science wire

At a symposium of the Simons Center for the Social Brain, six speakers described a diversity of recently launched studies aimed at improving understanding of the autistic brain.

Key Takeaways While experts know that microbes influence important processes like the cycling of nutrients through environments and the formation of harmful algal blooms, little is currently known about the microbial species living in the sensitive San Francisco Estuary ecosystem.

VU Amsterdam closes during the holidays. Please ask your questions on time and arrange your affairs before 21 December.

Caltech researchers have quantified the speed of human thought: a rate of 10 bits per second. However, our bodies' sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a billion bits per second, which is 100 million times faster than our thought processes.

MIT researchers introduce Boltz-1, a fully open-source model for predicting biomolecular structures With models like AlphaFold3 limited to academic research, the team built an equivalent alternative, to encourage innovation more broadly.

Researchers at the University of Würzburg have discovered a process that breaks down mRNA molecules in the human body particularly efficiently. This could be useful, for example, in the treatment of cancer. They are like the architects of our body: messenger ribonucleic acids, or mRNA for short. They contain detailed blueprints for proteins, which are read and translated by their "colleagues", the ribosomes.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's  Department of Biological Sciences and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have uncovered how a subset of cells in the intestines change throughout the day. "We found abundance of the sentinel tuft cells is higher at dusk, the beginning of the active phase, and low at dawn, the beginning of the resting phase," said Jianglin Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon and first author on a paper published in Science Immunology.

Juliette van Haren used insights from medical biology and industrial design for her PhD research. A better alternative for current incubator care: that's the goal of the interdisciplinary This new approach mimics the womb and may offer premature babies better development chances.

UW researchers find previously unknown links between microbial bile acids and the risk of colon cancer  Microbes living in our guts help us digest food by reshaping the bile acids that our livers produce for breaking down fats. It turns out that two of these microbially-modified bile acids may affect our risk - in opposite directions - for developing colon cancer.

Murres, a common seabird, look a little like flying penguins. These stout, tuxedo-styled birds dive and swim in the ocean to eat small fish and then fly back to islands or coastal cliffs where they nest in large colonies.

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Oxford researchers are to lead and co-lead on two MRC research centres, which are being launched to develop new advanced treatments for currently untreatable diseases.

The bottom trawl fishery for sole is severely disrupting the North Sea ecosystem. In terms of number of sea creatures, 99 per cent of what is caught in trawl nets is discarded marine life, ranging from small seahorses to thornback rays over a meter long.

A detailed new look at dopamine signaling suggests neuroscientists' model of reinforcement learning may need to be revised. Dopamine is a powerful signal in the brain, influencing our moods, motivations, movements, and more. The neurotransmitter is crucial for reward-based learning, a function that may be disrupted in a number of psychiatric conditions, from mood disorders to addiction.

Zooming in to the "pixels of reality": the electron microscope helps us to do that. However, it is unsuited for particularly sensitive targets.

Australia boasts some of the world's most stunning beetles. University of Sydney entomologist Tanya Latty and CSIRO beetle expert James Bickerstaff highlight five outstanding examples to keep an eye out for.

A new analysis published in the journal Science reveals that overfishing has caused populations of chondrichthyan fishes - sharks, rays, and chimaeras - to decline by more than 50 per cent since 1970.

Johns Hopkins researchers reveal an unexpected quality in electrical switches, potentially impacting computer memory Key takeaways: The surprising discovery suggests there is potential to develop electronic memory systems that mimic the way human brains work and form memories The device could one day decrease the massive amounts of energy consumed by cloud data storage A team of Johns Hopkins materials scientists made a surprising discovery that could change the way memory works in electronics.

AI pinpoints stroke timing, treatment potential from a single scan New AI software can read the brain scans of patients who have had a stroke, to more accurately pinpoint when it happened and help doctors work out whether it can be successfully treated.

Researchers from the United States and Germany have discovered a peptide that makes barley in the most important barley-growing region of the United States more susceptible to leaf blotch disease.

Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) have enabled a handful of test participants who are unable to move or speak to communicate simply by thinking. An implanted device picks up the neural signals associated with a particular thought and converts them into control signals that are fed into a computer or a robotic limb.

A total of 74 UCL academics are featured in Clarivate's annual 'Highly Cited Researchers List' 2024, recognising authors of the most influential research papers around the world.

Scientists from The University of Manchester have developed a pioneering process using engineered bacteria to transform complex mixed waste into sustainable biopolymers including human therapeutics such as insulin, and bioplastics. A new study from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology describes a novel biological method to convert mixed municipal waste-like fractions - including food scraps, plastics, and textiles - into valuable bio-products.

Women who have a high genetic risk of depression are more likely to develop heart disease, University of Queensland researchers have found. During a study that analysed genetic and health data from more than 300,000 people, Dr Sonia Shah Dr Clara Jiang from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience found women who had a high genetic risk of developing depression also had a high risk of developing heart disease, even in the absence of a depression diagnosis.