Culture

Immunologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have identified a biological pathway that selectively controls how key immune cells, called T follicular helper cells, mature into functional components of the immune system.

The finding offers the promise of developing drugs to activate the metabolic pathway to enhance the effectiveness of vaccines, including those that protect against COVID-19. Such medications could stimulate the immune system to respond more vigorously following immunization to produce more antibodies against a virus or bacterium.

"Equal pay for equal work," a motto touted by many people, turns out to be relevant to the plant world as well. According to new research by Stanford University ecologists, plants allocate resources to their microbial partners in proportion to how much they benefit from that partnership.

When you insist you're not racist, you may unwittingly be sending the opposite message.

That's the conclusion of a new study* by three Berkeley Haas researchers who conducted experiments with white participants claiming to hold egalitarian views. After asking them to write statements explaining why they weren't prejudiced against Black people, they found that other white people could nevertheless gauge the writers' underlying prejudice.

When someone is suspected of criminal activity, one of the most important questions they are asked is if they have a credible alibi. Playing back past events in our minds, however, is not like playing back a video recording. Recollections of locations, dates, and companions can become muddled with the passage of time. If a suspect's memories are out of line with documented events, a once-plausible alibi can crumble and may be seen as evidence of guilt.

Researchers have produced vaccine-like immune responses to a dangerous bacterium by colonizing 26 healthy volunteers with a related, but harmless, commensal bacterial species. The first-in-human, controlled infection study showed the strategy was safe, as no side effects were reported and the volunteers didn't transmit the commensal bacteria to bedroom-sharers over the 90-day study. Neisseria lactamica is a member of the microbiome that usually resides in the upper airways of children but can also safely colonize the airways of adults.

Astronomers have designed and trained a computer program which can classify tens of thousands of galaxies in just a few seconds, a task that usually takes months to accomplish.

In research published today, astrophysicists from Australia have used machine learning to speed up a process that is often done manually by astronomers and citizen scientists around the world.

In 2016, researchers from the EDDyLab - Evolution & Diversity Dynamics Lab - at the University of Liège (Belgium) proposed a new definition of the geological boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods (359 million years). This new definition has been tested by hundreds of researchers around the world and the results are now compiled in a special issue of the journal Palaeodiversity & Palaeoenvironments.