Earth
Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Locations and topics studied this month include the central Appalachian Mountains; fossil pollen in Colombia; the precision and accuracy of model analyses; the Bone Spring Formation, Permian Basin, west Texas; and the geochronology of modern river sediment in south-central Alaska. You can find these articles at https://geosphere.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent .
LA JOLLA--(June 30, 2021) Scientists--and gardeners--have long known that plants grow taller and flower sooner when they are shaded by close-growing neighbors. Now, for the first time, researchers at the Salk Institute have shown the detailed inner workings of this process.
When it comes to climate change, not all organisms will lose out. A new Cal Poly study finds that rattlesnakes are likely to benefit from a warming climate.
A combination of factors makes a warming climate beneficial to rattlesnakes that are found in almost every part of the continental United States but are especially common in the Southwest.
PULLMAN, Wash. - Fire can put a tropical songbird's sex life on ice.
Following habitat-destroying wildfires in Australia, researchers found that many male red-backed fairywrens failed to molt into their red-and-black ornamental plumage, making them less attractive to potential mates. They also had lowered circulating testosterone, which has been associated with their showy feathers.
With advances in medical science driving progress against childhood brain tumors, today three out of four young patients survive at least five years beyond diagnosis. However, the outcomes look grim when malignant cells spread, or metastasize.
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers have shown how RNA-binding proteins modulate synaptic responses that mediate the transmission of nerve cell impulses.
Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and the UK investigated the safety and efficacy of new chemistry in antisense oligonucleotides used to treat spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a debilitating genetic disease. Their results may lead to the development of drugs with less toxicity and fewer injections needed thanks to prolonged action. The paper was published in the journal Nucleic Acid Therapeutics.
During summer 2020, the Yangtze River basin experienced persistent, record-breaking meiyu rainfall. Likewise, the region suffered from severe flooding and water damage as accumulated rainfall broke records dating back to 1954. Regions outside the meiyu rain belt received significant summer rainfall as well, including Beijing, located in northeastern China.
A recent proof-of-concept study finds that a low-cost training program can reduce hazardous driving in older adults. Researchers hope the finding will lead to the training becoming more widely available.
"On-road training and simulator training programs have been successful at reducing car accidents involving older drivers - with benefits lasting for years after the training," says Jing Yuan, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. "However, many older adults are unlikely to have access to these training programs or technologies."
Scientists have discovered how plants manage to live alongside each other in places that are dark and shady.
Moderate shade or even the threat of shade - detected by phytochrome photoreceptors - causes plants to elongate to try to outgrow the competition.
But in the deep gloom of a dense forest or a cramped crop canopy where resources and photosynthesis are limited, this strategy doesn't work. In these conditions it would be a waste of energy and detrimental to survival to elongate stems because seedlings would never be able to over-grow larger neighbours.
Knowing the weight of a commodity provides an objective way to value goods in the marketplace. But did a self-regulating market even exist in the Bronze Age? And what can weight systems tell us about this? A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen researched this by investigating the dissemination of weight systems throughout Western Eurasia. Their new simulation indicates that the interaction of merchants, even without substantial intervention from governments or institutions, is likely to explain the spread of Bronze Age technology to weigh goods.
Los Angeles, Calif. - The AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), the largest global HIV research network, today announced that findings from a sub-study of REPRIEVE (A5332/A5332s, an international clinical trial studying heart disease prevention in people living with HIV) have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open (JAMA Network Open).
The Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology laboratory, led by ICREA Researcher Dr. Patrick Aloy, has completed the bioactivity information for a million molecules using deep machine-learning computational models. It has also disclosed a tool to predict the biological activity of any molecule, even when no experimental data are available.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have found that a marine invasive species - a sea squirt that lives on rocky shores - could spread along 3,500 kilometres of South American coastline if climate change or human activities alter sea conditions.