298 articles from TUESDAY 6.7.2021

Schools in Barcelona create a map of the city's air pollution thanks to citizen science

A study led by University of Barcelona researchers and carried out together with more than 1,650 students and their family members from 18 educational centers in Barcelona shows that citizen science is a valid approach able for doing high quality science, and in this case, able to provide nitrogen dioxide values with an unprecedented resolution and to assess the impact of the pollution in the...

Secret to weathering climate change lies at our feet

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently discovered that the ability of agricultural grasses to withstand drought is directly related to the health of the microbial community living on their stems, leaves and seeds.

Personalized medicine for cats with heart disease

Veterinarians at the University of California, Davis, have found that a cat's DNA alters how it responds to a life-saving medication used to treat hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, a heart disease that affects 1 in 7 cats. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

What We Learned About Relationships During the Pandemic

The pseudo-scientific formula that explains most human bonding is basically time + affection + togetherness = relationship. So what happens to humans and their interconnectedness when two of the key elements—time and togetherness—are removed or increased? Can digital communication replace human to human contact? How do couples cope with stressful events they have never before...

The evolution of vinegar flies is based on the variation of male sex pheromones

By analyzing the genomes of 99 species of vinegar flies and evaluating their chemical odor profiles and sexual behaviors, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology show that sex pheromones and the corresponding olfactory channels in the insect brain evolve rapidly and independently. Female flies are able to recognize conspecific males through their specific odor profiles....

Relationship between chromosomal instability and senescence revealed in Drosophila

Chromosomal instability is a feature of solid tumors such as carcinoma. Likewise, cellular senescence is a process that is highly related to cellular aging and its link to cancer is becoming increasingly clear. Scientists led by ICREA researcher Dr. Marco Milán at IRB Barcelona have revealed the link between chromosomal instability and cellular senescence.

Satellite galaxies can continue forming stars when they pass close to their parent galaxies

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy, its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by Arianna di Cintio, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has...

Researchers achieve improved prediction of Indian Monsoon onset using machine learning

The onset of the Indian summer monsoon has been predicted three months ahead for the last 40 years with the highest precision up until today. The result indicates longer seasonal forecasts based on machine learning may be a way to mitigate the consequences of an erratic monsoon system under future global warming. Dr. Takahito Mitsui and Dr. Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact...

Not enough women and minorities apply for a job? Change the recruitment committee

Amid calls for racial and social justice nationwide, businesses and educational institutions are grappling with how to adopt more inclusive organizational practices, including more diversified hiring. However, recruitment teams and strategic leaders often blame their lack of a diverse workforce on a lack of diverse applicants. A large study of recruitment data suggests a simple and efficient way...

Studies add to concern about climate tipping

Two model studies document the probability of climate tipping in Earth subsystems. The findings support the urgency of restricting CO2 emissions as abrupt climate changes might be less predictable and more widespread in the climate system than anticipated. The work is part of the European TiPES project, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark but was conducted by Professor Michael...

From eyebrow beans to 'lost' rice: Community seedbanks are protecting China's crops

Wangjinzhuang village is nestled amongst the steep slopes of the South Taihang Mountains in Hebei Province, China. To prosper in the northern climate, the villagers have developed a tried-and-true strategy: Using the land to plant a hundred kinds of crops and not rely on the sky. Their fields contain red millet, white sorghum, purple and green eyebrow beans, and yellow radishes. Having survived...

Acid sensor discovered in plants

Climate change is causing increased flooding and prolonged waterlogging in northern Europe, but also in many other parts of the world. This can damage meadow grasses, field crops or other plants—their leaves die, the roots rot.

Predicting the future of cod: Scientists develop new fisheries management planning tool

The future of cod stocks in the North Sea and the Barents Sea may be much easier to predict than before. This is the result of an international research project led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon and its Institute of Coastal Systems—Analysis and Modeling. For the first time, the team has succeeded in predicting the development of stocks for ten years in advance, taking into account both changes...

Why kiwi and kōkako are more vulnerable than fantails

Life history traits explain the vulnerability of endemic forest birds and predict recovery after predator suppression. New modeling, published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology, has disentangled the limiting effects of predation, forest area, and food availability to predict the outcomes we can expect for different native bird species in a predator-free New Zealand.

Sexual reproduction without mating

One of the organisms attacked by the fungus Cyclocybe parasitica is the Tawa tree (Beilschmiedia tawa), which is relevant to the timber industry in New Zealand. Cyclocybe parasitica is widespread in the Pacific region and has long been known to the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, under the name Tawaka as an edible wild mushroom.

Editing light-emitting organic molecules via surface modification

Many researchers in the field of materials science constantly seek novel and versatile platforms that can be used to tailor materials to match their intended use. One example of this are covalent organic frameworks (COFs), an emerging class of crystalline porous polymers with a favorable set of fundamental properties, namely crystallinity, stability, and porosity. This combination makes them, in...

How an unfolding protein can induce programmed cell death

The death of cells is well regulated. If it occurs too much, it can cause degenerative diseases. Too little, and cells can become tumors. Mitochondria, the power plants of cells, play a role in this programmed cell death. Scientists from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the University of Pittsburgh (U.S.) have obtained new insights in how mitochondria receive the signal to...

Fighting COVID with COVID

What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus's growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.

A new look at color displays

Researchers at Linköping University have developed a method that may lead to new types of displays based on structural colors. The discovery opens the way to cheap and energy-efficient color displays and electronic labels. The study has been published in the scientific journal Advanced Materials.

How racial wage discrimination of football players ended in England

Increased labor mobility seems to have stopped the racial wage discrimination of Black English football players. A new study in economics from Stockholm university and Université Paris-Saclay used data from the English Premier League to investigate the impact of the so-called "Bosman ruling," and found that racial discrimination against English football players disappeared—but not for non-EU...

Research suggests demography is the key to managing habitat loss and fragmentation

City sprawl and road development is increasingly fragmenting the habitats that many plant and animal species need to survive. Ecologists have long known than sustainable development requires attention to ecological connectivity—the ability to keep plant and wildlife populations intact and healthy, typically by preserving large tracts of land or creating habitat corridors for animals. New...

Communication: A key tool for citizen participation in science

Researchers from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) have analyzed the way citizen science is practiced in Spain. The paper, produced by Carolina Llorente and Gema Revuelta, from UPF's Science, Communication and Society Studies Centre (CCS-UPF) and Mar Carrió, from the University's Health Sciences Educational Research Group (GRECS), has been published in the Journal of Science...

An 'instruction' to the crocodylian skull

The braincase of crocodylians has a distinctive structure. Unlike evolutionary relatives (birds and squamates), in crocodylians, all braincase bones are rigidly fixed together and form an akinetic structure. In the process of evolution, this made it possible for animals to develop powerful jaws and stronger bite forces, thanks to which crocodylians could gnaw through the hard shell of crayfish and...

A new look at color displays

Researchers have developed a method that may lead to new types of displays based on structural colors. The discovery opens the way to cheap and energy-efficient color displays and electronic labels.

Predicting the future of cod

Until now, fisheries have set catch levels a year in advance. Long-term influences such as changes in water temperatures are not taken into account. Researchers have now developed a computational model that can estimate the future of cod a full ten years in advance - taking into both account fishing and climate. The fishing industry has a completely new planning tool at its disposal.

Fighting COVID with COVID

Researchers design a new COVID-19 therapy that uses a defective version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to drive the disease-causing version to extinction.

Keeping bacteria under lock and key

A chemical and biomolecular engineer with biosecurity expertise in teaching cells to create and harness chemical building blocks not found in nature. New research describes progress on the stability of a biocontainment strategy that uses a microbe's dependence on a synthetic nutrient to keep it contained.

Ultrathin semiconductors electrically connected to superconductors

Researchers have equipped an ultrathin semiconductor with superconducting contacts. These extremely thin materials with novel electronic and optical properties could pave the way for previously unimagined applications. Combined with superconductors, they are expected to give rise to new quantum phenomena and find use in quantum technology.

Lab analysis finds near-meat and meat not nutritionally equivalent

A research team's deeper examination of the nutritional content of plant-based meat alternatives, using metabolomics, shows they're as different as plants and animals. Beef contained 22 metabolites that the plant substitute did not. The plant-based substitute contained 31 metabolites that meat did not. The greatest distinctions occurred in amino acids, dipeptides, vitamins, phenols, and types of...

NASA Science Live: International Asteroid Day

At NASA, every day is asteroid day. From the many missions journeying to asteroids in our solar system – some even returning samples to Earth – to the efforts to find, track and monitor near-Earth objects and protect our planet from potential impact hazards, NASA and its partners are always looking to the skies. Meet the experts:    Dr. Dani DellaGiustina is a Research...

Source of remarkable memory of 'superagers' revealed

'Superagers' who performed a challenging memory task in an MRI scanner were able to learn and recall new information as well as 25-year-old participants. Neurons in the visual cortex of brains of superaging older adults retain their selective and efficient ability to process visual stimuli and create a distinct memory of the images. In the future, interventions to train specific areas of the brain...