The John Innes Centre and Stanford University joined forces to form a research team and utilized groundbreaking techniques to uncover the biosynthetic pathways of these valuable molecules. These molecules are produced by specific plant families, including mahogany and citrus. In the study which appears in Science, the John Innes Centre research team used genomic tools to map the genome of Chinaberry (Melia azedarach), a mahogany species, and combined this with molecular analysis to reveal the enzymes in the biosynthetic pathway....

The scientists published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Much of the previous evidence of this was based upon decades of correlations. This is a rare example of a direct manipulation with a result. The optimism bias isn’t something new, it was recognized decades ago and seems to exist fairly uniformly among humans of all ages. Tali Sharot, of the UCL, has been studying this bias since 2007....

An exploding star known as a Type Ia supernova plays a key role in our understanding of the universe. Studies of Type Ia supernovae led to the discovery of dark energy, which garnered the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet the cause of this variety of exploding star remains elusive. All evidence points to a white dwarf that feeds off its companion star, gaining mass, growing unstable, and ultimately detonating....

The scientists will publish a comprehensive assessment in the journal The Lancet. The Global Burden of Disease report involved almost 500 scientists in 50 countries and also concluded that doctors have finally got a handle on some common infectious diseases, helping to save millions of lives. But collectively people are spending more of their lives living in poor health and with disabilities. The report assessed the prevalence of diseases and causes of death across the world in 2010, and compared these with collected data in 1990 in order to identify any trends....

OMZs (Oxygen Minimum Zones) are regions in the ocean with insufficient oxygen levels in the mid-waters (100-1000m below the surface) to support marine life. These dead zones play an important role in the ocean’s overall health. “OMZs are very important for geochemical cycling in the ocean,” says Catherine Davis, assistant professor of marine, earth, and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the research. “They occur in areas where sunlight and atmospheric oxygen don’t reach....

Older age, male sex, and other medical conditions not associated with heightened risk ….Unlike Asian ethnicity, obesity, overcrowding, socializing, and people-facing roles. People with allergic conditions such as hay fever, rhinitis, and atopic eczema, may have a lower risk of COVID-19 infection, especially if they also have asthma, finds a large, population-based study of UK adults, published online in the respiratory journal Thorax. And contrary to the findings of recent studies, older age, male sex, and other underlying conditions aren’t linked to a heightened risk of infection, the research indicates....

The wandering albatross is the poster bird for avian monogamy. The graceful glider is known to mate for life, partnering up with the same bird to breed, season after season, between long flights at sea. But on rare occasions, an albatross pair will “divorce” — a term ornithologists use for instances when one partner leaves the pair for another mate while the other partner remains in the flock. Divorce rates vary widely across the avian world, and the divorce rate for wandering albatrosses is relatively low....

Can worldwide communication ever be fully secure? Quantum physicists believe they can provide secret keys using quantum cryptography via satellite. Unlike communication-based on classical bits, quantum cryptography employs the quantum states of single light quanta (photons) for the exchange of data. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle limits the precision with which the position and momentum of a quantum particle can be determined simultaneously, but can also be exploited for secure information transfer....

The research, published recently in the journal Acta Astronautica, marks the latest to explore a persistent, and perhaps surprising, hiccup in humanity’s dreams of colonizing the moon: dust. Astronauts walking or driving over the lunar surface kick up huge quantities of this fine material, also called regolith. “It’s really annoying,” said Xu Wang, a research associate in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU Boulder. “Lunar dust sticks to all kinds of surfaces—spacesuits, solar panels, helmets—and it can damage equipment....

Arabia Terra is in the northern latitudes of Mars. Named in 1879 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, this ancient land covers an area slightly larger than the European continent. Arabia Terra contains craters, volcanic calderas, canyons, and beautiful bands of rock reminiscent of sedimentary rock layers in the Painted Desert or the Badlands. These layers of rock and how they formed was the research focus for Koeppel along with his advisor, associate professor Christopher Edwards of NAU’s Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science along with Andrew Annex, Kevin Lewis, and undergraduate student Gabriel Carrillo of Johns Hopkins University....

Using a citizen science database with records going back to the mid-18th century, a research team led by the University of Cambridge has found that the effects of climate change are causing plants in the UK to flower one month earlier under recent global warming. The researchers based their analysis on more than 400,000 observations of 406 plant species from Nature’s Calendar, maintained by the Woodland Trust, and collated the first flowering dates with instrumental temperature measurements....

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have been able to probe into the chemical signatures of dusky disks encircling four distant star systems. They discovered that surprisingly the chemical composition was eerily similar to Earth. Those elements make up 93% of the Earth’s mass. White dwarf stars, several hundreds of light-years distant from Earth, could give an inkling of what will happen in the future to Earth. The findings were published on arXiv, and have been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

“Our study has two novel aspects,” said Youssef Ezzyat, a senior data scientist in Penn’s psychology department in the School of Arts and Sciences and lead author on the paper. “We developed a system to monitor brain activity and trigger stimulation responsively based on the subject’s brain activity. We also identified a novel target for applying stimulation, the left lateral temporal cortex.” In previous work by the Penn team, led by Michael Kahana, professor of psychology and RAM program principal investigator, and Daniel Rizzuto, director of cognitive neuromodulation, electrical pulses were delivered at regular intervals, independent of a subject’s success at learning....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science (1, 2, 3) in three papers. The ice, which was long suspected, seems to be much purer than ice trapped in similar craters on Earth’s Moon. This could mean that Mercury is a better place to trap icy materials delivered by asteroids and comets. The floors of many of Mercury’s polar craters are cast in permanent shadow, despite the planet’s blistering 400 °C temperatures....

Like humans, cells can be easily influenced by peer pressure. Take a neural stem cell in the brain: Whether this cell remains a stem cell or differentiates into a fully formed brain cell is ultimately determined by a complex set of molecular messages the cell receives from countless neighbors. Understanding these messages is key for scientists hoping to harness these stem cells to treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The biggest changes are currently occurring in developing countries. The UN predicts that cities will absorb all of the world’s population growth, which is about 2.3 billion people, in the next four decades. However, these predictions don’t account for variations in how the individual cities will change and evolve to meet this growth. Karen Seto, a geographer at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, and her team looked closely at how cities grow....

Even though vaccines may be steering the world toward a post-pandemic normal, a constantly mutating SARS-CoV-2 necessitates the development of effective drugs. In a new study published in Nature Microbiology, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers, together with collaborators from the Pasteur Institute, France, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA, offer a novel therapeutic approach to combating the notorious virus. Rather than targeting the viral protein responsible for the virus entering the cell, the team of researchers addressed the protein on our cells’ membrane that enables this entry....

The speed of writing and reading out magnetic information from storage devices is limited by the time that it takes to manipulate the data carrier. To speed up these processes, researchers have recently started to explore the use of ultrashort laser pulses that can switch magnetic domains in solid-state materials. This route proved to be promising, but the underlying physical mechanisms remain poorly understood. This is largely due to the complexity of the magnetic materials involved, in which a large number of magnetic entities interact with one another....

Quantum computers can potentially answer questions beyond the capabilities of classical computing – but their answers might not be reliableUniversity of Warwick scientists have developed a protocol for quantum computers to measure how close their answers are to the correct onesChecking whether these answers are correct using classical methods is extremely resource-intensiveCould be used in confirming whether a quantum computer has outperformed classical computers, so-called quantum supremacy A new test to check if a quantum computer is giving correct answers to questions beyond the scope of traditional computing could help the first quantum computer that can outperform a classical computer to be realized....

In a race against time, in some of the roughest terrain on Earth, researchers are working with a group of First Nations Australians to document ancient art in the bark of Australia’s boab trees. Carvings in the boab trees tell the stories of the King Brown Snake (or Lingka) Dreaming in a remote area of the Tanami desert, a desert in northern Australia which straddles the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory....