Earth
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves only 13.8% of all tested drugs, and these numbers are even lower in "orphan" diseases that affect relatively few people.
Part of the problem lies in the imperfect nature of preclinical drug testing that aims to exclude toxic effects and predetermine concentrations and administration routes before drug candidates can be tested in people. How new drugs move within the human body and are affected by it, and how drugs affect the body itself, cannot be predicted accurately enough in animal and standard in vitro studies.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Transferring genetic markers in plant breeding is a challenge, but a team of grapevine breeders and scientists at Cornell University have come up with a powerful new method that improves fruit quality and acts as a key defense against pests and a changing climate.
Plant breeders are always striving to develop new varieties that satisfy growers, producers and consumers. To do this, breeders use genetic markers to bring desirable traits from wild species into their cultivated cousins.
MADISON - In 1961, John Kutzbach, then a recent college graduate, was stationed in France as an aviation weather forecaster for the U.S. Air Force. There, he found himself exploring the storied caves of Dordogne, including the prehistoric painted caves at Lascoux.
AMHERST, Mass. - For more than 50 years, social scientists and practitioners have suggested that having members of different groups interact with each other can be an effective tool for reducing prejudice. But emerging research points to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the effects of contact between groups, say Linda Tropp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Tabea Hässler, leader of a multi-national research team based at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Costs of solar panels have plummeted over the last several years, leading to rates of solar installations far greater than most analysts had expected. But with most of the potential areas for cost savings already pushed to the extreme, further cost reductions are becoming more challenging to find.
Now, researchers at MIT and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have outlined a pathway to slashing costs further, this time by slimming down the silicon cells themselves.
When facing a volatile climate, nature searches for a way to survive. For plants, that often means spreading new roots deeper and wider in search of water, particularly in times of drought. While scientists have recognized the process of root emergence for decades, how intercellular communication may drive this phenomenon was previously unknown.
A combination of climate change, extreme weather and pressure from local human activity is causing a collapse in global biodiversity and ecosystems across the tropics, new research shows.
The study, published today, mapped over 100 locations where tropical forests and coral reefs have been affected by climate extremes such as hurricanes, floods, heatwaves, droughts and fires. It provides an overview of how these very diverse ecosystems are being threatened by a combination of ongoing climate changes, increasingly extreme weather and damaging local human activities.
An ecological pileup of unprecedented changes in the ocean off the West Coast beginning about 2014 led to record entanglements of humpback and other whales, putting the region's most valuable commercial fishery at risk, new research shows.
PULLMAN, Wash. - A Washington State University team has developed a more efficient, safer, and cost-effective way to produce cadmium telluride (CdTe) material for solar cells or other applications, a discovery that could advance the solar industry and make it more competitive.
White lupin is a particularly abstemious crop, requiring very little fertiliser and producing high-protein seeds of great nutritive quality. The plant has just yielded the secrets of its genome thanks to the collaboration of eleven French and foreign laboratories coordinated by Benjamin Péret, a CNRS researcher at the Biochimie et physiologie moléculaire des plantes laboratory (CNRS/Inrae/Université de Montpellier/Montpellier SupAgro). Lupin has the distinctive feature of possessing "proteoid" or cluster roots, which enable it to solubilise phosphate and extract it efficiently.
New research done at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Huazhang University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, has exciting implications for secure data transfer across optical fibre networks. The team have demonstrated that multiple quantum patterns of twisted light can be transmitted across a conventional fibre link that, paradoxically, supports only one pattern. The implication is a new approach to realising a future quantum network, harnessing multiple dimensions of entangled quantum light.
CINCINNATI -- A new study suggests that significant early childhood exposure to traffic-related air pollution (TRAP) is associated with structural changes in the brain at the age of 12.
The Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center study found that children with higher levels of TRAP exposure at birth had reductions at age 12 in gray matter volume and cortical thickness as compared to children with lower levels of exposure.
When we cut our skin, groups of cells rush en masse to the site to heal the wound.
But the complicated mechanics of this collective cell movement -- which are facilitated by rearrangements between each cell and its neighbors -- have made it challenging for researchers to decipher what's actually driving it.
"If we can understand the key factors causing cell migration, then we could perhaps develop new treatments to speed up wound healing," says Jacob Notbohm, an assistant professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The entire set of our emotions is topographically represented in a small region of the brain, a 3 centimeters area of the cortex, report scientists in a study conducted at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy. The discovery of this "map" of emotions comes from a work conducted by the Molecular Mind Laboratory (MoMiLab) directed by Professor Pietro Pietrini, and recently published in Nature Communications.