Earth
One of the big questions in biology is why certain plants and animals are found in some places and not others. Figuring out how species evolve and spread, and why some places are richer in species than others, is key to understanding and protecting the world around us. Mountains make a good laboratory for scientists tackling these questions: mountains are home to tons of biodiversity, in part due to all the different habitats at different elevations.
The discovery of altered adaptive immunity in anglerfish helps explain how the creatures are able to temporarily or permanently fuse with their mates without experiencing immune rejection. For most vertebrates, the loss of the adaptive immune arm - orchestrator of protective T and B cell responses that are considered hallmarks of vertebrate immunity - could be fatal.
Within a mere eight years, CRISPR-Cas9 has become the go-to genome editor for both basic research and gene therapy. But CRISPR-Cas9 also has spawned other potentially powerful DNA manipulation tools that could help fix genetic mutations responsible for hereditary diseases.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have now obtained the first 3D structure of one of the most promising of these tools: base editors, which bind to DNA and, instead of cutting, precisely replace one nucleotide with another.
A study conducted over the past 18 years has found differences between lead exposure effects in young Japanese boys versus girls.
Researchers from the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine have been tracking 289 children in Japan since they were in the womb through age 12. They measured lead levels in blood at a prenatal stage and at the age 12, and conducted IQ and linguistic tests.
What if we were able to modify the negative effect of a returning memory that makes us afraid? A research group from the University of Bologna succeeded in this and developed a new non-invasive experimental protocol. The result of this study (to be found in the journal Current Biology) is an innovative protocol that combines fear conditioning - a stimulus associated with something unpleasant, that induces a negative memory - and the neurostimulation of a specific site of the prefrontal cortex.
The global expansion of coastal cities could leave more than three quarters of their neighbouring seafloor exposed to potentially harmful levels of light pollution.
A study led by the University of Plymouth (UK) showed that under both cloudy and clear skies, quantities of light used in everyday street lighting permeated all areas of the water column.
This could pose a significant threat to coastal species, with recent research showing the presence of artificial skyglow can disrupt the lunar compass species use when covering long distances.
During expeditions to oil and gas reservoirs in the central North Sea in 2012 and 2013, scientists of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (Germany) became aware of a phenomenon that had been hardly recognized before. They discovered that methane bubbles emerged from the seabed around abandoned wells. The gas originates from shallow gas pockets, which lie less than 1000 meters deep below the seafloor and that were not the target of the original drilling operations. An initial assessment showed that these emissions could be the dominant source of methane in the North Sea.
Exopolysaccharides (EPS) are surface-exposed carbohydrates that surround and protect bacteria and are involved in biofilm formation, cell-to-cell interactions, immune evasion, and pathogenesis. The structures and compositions of EPS synthesized by different bacteria are highly diverse and therefore a molecular fingerprint.
Major Depressive Episodes Far More Common than Previously Believed, New Study Finds
The number of adults in the United States who suffer from major depressive episodes at some point in their life is far higher than previously believed, a new study by the Yale School of Public Health finds.
A Chinese-Australian collaboration has demonstrated for the first time that interlayer coupling in a van der Waals (vdW) material can be largely modulated by a protonic gate, which inject protons to devices from an ionic solid.
The discovery opens the way to exciting new uses of vdW materials, with insertion of protons an important new technique, now available for the wider 2D materials research community.
Behavioral and nicotine replacement therapies offered together can help people who are incarcerated quit smoking, according to Rutgers researchers.
The study published in the American Journal of Men's Health, found that the combination of group-based tobacco dependence treatment and nicotine replacement therapy was an effective and feasible option to reduce tobacco dependence among men who were incarcerated and transgender women who face significant barriers to accessing smoking cessation treatment services.
A team of scientists, led by UK Met Office, has achieved a scientific breakthrough allowing the longer-term prediction of North Atlantic pressure patterns, the key driving force behind winter weather in Europe and eastern North America.
New, first-of-its-kind research from the University of Colorado Boulder shows that climate change is driving increasing amounts of freshwater in the Arctic Ocean. Within the next few decades, this will lead to increased freshwater moving into the North Atlantic Ocean, which could disrupt ocean currents and affect temperatures in northern Europe.
The paper, published July 27, 2020 in Geophysical Research Letters, examined the unexplained increase in Arctic freshwater over the past two decades and what these trends could mean for the future.
Sophia Antipolis, 30 July 2020: In adolescents the use of e-cigarettes doubles the risk of starting to smoke traditional cigarettes, states a position paper published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1
"Vaping is marketed towards teenagers and the tobacco industry uses celebrities to promote it as being healthier than smoking," said senior author Professor Maja-Lisa Løchen of UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.
It is a fact that has long baffled doctors: Cancer in the small intestine is quite rare, whereas colorectal cancer, a neighboring though much smaller organ, is one of the leading causes of cancer death for men and women. What is it about the colon that seems to "attract" cancer?