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The blood-brain barrier is impermeable to cholesterol, yet high blood cholesterol is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia. However, the underlying mechanisms mediating this relationship are poorly understood. A study published in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Vijay Varma and colleagues at the National Institute on Aging, suggests that disturbances in the conversion of cholesterol to bile acids may play a role in the development of dementia.

A new paper, published recently in PLOS Computational Biology by a team including UMass Amherst researchers, seeks to help scientists structure their lab-group meetings so that they are more inclusive, more productive and, ultimately, lead to better science.

Many seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere are struggling to breed -- and in the Southern Hemisphere, they may not be far behind. These are the conclusions of a study, published May 28 in Science, analyzing more than 50 years of breeding records for 67 seabird species worldwide.

One hundred fifty years after Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table classified atomic nuclei, biologists have created a new classification system for cell nuclei - and shown how they can be transmuted from one type into another.

According to a new study, "Local conditions magnify coral loss after marine heatwaves," published in the journal Science, what's key to coral reefs surviving climate-driven heatwaves and subsequent bleaching is managing global climate change--and local conditions.

In a study that uniquely evaluates marine ecosystem responses to a changing climate by hemisphere, researchers report that the fish-eating, surface-foraging bird species of the Northern Hemisphere suffered greater breeding productivity stresses over the last half-century than their Southern Hemisphere counterparts.

Some seabirds are struggling to raise young where the globe is most rapidly warming - in the northern hemisphere, according to a study published in the journal Science. The research was undertaken by an international team of 40 scientists led by Farallon Institute in California.

An exoskeleton can reduce the metabolic cost of walking not by adding energy or by recycling energy from one gait phase to another, as other exoskeletons have done, but by removing the kinetic energy of a striding person's swinging leg so they don't have to tense their muscles so much.

Local management of coral reefs to ease environmental stressors, such as overfishing or pollution, could increase reefs' chances of recovery after devastating coral bleaching events caused by climate change, a new study finds.

How materials behave depends on the interactions between countless atoms. You could see this as a giant group chat in which atoms are continuously exchanging quantum information. Researchers from Delft University of Technology in collaboration with RWTH Aachen University and the Research Center Jülich have now been able to intercept a chat between two atoms. They present their findings in Science on 28 May.

Currently available COVID-19 vaccines rely on mRNA strands to teach the human immune system to recognize the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have reported the successful development of a vaccine that instead uses DNA encoding the virus' spike protein.

New estimates suggest that mass gatherings during an election in the Malaysian state of Sabah directly caused 70 percent of COVID-19 cases detected in Sabah after the election, and indirectly caused 64.4 percent of cases elsewhere in Malaysia. Jue Tao Lim of the National University of Singapore, Kenwin Maung of the University of Rochester, New York, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

In the perpetual arms races between bacteria and human-made antibiotics, there is a new tool to give human medicine the edge, in part by revealing bacterial weaknesses and potentially by leading to more targeted or new treatments for bacterial infections.

Fear that you are at particularly lethal risk of COVID-19 infection might not be quite as strong of motivation to support strict government regulations and drastically change your lifestyle as your perception of whether others are doing enough to fight COVID-19, concludes a new study looking into data from the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The research paper is published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychological Bulletin.

Climate skeptics who aren't persuaded by the existing evidence from climate change are unlikely to change their minds for many years, according to a newly published quantitative study by a University of Oregon environmental economist, The central question posed by the study published in the journal Climate Change was "How much evidence would it take to convince skeptics that they are wrong?"

Immunoassays have emerged as an immensely reliable means of detection in fields ranging from biological research to food safety management. In a recent study, scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) developed a new type of immunosensor for these purposes. Termed "BRET Q-body", the sensor works on the principle of bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) and can be used to detect antigens without the need for an external light source, greatly simplifying immunoassays.

A new, extremely precise technique, developed by the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, allows the identification of the metabolic function and genome of soil bacteria one bacterial cell at a time instead of having to analyze millions all at once.

Long interested in interactions between robots and humans, Columbia Engineering researchers have created EVA, a new autonomous robot with a soft and expressive face that responds to match the expressions of nearby humans. "The idea for EVA took shape a few years ago, when my students and I began to notice that the robots in our lab were staring back at us through plastic, googly eyes," said Prof Hod Lipson, who led the team.

Nicola Marzari, head of EPFL's THEOS lab and director of NCCR MARVEL, has published with Andrea Ferretti and Chris Wolverton a review of electronic-structure methods as part of a special edition Insight from Nature Materials. It gives an overview of the methods, application to the prediction of materials properties, and examines strategies targeting broader goals of materials design and discovery. The authors consider emerging challenges in predictive accuracy and addressing real-life complexity.

As the owner of a human body, you're carrying trillions of microbes with you everywhere you go. These microscopic organisms aren't just hitching a ride; many of them perform essential chemical reactions that regulate everything from our digestion to our immune system to our moods.