Earth
New, lower-cost help may soon be on the way to help manage one of the biggest threats facing the Great Barrier Reef.
That threat is pollution from land making its way downstream by way of the many rivers and streams that flow into coastal waters along the reef.
The size of the reef - which stretches for 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coast - makes it extremely hard to get an idea of what's happening in real-time.
A simple and sensitive urine test developed by Imperial and MIT engineers has produced a colour change in urine to signal growing tumours in mice.
Tools that detect cancer in its early stages can increase patient survival and quality of life. However, cancer screening approaches often call for expensive equipment and trips to the clinic, which may not be feasible in rural or developing areas with little medical infrastructure. The emerging field of point-of-care diagnostics is therefore working on cheaper, faster, and easier-to-use tests.
Due to their function, the lungs are constantly exposed to various compounds carried in the air, sometimes harmful, sometimes harmless. The lung immune system plays a pivotal role in deciding or not deciding to mount an immune response in order to sustain respiratory function. In some cases, there is a dysfunction of the immune system that responds against harmless compounds, as is the case in the development of asthma.
Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information.
1. Poor diet causes blindness in a young "fussy eater"
Abstract: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/L19-0361
URLs go live when the embargo lifts
Dog brain structure varies across breeds and is correlated with specific behaviors, according to new research published in JNeurosci. These findings show how, by selectively breeding for certain behaviors, humans have shaped the brains of their best friends.
Chronic cocaine use changes gene expression in the hippocampus, according to research in mice recently published in JNeurosci.
Chronic drug users learn to associate the drug-taking environment with the drug itself, reinforcing memories that contribute to addiction. These memories are thought to be created by changes in gene expression in the hippocampus and potentially involve the gene FosB, but the exact mechanism is unknown.
New research from the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health reveals a new role for the enzyme telomerase. Telomerase's only known role in normal tissue was to protect certain cells that divide regularly, such as embryonic cells, sperm cells, adult stem cells and immune cells. Scientists thought telomerase was turned off in all other cells, except in cancerous tumors where it promotes unlimited cell division.
Climate change could negatively impact banana cultivation in some of the world's most important producing and exporting countries, a study has revealed.
Bananas are recognised as the most important fruit crop - providing food, nutrition and income for millions in both rural and urban areas across the globe.
While many reports have looked at the impact of climate change on agricultural production, the effect rising temperatures and changing rainfall has on crucial tropical crops such as the banana are less well understood.
Highlights:
The traditional drug discovery starts with the testing of thousands of small molecules in order to get to just a few lead-like molecules and only about one in ten of these molecules pass clinical trials in human patients.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a form of AI imagination and are commonly used to generate images with specific properties
Since the seminal publication by Insilico Medicine team in 2016 GANs are being explored for generation of novel molecular structures with specified properties
New York, NY--September 2, 2019--A new Columbia Engineering study indicates that the world will experience more frequent and more extreme drought and aridity than currently experienced in the coming century, exacerbated by both climate change and land-atmosphere processes. The researchers demonstrate that concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity are largely driven by a series of land-atmosphere processes and feedback loops. They also found that land-atmosphere feedbacks would further intensify concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity in a warmer climate.
Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet.
For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth's history. Now, researchers from Florida State University have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - A new study provides valuable insights into pollen abundance and diversity available to honeybee colonies employed in five major pollinator-dependent crops in Oregon and California, including California's massive almond industry.
Boulder, Colo., USA: A new study published in Geology presents the detailed observation of a tsunami-generating volcano collapse by remote sensing. The paper by Rebecca Williams of the University of Hull and colleagues analyzes the 2018 collapse of Anak Krakatau, which triggered a tsunami that claimed over 430 lives and devastated coastal communities along the Sunda Strait, Indonesia.
Researchers led by Prof. Johan Thevelein (VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology) have discovered that Saccharomyces boulardii, a yeast with probiotic properties, produces uniquely excessive amounts of acetic acid, the main component of vinegar. They were also able to find the genetic basis for this trait, which allowed them to modify the acetic acid production of the yeast. If this unique S. boulardii trait can be further validated to have a probiotic effect in animal models, these results could provide the first genetic basis for S. boulardii's unique probiotic potency.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Stone tools and other artifacts unearthed from an archeological dig at the Cooper's Ferry site in western Idaho suggest that people lived in the area 16,000 years ago, more than a thousand years earlier than scientists previously thought.
The artifacts would be considered among the earliest evidence of people in North America.