A recent study published in the Journal of Physiology has further supported the idea that exercise can help maintain youthful qualities in aging organisms. This research builds upon earlier experiments with lab mice who were near the end of their lifespan and had access to a weighted exercise wheel. The lead author of the paper is Kevin Murach, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas in the Department of Health, Human Performance and Recreation....

Humans observe the world through a combination of different modalities, like vision, hearing, and our understanding of language. Machines, on the other hand, interpret the world through data that algorithms can process. So, when a machine “sees” a photo, it must encode that photo into data it can use to perform a task like image classification. This process becomes more complicated when inputs come in multiple formats, like videos, audio clips, and images....

In a paper published as a “First Release,” in the journal Science, lead authors Kirill Martemyanov, PhD, and Brock Grill, PhD, describe how they designed and implemented a new, unbiased approach for decoding the genetic network that controls the actions of opioids in a nervous system. They used a small soil dwelling animal, the nematode worm, to discover something surprising about one of the most-studied drug receptors. “A study like this makes it clear that even though we may think we know everything there is to know about the opioid response, we’re actually just scratching the surface,” Martemyanov says....

The Dragon spacecraft successfully departed the space station after arriving at the orbiting laboratory a little over one month ago to deliver about 4,400 pounds of scientific investigations and supplies. After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will make a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Florida on Wednesday, January 11. NASA will not broadcast the splashdown. Dragon arrived at the space station on November 27, 2022, following a launch one day prior on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida....

While scientists have studied the properties of air at the mouth, such as volume, temperature, droplet distribution, and humidity, less is known about how these properties change as the cough cloud travels. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers estimate the evolving volume of the cough cloud and quantify the reduction in its volume in the presence of a face mask. “We estimate this volume of the air, which may help to design ventilation of closed spaces and consequently reduce the spread of the disease,” said Amit Agrawal, one of the authors....

Information is processed and transmitted by ever-smaller components, sometimes with electrons and sometimes with light. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart have now developed a light source that converts an electrical voltage pulse into a light pulse by means of a single molecule. Here the molecule functions as a transistor-controlled light switch which even allows the intensity of the light to be regulated. Since the molecular switch allows the light to be switched on and off extremely fast, the light source could serve as a prototype for nano-components that convert electrical into optical signals with gigahertz frequencies....

It’s long been known that the proteins that package DNA, like students at a high school dance, require a chaperone. But what exactly that guardian looks and acts like has been a mystery–until now. A team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder has cracked the puzzle of the Facilitates Chromatin Transcription (FACT) protein structure. This protein is partly responsible for making sure everything goes smoothly and no improper interactions take place when DNA temporarily sheds and replaces its guardian proteins, or histones....

An international collaboration led by scientists at Yale has cracked a tough nut in multiple sclerosis: Where are all the genes? Previous work by the International Multiple Sclerosis Genetics Consortium (IMSGC) has identified 233 genetic risk variants. However, these only account for about 20% of overall disease risk, with the remaining genetic culprits proving elusive. To find them, the IMSGC pooled more than 68,000 MS patients and control subjects from Australia, ten European countries, and the United States....

In the US, obesity and diabetes are widespread diseases. Microproteins, small proteins, have been previously overlooked in research but recent studies suggest they play a crucial role in metabolism. Researchers at the Salk Institute have found that both white and brown fat contain numerous unknown microproteins and one of these microproteins, Gm8773, has the ability to increase appetite in mice. The findings, recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism, could result in a therapeutic to increase weight in specific diseases such as during cancer chemotherapy....

The molecular power plants that carry out photosynthesis are at the root of a scientific quest to learn how they channel energy from sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. Understanding these fundamental processes could help scientists develop technologies that replicate nature’s handiwork to produce cheaper and more efficient fuels. Now, an international research team led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has used a powerful X-ray laser to shine new light on a tiny cluster of molecules that is integral to an important stage of photosynthesis known as Photosystem II....

More than twenty scientists collaborated on a recently published study that reconstructed the ancestor of placental mammals. The common ancestor of more than 5,000 contemporary placental mammals such as rats, whales, and humans was a small, insect-eating animal that appeared after the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, an international team of researchers report in the February 8 issue of the journal Science. Our evolutionary ancestor appeared about 36 million years more recently than molecular data had predicted, according to the analysis of more than 4,500 anatomical features analyzed by the team of scientists under the National Science Foundation’s Assembling the Tree of Life program....

If the coronavirus were a cargo ship, it would need to deliver its contents to a dock in order to infect the host island. The first step of infection would be anchoring by the dock, and step two would be tethering to the dock to bring the ship close enough that it could set up a gangplank and unload. Most treatments and vaccines have focused on blocking the ability of the ship to anchor, but the next step is another potential target....

For a long of time, sociologists have been intrigued by the formation of social groups and their underlying mechanisms. They have observed that people tend to join groups with individuals who share similar traits, opinions, or features, a phenomenon known as homophily. Additionally, people tend to form social groups as a means of avoiding stress. “Although multiple models have been studied, little is known about how homophily and stress avoidance affect the formation of human groups, and in particular the size distribution of them – whether there are many small groups or few large ones, for example,” explains Jan Korbel from CSH and first author of the study....

In the first-of-its-kind study, insect herbivore damage of modern-era plants was compared with that of fossilized leaves from as far back as the Late Cretaceous period, nearly 67 million years ago. The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Our work bridges the gap between those who use fossils to study plant-insect interactions over deep time and those who study such interactions in a modern context with fresh leaf material,” says the lead researcher, University of Wyoming Ph....

The amount of sea ice around Earth’s poles waxes and wanes with the seasons, melting through spring and summer and growing through fall and winter. In recent decades, there has been more waning than waxing, as polar sea ice has mostly been in a long-term decline since the start of the satellite record in the 1970s. The maps on this page represent the most recent snapshots of those annual highs and lows....

Ichthyosaurs were an extinct group of marine reptiles whose fossils have been recovered worldwide. They were amongst the first land-living animals to adapt to life in the open sea, and evolved a ‘fish-like’ body shape similar to modern whales. Ichthyosaurs were at the top of the food chain in the oceans while dinosaurs roamed the land, and dominated marine habitats for over 160 million years. According to the textbooks, reptiles first ventured into the open sea after the end-Permian mass extinction, which devastated marine ecosystems and paved the way for the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs nearly 252 million years ago....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. Carbon dating is used to date any organic material and hinges on the steady decay ratio of carbon-14, a radioactive element. Organisms capture a certain amount of carbon-14 from the atmosphere. By measuring the ratio of the radio isotope to non-radioactive carbon, the amount of carbon-14 can be worked out and give an age for specimens. This assumes that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is constant....

In February 2020, the Israeli government issued emergency rules to contain the spread of COVID-19, ordering individuals considered as exposed to COVID-19 to self-quarantine. This regulation was extended in March to include almost the entire population. In enacting the rules, the country’s health officials hoped that the public would comply with the orders. However, one potential obstacle to compliance is concern over loss of income. Moran Bodas and Kobi Peleg, both with the Gertner Institute’s Israel National Center for Trauma and Emergency Medicine, report the results of a poll of a randomized sample of Israeli adults to ascertain their willingness to self-quarantine....

Researchers led by Prof. Chenglong Deng from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators have reconstructed AABW history back to approximately 4.7 million years ago (mya). They found that AABW has collapsed several times and such collapses might have induced moisture transport to fuel the Northern Hemisphere glaciation (NHG). This work will be published today (February 24, 2023) in the journal Science Advances....

Tissue implants made of cells grown on a sponge-like scaffold have been shown in clinical trials to help heal arteries scarred by atherosclerosis and other vascular diseases. However, it has been unclear why some implants work better than others. MIT researchers led by Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, have now shown that implanted cells’ therapeutic properties depend on their shape, which is determined by the type of scaffold on which they are grown....