104 articles from FRIDAY 20.1.2023

U.S. should expand rules for risky virus research to more pathogens, panel says

U.S. health officials should expand oversight of federally funded research that tweaks deadly viruses to include some less risky types of pathogens, an expert panel has concluded. Its draft report , released today, also recommends funding agencies share more information about decisions to approve such work. The recommendations are welcome news for scientists,...

Teaching evaluations reflect—and may perpetuate—academia’s gender biases

Universities routinely use student teaching evaluations to help make decisions about which faculty members get tenure and promotions. But factors unrelated to teaching performance, such as gender, race, and even attractiveness, can skew these evaluations, potentially exacerbating existing inequities in academia. Now, a new study suggests an additional source of bias:...

Vulnerability of red sea urchins to climate change depends on location

A new study of red sea urchins, a commercially valuable species, investigated how different populations respond to changes in their environments. The results show that red sea urchin populations in Northern and Southern California are adapted to their local conditions but differ in their vulnerability to the environmental changes expected to occur in the future due to global climate change and...

Regulating immunological memory may help immune system fight disease

Scientists have long sought to better understand the human body's immune responses that occur during various diseases, including cancer and inflammatory diseases. Scientists have now analyzed how immunological memory -- the memory the body's immune system retains after an infection or vaccination that helps protect against reinfection -- gets generated and maintained, as well as the role...

What Time You Eat Doesn’t Matter For Weight Loss, Study Finds

Recent diet trends have promised that clocks are as important for weight loss as scales. One such diet is known as intermittent fasting, which entails a schedule of alternating fasting and eating. A popular intermittent fasting schedule is time-restricted eating. By restricting eating to a limited number of hours a day, some proponents of this diet argue people can harness their bodies’...

Morris Nitsun obituary

My friend Dr Morris Nitsun, who has died aged 79, was a consultant psychologist, psychotherapist and group analyst who worked in the NHS for 50 years. He was also a gifted artist.Born in Worcester, a small, remote town in the Western Cape, South Africa, Morris was the youngest of three children of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants. His father, Joseph Nitsun, was a businessman who had lost family in the...

A U.S. judge lectures the government on how academic research works

A sentencing hearing is a forum to mete out justice for someone convicted of a crime. But this week, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Julie Robinson used the sentencing of Franklin Tao , a chemical engineer formerly at the University of Kansas (KU), Lawrence, to also talk at length about what motivates academic researchers—and how the U.S. government appeared to...

A mixture of crops provides ecological benefits for agricultural landscapes, find researchers

There are often too few flowering plants in agricultural landscapes, which is one reason for the decline of pollinating insects. Researchers at the University of Göttingen have now investigated how a mixture of crops of fava beans (broad beans) and wheat affects the number of pollinating insects. They found that areas of mixed crops compared with areas of single crops are visited equally often by...

Vulnerability of red sea urchins to climate change depends on location

A new study of red sea urchins, a commercially valuable species, investigated how different populations respond to changes in their environments. The results show that red sea urchin populations in Northern and Southern California are adapted to their local conditions but differ in their vulnerability to the environmental changes expected to occur in the future due to global climate change and...

Unprecedented levels of high-severity fire burn in Sierra Nevada

High-severity wildfire is increasing in Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade forests and has been burning at unprecedented rates compared to the years before Euro-American settlement, according to a study from the Safford Lab at the University of California, Davis and its collaborators. Those rates have especially shot up over the past decade.

Researchers develop new, more accurate computational tool for long-read RNA sequencing

On the journey from gene to protein, a nascent RNA molecule can be cut and joined, or spliced, in different ways before being translated into a protein. This process, known as alternative splicing, allows a single gene to encode several different proteins. Alternative splicing occurs in many biological processes, like when stem cells mature into tissue-specific cells. In the context of disease,...