Culture
PULLMAN, Wash. - A team of researchers for the first time has found a correlation between the levels of bacteria and fungi in the gastrointestinal tract of children and the amount of common chemicals found in their home environment.
The work, published this month in Environmental Science and Technology Letters, could lead to better understanding of how these semi-volatile organic compounds may affect human health.
Across the United States, weather stations made up of instruments and sensors monitor the conditions that produce our local forecasts, like air temperature, wind speed and precipitation. These systems aren’t just weather monitors, they are also potent tools for research on topics from farming to renewable energy generation.
Researchers investigating the heritage of thousands of rice varieties have identified just two distinct maternal lineages, a discovery which could help address the issue of global food security.
University of Queensland scientists studied more than 3000 rice genotypes and found diversity was inherited through two maternal genomes identified in all rice varieties.
Lead researcher UQ's Professor Robert Henry said the finding was important in understanding how rice adapted to its environment.
EUGENE, Ore. - Nov. 11, 2020 - The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board launched the Real-time Transaction Reporting System in 2005 to tighten the gap in trade reporting in municipal bond markets from a full day to fifteen minutes.
The system brought real-time price discovery to the $4 trillion over-the-counter market, transforming muni trading, investing and potentially the financing of civic projects. In a new study, a team of researchers investigated the effects of improved disclosure of trading information for muni investors and bond dealers.
More than half of people with acute COVID-19 infection continue to have persistent fatigue 10 weeks after their initial illness, according to a new study published November 9 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Liam Townsend of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and colleagues.
Scientists have developed a bilayer passive cooling technology inspired by the way camels stay cool in the hot desert sun. The technology's bottom hydrogel layer acts like a camel's sweat glands, lowering the temperature through evaporating water, whereas the top aerogel layer functions like fur, insulating against outside heat while letting water vapor pass through. The research, published November 11 in the journal Joule, demonstrates that the design keeps products cool five times longer than conventional single-layer approaches.
Since the first bird evolved more than 150 million years ago, its descendants have adapted to a vast range of ecological niches, giving rise to tiny, hovering hummingbirds, plunge-diving pelicans and showy birds-of-paradise. Today, more than 10,000 species of birds live on the planet--and now scientists are well on their way to capturing a complete genetic portrait of that diversity.
Three papers published November 11 in Nature present major advances in understanding the evolution of birds and mammals, made possible by new methods for comparing the genomes of hundreds of species.
Comparative genomics uses genomic data to study the evolutionary relationships among species and to identify DNA sequences with essential functions conserved across many species. This approach requires an alignment of the genome sequences so that corresponding positions in different genomes can be compared, but that becomes increasingly difficult as the number of genomes grows.
Bo Li, Kai Kou, Research Fellows of IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter, Walter Kob, Professor of University of Montpellier and Institute Universitaire de France and Steve Granick, Director of the IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter report together in the 7833 issue of the journal Nature that onset of glass transition is a highly non-trivial process involving complex non-linear responses.
Scientists can now select individual cells from a population that grows on the surface of a laboratory dish and study their molecular contents. Developed by University of Toronto researchers, the new tool will enable a deeper study of stem cells and other rare cell types for therapy development.
The method is the first to marry cell microscopy with omics platforms to link the cells' physical parameters that are visible by eye, such as appearance, the presence of surface markers or cell-cell contacts, to their molecular makeup.
Looking for a bird's-eye view of human impact? A new study published in the journal Nature provides the most comprehensive picture yet of how human noise and light pollution affect birds throughout North America, including how these factors may interact with or mask the impacts of climate change.
Recent troubling findings suggest bird populations have declined by more than 30% in the last few decades. To develop effective strategies to reverse this trend, scientists and land managers need to understand what caused the decline.
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 11 A.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOV. 11, 2020
PITTSBURGH, Nov. 11, 2020 - Researchers from the Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine announced today in the journal Neuron that they've uncovered additional complexities behind mechanical allodynia--the sensation of pain from innocuous stimuli, such as light touch.
Carbon dioxide fuels photosynthesis, the process by which plants generate their food in the form of carbohydrates. The atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels are rapidly increasing, but there is uncertainty about whether plants can turn these extra resources into higher yields while retaining nutritional quality.
Researchers can now more accurately and precisely target specific proteins in yeast, mammalian cells and mice to study how knocking down specific protein traits can influence physical manifestation in a cell or organism.
The Japan-based team published their results on November 11th in Nature Communications.
A large international consortium led by scientists at Uppsala University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has sequenced the genome of 130 mammals and analysed the data together with 110 existing genomes to allow scientist to identify which are the important positions in the DNA. This new information can help both research on disease mutations in humans and how best to preserve endangered species. The study is published in Nature.