Earth
The 10-year plan for conserving biodiversity adopted as part of the International Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) failed to reach its targets for 2020. A scientist from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) proposes therefore a prominent political target to give discussions of species conservation more vigor. Together with a group of experts from other research institutions, he proposes to limit species extinctions to 20 per year. This is reported in Science. (DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6592).
The modern photonics industry is constantly working on making its devices more compact, be it computing systems or sensors and lidars. For this, it is necessary to make lasers, transistors and other elements smaller. A team of scientists led by ITMO researchers proposed a quick and affordable method to create optical chips right in a Petri dish. The research was published in ACS Nano.
Prehistoric pioneers could have relied on shellfish to sustain them as they followed migratory routes out of Africa during times of drought, a new study suggests.
The study examined fossil reefs near to the now-submerged Red Sea shorelines that marked prehistoric migratory routes from Africa to Arabia. The findings suggest this coast offered the resources necessary to act as a gateway out of Africa during periods of little rainfall when other food sources were scarce.
MOSS LANDING, CA--For 30 years, MBARI ecologist Ken Smith and his colleagues have studied deep-sea communities at a research site called Station M, located 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) below the ocean's surface and 290 kilometers (180 miles) off the coast of Central California. A recent special issue of the journal Deep-Sea Research features 16 new papers about research at Station M by scientists from around the world. These papers cover a wide range of topics, from satellite observations of the sea surface to the behavior and genetics of deep-sea life.
(Boston, MA)--A new study led by the Department of Population Medicine finds that individuals with bipolar disorder who switched to high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) experienced a moderate decrease in nonpsychiatrist mental health outpatient visits, but rates of psychiatrist visits, medication use, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations did not change. The study, "Effect of High-deductible Insurance on Healthcare Use in Bipolar Disorder" appears in The American Journal of Managed Care on June 16.
Antoine Champreux, a PhD student in the Global Ecology Lab at Flinders University, has catalogued the discovery of the new fern-like plant species as part of an international effort to examine the Australian fossil in greater detail.
The fossil was found in the 1960s by amateur geologist Mr John Irving, on the bank of the Manilla River in Barraba, New South Wales. The fossil was exposed after major flooding events in 1964, and Mr Irving gave the fossil to the geological survey of New South Wales, where it remained for more than 50 years without being studied.
BOSTON - In its first randomized clinical trial, a drug that targets a protein needed by cancer cells to maintain their dogged growth and division has shown considerable promise in combination with chemotherapy in patients with a common form of ovarian cancer, investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report.
Research out today identifies traits among high-risk adolescents associated with increased risk for gun use. Among high-risk adolescents, those with greater callous-unemotional traits were more likely to carry a gun and to use a gun during a crime over a four-year period following an initial arrest, according to a study published online in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Yale scientists may have found a cause for the sudden onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in some children, they report.
Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders, or PANDAS, were first proposed in the 1990s. Thought to be triggered by streptococcal infections, they account for an unknown portion of youth OCD cases. But the biology underpinning this disorder has baffled scientists.
Water and its interactions with other substances are essential to human life. However, understanding the structure of liquid water and its hydrogen-bonding networks has been a challenge.
According to previous studies, all oxygen atoms in water trimers, tetramers, and pentamers with cyclic minimum-energy structures exist in a two-dimensional (2D) plane. In contrast, water hexamers have noncyclic three-dimensional (3D) structures. Therefore, the water hexamer was long considered to be the smallest water droplet with a 3D hydrogen-bonding network.
Following two studies that screened thousands of human antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 to identify highly potent pairs, in which both antibodies bind the viral target simultaneously, a resultant antibody cocktail is being tested in human trials. The double-antibody approach, versus use of a single antibody, is designed not only to be effective as a treatment, the authors say, but to protect against antibody resistance that might arise in response to selective pressure from single antibody therapies, which are also being explored to treat COVID-19.
The communities of tiny picoplankton in oceans reveal a great deal about the health of marine ecosystems and food webs. KAUST researchers have examined how numbers of these organisms vary across the year in both coastal and offshore locations in the Red Sea, while investigating the predators and viruses that control them.
The cultivation of coffee, cocoa and vanilla secures the income of many small-holder farmers and is also a driver of land-use change in many tropical countries. In particular, cultivation in agroforestry systems, in which these crops are combined with trees that provide shade, is often considered to have great potential for ecologically sustainable cultivation. Researchers at the University of Göttingen are now showing that the land-use history of agroforestry systems plays a crucial role in assessing the sustainability of agroforestry.
In 2017, Stanford University researchers presented a new device that mimics the brain's efficient and low-energy neural learning process. It was an artificial version of a synapse - the gap across which neurotransmitters travel to communicate between neurons - made from organic materials. In 2019, the researchers assembled nine of their artificial synapses together in an array, showing that they could be simultaneously programmed to mimic the parallel operation of the brain.
Pathological protein clumps are characteristic of a series of diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and type 2 diabetes. Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, and Maastricht University have now used cryo-electron microscopy to obtain a sharp image for the first time of how individual molecules are arranged in protein strings, which constitute the deposits typical for diabetes. The structure of the fibrils is very similar to that of Alzheimer's fibrils.