In collaboration with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a University of Maryland (UMD) researcher co-published a large-scale study examining the genetic diversity of mangroves over more than 1,800 miles of coastline in the Western Indian Ocean, including Eastern Africa and several islands. This work showcases how oceanic currents create both connectivity and barriers between mangrove populations, wi

Danske eksperter er stærkt bekymrede for de etiske udfordringer ved forskningen, som tilføjer stamceller fra mennesker til befrugtede æg fra makak-aber.

Et dagligt forbrug af svampe reducerer risikoen for kræft, konkluderer et hold forskere på baggrund af en ny metaanalyse. Men der er grund til at være skeptisk over for den konklusion, vurderer seniorforsker i Kræftens Bekæmpelse.

The Greater London area is home to thousands of parakeets. The population of feral ring-necked parakeets has grown from hundreds of individuals back in the 1980s to more than 30,000 according to the last count in 2012. The birds, native to Africa and India, are generalist feeders and seem to be well-adapted to the urban settings and colder climate of southern England. The origins of the London pa

Skoltech researchers used Google Trends' Big Data ensuing from human interactions with the Internet to develop a new methodology – a tool and a data source – for analyzing and researching the growth of startups.

Researchers have spent more than three decades developing and studying miniature biosensors that can identify single molecules. To boost the accuracy and speed of these measurements, scientists must find ways to better understand how molecules interact with these sensors. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) have now

Loss of the fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) causes fragile X syndrome (FXS). FMRP is widely thought to repress protein synthesis, but its translational targets and modes of control remain in dispute. We previously showed that genetic removal of p70 S6 kinase 1 (S6K1) corrects altered protein synthesis as…

Darwinian evolution tends to produce energy-efficient outcomes. On the other hand, energy limits computation, be it neural and probabilistic or digital and logical. Taking a particular energy-efficient viewpoint, we define neural computation and make use of an energy-constrained computational function. This function can be optimized over a variable that is…

Creating and characterizing individual genetic variants remains limited in scale, compared to the tremendous variation both existing in nature and envisioned by genome engineers. Here we introduce retron library recombineering (RLR), a methodology for high-throughput functional screens that surpasses the scale and specificity of CRISPR-Cas methods. We use the targeted…

Anaerobic fungi (class Neocallimastigomycetes) thrive as low-abundance members of the herbivore digestive tract. The genomes of anaerobic gut fungi are poorly characterized and have not been extensively mined for the biosynthetic enzymes of natural products such as antibiotics. Here, we investigate the potential of anaerobic gut fungi to synthesize natural…

Intracarotid arterial hyperosmolar mannitol (ICAHM) blood–brain barrier disruption (BBBD) is effective and safe for delivery of therapeutics for central nervous system malignancies. ICAHM osmotically alters endothelial cells and tight junction integrity to achieve BBBD. However, occurrence of neuroinflammation following hemispheric BBBD by ICAHM remains unknown. Temporal proteomic changes in rat..

Free oxygen represents an essential basis for the evolution of complex life forms on a habitable Earth. The isotope composition of redox-sensitive trace elements such as tungsten (W) can possibly trace the earliest rise of oceanic oxygen in Earth’s history. However, the impact of redox changes on the W isotope…

Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they consume free energy, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced estimators for the entropy production rate have provided major insights into the efficiency of important cellular…

Microbial community responses to environmental change are largely associated with ecological processes; however, the potential for microbes to rapidly evolve and adapt remains relatively unexplored in natural environments. To assess how ecological and evolutionary processes simultaneously alter the genetic diversity of a microbiome, we conducted two concurrent experiments in the…

Regional quarantine policies, in which a portion of a population surrounding infections is locked down, are an important tool to contain disease. However, jurisdictional governments—such as cities, counties, states, and countries—act with minimal coordination across borders. We show that a regional quarantine policy’s effectiveness depends on whether 1) the network…

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to quickly and reliably prioritize clinically approved compounds for their potential effectiveness for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections. Here, we deployed algorithms relying on artificial intelligence, network diffusion, and network proximity, tasking each of them to rank 6,340 drugs for…

Strategic Downsizing In recent years, executive salaries have skyrocketed. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s 2020 report on CEO pay, the average American CEO earned 320 times as much as the typical worker, and that number has consistently climbed over the decades. Excesses like that make a really good case for merely replacing executives with comparatively-inexpensive artificial intell

Crew members who took part in the Mars500 mission experiment showed significant changes in their gut microbiota after 520 days in confinement, according to a new study. The researchers analyzed data from fecal samples of six crew members from Russia, Europe, and China. The crew lived in a completely sealed habitat in Moscow from June 2010 to November 2011 to simulate a manned mission to Mars, whi

Researchers have designed an experimental system that shows exposure of SARS-CoV-2 to a very high temperature, even if applied for less than a second, can be sufficient to neutralize the virus so that it can no longer infect another human host.

An international team of paleontologists has identified a new genus and species of hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur, Yamatosaurus izanagii, on one of Japan's southern islands. The fossilized discovery yields new information about hadrosaur migration, suggesting that the herbivors migrated from Asia to North America instead of vice versa. The discovery also illustrates an evolutionary step as the

Researchers have designed a completely novel potential treatment for COVID-19: nanoparticles that capture SARS-CoV-2 viruses within the body and then use the body's own immune system to destroy it.

Researchers have designed a completely novel potential treatment for COVID-19: nanoparticles that capture SARS-CoV-2 viruses within the body and then use the body's own immune system to destroy it.

EVOLUTION Fairydale, Bethulie, in South Africa’s Karoo Basin. End-Permian extinction patterns in South Africa The greatest mass extinction on Earth occurred at the end of the Permian Period, approximately 252 million years ago. However, there are few quantitative investigations of the extinction’s impact on land animals. Pia Viglietti et al….

The inhibition of condensation freezing under extreme conditions (i.e., ultra-low temperature and high humidity) remains a daunting challenge in the field of anti-icing. As water vapor easily condensates or desublimates and melted water refreezes instantly, these cause significant performance decrease of most anti-icing surfaces at such extreme conditions. Herein, inspired…

Melting snow and ice supply water for nearly 2 billion people [J. S. Mankin, D. Viviroli, D. Singh, A. Y. Hoekstra, N. S. Diffenbaugh, Environ. Res. Lett. 10, 114016 (2015)]. The Indus River in South Asia alone supplies water for over 300 million people [S. I. Khan, T. E. Adams,…

Education has been related to various advantageous lifetime outcomes. Here, using longitudinal structural MRI data (4,422 observations), we tested the influential hypothesis that higher education translates into slower rates of brain aging. Cross-sectionally, education was modestly associated with regional cortical volume. However, despite marked mean atrophy in the cortex and…

Despite receiving just 30% of the Earth’s present-day insolation, Mars had water lakes and rivers early in the planet’s history, due to an unknown warming mechanism. A possible explanation for the >102-y-long lake-forming climates is warming by water ice clouds. However, this suggested cloud greenhouse explanation has proved difficult to…

The role of integrins, in particular αv integrins, in regulating insulin resistance is incompletely understood. We have previously shown that the αvβ5 integrin ligand milk fat globule epidermal growth factor like 8 (MFGE8) regulates cellular uptake of fatty acids. In this work, we evaluated the impact of MFGE8 on glucose…

Estimates of the global population of humans living at high altitude vary widely, and such data at the country level are unavailable. Herein, we use a geographic information system (GIS)-based approach to quantify human population at 500-m elevation intervals for each country. Based on georeferenced data for population (LandScan Global…

Economic inequality is notoriously difficult to quantify as reliable data on household incomes are missing for most of the world. Here, we show that a proxy for inequality based on remotely sensed nighttime light data may help fill this gap. Individual households cannot be remotely sensed. However, as households tend…

Nitrification is a central process of the aquatic nitrogen cycle that controls the supply of nitrate used in other key processes, such as phytoplankton growth and denitrification. Through time series observation and modeling of a seasonally stratified, eutrophic coastal basin, we demonstrate that physical dilution of nitrifying microorganisms by water…

Three studies translate social dominance theory to policing, testing the relationship between individual officers’ endorsement of social hierarchies and their tendency to use force against residents. This article demonstrates a link between officer psychological factors and force. Because police are empowered to use force to maintain social order, and because…

Lignocellulose, the structural component of plant cells, is a major agricultural byproduct and the most abundant terrestrial source of biopolymers on Earth. The complex and insoluble nature of lignocellulose limits its conversion into value-added commodities, and currently, efficient transformation requires expensive pretreatments and high loadings of enzymes. Here, we report…

Neuropeptides and neurotrophic factors secreted from dense core vesicles (DCVs) control many brain functions, but the calcium sensors that trigger their secretion remain unknown. Here, we show that in mouse hippocampal neurons, DCV fusion is strongly and equally reduced in synaptotagmin-1 (Syt1)- or Syt7-deficient neurons, but combined Syt1/Syt7 deficiency did…

The cochlea of our auditory system is an intricate structure deeply embedded in the temporal bone. Compared with other sensory organs such as the eye, the cochlea has remained poorly accessible for investigation, for example, by imaging. This limitation also concerns the further development of technology for restoring hearing in…

The development of follicular helper CD4 T (TFH) cells is a dynamic process resulting in a heterogenous pool of TFH subsets. However, the cellular and molecular determinants of this heterogeneity and the possible mechanistic links between them is not clear. We found that human TFH differentiation is associated with significant…

Abiotic niche lability reduces extinction risk by allowing species to adapt to changing environmental conditions in situ. In contrast, species with static niches must keep pace with the velocity of climate change as they track suitable habitat. The rate and frequency of niche lability have been studied on human timescales…

Amyloid fibril formation of α-synuclein (αS) is associated with multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease (PD). Growing evidence suggests that progression of PD is linked to cell-to-cell propagation of αS fibrils, which leads to seeding of endogenous intrinsically disordered monomer via templated elongation and secondary nucleation. A molecular understanding of…

Since the commercialization of transgenic glyphosate-tolerant (GT) crops in the mid-1990s, glyphosate has become the dominant herbicide to control weeds in corn, soybean, and other crops in the United States and elsewhere. However, recent public concerns over its potential carcinogenicity in humans have generated calls for glyphosate-restricting policies. Should a…

Molecular events that drive the development of precancerous lesions in the bronchial epithelium, which are precursors of lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), are poorly understood. We demonstrate that disruption of epithelial cellular polarity, via the conditional deletion of the apical determinant Crumbs3 (Crb3), initiates and sustains precancerous airway pathology. The…

Precise spatiotemporal control of gene expression in the developing brain is critical for neural circuit formation, and comprehensive expression mapping in the developing primate brain is crucial to understand brain function in health and disease. Here, we developed an unbiased, automated, large-scale, cellular-resolution in situ hybridization (ISH)–based gene expression profiling…

Memories of the images that we have seen are thought to be reflected in the reduction of neural responses in high-level visual areas such as inferotemporal (IT) cortex, a phenomenon known as repetition suppression (RS). We challenged this hypothesis with a task that required rhesus monkeys to report whether images…

The nucleation of ice crystals in clouds is poorly understood, despite being of critical importance for our planet’s climate. Nucleation occurs largely at rare “active sites” present on airborne particles such as mineral dust, but the nucleation pathway is distinct under different meteorological conditions. These give rise to two key…