Science news

• Occupational therapy reduces hospital readmissions, research finds

  15-09-2016 23:59
  A recent study has found that 30-day readmission rates for heart failure, pneumonia, and acute myocardial infarction were improved with the help of occupational therapy.
  
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• New tech promises to boost electric vehicle efficiency, range

  15-09-2016 23:54
  Researchers have developed a new type of inverter device with greater efficiency in a smaller, lighter package -- which should improve the fuel-efficiency and range of hybrid and electric vehicles.
  
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• 'Thermal metamaterial' innovation could help bring waste-heat harvesting technology to power plants, factories

  15-09-2016 23:49
  Researchers have used a 'thermal metamaterial' to control the emission of radiation at high temperatures, an advance that could bring devices able to efficiently harvest waste heat from power plants and factories.
  
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• New way to reprogram lymph node function to fight multiple sclerosis

  15-09-2016 23:40
  Researchers report a new way to turn off the harmful immune attack that occurs during autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), while keeping healthy functions of the immune system intact.
  
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• Assessing health risks from oil and gas operations

  15-09-2016 23:36
  A new study of air pollutant emissions from northern Front Range oil and gas operations has been presented to state officials in Colorado.
  
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• Houthis study U.S. truce proposal for Yemen -negotiator

  15-09-2016 23:33
  DUBAI/SANAA (Reuters) - A senior U.S. diplomat has presented a proposal for a comprehensive ceasefire in Yemen to the country's dominant Houthis at a meeting in Oman, a member of the Houthi negotiating team said on Thursday. Negotiators will return to Houthi-controlled Sanaa on Friday carrying the plan offered by U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon in talks in Muscat, he said. In Washington, U.S. officials said the plan was an "extension of the efforts Secretary (of
  
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• Cassini begins epic final year at Saturn

  15-09-2016 23:32
  After more than 12 years studying Saturn, its rings and moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered the final year of its epic voyage. The conclusion of the historic scientific odyssey is planned for September 2017, but not before the spacecraft completes a daring two-part endgame.
  
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• First U.S. ocean monument named in the Atlantic

  15-09-2016 23:21
  
  A region of ocean off the coast of Cape Cod has become the first U.S. marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, President Barack Obama announced.
  
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• Harvest Moon Lunar Eclipse Occurs Friday: Watch It Live with Slooh

  15-09-2016 23:05
  
  A penumbral lunar eclipse will coincide with September's full moon, also known as the Harvest Moon, this Friday (Sept. 16), and you can watch it live thanks to the Slooh Community Observatory, which is partnering with the Old Farmer's Almanac to broadcast the Harvest Moon eclipse. You can also watch the lunar eclipse webcast on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh. During the webcast, Slooh astronomer Paul Cox will explain the science of a penumbral lunar eclipse, which happens when the moon moves
  
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• Abort! SpaceX, Boeing Taking Different Tacks in Launch Escape Tests

  15-09-2016 23:04
  
  Representatives of SpaceX and Boeing, along with a representative from NASA, discussed the testing process in a session at a meeting of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), held this week in Long Beach, California. Founded and helmed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, SpaceX is currently flying cargo to the space station for NASA using the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Drago cargo capsule.
  
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• Gene therapy used to treat pulmonary dysfunction in Pompe disease

  15-09-2016 22:58
  Researchers have successfully used gene therapy to treat patients with infantile onset Pompe disease, a progressive condition that severely compromises cardiopulmonary function in the first years of life.
  
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• New mosquito-borne disease detected in Haiti

  15-09-2016 22:49
  Researchers have identified a patient in Haiti with a serious mosquito-borne illness that has never before been reported in the Caribbean nation.
  
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• U.S. regulators issue official recall of Samsung Note 7 smartphones

  15-09-2016 22:47 via cbc.ca
  
  U.S. regulators are issuing an official recall of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 phone because of the risk that its batteries can explode or catch fire.
  
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• [This Week in Science] Uncovering how a drug works

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: John F. Foley
  
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• [This Week in Science] Treatment by the earful

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Yevgeniya Nusinovich
  
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• [This Week in Science] Stretching the connections

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Marc S. Lavine
  
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• [This Week in Science] Staring antiferromagnetism in the face

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Jelena Stajic
  
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• [This Week in Science] Pathogen stimulates gut oxygen

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Caroline Ash
  
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• [This Week in Science] Neuronal assembly dynamics in the brain

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Peter Stern
  
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• [This Week in Science] Like in scale, different in pattern

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Sacha Vignieri
  
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• [This Week in Science] God to eat, good for the planet

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Julia Fahrenkamp-Uppenbrink
  
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• [This Week in Science] Functional microbial distribution in the ocean

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Caroline Ash
  
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• [This Week in Science] Brushing out uniform nanorods

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Marc S. Lavine
  
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• [This Week in Science] A useful AID for genome editing

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Guy Riddihough
  
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• [Special Issue Review] The plant lipidome in human and environmental health

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Lipids and oils derived from plant and algal photosynthesis constitute much of human daily caloric intake and provide the basis for high-energy bioproducts, chemical feedstocks for countless applications, and even fossil fuels over geological time scales. Sustainable production of high-energy compounds from plants is essential to preserving fossil fuel sources and ensuring the well-being of future generations. As a result of progress in basic research on plant and algal lipid metabolism, in comb
  
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• [Special Issue Review] Plant metabolism, the diverse chemistry set of the future

  15-09-2016 22:43
  New technologies are redefining how plant biology will meet societal challenges in health, nutrition, agriculture, and energy. Rapid and inexpensive genome and transcriptome sequencing is being exploited to discover biochemical pathways that provide tools needed for synthetic biology in both plant and microbial systems. Metabolite detection at the cellular and subcellular levels is complementing gene sequencing for pathway discovery and metabolic engineering. The crafting of plant and microbial
  
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• [Special Issue News] When is a GM plant not a GM plant?

  15-09-2016 22:43
  The recently developed genome-editing methods, from zinc finger nucleases to transcription activatorlike effector nucleases (TALENs) to CRISPR, are shaking up the debate over how to regulate genetically modified (GM) crops. Canada, for example, has stuck to its rule that a plant should be regulated as GM if a novel trait has been introduced to it, regardless of the technology used. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has so far exempted plants altered by TALENs and CRISPR from its GM regulati
  
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• [Special Issue News] The plant engineer

  15-09-2016 22:43
  As a child, Dan Voytas developed a green thumb and business savvy running his own seedling business. Now, marrying his academic research with a company, he's poised to reshape 21st century agriculture. Over the past 20 years, he has pioneered new ways of precisely editing a crop's DNA to give it new traits or delete undesirable ones. It's an approach that is potentially more powerful than the traditional way of making genetically modified (GM) crops, and because it leaves no foreign DNA behind,
  
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• [Special Issue News] The nitrogen fix

  15-09-2016 22:43
  A handful of biologists is working to endow major crops with the ability to "fix" nitrogen from the air into a biochemically usable form, a talent that is currently limited to certain microbes—and is essential to life. Fixed nitrogen is a key ingredient in important biomolecules, including amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And, for now, farmers have to laboriously supply it by applying fertilizer or planting legumes, which host nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots. Alt
  
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• [Special Issue News] The new harvest

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Translational plant science yields sustainable oils, pharmaceuticals, and proteins
  Authors: Pamela J. Hines, John Travis
  
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• [Research Article] Targeted nucleotide editing using hybrid prokaryotic and vertebrate adaptive immune systems

  15-09-2016 22:43
  The generation of genetic variation (somatic hypermutation) is an essential process for the adaptive immune system in vertebrates. We demonstrate the targeted single-nucleotide substitution of DNA using hybrid vertebrate and bacterial immune systems components. Nuclease-deficient type II CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated) and the activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) ortholog PmCDA1 were engineered to form a synthetic complex (Target-A
  
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• [Report] Spin- and density-resolved microscopy of antiferromagnetic correlations in Fermi-Hubbard chains

  15-09-2016 22:43
  The repulsive Hubbard Hamiltonian is one of the foundational models describing strongly correlated electrons and is believed to capture essential aspects of high-temperature superconductivity. Ultracold fermions in optical lattices allow for the simulation of the Hubbard Hamiltonian with control over kinetic energy, interactions, and doping. A great challenge is to reach the required low entropy and to observe antiferromagnetic spin correlations beyond nearest neighbors, for which quantum gas mi
  
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• [Report] Site-resolved measurement of the spin-correlation function in the Fermi-Hubbard model

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Exotic phases of matter can emerge from strong correlations in quantum many-body systems. Quantum gas microscopy affords the opportunity to study these correlations with unprecedented detail. Here, we report site-resolved observations of antiferromagnetic correlations in a two-dimensional, Hubbard-regime optical lattice and demonstrate the ability to measure the spin-correlation function over any distance. We measure the in situ distributions of the particle density and magnetic correlations, ex
  
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• [Report] Quantifying the impact of molecular defects on polymer network elasticity

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Elasticity, one of the most important properties of a soft material, is difficult to quantify in polymer networks because of the presence of topological molecular defects in these materials. Furthermore, the impact of these defects on bulk elasticity is unknown. We used rheology, disassembly spectrometry, and simulations to measure the shear elastic modulus and count the numbers of topological “loop” defects of various order in a series of polymer hydrogels, and then used these data to evalu
  
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• [Report] Observation of spatial charge and spin correlations in the 2D Fermi-Hubbard model

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Strong electron correlations lie at the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. Its essence is believed to be captured by the Fermi-Hubbard model of repulsively interacting fermions on a lattice. Here we report on the site-resolved observation of charge and spin correlations in the two-dimensional (2D) Fermi-Hubbard model realized with ultracold atoms. Antiferromagnetic spin correlations are maximal at half-filling and weaken monotonically upon doping. At large doping, nearest-neighbor cor
  
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• [Report] Decoupling function and taxonomy in the global ocean microbiome

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Microbial metabolism powers biogeochemical cycling in Earth’s ecosystems. The taxonomic composition of microbial communities varies substantially between environments, but the ecological causes of this variation remain largely unknown. We analyzed taxonomic and functional community profiles to determine the factors that shape marine bacterial and archaeal communities across the global ocean. By classifying >30,000 marine microorganisms into metabolic functional groups, we were able to d
  
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• [Report] Awake hippocampal reactivations project onto orthogonal neuronal assemblies

  15-09-2016 22:43
  The chained activation of neuronal assemblies is thought to support major cognitive processes, including memory. In the hippocampus, this is observed during population bursts often associated with sharp-wave ripples, in the form of an ordered reactivation of neurons. However, the organization and lifetime of these assemblies remain unknown. We used calcium imaging to map patterns of synchronous neuronal activation in the CA1 region of awake mice during runs on a treadmill. The patterns were comp
  
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• [Policy Forum] Will latest U.S. law lead to successful schools in STEM?

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Remarkably, after a long delay, the U.S. Congress passed and President Obama signed in late 2015 a new version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the law that since 1965 has staked out the federal government's commitment to education from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12). This version, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), replaces the controversial version known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (1, 2). With ESSA scheduled to take full effect in fall 2017, states are now in planning
  
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• [Policy Forum] A missed opportunity for U.S. biotechnology regulation

  15-09-2016 22:43
  A rare policy window (1)—an opportunity for change that happens when problem, political, and policy streams come together—recently opened for biotechnology regulation in the United States: an explosion of genetic engineering (GE) techniques and products challenging federal oversight; intensifying public, media, and political attention; and a growing number of policy ideas for change. When the White House in summer 2015 called for a process to revisit the 1986 Coordinated Framework for the Re
  
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• [Perspective] Vaccine trust and the limits of information

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Over the past decade, there has been growing recognition and increasing research around the phenomenon of vaccine reluctance and refusal (1, 2). More recently, there has been a flurry of articles on what is being referred to as “vaccine hesitancy,” depolarizing the earlier characterization of individuals or groups as being outright pro- or antivaccine, and instead recognizing the liminal state between becoming aware of, and deciding whether or not to accept, vaccination. Episodes of waning p
  
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• [Perspective] Harnessing mutation: The best of two worlds

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Rapid evolution requires high rates of mutation that come at the cost of reduced viability. This is true at the single-cell level in bacteria as well as in the highest complex vertebrates. Immunity relies on rapid evolution to enhance the recognition of external threats and to neutralize them, often by inflicting damage to the genomes of potentially harmful invaders. On page 1248 of this issue, Nishida et al. (1) report combining a polynucleotide cytosine deaminase (PmCDA1)—an enzyme involved
  
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• [Perspective] Designer nanorod synthesis

  15-09-2016 22:43
  One-dimensional (1D) rodlike nanostructures are of fundamental interest for examining size- and shape-dependent phenomena and can have applications that include next-generation electronics and sensing elements (1–3). The growth of such nanostructures poses considerable challenges for synthetic chemists and materials scientists. However, because few materials naturally grow in such an anisotropic manner, linear pores (molds) or surface templates (such as DNA) are used to guide their formation.
  
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• [Letter] Public feedback at risk in Brazil

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Authors: Simone Athayde, Paula Franco Moreira, Michael Heckenberger
  
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• [Letter] Precision medicine: Fantasy meets reality

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Author: Jeff Shrager
  
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• [Letter] Passport power: Entrenching inequality

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Authors: John W. Wilson, Duan Biggs
  
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• [In Depth] Turkey shakes up universities as coup fallout continues

  15-09-2016 22:43
  For Turkish researchers and educators, the aftershocks of the failed 20 July military coup are continuing. With just weeks to go before the start of the academic year, the government has launched a broader reorganization of higher education. Using powers granted under an ongoing state of emergency, the government fired 2346 more university staff, closed 15 private universities—leaving tens of thousands of students in the lurch—and launched a fresh wave of firings at secondary schools. The n
  
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• [In Depth] Study takes sharp tusk to effort to legalize ivory trade

  15-09-2016 22:43
  Poachers have killed so many African elephants in recent years, the animals' continent-wide population is at its lowest point in a century. Would legally selling ivory help stop the decline and save the behemoths from extinction? That's what some southern African countries will propose at an upcoming international meeting on the trade in endangered species in Johannesburg, South Africa. But a virtual test of that provocative idea concludes that it's impossible to sustainably harvest elephants' t
  
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• [In Depth] Pyre experiments cast doubt on students' fate

  15-09-2016 22:43
  In September 2014, 43 university students disappeared in Guerrero state in southern Mexico. The Mexican government has maintained that a drug cartel murdered the students and burned their bodies at a trash dump. New experiments using pig carcasses as a proxy for human bodies cast doubt on that theory of the crime. José Torero, a fire scientist at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia, in Brisbane, Australia, incinerated up to four pig carcasses at a time and determined that the inferno necess
  
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• [In Depth] In Iran, a shady market for papers flourishes

  15-09-2016 22:43
  A veritable army of outfits in Iran offer to write theses and scientific papers for a fee, advertising on the internet, through fliers, and via the placard-carrying touts who line the sidewalk outside the University of Tehran. It's unknown how many papers and theses are ginned up under false pretenses. In 2014, a member of Iran's Academy of Sciences estimated that each year as many as 5000 theses—roughly 10% of all master's and Ph.D. theses awarded in Iran—are bought from dealers. Such trans
  
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• [In Depth] Former star surgeon's disgrace rocks Swedish science

  15-09-2016 22:43
  What seemed a coup has turned into a nightmare for Sweden's most prestigious university, the Karolinska Institute (KI). In 2010, KI and its associated hospital in Stockholm managed to recruit star surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who made international headlines when he implanted artificial windpipes into patients. With his groundbreaking tissue engineering work, KI leaders hoped he would propel the university to the top of a hot field. Instead, Macchiarini has plunged Swedish science and KI into the
  
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