A study shows that there are almost twice as many risky days for large human-caused fires in the American West as there are for lightning-caused fires, due to differences in the level of heat and aridity under which each type of fire is likely to occur. The discrepancy is not accounted for in most fire early warning systems. In addition, risky days for human-caused fires are growing faster than risky days for lighting-caused fires as the climate warms.  Fa Li and colleagues focused on Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD), which captures both dryness ...

PULLMAN, Wash. — Foods that evoke a sense of nostalgia and comfort and have good texture variety are important considerations in prepared meals aimed at older adults, according to new Washington State University research. “We want to help the prepared food industry produce appetizing, healthy meals for older adults,” said Carolyn Ross, professor in WSU’s School of Food Science. “Malnutrition is quite prevalent in people over 60 because food may be available, but they won’t eat it if they don’t like it. We want to walk a line where food is tasty, convenient, and full of nutrients.” In a paper recently published ...

In recent years, some public figures have argued that undocumented residents in the United States should not be included in census data used for congressional apportionment because their inclusion unfairly benefits Democratic-leaning states. John Robert Warren and Robert E. Warren analyzed data from every census from 1980 through 2020 and used high quality state-level estimates of the size of the undocumented resident population at each time point. The authors then calculated how many House seats and how many Electoral College votes would have changed had undocumented residents been excluded from the data after each census. Previous efforts to ...

Attitudes about climate change and carbon footprints show strong regional patterning. Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi and colleagues investigated the role of moral values in these geographic patterns. The authors used Moral Foundations Theory, which posits that moral judgements emerge from deeply held intuitions about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The authors used opinion surveys, comprising 12,061 respondents, conducted from 2008–2013 that measured beliefs regarding the reality, human causation, and negative impacts of climate change, as well as estimates of household carbon footprint provided by UC Berkeley CoolClimate Network. This data ...

The math that describes the branching pattern of trees in nature also holds for trees depicted in art—and may even underlie our ability to recognize artworks as depictions of trees. Trees are loosely fractal, branching forms that repeat the same patterns at smaller and smaller scales from trunk to branch tip. Jingyi Gao and Mitchell Newberry examine scaling of branch thickness in depictions of trees and derive mathematical rules for proportions among branch diameters and for the approximate number of branches of different diameters. The authors begin with ...

For decades, scientists across the globe have investigated methods to accurately measure drug permeability across the blood-brain barrier, a compact layer of cells that protect the brain from potentially dangerous substances and microbes. They struggled with a number of parameters, such as blood flow and binding to plasma proteins, which were shown to impact permeability in different ways. In research published in the December 2024 issue of Fluids and Barriers of the CNS (“Brain endothelial permeability, transport and flow ...

Mill Valley, CA – February 11, 2025 – The SynGAP Research Fund 501(c)(3) dba Cure SYNGAP1 proudly announces the release of its inaugural Impact Report, a transparent and celebratory reporting of tangible goals achieved and purposeful progress made in 2024 by this growing and dynamic organization led entirely by families and driven by volunteers. With a mission rooted in improving the lives of SYNGAP1 patients, and built upon the promises of Collaboration, Transparency and Urgency, SRF’s 2024 Impact Report provides stakeholders – including families, scientists, and donors ...

Middle molecules with a molecular weight of more than 1,000 are difficult to synthesize due to multiple steps and time-consuming nature, demanding the development of a new approach that can overcome these disadvantages. Click chemistry has become an essential tool in applied chemistry due to its simplicity, efficiency, and versatility. This approach to chemical synthesis allows for quick and reliable joining of small molecules into larger, more complex structures, often with minimal side reactions and byproducts. By definition, click chemistry reactions are highly selective and efficient, making them ...

Digital Science has awarded its latest Catalyst Grants to two innovative teams, supporting their technology ideas aimed at safeguarding research integrity and strengthening trust in science. The winners will use the funding and mentorship from Digital Science to develop their ideas, both of which include enhanced dashboards – visualizations based on available data – to flag retracted or questionable research papers. The winning applications from Digital Science’s 2024 Catalyst Grant round announced today are: PostPub ...

The immune system plays a key role in detecting and destroying cancer cells. Cancer immunotherapy works by programming immune cells to recognize and eliminate cancer cells. However, many cancers can escape immune surveillance through various mechanisms, resulting in resistance to treatment. This highlights the need to better understand the molecular processes that enable immune evasion.  The tumor microenvironment (TME)—the space surrounding a tumor—plays a critical role in interactions between cancer and immune cells. Cancer cells can reshape the TME to ...

Embargoed for release: Tuesday, February 11, 2025, 6:00 AM ET Key points: More than half of employees in the U.S. (58%) report having physical chronic health conditions, such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and asthma, according to a new nationally representative survey. Three-fourths of U.S. employees with chronic conditions (76%) need to manage their conditions during work hours, yet a majority (60%) have not formally disclosed their conditions to their employer.  More than one-third of U.S. employees with chronic conditions (36%) say they have skipped medical appointments or delayed getting care to avoid ...

UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL TUESDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2025, 11am (UK time)   Disruption of a single amino acid in a cellular protein makes breast cancer cells behave like stem cells   Peer reviewed | Observational | Cells  Changes to the intermediate filament (IF) protein, vimentin, were found to promote tumour growth by increasing cancer stemness in an oestrogen independent manner. Targeting vimentin and/or the long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) ‘XIST’ could be an effective therapeutic strategy ...

Having a job – whether it’s working for someone else or being their own boss – gives older Americans more than just a way to earn money or get health insurance, a new poll finds. More than two-thirds of those who work after age 50 say that working boosts their physical health, mental health, and/or their overall wellbeing, according to a new report from the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging. Nearly half (46%) of those who work say that having a sense of purpose is a very important ...

Is the Metaverse a new frontier for human-centric manufacturing?  The future of manufacturing is not just about machines and AI; it's about re-empowering humans, according to a new study from the University of Surrey.  The integration of advanced technologies like augmented reality (AR) and digital twins is set to redefine the workforce's role, making humans an essential part of the manufacturing equation once again.  The paper, published in Sustainability, explores the transformative potential of Metaverse technologies ...

Qubits—the fundamental units of quantum information—drive entire tech sectors. Among them, superconducting qubits could be instrumental in building a large-scale quantum computer, but they rely on electrical signals and are difficult to scale. In a breakthrough, a team of physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has achieved a fully optical readout of superconducting qubits, pushing the technology beyond its current limitations. Their findings were now published in Nature Physics. Following a year-long rally, ...

Toronto, ON – A sizeable improvement was found in the prevalence of American adults aged 65 and older without disabilities -- including memory, hearing, visual, and functional disabilities or limitations in activities of daily living -- according to a new nationally representative study published online in the Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus found. In total, 61% of older Americans reported being free from disability in 2008. The prevalence increased to 65% in 2017. While this may seem like a small increase, had the prevalence of individuals without disabilities remained ...

THESSALONIKI, Greece, 11 February 2025 - In a notable Genomic Press research report, researchers at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki have uncovered a significant presence of manic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs), offering valuable insights that could reshape treatment approaches. The rigorous peer-reviewed study, published in Brain Medicine, examined 75 stable outpatients with SSDs, revealing that more than one in four patients (26.7%) exhibited distinct manic symptoms, a finding that ...

“The cosmological principle is like an ultimate kind of statement of humility,” explains James Adam, astrophysicist at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, and lead author of the new paper. According to the Cosmological Principle, not only are we not at the center of the Universe, but a true center does not exist. A further assumption, similar to but distinct and independent from homogeneity, is that the Universe is also isotropic, meaning it has no preferred directions. These assumptions underlie the Standard Model of Cosmology, the theoretical ...

Most people want harmful social media content such as physical threats and defamation to be restricted. This also applies in the USA where several social media platforms have recently modified their policies in favor of unrestricted free speech. However, the majority of users believe that intolerance and hate have become unavoidable on social media. This was revealed in a large-scale survey conducted by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Oxford in 10 countries in Europe, America, Africa and Australia. The study also highlights differences among countries. The global debate on whether and how social media content should ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 4:00 AM GMT TUESDAY 11 FEBRUARY / 23:00 ET MONDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2025 A new large-scale, global survey has revealed that most people want harmful social media content such as physical threats and defamation to be restricted. This also applies in the USA where several social media platforms have recently modified their policies in favor of unrestricted free speech. However, the majority of users believe that intolerance and hate have become unavoidable on social media. This study, conducted ...

New Curtin University research has found exposure to outdoor air pollution and extreme temperatures during pregnancy may increase the risk of prolonged pregnancy, offering new insights into the impact of climate change on maternal health.   The study analysed data from nearly 400,000 births in Western Australia and found that higher exposure to fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and biothermal stress (a measure that combines air temperature, radiant temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and human physiology) was associated ...

Researchers have developed a new AI algorithm, called Torque Clustering, that is much closer to natural intelligence than current methods. It significantly improves how AI systems learn and uncover patterns in data independently, without human guidance. Torque Clustering can efficiently and autonomously analyse vast amounts of data in fields such as biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, finance and medicine, revealing new insights such as detecting disease patterns, uncovering fraud, or understanding behaviour. “In nature, animals learn by observing, exploring, and interacting with their ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — It’s 1999, the 21st century is on the horizon, and California has big plans for marine conservation. New legislation has presented a mandate to establish an ambitious network of marine protected areas (MPAs) unlike anywhere else in the world. The goal is to craft strategic protections to safeguard the state’s marine life for preservation and economic benefits alike. Now 25 years later, an international team of researchers, led by scientists at UC Santa Barbara, have evaluated the network’s ...

Public posts on social media platforms shed light on the extent and nature of prolific illegal wildlife hunting in Lebanon, research in Oryx—The International Journal of Conservation, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora, has found.  The study is the first to use social media as a tool for assessing illegal hunting activities in Lebanon. The country, along with the Mediterranean region more broadly, is a global poaching blackspot, particularly for the illegal killing of protected ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The world’s largest known lithium deposit exists within a vast salt pan called the Salar de Uyuni, which stretches for thousands of square miles atop a high, dry Andean plateau in Bolivia. For most of the year, salt crystals encrust the terrain, white as confectioner’s sugar. During the wet season, pooling rainwater mirrors surrounding mountains and sky. “The Salar is a magical place for travelers from all over the world who come to see the colors, the reflections, in this endless white landscape,” said Avner Vengosh, Nicholas Chair of Environmental Quality at the Duke University ...