International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Perched below the tree line twisted tones emerge, groves of crooked wood that buckle at the knee. Lodgepole seedlings scatter through sunlight, drifting over seas of spruce that shimmer in the breeze. We count your dead neath looming shadows that flitter overhead. A weathered carcass bearing scars of passing like a debt, every untamed flame and raging swarm etched into the landscape. We count your dead disappearing from view, as you fade into the background of our mounting loss. Dead trees in a subalpine Colorado forest on Niwot Ridge, west of Boulder (Image Credit: Robert Andrus). This poem is inspired by recent research , which has found that trees in Colorado subalpine forests are dying at increasing rates from warmer and drier summer conditions. A subalpine forest is a conifer-dominated forest which occurs mainly in the subalpine zone of temperate latitudes. The subalpine zone itself is the zone of plants just below the tree line, i.e. the altitude above w...

In a sample of over 400 older adults in Argentina who had recovered from COVID-19, more than 60% displayed some degree of cognitive impairment, a researcher from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio reported July 29 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. It is not known whether the impairment, such as forgetfulness and language difficulty, will be progressive, said Gabriel de Erausquin, MD, PhD, a neurologist with the health science center’s Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases. The individuals in the study are over 60 years of age and have been assessed once so far. They will be followed for the next three to five years, Dr. de Erausquin said. The study is being conducted by Dr. de Erausquin and collaborators from the Alzheimer’s Association-led global Cognitive Neuropsychiatric Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (CNS SC2) consortium. Problems with thinking were seen even in recovered COVID-19 patients who had only a mi...

As you read this text, the millions of cells that make up your body are hard at work. Within every cell is a flurry of activity keeping you alive, mostly driven by machinery that is made up of proteins. Some of this protein machinery is so important to living things that it has remained unchanged over millions of years of evolution. One of these ancient cellular machines is the endoplasmic reticulum membrane protein complex (EMC), which is present in all eukaryotes, from mushrooms to insects to mice to humans. Shaped like a kind of knobby tube, the EMC acts as a gateway between the interior of the cell and the cell’s outer membrane, and behaves as a kind of border control through which only certain proteins can pass. The EMC interacts with proteins involved in a wide range of important processes, such as regulating blood pressure and heart rate, and the levels of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. Now, in a new paper published in the July issue of the journal  Mo...

Dozens of online videos document an unusual behavior among tufted titmice and their closest bird kin. A bird will land on an unsuspecting mammal and, cautiously and stealthily, pluck out some of its hair. A new paper in the journal Ecology documents this phenomenon, which the authors call “kleptotrichy,” from the Greek roots for “theft” and “hair.” The authors found only a few descriptions of the behavior in the scientific literature but came up with dozens more examples in online videos posted by birders and other bird enthusiasts. In almost all the videorecorded cases, the thief is a titmouse plucking hair from a cat, dog, human, raccoon or, in one case, porcupine. Many species of titmice, chickadees and tits – all members of the family  Paridae  – are known to use hair or fur to line their nests, said  Mark Hauber , a professor of  evolution, ecology and behavior  at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the write-up with postdoctoral resear...

A pond in summer can reveal more about a fish than a pond in winter. The fish living in icy conditions might remain still enough to study its scales, but to understand how the fish swims and behaves, it needs to freely move in three dimensions. The same holds true for analyzing how biological items, such as viruses, move in the human body, according to a research team led by Deb Kelly, Huck Chair in Molecular Biophysics and professor of biomedical engineering at Penn State, who has used advanced electron microscopy (EM) technology to see how human viruses move in high resolution in a near-native environment. The visualization technique could lead to improved understanding of how vaccine candidates and treatments behave and function as they interact with target cells, Kelly said. In an effort to expand the tools scientists have to study the microscopic world, researchers recorded live, 20-second-long movies of human viruses floating in liquid at near-atomic detail in an electron micr...

Rates of childhood obesity are at historically high levels in the U.S., yet there are few interventions that promote healthy weight gain in children from infancy to age 2 — a critical period for the development and prevention of childhood obesity. A new study published in  Pediatrics  found that fewer infants gained excess weight when low-income pregnant women received individualized health coaching in tandem with clinicians in community health centers and public health programs systematically changing how they delivered care to women and their infants. “Most interventions to prevent obesity in children attempt to change the behavior of the child’s parent or family,” explains lead author Elsie Taveras, chief of the Division of General Academic Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). “But a child’s health is also influenced by how well clinical and public-health systems interact with families and provide care targeted to reducing the risk of obesity.” The novel ...

In a recent posting on her Facebook page, Brytney Cobia, a physician in Birmingham, Alabama, described the pain of telling COVID patients who are about to be intubated that their pleas for vaccination have come too late. “A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same,” Cobia wrote. “They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political … They thought it was ‘just the flu.’ But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t.” Testimony like Cobia’s could be key to persuading the unvaccinated to join the two-thirds of Americans who have received at least one shot, a Harvard specialist says. An education campaign that features powerful local voices reminding people of COVID’s dangers could do more than lotteries, mandates, or a “carrots-or-stick” approach, said  Robert Blendon , Richard L. Menschel Professor o...

Following the Surgeon General’s July 15 advisory on health misinformation and social media, President Joe Biden remarked that Facebook and other social media platforms are “killing people.” Though Biden quickly backpedaled on his remark, Facebook rebutted it, citing instead its own study that showed increasing “vaccine acceptance” by U.S. Facebook users. So, does Facebook play a role in COVID-19 misinformation? New  survey  results from researchers at Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern and Rutgers universities show that it does. While the researchers state that their results do not indicate that social media platforms are “killing people,” as Biden said, they do find, however, that those who relied on Facebook for COVID-19 news had substantially lower vaccination rates than the overall U.S. population. Those who received most of their news from Facebook also displayed lower levels of institutional trust and greater acceptance of misinformatio...

Populations of giant pandas in the wild are more fragmented and isolated than they were 30 years ago and many continue to face a high risk of extinction despite recent gains in the species’ overall numbers, a new study by Chinese and American scientists finds. Climate change, habitat loss and reduced breeding viability — an inherent risk in small, remote populations where potential mates are few — could pose a triple whammy for these animals, the research suggests. Scientists need to find ways to restore connectivity between these populations or introduce new breeding animals into them, the study’s authors say. “Our models show that populations with fewer than 30 individuals have, under a best-case scenario, a one in five chance of going extinct in 100 years on average. Some may not be that lucky,” said Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, who helped design the new study. As climate change intensifies in...

Johns Hopkins University scientists have developed a new tool for predicting which patients suffering from a complex inflammatory heart disease are at risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Published in  Science Advances , their method is the first to combine models of patients’ hearts built from multiple images with the power of machine learning. “This robust new personalized technology outperformed clinical metrics in forecasting future arrhythmia and could transform the management of cardiac sarcoidosis patients,” said senior author  Natalia Trayanova , a Johns Hopkins professor of biomedical engineering and co-director of the Alliance for Cardiovascular Diagnostic and Treatment Innovation (ADVANCE). Doctors don’t currently have precise methods for assessing which patients with carciac sarcoidosis, a condition causing inflammation and scarring that can trigger irregular heartbeats, are likely to have a fatal arrthmia, meaning that some patients don’t survive, while others underg...

Obesity is linked to several cardiometabolic abnormalities, such as high blood sugar and hypertension, which are considered to be risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Nearly 45 percent of Latino adults are obese, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health. In a new study, to be published August 3, 2021 in the print issue of the  Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease , researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, with colleagues elsewhere, report that obesity alone is not associated with cognitive decline among Latinos. Researchers examined data from more than 6,000 participants enrolled in the Study of Latinos-Investigation of Neurocognitive Aging (SOL-INCA). Participants were ethnically diverse, including Central Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and South Americans, residing in one of four U.S. cities: San Diego, New York City, Miami and Chicago. For SOL-INCA, participants complete...

Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist  Dan Wilkins  noticed an intriguing pattern. He observed a series of bright flares of X-rays – exciting, but not unprecedented – and then, the telescopes recorded something unexpected: additional flashes of X-rays that were smaller, later and of different “colors” than the bright flares. According to theory, these luminous echoes were consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole – but even a basic understanding of black holes tells us that is a strange place for light to come from. “Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole,” said Wilkins, who is a research scientist at the  Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology  at Stanford and  SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory . It is ...

Subjectively, getting more sleep seems to provide big benefits: Many people find it gives them increased energy, emotional control, and an improved sense of well-being. But a new study co-authored by MIT economists complicates this picture, suggesting that more sleep, by itself, isn’t necessarily sufficient to bring about those kinds of appealing improvements. The study is based on a distinctive field experiment of low-income workers in Chennai, India, where the researchers studied residents at home during their normal everyday routines — and managed to increase participants’ sleep by about half an hour per night, a very substantial gain. And yet, sleeping more at night did not improve people’s work productivity, earnings, financial choices, sense of well-being, or even their blood pressure. The only thing it did, apparently, was to lower the number of hours they worked. “To our surprise, these night-sleep interventions had no positive effects whatsoever on any of the outcomes we ...

A combination of a once-debunked 19th-century identification of a water-carrying iron mineral and the fact that these rocks are extremely common on Earth, suggests the existence of a substantial water reservoir on Mars, according to a team of geoscientists. “One of my student’s experiments was to crystalize hematite,” said Peter J. Heaney, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “She came up with an iron-poor compound, so I went to Google Scholar and found two papers from the 1840s where German mineralogists, using wet chemistry, proposed iron-poor versions of hematite that contained water.” In 1844, Rudolf Hermann named his mineral turgite and in 1847 August Breithaupt named his hydrohematite. According to Heaney, in 1920, other mineralogists, using the then newly developed X-ray diffraction technique, declared these two papers incorrect. But the nascent technique was too primitive to see the difference between hematite and hydrohematite. Si Athena Chen, Heaney’s doctoral student i...

When Android and Apple operating system updates started giving users the option to put their smartphones in dark mode, the feature showed potential for saving the battery life of newer phones with screens that allow darker-colored pixels to use less power than lighter-colored pixels. But dark mode is unlikely to make a big difference to battery life with the way that most people use their phones on a daily basis, says a  new study  by Purdue University researchers. That doesn’t mean that dark mode can’t be helpful, though. “When the industry rushed to adopt dark mode, it didn’t have the tools yet to accurately measure power draw by the pixels,” said  Charlie Hu , Purdue’s Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of  Electrical and Computer Engineering . “But now we’re able to give developers the tools they need to give users more energy-efficient apps.” Based on their findings using these tools they built, the researchers clarify the facts about the effects of dark...