APRIL 24, 2024 – A research paper published today in Science Advances reveals a direct correlation between plastic production and plastic pollution, such that every 1% increase in plastic production is associated with a 1% increase in plastic pollution in the environment. The study finds that fast-moving consumer goods companies disproportionately contribute to the problem more than household and retail companies. The study marks the first robust quantification of the global relationship between plastic production and pollution. The research, led by scientists ...

In a new paper appearing in Science Advances, Michigan State University researchers have unraveled a surprising genetic mystery centered on sugars found in what gardeners know as “tomato tar.” Anyone who has pruned tomato plants barehanded has likely found their fingers darkened with a sticky, gold-black substance that won’t quite wash off. This tomato tar is sticky for good reason. It’s made of sugars — acylsugars, to be precise — and acts as a sort of natural flypaper for ...

NEW YORK, April 24, 2024 — Sexual dimorphism—the visible difference between females and males—can be seen in diverse animals, including humans. One intriguing aspect of this phenomenon is sex-limited polymorphism, where one sex displays greater variations in a particular trait than the other. In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers delve into the genetic underpinnings behind the color polymorphism observed in adult females of the brood parasitic Cuculus, more widely known as cuckoo birds, shedding light on the evolution and functional significance of this phenomenon. Several species of cuckoos, a genus of birds ...

Philadelphia, April 24, 2024 – As patients with congenital heart diseases live longer, researchers are attempting to understand some of the other complications they may face as they age. In a new study, a team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) used state-of-the-art technologies to understand the underlying biology of Fontan-associated liver disease (FALD). The findings, published today in Science Translational Medicine, reveal unprecedented insights into how the disease develops and potential therapeutic targets for future treatment options. The Fontan operation is ...

A thin film that combines an electrode grid and LEDs can both track and produce a visual representation of the brain’s activity in real-time during surgery–a huge improvement over the current state of the art. The device is designed to provide neurosurgeons visual information about a patient’s brain to monitor brain states during surgical interventions to remove brain lesions including tumors and epileptic tissue.  Each LED in the device mirrors the activity of a few thousand neurons. In a series of proof-of-concept experiments in rodents and large non-primate mammals, researchers showed that ...

Kyoto, Japan -- Climate change can be characterized as the Grim Reaper or some other harbinger of dire times for humanity and natural environment, including forests. Previous studies reporting a decline in forest productivity due to climate warming and long-term drought may suggest that trees' survival hangs in the balance. Now, a study by an international group, including Kyoto University, found that forests with higher trait diversity not only adapt better to climate change but may also thrive. The study, conducted by researchers from Lakehead ...

Every cuckoo is an adopted child – raised by foster parents, into whose nest the cuckoo mother smuggled her egg. The cuckoo mother is aided in this subterfuge by her resemblance to a bird of prey. There are two variants of female cuckoos: a gray morph that looks like a sparrowhawk, and a rufous morph. Male cuckoos are always gray. “With this mimicry, the bird imitates dangerous predators of the host birds, so that they keep their distance instead of attacking,” says Professor Jochen Wolf from LMU Munich. Together with researchers at CIBIO (Centro de Investigação ...

A new way of quickly distinguishing between illegal elephant ivory and legal mammoth tusk ivory could prove critical to fighting the illegal ivory trade. A laser-based approach developed by scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Lancaster, could be used by customs worldwide to aid in the enforcement of illegal ivory from being traded under the guise of legal ivory. Results from the study are published in PLOS ONE today [24 April]. Despite the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) ban on ivory, poaching associated with its illegal trade has ...

Robotics engineers have worked for decades and invested many millions of research dollars in attempts to create a robot that can walk or run as well as an animal. And yet, it remains the case that many animals are capable of feats that would be impossible for robots that exist today.    “A wildebeest can migrate for thousands of kilometres over rough terrain, a mountain goat can climb up a literal cliff, finding footholds that don't even seem to be there, and cockroaches can lose a leg and not slow down,” ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Conditions such as diabetes, heart attack and vascular diseases commonly diagnosed in people with spinal cord injuries can be traced to abnormal post-injury neuronal activity that causes abdominal fat tissue compounds to leak and pool in the liver and other organs, a new animal study has found. After discovering the connection between dysregulated neuron function and the breakdown of triglycerides in fat tissue in mice, researchers found that a short course of the drug gabapentin, commonly prescribed for nerve pain, prevented ...

Neuroscientists have revealed that recency bias in working memory naturally leads to central tendency bias, the phenomenon where people’s (and animals’) judgements are biased towards the average of previous observations. Their findings may hint at why the phenomenon is so ubiquitous. Researchers in the Akrami Lab at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and the Clopath Lab at Imperial College London developed a network model with a working memory module and another accounting for sensory histories. The study, published in eLife, describes how the model shows neural circuits ...

April 24, 2024, NEW YORK – A Ludwig Cancer Research study has discovered how a lipid molecule found at high levels within tumors undermines the anti-cancer immune response and compromises a recently approved immunotherapy known as adoptive cell therapy (ACT) using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes, or TIL-ACT. In this individualized cell therapy, TILs—CD8+ T cells that kill cancer cells—are expanded in culture from a patient’s tumor samples and reinfused into the patient as a treatment. Researchers led by Ludwig Lausanne’s Matteo ...

In 2022, an estimated 249 million malaria cases killed 608,000 people  in 85 countries worldwide including the United States, according to the World Health Organization. Malaria continues to pose a considerable public health risk in tropical and subtropical areas, where it impacts human health and economic progress. Despite concerns about the potential impact of climate change on increasing malaria risk, there is still limited understanding of how temperature affects malaria transmission – until now. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite that spreads from bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. If left untreated in humans, malaria can cause severe symptoms, ...

The secondary salinization of saline-alkali land is increasing globally. It is of strategic significance to explore the salt-tolerant molecular mechanism of halophytes and cultivate saline-alkali resistant crops for the improvement of saline-alkali land. The recretohalophyte Limonium bicolor has a unique salt-secreting structure, salt gland, which can directly excrete Na+ out of the body to effectively avoid salt stress. Exploring the development mechanism of salt gland structure in recretohalophyte is of great significance for analyzing the development of plant epidermis structure and improving the salt-resistant mechanism of plants. Recently, Wang ...

SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human has been named as a 16th Annual Shorty Awards finalist in the Science and Technology Podcast Category.  The Shorty Awards honor the best work in digital and social media by the most creative and influential brands, agencies, organizations, and individuals whose work has excelled in creativity, strategy, and effectiveness. SAPIENS’s work has demonstrated outstanding performance across the judging criteria, which makes it a top contender for a Shorty Award in a most competitive year. The work is also eligible for ...

Commercial bankers provide capital to fund the operations and growth of businesses. However, as these lenders evaluate entrepreneurs who apply for loans, gender bias leads to women being denied more often than their male counterparts. Estimates show a $1.7 trillion financing gap worldwide for small- and medium-sized enterprises owned by women. Studies show that when women do secure business loans, the amounts tend to be smaller, have higher interest rates and require more collateral, which restricts the economic potential of women-led ventures. However, findings ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Adverse life events are a known and predominant risk factor for postpartum depression in women after delivery of their baby. Furthermore, the postpartum depression in women who have experienced adverse life events tends to be refractory to treatment. In a study using a mouse model and human subjects, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Johns Hopkins Medicine show that stress from adolescent social isolation in mice elicits a prolonged elevation of corticosterone levels and glucocorticoid signaling, which in turn results ...

One day you hear that red wine is good for your heart. The next day, it’s not. The same goes for chocolate. And coffee. The see-saw of contradicting information isn’t anything new, but what happens when clinicians hear conflicting studies about a medication they use for their patients? Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are hoping to use, among other methods, a variety of artificial intelligence to help sort that out.  Ellen Caniglia, ScD, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and Enrique Schisterman, PhD, a professor and the chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics (DBEI), ...

New research has discovered that neotame, one of the new generation of artificial sweeteners, is capable of damaging the human intestine and causing illness. The study is the first to show that neotame can cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased and invade the gut wall – potentially leading to health issues including irritable bowel syndrome and sepsis – and also cause a breakdown of the epithelial barrier, which forms part of the gut wall. The research, which is published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition and was carried out at Anglia Ruskin ...

In a proof-of-concept study, researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of a potential new therapy for Timothy syndrome, an often life-threatening and rare genetic disorder that affects a wide range of bodily systems, leading to severe cardiac, neurological, and psychiatric symptoms as well as physical differences such as webbed fingers and toes. The treatment restored typical cellular function in 3D structures created from cells of people with Timothy syndrome, known as organoids, which can mimic the function of cells ...

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights showcases the latest breakthroughs in cancer care, research and prevention. These advances are made possible through seamless collaboration between MD Anderson’s world-leading clinicians and scientists, bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back. Recent developments at MD Anderson offer insights into a novel targeted therapy for rare cancers, the role of enhancer RNAs in cell differentiation, novel biomarkers for the prognosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer, imaging signatures to stratify ...

Crossing a busy street safely typically is a result of a social exchange. Pedestrians look for cues—a wave, a head nod, a winking flash of the headlights, and, of course, a full vehicle stop—to know it’s safe to cross. But those clues could be absent or different with self-driving vehicles. How will children and adults know when it’s safe to cross the road? In a new study, University of Iowa researchers investigated how pre-teenage children determined when it was safe to cross a residential street with oncoming self-driving cars. The researchers found children made the ...

Mount Sinai researchers have published the first study to use single-cell analysis in identifying several pathophysiological mechanisms of abnormal passageways in the digestive system known as perianal fistulae, a common complication of Crohn’s disease. These findings were published in the journal Med on April 24. Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that causes chronic inflammation at any part of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and impacts more than half a million people in the United States. Perianal fistulae, abnormal connections between the anal canal and perianal skin, are a common complication of Crohn’s disease that often result in ...

HOUSTON – (April 24, 2024) – People say “When pigs fly” to describe the impossible. But even if most mammals are landlubbers, the ability to glide or fly has evolved again and again during mammalian evolution, in species ranging from bats to flying squirrels. How did that come about? In a study published in the journal Nature this week, a team of researchers led by Princeton University and Baylor College of Medicine explains the genomic and developmental basis of the patagium, the thin skin membrane that allows some mammalian species to soar through the air. “We don't quite understand how novel traits and adaptations originate from a molecular ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of pediatric enrollees across three commercial health insurance databases, statistical signals detected for myocarditis or pericarditis after BNT162b2 (ages 12-17 years) were consistent with previous reports, and seizures after BNT162b2 (ages 2-4 years) and mRNA-1273 vaccinations (ages 2-5 years) should be further investigated in a robust epidemiologic study with confounding adjustment. The Food and Drug Administration concludes that the known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks of COVID-19 infection.  Authors: Patricia C. Lloyd, Ph.D., Sc.M., of the Food and Drug Administration in Silver ...