Australasia has likely overlooked a pollination crisis, according to new research published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The research, led by Macquarie University, also underscores a pressing need for intervention to avoid biodiversity loss and long-term food insecurity in the region. The authors analysed thousands of research papers on human-induced pollinator decline globally, and found despite only a tiny portion mentioning Australasia, the causes of pollinator decline in the northern hemisphere were mirrored in this region. Research in Europe and North America finds threats that include ...

New research from a consortium of quantum physicists, led by Trinity College Dublin’s Dr Mark Mitchison, shows that imperfect timekeeping places a fundamental limit to quantum computers and their applications. The team claims that even tiny timing errors add up to place a significant impact on any large-scale algorithm, posing another problem that must eventually be solved if quantum computers are to fulfil the lofty aspirations that society has for them.  It is difficult to imagine modern life without clocks to help organise our daily schedules; with a digital clock in every person’s smartphone or watch, we ...

Multiple studies have shown that the COVID-19 vaccines do not lead to infertility or pregnancy complications such as miscarriage, but many people are still wary of adverse effects from the vaccine on pregnancy. A new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers now provides deeper insight into the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for people planning to become pregnant. Published in the journal Human Reproduction, the study found no increased risk of early or late miscarriage as a result of male ...

INDIANAPOLIS, IND – The Canadian Cardiovascular Society (CCS) released the world’s first classification of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), or heart attack, based on heart tissue damage research that was driven by two cardiovascular investigators within the Ischemic Heart Disease Program of Krannert Cardiovascular Research Center (KCVRC) at Indiana University School of Medicine and Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The four-stage classification, CCS-AMI, was presented at the Vascular 2023 conference on Oct. 29 in Montréal, Canada, and published ...

ITHACA, N.Y. –Micron-size microplastic debris can be carried by the jet stream across oceans and continents, and their shape plays a crucial role in how far they travel. A Cornell University collaboration has developed a model to simulate the atmospheric transport of microplastic fibers and shows that flat fibers travel farther in the lower atmosphere, and are more prevalent, than spherical fibers. Previous studies assumed these fibers to be spherical. The modeling has the potential to help scientists determine the sources of the pervasive waste – which could inform policy efforts to reduce it. The ...

Colorectal cancer screening is widely recommended for adults ages 45 to 75 with an average risk of developing the disease. However, many people don’t realize that the benefits of screening for this type of cancer aren’t always the same for older adults. “While many clinicians simply follow guideline recommendations for colon cancer screening in adults within this age range, this isn’t always the best approach,” said Sameer Saini, M.D., M.S., who is a gastroenterologist at both Michigan Medicine and the Lieutenant Colonel Charles S. Kettles VA Medical Center and is as a health ...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has gazed at the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Since the recording of this energetic event in 1054 CE by 11th-century astronomers, the Crab Nebula has continued to draw attention and additional study as scientists seek to understand the conditions, behavior, and after-effects of supernovae through thorough study of the Crab, a relatively nearby example. Using Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), a team led by Tea Temim at Princeton University is searching for answers about the Crab Nebula’s ...

The impacts of Roe v. Wade's reversal in 2022 are still being understood, but new research from Portland State's Rajiv Sharma provides another piece of the puzzle. Sharma found that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision, female students are more likely to choose a university or college in states where abortion rights and access are upheld. The research, conducted with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, indicates a potential impact on future workforces and economic development ...

DALLAS, Monday, October 30, 2023 – The national Board of Directors of the American Heart Association last week voted to provide full support to the House of Cardiology’s consortium proposal to create a new American Board of Cardiovascular Medicine (ABCVM) specifically to certify cardiovascular physicians. The proposal for the new ABCVM was announced on September 21, 2023 by the consortium of professional societies including the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the Heart Failure Society of America (HFSA), the Heart Rhythm ...

RESTON, Va. — The first widescale assessment of methylmercury in adult amphibians in the U.S. to date shows that, in amphibians, this toxic compound is common, widespread and, at least for some, can reach very high levels. The study, “Broad-scale Assessment of Methylmercury in Adult Amphibians,” which published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, brought together scientists from around the country to test more than 3,200 amphibians representing 14 species from 26 populations. “Amphibians ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Online privacy policies may not only be difficult to find but nonexistent, according to Penn State researchers who crawled millions of websites and found that only one-third of online organizations made their privacy policy available for review. “Privacy Lost and Found: An Investigation at Scale of Web Privacy Policy Availability,” a paper authored by students and faculty from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), detailed an analysis of the online privacy policy landscape and studied the unavailability of privacy policies on company domains. It received the Best Student Paper ...

The ability to dynamically track the movement of cells is essential for modeling cellular interactions as they form organs such as the heart. But current microscope technology isn’t up to the task of capturing those movements. Juhyun Lee, associate professor in the Bioengineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, recently received a five-year, $1.94 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a 4D high-resolution imaging system to quantify cell tracking. Traditional microscopes allow users to zoom in to view an individual cell. However, doing so obscures that cell’s relationship ...

Screen readers, which convert digital text to audio, can make computers more accessible to many disabled users — including those who are blind, low vision or dyslexic. Yet slideshow software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides, isn’t designed to make screen reader output coherent. Such programs typically rely on Z-order — which follows the way objects are layered on a slide — when a screen reader navigates through the contents. Since the Z-order doesn’t adequately convey how a slide is laid out in two-dimensional space, slideshow software can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. A team led by researchers ...

Three-quarters of Colorado prisons are likely to experience a natural disaster in the coming years, but due to aging infrastructure and outdated policies, many are ill-equipped to keep residents safe, suggests new CU Boulder research. The study, published in the journal Natural Hazards Review, comes on the heels of one of the hottest summers on record and as U.S. lawmakers are calling for an investigation into a rash of what are believed to be heat-related deaths in the nation’s prisons. In other research, including interviews and focus groups with 35 formerly incarcerated Coloradans, the researchers found that most had already suffered from climate-related hazards, experiencing ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 30 October 2023 Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet @Annalsofim Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also ...

A recent study found some of the oldest animals in the world living in a place you wouldn’t expect: fishes in the Arizona desert. Researchers found the second genus of animal ever for which three or more species have known lifespans greater than 100 years, which could open the doors to aging studies across disciplines, such as gerontology and senescence (aging) among vertebrates.  The study centers around a series of fish species within the Ictiobus genus, known as buffalofishes. Minnesota has native populations of each of the three species studied: bigmouth buffalo, smallmouth buffalo and black buffalo. The importance of this research is underscored ...

As the impacts of climate change grow, society and people struggle to adapt to the challenges of the new reality. Change, however, is difficult, and adapting to new ways of life or new ways of doing business often requires a change in culture.  To determine how culture and society adapt to a changing climate, a team of researchers from the University of Maine and the University of Vermont (UVM) have conducted the first-ever study of cultural adaptation to climate change. Using the science of cultural evolution to examine data on which crops farmers plant across the U.S., their work can help inspire more effective policy solutions to survive in ...

From monitoring concentrations of greenhouse gases to detecting COVID in the breath, laser systems known as frequency combs can identify specific molecules as simple as carbon dioxide and as complex as monoclonal antibodies with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity. Amazing as they are, however, frequency combs have been limited in how fast they can capture a high-speed process such as hypersonic propulsion or the folding of proteins into their final three-dimensional shapes. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Historically, most children in the United States who needed to be hospitalized were treated at general hospitals that treat both children and adults. But the number of hospitals providing inpatient care for children has decreased over the last decade, and many of them struggled to keep up with the demand for children’s care during a viral infection surge in the fall of 2022. Now children are much more likely to be treated at children’s hospitals that are concentrated into fewer locations, according to a new study led by UNC School of Medicine researchers. “The ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain. How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised learning.” This type of machine learning, originally developed as a way to create more efficient models for computer vision, allows computational models to learn about visual scenes based solely on the similarities and differences between them, with no ...

The largest brain autopsy study of women who had experienced intimate partner violence reveals substantial vascular and white matter damage in the brain, but no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease recognized among male contact sports athletes who sustain repeated head trauma. The international collaboration, led by a team from the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai in collaboration with the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, appears in the most recent issue of Acta Neuropathologica. Importantly, ...

URBANA, Ill. – Over the past decades, Brazil has become the world’s leading soybean producer, as well as the leading consumer of pesticides. Despite concerns about potential public health consequences, little is known about the effects of pesticide exposure in the general population. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with the University of Denver and University of Wisconsin-Madison looks at how soy expansion and increased pesticide use in Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon biomes correlate with increased childhood cancer mortality. “The Brazilian Amazon region is undergoing a transition ...

Deforestation in the Amazon causes land surfaces up to 100 kilometres away to get warmer, according to a new study.   The research, by a team of British and Brazilian scientists, led by Dr Edward Butt at the University of Leeds, suggests that tropical forests play a critical role in cooling the land surface - and that effect can play out over considerable distances.  It is known that when tropical forests are cleared, the climate in the immediate vicinity gets warmer.   In this latest study, the researchers wanted to know if deforestation in the Amazon was resulting in climate warming further afield, and the study examined the impact of forest loss on sites up to ...

Abu Dhabi, UAE, October 2023: A team of scientists, led by Post-Doctoral Associate Marieh Al-Handawi and Professor of Chemistry Panče Naumov from NYU Abu Dhabi’s Smart Materials Lab and NYU Abu Dhabi Institute’s Center for Smart Engineering Materials (CSEM) has revealed the mechanism a desert plant native to the United Arab Emirates uses to capture moisture from the desert air in order to survive. The identification of this unique mechanism, in which the plant excretes salts to extract and condense water onto the surface of its leaves, has the potential to inspire ...

The Royal Canadian Institute for Science (RCIScience) awards the 2023 Sandford Fleming Medal for Excellence in Science Communication to independent science writer Terry Collins and the William Edmond Logan Award to the team behind CBC Radio's national weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. A knowledge translator for over 27 years, Terry Collins' reporting has been picked up by journalists in Canada and worldwide, awakening public interest in and deepening understanding of diverse sciences, fostering political will and mobilizing resources for change.  Nominator Dr. Peter A. Singer, former Special Advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, ...