Racial stereotypes may play role with assumptions that African-Americans are more violent, study finds. People are more likely to blame violent video games as a cause of school shootings by white perpetrators than by African American perpetrators, possibly because of racial stereotypes that associate minorities with violent crime, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. Researchers analyzed more than 200,000 news articles about 204 mass shootings over a 40-year period and found that video games were eight times more likely to be mentioned when the shooting occurred at a school and the perpetrator was a white male than when the shooter was an African American male....

For many, 2020 was a year of life suspended, as the novel coronavirus spread rapidly across the planet and forced people indoors — often far apart from their loved ones. But for biomedical researchers on the COVID-19 frontlines, the race to develop a vaccine happened at a blisteringly fast pace. Now, little less than a year after SARS-CoV-2 reared its ugly head, researchers have achieved their goal. To honor this feat, Science has named the rapid development of effective vaccines against COVID-19 as its 2020 breakthrough of the year....

Scientists have proposed the first steps towards a united global plan to save our oceans, for the sake of human health. An interdisciplinary European collaboration called the Seas Oceans and Public Health In Europe (SOPHIE) Project, led by the University of Exeter and funded by Horizons 2020, has outlined the initial steps that a wide range of organizations could take to work together to protect the largest connected ecosystem on Earth....

In the giant system that connects Earth to the sun, one key event happens over and over: solar material streams toward Earth and the giant magnetic bubble around Earth, the magnetosphere helps keep it at bay. The parameters, however, change: The particles streaming in could be from the constant solar wind, or perhaps from a giant cloud erupting off the sun called a coronal mass ejection, or CME. Sometimes the configuration is such that the magnetosphere blocks almost all the material, other times the connection is long and strong, allowing much material in....

A team of scientists, led by Joachim Reichert, Johannes Barth, and Alexander Holleitner (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Clusters of Excellence MAP and NIM), and Itai Carmeli (Tel Aviv University) developed a method to measure photocurrents of a single functionalized photosynthetic protein system. The scientists could demonstrate that such a system can be integrated and selectively addressed in artificial photovoltaic device architectures while retaining their biomolecular functional properties. The proteins represent light-driven, highly efficient single-molecule electron pumps that can act as current generators in nanoscale electric circuits....

A new study suggests that it hasn’t all been downhill, though. The storm seems to have increased in area at least once along the way, and it’s growing taller as it gets smaller. “Storms are dynamic, and that’s what we see with the Great Red Spot. It’s constantly changing in size and shape, and its winds shift, as well,” said Amy Simon, an expert in planetary atmospheres at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the new paper, published in the Astronomical Journal....

However, what physiological and evolutionary mechanisms allow for the enormous variety of flower colors, shapes, and visual patterns seen in desiertos floridos? And how do pollinators, mainly hymenopterans like solitary wasps and bees in the Atacama, who are the beneficiaries of this visual spectacle, perceive all this variation? This is the topic of recent research published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. “Our aim was to shed light on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that cause biological diversity in extreme environments like the Atacama desert,” said first author Dr....

“Many diseases are related to OGT function,” says LJI Instructor Xiang Li, Ph.D., who served as the first author for the new study. “For example, many studies have shown abnormal OGT function in cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.” The new study, spearheaded by Li and co-led by LJI Professor Anjana Rao, Ph.D., and LJI Assistant Professor Samuel Myers, Ph.D., is the first to show that OGT controls cell survival by regulating a critical protein called mTOR....

The corrected identification is significant because the fossil in question was the only bamboo macrofossil still considered from the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana. The oldest microfossil evidence for bamboo in the Northern Hemisphere belongs to the Middle Eocene, while other South American fossils are not older than Pliocene. Over the last decades, some authors have doubted whether the Patagonian fossil was really a bamboo or even a grass species at all....

Findings lay groundwork for clinical development program. The development of a safe and effective vaccine will likely be required to end the COVID-19 pandemic. A group of scientists, led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) immunologist Dan H. Barouch, MD, PhD, now report that a leading candidate COVID-19 vaccine developed at BIDMC in collaboration with Johnson & Johnson raised neutralizing antibodies and robustly protected non-human primates (NHPs) against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19....

CU Anschutz experts predict the BA.1 subvariant’s similarities downgrade its risks. As the nation moves into the least-infectious period since the start of the pandemic, with Colorado’s governor last week ushering the healthy and fully vaccinated back into a mask-less and more normal life, some experts warn against moving too fast. Concerns focus on an emerging omicron subvariant coined BA.2, which the World Health Organization recently reminded is a “variant of concern,” the durability of COVID-19 vaccines and the risks of the unknowns....

No one will know how the rover is doing until it speaks. But the team notes there’s reason to be optimistic: They’ve performed several studies on the state of its batteries before the storm, and temperatures at its location. Because the batteries were in relatively good health before the storm, there’s not likely to be too much degradation. And because dust storms tend to warm the environment — and the 2018 storm happened as Opportunity’s location on Mars entered summer — the rover should have stayed warm enough to survive....

The sedimentary rocks, much like the limestone in tropical oceans today, formed in oceans starved of sand and mud eroded from the land. Lead author Ph.D. candidate Adam Nordsvan, from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, said the new research called into question previous suggestions that the formation of the characteristic rocks took place over a much shorter period of time. “It was previously thought that these distinctive carbonate rocks were deposited over less than 10 thousand years, as the sea level rose when the ice that covered the entire globe melted, but we have shown that they were likely deposited over hundreds of thousands to millions of years following the sea-level rise,” Mr....

The crew of four spent around 23 hours orbiting Earth and catching up with the International Space Station after their launch before docking to the Node-2 Harmony module, marking the start of ESA’s six-month mission Alpha. Thomas is the first European to be launched to space on a US spacecraft in over a decade. The new Crew Dragon ships four astronauts at a time, allowing more people to live and work on the International Space Station doing more research for scientists on Earth....

Human spaceflight is incredibly difficult and expensive; the rockets must be reliable and the vehicle must be built with expensive life support systems and a certain level of redundancy. To date, only three countries – Russia, the United States and China – have achieved this feat. As a space policy expert, I find it hard to overstate the significance for both SpaceX and spaceflight in general. For SpaceX, it’s another step on their road to Mars, but more generally, it demonstrates that spaceflight need not be reserved for only the most powerful of states....

The spider is believed to be a new species, and crafts a larger spider from leaves, debris, and dead insects. The genus Cyclosa includes other sculpting spiders, but this is the first that has been observed to build a replica with multiple legs and to use a web-shaking behavior. The fake spiders serve as decoys, as part of a defense mechanism meant to confuse or distract predators. Within a 1-square-mile area, researchers found more of these spider-building spiders....

The researchers claim that multimorbidity, the term for the presence of multiple chronic health disorders, poses a serious danger to the well-being of aging populations. As a result, there may be a greater burden on the healthcare and federal insurance systems as well as the health of older people, especially given that by 2050, there will be more than 50% more Americans over the age of 65 living in the United States....

Up to 3 times more children suffer severe hunger with each El Niño than from COVID-19. El Niño events provide a snapshot of the future under climate change and chronicle the lack of proactive policy action even when climate events are predictable. Over the last year and a half, the 1-in-100-year COVID-19 pandemic drove millions of children into hunger. But every four to seven years, an El Niño causes weather patterns to shift across the tropics, leading to warmer temperatures and precipitation changes and widespread impacts on agriculture, infectious diseases, conflicts and more....

A simple modification of a DNA base in small areas of the genome may explain why glioblastoma tumors are so deadly, researchers at Yale and the University of California-San Diego report on November 1 in the journal Cell. Glioblastomas are particularly virulent brain tumors, with survival rates of only about three to six months. A major culprit is the existence of a group of special tumor cells that are highly resistant to standard therapies....

In a paper published in a recent issue of eLife, a team of researchers at UC San Diego’s BioCircuits Institute (BCI) and Department of Physics, led by Research Scientist and BCI Associate Director Lev Tsimring, reports that when non-motile E. coli (Escherichia coli) are placed on an agar surface together with motile A. baylyi (Acinetobacter baylyi), the E. coli “catch a wave” at the front of expanding A. baylyi colony....