Eurekalert

A massive collaborative research project covered in the journal Nature this week offers projections to the year 2100 of future sea-level rise from all sources of land ice, offering the most complete projections created to date.

Scientists from Russia and Italy studied a new axis of the pathway that prevents the development of liver fibrosis. The role of GILZ protein in curbing the disease progression was shown in a study using mice models and confirmed by clinical data. These findings can be used in the treatment of liver fibrosis in humans.

University of Delaware's Swati Singh is among a small group of researchers across the dark matter community that have begun to wonder if they are looking for the right type of dark matter. Singh, Jack Manley, a UD doctoral student, and collaborators at the University of Arizona and Haverford College, have proposed a new way to look for the particles that might make up dark matter by repurposing existing tabletop sensor technology.

Ring microlasers are eyed as potential light sources for photonic applications, but they first must be made more powerful. Combining multiple microlasers into an array solves only half of the problem, as this adds noisy "modes" to the resulting laser light. Now, thanks to the math behind supersymmetry theory, Penn Engineers have achieved single-mode lasing from such an array. By calculating the necessary properties for "superpartner" arrays, they can cancel out the unwanted extra modes.

Engineers and scientists from MIT and Georgia Tech are enabling near real-time modeling of wheels, treads, and desert animals traveling at high speeds across sandy terrains. "Dynamic Resistive Force Theory," or DRFT, provides a path to speedier granular modeling -- and help in designing optimal rough terrain vehicles, like Mars and lunar rovers.

The first mental health study of Black communities in Canada has found the majority of Black Canadians display severe depressive symptoms - women, even more so - with racial discrimination confirming the appearance of these signs for nearly all.

An Austrian-American research team (University of Vienna, Department Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics), in collaboration of Hungarian experts from Eötvös Loránd University, has developed a new method that allows the almost non-destructive extraction of genetic material from archaeological human remains. The method allows anthropologists, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists to avoid the risk of serious damage to artefacts of significant scientific and heritage value, which can then be fully examined in future research.

A new study investigated the impact of Airbnb's algorithm on racial disparities among Airbnb hosts. Adopting the tool narrowed the revenue gap between White and Black hosts considerably, but because far fewer Black hosts used the algorithm, the revenue gap between White and Black hosts actually increased after the tool's introduction.

Inspired by the powerful eyes of the mantis shrimp, scientists have designed an imaging system that can distinguish between cancerous and healthy tissues during cancer surgery.

Experts at Cincinnati Children's and Stanford screened a library of 4500 compounds to find one, called AG1296, that shows promise as a potential treatment for the rare lung disease PAH.

When access to free and low-cost birth control goes up, the percentage of young women who leave high school before graduating goes down by double-digits, according to new University of Colorado research.

Who made more accurate predictions about the course of the COVID-19 pandemic - experts or the public? A study from the University of Cambridge has found that experts such as epidemiologists and statisticians made far more accurate predictions than the public, but both groups substantially underestimated the true extent of the pandemic.

Deep down in the seafloor anaerobic microbes consume large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Even though this process is a crucial element of the global carbon cycle, it is still poorly understood. Scientists from Bremen and Israel now found the solution to a long-standing enigma in this process: why methane carbon isotopes behave so differently than expected. In a joint effort with their colleagues they present the answer in the journal Science Advances.

Increased access to birth control led to higher graduation rates among young women in Colorado, according to a study following the debut of the 2009 Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CPFI). The study identified a statistically significant 1.66 percentage-point increase in high school graduation among young women one year after the initiative was introduced.

A protein called Sir2 may facilitate C. albicans' transition from ovoid yeast to thread-like hypha. C. albicans cells that were missing the Sir2 gene were less likely to form true hyphae in lab experiments than cells of the same species that had that gene.

Researchers at CRANN (The Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices), and the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin today announced that a magnetic material developed at the Centre demonstrates the fastest magnetic switching ever recorded. This discovery demonstrates the potential of the material for a new generation of energy efficient ultra-fast computers and data storage systems.

Biodiversity is of crucial importance to the marine ecosystem. The prohibition of trawling activities in the Hong Kong marine environment for two and a half years has significantly improved biodiversity, an inter-university study led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has found. Research results showed that the trawl ban could restore and conserve biodiversity in tropical coastal waters.

Researchers have created a probe that glows when it detects an enzyme associated with issues that can lead to blood clots and strokes.

Last year, researchers used a mouse model that included immune-reactive T cells from patients with Crohn's disease in a proof-of-principle demonstration that a flagellin-directed immunotherapy might provide similar benefits in patients. Now they have moved a step closer to possible clinical testing of this treatment, with a study, published in the journal Gastroenterology, that is the first to describe IgG antibodies in Crohn's disease specific for human-derived flagellins of bacteria in the Lachnospiraceae family.

The Gerontological Society of America's highly cited, peer-reviewed journals are continuing to publish scientific articles on COVID-19. The following were published between March 17 and April 19; all are free to access.