Culture

New research led by Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor of Physics Shiladitya Banerjee demonstrates how certain types of bacteria can adapt to long-term exposure to antibiotics by changing their shape. The work was published this month in the journal Nature Physics.

School closures during COVID-19 have decreased access to school meals, which is likely to increase the risk for food insecurity among children in Maryland, according to a new report issued by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). The number of meals served to school-age children during the first three months of the pandemic dropped by 58 percent, compared to the number of free or reduced-price meals served the previous spring.

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Topics for articles posted for Geosphere this month include feldspar recycling in Yosemite National Park; the Ragged Mountain Fault, Alaska; the Khao Khwang Fold and Thrust Belt, Thailand; the northern Sierra Nevada; and the Queen Charlotte Fault.

As one of the most experienced archaeologists studying California's Native Americans, Lynn Gamble(link is external) knew the Chumash Indians had been using shell beads as money for at least 800 years.

But an exhaustive review(link is external) of some of the shell bead record led the UC Santa Barbara professor emerita of anthropology to an astonishing conclusion: The hunter-gatherers centered on the Southcentral Coast of Santa Barbara were using highly worked shells as currency as long as 2,000 years ago.

Scientists have broadened our understanding of how 'weak' cells bond with their more mature cellular counterparts to boost the body's production of insulin, improving our knowledge of the processes leading to type 2 diabetes - a significant global health problem.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus occurs when β-cells cannot release enough insulin - a tightly controlled process requiring hundreds of such cells clustered together to co-ordinate their response to signals from food, such as sugar, fat and gut hormones.

Researchers from the Hubrecht Institute mapped the recovery of the heart after a heart attack with great detail. They found that heart muscle cells - also called cardiomyocytes - play an important role in the intracellular communication after a heart attack. The researchers documented their findings in a database that is accessible for scientists around the world. This brings the research field a step closer to the development of therapies for improved recovery after heart injury. The results were published in Communications Biology on the 29th of January.

Efforts to understand when corals reproduce have been given a boost thanks to a new resource that gives scientists open access to more than forty years' worth of information about coral spawning.

Led by researchers at Newcastle University, UK, and James Cook University, Australia, the Coral Spawning Database (CSD) for the first time collates vital information about the timing and geographical variation of coral spawning. This was a huge international effort that includes over 90 authors from 60 institutions in 20 countries.

As part of standard patient protocol, doctors inform women of the risks of pregnancy. But there is one exception to this standard: stillbirth.

University of Arkansas law professor Jill Wieber Lens argues that women have a right to know of the risk of stillbirth, and, consistent with the evolution of informed consent law, this right should be enforceable through a medical malpractice tort claim.

COLLEGE PARK, Md.--The amount of methane released into the atmosphere as a result of coal mining is likely much higher than previously calculated, according to research presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union recently.

The study estimates that methane emissions from coal mines are approximately 50 percent higher than previously estimated. The research was done by a team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others.

The Japanese now have their own reference genome thanks to researchers at Tohoku University who completed and released the first Japanese reference genome (JG1).

Their study was published in the journal Nature Communications on January 11, 2021.

"JG1 can aid with the clinical sequence analysis of Japanese individuals with rare diseases as it eliminates the genomic differences from the international reference genome," said Jun Takayama, co-author of the study.

A new study has found that mobile apps can play a vital role in helping immigrants integrate into new cultures, as well as provide physical and mental health benefits.

Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) surveyed new migrants and refugees undertaking free beginners' language classes in Greece, often the first destination for people arriving into Europe from Africa and Asia, over a 10-month period.

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers discovered that light pollution leads to more than just wasted energy and washed-out starlight--it can increase the likelihood of a preterm birth by almost 13%. Laura Argys, professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver, collaborated with scientists at Lehigh University and Lafayette College to produce this study.

Aging and lifestyle-related metabolic imbalances, such as hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, and oxidative-stress, cause the accumulation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), including pentosidine (PEN, crosslinked type) and carboxymethyl-lysine (CML, non-crosslinked type). Osteoporosis is a widespread metabolic skeletal disease characterized by diminished bone mineral density (BMD) or bone strength, which increases the risk of fractures.

Cambridge, Massachusetts - They may be the youngest astronomers to make a discovery yet.

This week, 16-year-old Kartik Pinglé and 18-year-old Jasmine Wright have co-authored a peer-reviewed paper in The Astronomical Journal describing the discovery of four new exoplanets about 200-light-years away from Earth.

An international joint research team from the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with Zhejiang University and the Technical University of Denmark, reported an in-situ strategy to manipulate interfacial structure with atomic precision during catalytic reactions. Results were published in the latest issue of Science.