Earth
How did life survive the most severe ice age? A McGill University-led research team has found the first direct evidence that glacial meltwater provided a crucial lifeline to eukaryotes during Snowball Earth, when the oceans were cut off from life-giving oxygen, answering a question puzzling scientists for years.
Lasers. They are used for everything from entertaining our cats to encrypting our communications. Unfortunately, lasers can be energy intensive and many are made using toxic materials like arsenic and gallium. To make lasers more sustainable, new materials and lasing mechanisms must be discovered.
Most Australian GPs have used a placebo in practice at least once, with active placebos (active treatments used primarily to generate positive expectations) more commonly used than inert placebos, according to a new study.
International studies indicate that placebo use by general practitioners (GPs) is remarkably high, but until now usage in Australia was unknown.
The physicochemical and biological properties of hydrogen-bonded systems are significantly affected by nuclear quantum effects including zero-point energies of vibrational modes, proton delocalization, and tunneling effect. These originate from the extremely low nuclear mass of hydrogen; thus, hydrogen-bonded systems show remarkable isotope effects upon deuteration. In the 1930s, Ubbelohde first proposed that deuteration elongates and weakens hydrogen bonds in many hydrogen-bonded systems.
Researchers have identified the critical last pieces of a genetic defence system that gives oats resistance to soil pathogens.
The discovery opens significant opportunities for scientists and breeders to introduce versions of this defence mechanism into other crops.
It is an important milestone in research into avenacins, defensive antimicrobial compounds produced in the roots of oats. These were first identified more than 70 years ago and belong to the triterpene glycoside family of natural products which have diverse industrial and agricultural applications.
DNA from 75-year old eradicated European malaria parasites uncovers the historical spread of one of the two most common forms of the disease, Plasmodium vivax, from Europe to the Americas during the colonial period, finds a new study co-led by UCL.
The research published in Molecular Biology and Evolution reports the genome sequence of a malaria parasite sourced from blood-stained medical microscope slides used in 1944 in Spain, one of the last footholds of malaria in Europe.
A new deep-learning algorithm can quickly and accurately analyze several types of genomic data from colorectal tumors for more accurate classification, which could help improve diagnosis and related treatment options, according to new research published in the journal Life Science Alliance.
Colorectal tumors are extremely varied in how they develop, require different drugs and have very different survival rates. Often, they are classified into subtypes based on analysis of gene expression levels.
Many cellular processes involve patterned distributions of proteins. Scientists have identified the minimal set of elements required for the autonomous formation of one such pattern, thus enabling the basic phenomenology to be explored.
The structure of an Organic Lake Phycodnavirus rhodopsin II (OLPVRII), which is a unique protein found in the genome of giant viruses, has been determined thanks to the work of MIPT graduates and PhD students. The paper was published in Nature Communications.
CHICAGO --- The percentage of African ancestry in a person's genome determines the level that certain genes are expressed, called mRNA, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study. The discovery could offer insight into the different risk of diseases as well as a different response to medications in African Americans.
This is the first study to compare gene production between African Americans. Previous studies compared only black and white individuals.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers report that a central component of the innate immune response is activated by two short RNAs which are produced by site-specific cleavage of a precursor RNA molecule - and both derivatives are generated by the same enzyme.
Daily marijuana use during pregnancy may lead to an increased risk of low birth weight, low resistance to infection, decreased oxygen levels and other negative fetal health outcomes, according to a new study from a team of UNLV Medicine doctors.
A research team led by Northwestern Engineering's Luis Amaral has developed an algorithmic approach for data analysis that automatically recognizes uninformative words -- known as stop words -- in a large collection of text. The findings could dramatically save time during natural language processing as well as reduce its energy footprint.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Dec. 2, 2019) -- Understanding how the brain processes sweet, bitter and umami tastes may one day help researchers design more effective drugs for neurological disorders.
UCLA scientists have discovered a link between a protein and the ability of human blood stem cells to self-renew. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports that activating the protein causes blood stem cells to self-renew at least twelvefold in laboratory conditions.
Multiplying blood stem cells in conditions outside the human body could greatly improve treatment options for blood cancers like leukemia and for many inherited blood diseases.