Curated News: PNAS

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A new study led by Florida State University researchers found that plants and small organisms in Arctic rivers could be responsible for more than half the particulate organic matter flowing to the Arctic Ocean. That’s a greater proportion than previously estimated, and it has implications for how much carbon gets sequestered in the ocean and how much moves into the atmosphere.

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UC San Diego researchers have identified a strong association between the product of a gene expressed in most cancers and elevated levels of white blood cells that produce antibodies within tumors, suggesting a new therapeutic target.

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The injection of bubbles from waves breaking in turbulent and cold high-latitude regions of the high seas is an underappreciated way in which atmospheric gases are transported into the interior ocean. An improved mechanistic understanding of gas exchange in high latitudes is important for several reasons, including to better constrain climate models that are used to predict changes in the ocean inventory of key gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide.

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Differences in genes involved in inflammation, immunity response and neural transmissions begin in childhood and evolve across the lifespan in brains of people with autism, a UC Davis MIND Institute has found.

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Cardiovascular medicine, hematology and pulmonary medicine may soon have the first-ever therapies to correct poor tissue oxygenation, a key driver of disease in millions, including peripheral artery disease, sickle cell disease, heart failure, stroke, emphysema and many others. The breakthrough follows a landmark discovery from investigators at Harrington Discovery Institute at University Hospitals (UH) and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The research team showed that a modified version of hemoglobin, termed S-nitrosohemoglobin, senses areas with insufficient oxygen, and then restores blood flow for oxygenation. The study recently published in PNAS.

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From astronomical sums of money to opulent superyachts and lavish villas, the assets of the oligarchs providing the political and financial backing for Russian president Vladimir Putin's military ambitions have been publicly and fervently seized by Western nations since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Scientists suspect that the red streaks crossing the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is a frozen mixture of water and salts, but its chemical signature matches no known substance on Earth. Now researchers have discovered a new type of solid crystal that forms when water and table salt combine in cold, pressurized conditions. Researchers believe the new substance created in a lab on Earth could form at the surface and bottom of these worlds’ deep oceans.

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Cedars-Sinai investigators found that women who developed mood and anxiety disorders associated with pregnancy and childbirth had specific altered proteins circulating in their bloodstream in the third trimester. The study is published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

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Irvine, Calif., Feb. 23, 2023 – People often associate Escherichia coli with contaminated food, but E. coli has long been a workhorse in biotechnology. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated that the bacterium has further value as part of a system to detect heavy metal contamination in water. E.

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Northwestern University researchers have developed the first smart wearable device to continuously track how much people use their voices, alerting them to overuse before vocal fatigue and potential injury set in.

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists set out to address one of the biggest uncertainties about how carbon-rich permafrost will respond to gradual sinking of the land surface as temperatures rise. Using a high-performance computer simulation, the research team found that soil subsidence is unlikely to cause rampant thawing in the future.

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Reporting in the PNAS, UNC School of Medicine researchers made the stunning discovery that telomeres contain genetic information to produce two small proteins, one of which they found is elevated in some human cancer cells, as well as cells from patients suffering from telomere-related defects.

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ROCKVILLE, MD – The virus that causes COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2, uses its spike protein in order to stick to and infect our cells. The final step for the virus to enter our cells is for part of its spike protein to act like a twist tie, forcing the host cell’s outer membrane to fuse with the virus. Kailu Yang, in the lab of Axel Brunger, colleagues at Stanford University, and collaborators at University of California Berkely, Harvard Medical School, and University of Finland have generated a molecule based on the twisted part of the spike protein (called HR2), which sticks itself onto the virus and prevents the spike protein from twisting.

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So-called hydrated electrons play a major role in many physical, chemical and biological processes. They are not bound to an atom or molecule and are free in the solution. Since they are only ever created as an intermediate product, they are extremely short-lived.

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Canadian researchers show that in Fragile X syndrome, the most common cause of autism, sensory signals from the outside world are underrepresented by cortical pyramidal neurons in the brain. This phenomenon could provide important clues to the underlying cause of the syndrome's symptoms.

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Antimicrobial resistance represents one of the top 10 global public health threats according to the World Health Organization, and scientists have been scrambling to find new tools to cure the most deadly drug-resistant infections.

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A fungus that plagues rice crops worldwide gains entry to plant cells in a way that leaves it vulnerable to simple chemical blockers, a discovery that could lead to new fungicides to reduce the substantial annual losses of rice and other valuable cereals.

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Decisions are difficult. Humans often find themselves deliberating between multiple conflicting alternatives, or frustratingly fixated upon a single option.

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A research team led by Specially Appointed Professor Masanori Kohda from the Graduate School of Science at the Osaka Metropolitan University has demonstrated that fish think “it’s me” when they see themselves in a picture, for the first time in animals.

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MicroRNA (miRNA) molecules in pancreatic islets have been thought to play important roles in type 2 diabetes, but until now scientists have not confidently identified which miRNAs are associated with the disease in humans.

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Notre Dame researchers found that voter ID requirements motivated supporters of both parties equally to comply and participate, but had little overall effect on the actual outcomes of the elections.

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A study conducted by Florida State University Psychology Professor Chris Martin and a team of researchers at the University of Toronto, shows that a smart phone application can enhance memory function in older adults.

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Wistar scientists have identified a gene signature that accurately predicts the functioning of P53 variants, important information to assessing cancer risk and optimizing choices for cancer therapeutics.

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Human actions are changing the environment at an unprecedented rate. Plant and animal populations must try to keep up with these human-accelerated changes, often by trying to rapidly evolve tolerance to changing conditions.

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Efforts to fight disease-causing bacteria by harnessing their natural predators could be undermined when multiple species occupy the same space, according to a study by Dartmouth College researchers.

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Some past research has suggested that falsehoods travel more quickly online than the truth and are more popular with the public, but a new study gives a more hopeful view.

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More than three times as many houses and other structures burned in Western wildfires in 2010-2020 than in the previous decade, and that wasn’t only because more acreage burned, a new analysis has found.

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A team of researchers from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography at the MPIDR produced a database that contains the number of academics per country, and the migration flows and rates from 1996 to 2021.

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Cornell University researchers have found white-tailed deer ­– the most abundant large mammal in North America – are harboring SARS-CoV-2 variants that were once widely circulated, but no longer found in humans.

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Fluid dynamics researchers use many techniques to study turbulent flows like ocean currents, or the swirling atmosphere of other planets.

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A University of Colorado Boulder-led study shows that between 1985 and 2019 in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, deforestation decreased and reforestation increased on lands where Indigenous communities had been able to complete a legal process to receive formal recognition of their ancestral lands.

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Wisconsin virologists have outlined in atomic detail the intricate RNA replication machines that coronaviruses create inside infected cells, giving rise to potential new strategies to fight disease.

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Wolves on an Alaskan island caused a deer population to plumet and switched to primarily eating sea otters in just a few years, a finding scientists at Oregon State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game believe is the first case of sea otters becoming the primary food source for a land-based predator.

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Curtin University-led research into the durability and age of an ancient asteroid made of rocky rubble and dust, revealed significant findings that could contribute to potentially saving the planet if one ever hurtled toward Earth.

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Researchers at University of California San Diego and UC Riverside have further elucidated the molecular pathway used by the SARS-CoV-2 virus to infect human lung cells, identifying a key host-cell player that may prove a new and enduring therapeutic target for treating COVID-19.

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In findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Saint Louis University researchers and colleagues report that elephants play a key role in creating forests which store more atmospheric carbon and maintaining the biodiversity of forests in Africa. If the already critically endangered elephants become extinct, rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest rainforest on earth, would gradually lose between six and nine percent of their ability to capture atmospheric carbon, amplifying planetary warming.

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A new study has found high frequency propagating activity patterns in the motor cortex that contain details of upcoming movement — information that could lead to the development of better brain-machine interfaces.

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UC San Diego researchers identify mutation that causes excessive folding in human brain’s wrinkly cerebral cortex, resulting in diminished cognitive function.

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Recent research shows that magnetic fields can spontaneously emerge in a plasma if the plasma has a temperature anisotropy. This mechanism is known as the Weibel instability. This new research is the first to unambiguously observe the Weibel instability in the laboratory. It offers a possible solution to the problem of the origin of the microgauss-level magnetic fields that permeate the galaxies.

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Prof. Miguel Ángel Herrada, from the University of Seville, and Prof. Jens G. Eggers, from the University of Bristol, have discovered a mechanism to explain the unstable movement of bubbles rising in water.