Physical Review Letters about the fascinating dynamics of billiards with memory. Billiards: a mathematical mystery An idealized version of the game of billiards has fascinated mathematicians for decades. The basic ...

While there’s no regulation in the U.S. for what’s in organic shampoos, they tend to contain ingredients perceived as safe or environmentally friendly. However, these “clean” shampoos separate and spoil faster than those made with synthetic stabilizers and preservatives. Now, researchers in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering demonstrate that a simple process — spinning organic shampoo at high speeds — improved the final products’ shelf lives and ability to clean hair. Natural emulsifiers, such as xanthan gum and cetyl alcohol, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Left unchecked, corrosion can rust out cars and pipes, take down buildings and bridges, and eat away at our monuments. Corrosion can also damage devices that could be key to a clean energy future. And now, Duke University researchers have captured extreme close-ups of that process in action. “By studying how and why renewable energy devices break down over time, we might be able to extend their lifetime,” said chemistry professor and senior author Ivan Moreno-Hernandez. In his lab at Duke sits a miniature version of one such device. Called an electrolyzer, ...

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) has announced that the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville (SOMG) and Loma Linda University School of Medicine (LLUSM) are the first to earn the highest recognition of a “Platinum Plus” certification designation for the significant level of undergraduate lifestyle medicine curricula within their programs. The Platinum Plus is the highest tier of certification that a medical school can receive from ACLM and indicates the incorporation of at least 100 hours of evidence-based lifestyle medicine content within the curriculum. This level of lifestyle medicine ...

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Avi Wigderson as recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science. Wigderson is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has been a leading figure in areas including computational complexity theory, algorithms and optimization, randomness and cryptography, parallel and distributed computation, combinatorics, and graph theory, as well as ...

– By Lauren Core The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), which is led by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has been extended for five more years with $75 million in funding from DOE. NAWI will continue its contributions to helping decarbonize the water and wastewater sectors through investments in technologies that enhance the efficient use of energy for water use, treatment, and distribution.   “Water and energy are interdependent – water is used to produce nearly every major energy source, and ...