CERN: The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012 marked a significant milestone in particle physics. Since then, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have been diligently investigating the properties of this unique particle and searching to establish the different ways in which it is produced and decays into other particles. At the Large Hadron Collider Physics (LHCP) conference last week, ATLAS and CMS report how they teamed up to find the first evidence of the rare process in which the Higgs boson decays into a Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, and a photon, the carrier of the electromagnetic force. This Higgs boson decay could provide indirect evidence of the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The decay of the Higgs boson into a Z boson and a photon is similar to that of a decay into two photons. In these processes, the Higgs boson does not decay directly into these pairs of particles. Instead, the decays proceed via an intermediate "loop" of "virtual" particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson. The Standard Model predicts that, if the Higgs boson has a mass of around 125 billion electronvolts, approximately 0.15% of Higgs bosons will decay into a Z boson and a photon. But some theories that extend the Standard Model predict a different decay rate. Measuring the decay rate therefore provides valuable insights into both physics beyond the Standard Model and the nature of the Higgs boson.

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A German startup has secured initial funding to develop a revolutionary fusion energy machine that it hopes can provide a future source of abundant, emissions-free power. From a report: Proxima Fusion, incorporated in January, aims to build a complex device known as a stellarator and is the latest company to join the emerging fusion industry's effort to generate electricity by fusing atoms. Although the amount of funding is small at only $7.5mn, it is significant as Proxima is the first fusion company to spin out of Germany's revered Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. The institute is the home of the world's most advanced existing stellarator in Greifswald, in eastern Germany, built by government-funded scientists over the past 27 years using supercomputers and advanced engineering. Little known outside the world of plasma physics, a stellarator is an alternative to the better known tokamak device, pioneered by Soviet scientists in the 1950s. Both use huge magnets to suspend a floating mass of hydrogen plasma as it is heated to extreme temperatures so the atomic nuclei fuse releasing energy. Until recently nearly all funding of so-called magnetic confinement fusion has been channelled into tokamaks such as the Joint European Torus in Oxford, England, or the Sparc device being built by the Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts.

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Researchers in the Hybrid Quantum Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have put a sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states. The researchers "excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions -- putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition," reports Scientific American. From the report: As the research group reports in Science, this condition is much like that of the cat in the famous thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In Schrodinger's quantum-mechanical scenario, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of an atom that releases a vial of poison. The sapphire crystal in the new experiment has been put in the macroscopic equivalent of that "cat state." Such states can help scientists fathom how and why the laws of the quantum world transition into the rules of classical physics for larger objects. To get the sapphire, which consists of about 10^17 atoms, to behave like a quantum-mechanical object, the research group set it to oscillate and coupled it to a superconducting circuit. (In the terms of the original thought experiment, the sapphire was the cat, and the superconducting circuit was the decaying atom.) The circuit was used as a qubit, or bit of quantum information that is simultaneously in the states "0" and "1." The circuit's superposition was then transferred to the oscillation of the crystal. Thus, the atoms in the crystal could move in two directions at the same time -- for example, up and down -- just as Schrodinger's cat is dead and alive at the same time. Importantly, the distance between these two states (alive and dead or up and down) had to be greater than the distance ascribed to the quantum uncertainty principle, which the ETH Zurich scientists confirmed. Using the superconducting qubit, the researchers succeeded in determining the distance between the crystal's two vibrational states. At about two billionths of a nanometer, it's tiny -- but still large enough to distinguish those two states from each other beyond doubt. These findings have "pushed the envelope on what can be considered quantum mechanical in an actual lab experiment," says Shlomi Kotler, a physicist who studies quantum mechanical circuits at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kotler did not participate in the study. [...] Kotler notes that finding larger cat states is a way of "stretching the limit" of observed quantum-mechanical objects -- in this case, by demonstrating that something as massive as 16 micrograms can exist in this state. (Though, to be clear, 16 micrograms is still microscopic.)

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the journal Nature released a report from Nanjing University researchers that had attempted to replicate an earlier paper that described a compound that superconducted at room temperature and relatively moderate pressures. Despite persuasive evidence that they've produced the same chemical, the team indicates they see no sign of superconductivity, even down to extremely low temperatures. The failure will undoubtedly raise further questions about the original research, which came from a lab that had an earlier paper on superconductivity retracted. In 2020, the lab run by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester reported a carbon-hydrogen-sulfur compound formed at extreme pressures could superconduct at room temperature. But the results were controversial, partly because it wasn't clear that the paper included enough information for anyone else to produce the same conditions and because Dias was uncooperative when asked to share experiment data. Eventually, it became apparent that the team had used undocumented methods of obtaining some of the data underlying the paper, and it was retracted. But Dias continued to claim that the superconductivity was present. (There's a good overview of the controversy on the American Physical Society website.) Despite Nature retracting one of Dias' papers, the journal published another paper on superconductivity from his group. In this case, a lutetium-hydrogen chemical doped with nitrogen was reported to superconduct at room temperature but at much lower pressures, which could allow it to be tested with somewhat less specialized equipment. Given the history, the claim was greeted with an even higher degree of skepticism than the earlier paper.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they're closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people's dreams while they slumbered. To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects -- a process called "targeted dream incubation." Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them. The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed "toothpick for a giant" as an alternative use for a tree. The research was published in Scientific Reports.

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"A new experiment uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism," reports Ars Technica, "by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them." The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works — it's not even the first to do so with qubits. But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin. Because the qubits are so easy to control, the experiment provides a new precision to these sorts of measurements. And the hardware setup may be essential for future quantum computing efforts... Everyone working with superconducting qubits says that we will ultimately need to integrate thousands of them into a single quantum computer. Unfortunately, each of these qubits requires a considerable amount of space on a chip, meaning it gets difficult to make chips with more than a few hundred of them. So major players like Google and IBM ultimately plan to link multiple chips into a single computer (something the startup Rigetti is already doing). For tens of thousands of qubits, however, we're almost certainly going to need so many chips that it gets difficult to keep them all in a single bit of cooling hardware. This means we're going to eventually want to link chips in different refrigeration systems — exactly what was demonstrated here. So this is an important demonstration that we can, in fact, link qubits across these sorts of systems. Or, as long-time slashdot reader nounderscores puts it, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these. "The Qbits that Simon Storz et al at ETH Zurich entangled at the ends of 30m of cryogenically chilled wire not only put the last nail into the coffin of hidden variable theory by being so far apart, they also allow quantum computing to scale to multiple refrigeration systems."

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From a Science magazine report, shared by schwit1: When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was "shocked" by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010 -- and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers' group report. "It is just too hard to believe" at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It's as if "somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic." His findings underscore what was widely suspected: Journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts from paper mills -- secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship. "Paper mills have made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff," says Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices. A 2 May announcement from the publisher Hindawi underlined the threat: It shut down four of its journals it found were "heavily compromised" by articles from paper mills. Sabel's tool relies on just two indicators -- authors who use private, noninstitutional email addresses, and those who list an affiliation with a hospital. It isn't a perfect solution, because of a high false-positive rate. Other developers of fake-paper detectors, who often reveal little about how their tools work, contend with similar issues. Still, the detectors raise hopes for gaining the advantage over paper mills, which churn out bogus manuscripts containing text, data, and images partly or wholly plagiarized or fabricated, often massaged by ghost writers. Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors. Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern. To fight back, the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), representing 120 publishers, is leading an effort called the Integrity Hub to develop new tools. STM is not revealing much about the detection methods, to avoid tipping off paper mills. "There is a bit of an arms race," says Joris van Rossum, the Integrity Hub's product director. He did say one reliable sign of a fake is referencing many retracted papers; another involves manuscripts and reviews emailed from internet addresses crafted to look like those of legitimate institutions. Twenty publishers -- including the largest, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley -- are helping develop the Integrity Hub tools, and 10 of the publishers are expected to use a paper mill detector the group unveiled in April.

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An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from MIT Technology Review: Today, researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which they say combines the complete DNA of 47 diverse individuals -- Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups -- into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species. The new map, called a "pangenome," has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe. It was published in the journal Nature today. People's genomes are largely alike, but it's the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren't observable in conventional studies. The pangenome relies on a mathematical concept called a graph, which you can imagine as a massive version of connect-the-dots. Each dot is a segment of DNA. To draw a particular person's genome, you start connecting the numbered dots. Each person's DNA can take a slightly different path, skipping some numbers and adding others. One payoff of the new pangenome could be better ways to diagnose rare diseases, although practical applications aren't easy to name. Instead, scientists say it's mainly giving them insight into some of the "dark matter" of the genome that's previously been hard to see, including strange regions of chromosomes that seem to share and exchange genes. For now, most biologists and doctors will stick to the existing "reference genome," the one first produced in draft form in 2001 and gradually improved. It answers most questions researchers are interested in, and all their computer tools work with it. The reason a reference genome is important is that when a new person's genome is sequenced, that sequence is projected onto the reference in order to organize and read the new data. Yet since the current reference is just one possible genome, missing bits that some people have, some information can't be analyzed and is usually ignored. Researchers call this effect "reference bias" or, more simply, the streetlamp problem. You don't see where you don't look. Officials with NIH said they hoped the new update to the genome map would make gene research more "equitable." That's because the more different your genome is from the current reference, the more information about you could be missed. The existing reference is largely the DNA of one African-American man, although it includes segments from several other people as well. "If the genome you want to analyze has sequences that are not in that reference, they will be missed in the analysis," says Deanna Church, a consultant with the business incubator General Inception, who previously held a key role at NIH managing the reference genome. "In reality, the notion that there is a 'human genome' is really the problem," she says. "The current version is the simplest model you can make. It made sense when we started ... But now we need better models."

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Researchers have developed a "language" called Remmyo, which relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. People who are capable of lucid dreaming can learn this language during their waking hours and potentially communicate while they are asleep. Ars Technica reports: "You can transfer all important information from lucid dreams using no more than three letters in a word," [sleep expert Michael Raduga], who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. "This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources." Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Slight electrical impulses that reach facial muscles make them capable of movement during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that can type, vocalize, and translate Remmyo. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language as it is being "spoken" by the sleeper. "We can digitally vocalize Remmyo or its translation in real time, which helps us to hear speech from lucid dreams," Raduga said. For his initial experiment, Raduga used the sleep laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of Frankfurt University in Germany. His subjects had already learned Remmyo and were also trained to enter a state of lucid dreaming and signal that they were in that lucid state during REM sleep. While they were immersed in lucid dreams, EMG sensors on their faces sent information from electrical impulses to the translation software. The results were uncertain. Based on attempts to translate planned phrases, Remmyo turned out to be anywhere from 13 to 81 percent effective, and in the interview, Raduga said he faced skepticism about the effectiveness of the translation software during the peer review process of his study, which is now published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. He still looks forward to making results more consistent by leveling up translation methods in the future. "The main problem is that it is hard to use only one muscle on your face to say something in Remmyo," said Raduga. "Unintentionally, people strain more than one muscle, and EMG sensors detect it all. Now we use only handwritten algorithms to overcome the problem, but we're going to use machine learning and AI to improve Remmyo decoding."

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Louise Lerner writes via Phys.Org: Inside a lab, scientists marvel at a strange state that forms when they cool down atoms to nearly absolute zero. Outside their window, trees gather sunlight and turn them into new leaves. The two seem unrelated -- but a new study from the University of Chicago suggests that these processes aren't so different as they might appear on the surface. The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates -- a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said. When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the "hole" where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area where it triggers a chemical reaction to make sugars for the plant. Together, that traveling electron-and-hole-pair is referred to as an "exciton." When the team took a birds-eye view and modeled how multiple excitons move around, they noticed something odd. They saw patterns in the paths of the excitons that looked remarkably familiar. In fact, it looked very much like the behavior in a material that is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, sometimes known as "the fifth state of matter." In this material, excitons can link up into the same quantum state -- kind of like a set of bells all ringing perfectly in tune. This allows energy to move around the material with zero friction. (These sorts of strange behaviors intrigue scientists because they can be the seeds for remarkable technology -- for example, a similar state called superconductivity is the basis for MRI machines). According to the models [...], the excitons in a leaf can sometimes link up in ways similar to exciton condensate behavior. This was a huge surprise. Exciton condensates have only been seen when the material is cooled down significantly below room temperature. It'd be kind of like seeing ice cubes forming in a cup of hot coffee. "Photosynthetic light harvesting is taking place in a system that is at room temperature and what's more, its structure is disordered -- very unlike the pristine crystallized materials and cold temperatures that you use to make exciton condensates," explained [study co-author Anna Schouten]. This effect isn't total -- it's more akin to "islands" of condensates forming, the scientists said. "But that's still enough to enhance energy transfer in the system," said Sager-Smith. In fact, their models suggest it can as much as double the efficiency. The findings open up some new possibilities for generating synthetic materials for future technology, said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti. "A perfect ideal exciton condensate is sensitive and requires a lot of special conditions, but for realistic applications, it's exciting to see something that boosts efficiency but can happen in ambient conditions."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream. The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.

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Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from LiveScience: Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds... The layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of Italian and Japanese researchers hypothesized that they could identify previously unknown burial hypogea from the Hellenistic period using 21st-century techniques. Their study, published April 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, details how they used muography to detect underground voids that were unknown to archaeologists... In 1936, scientists discovered that muons are produced by cosmic rays in Earth's atmosphere, and that these tiny particles can easily penetrate walls and rocks, scattering in open spaces. In this study, the muons' tracks were recorded using nuclear emulsion technology, in which extremely sensitive photographic film is used to capture and visualize the paths of the charged particles. By measuring muon flux — how many muons arrive in a particular area over time — and direction using a particle detector, researchers can peer into volcanoes, underground cavities and even the Egyptian pyramids through muography... Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy's National Institute for Nuclear Physics, and his colleagues placed the muon tracking devices 59 feet (18 m) underground, in a 19th-century cellar that was used for aging ham, where they recorded the muon flux for 28 days, capturing about 10 million muons... 3D laser scans of the accessible structures can then be compared with the measured muon flux. Anomalies in the muon flux images that are not visible in the 3D model can be confidently assumed to be hidden or unknown cavities. Muography revealed an excess of muons in the data that can be explained only by the presence of a new burial chamber. The chamber's area measures roughly 6.5 by 11.5 feet (2 by 3.5 m), according to the study, and its rectangular shape indicates it is human-made rather than natural.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The creamy fruit and nectar-rich flowers of the milk fruit tree are irresistible to Xenohyla truncata, a tree frog native to Brazil. On warm nights, the dusky-colored frogs take to the trees en masse, jostling one another for a chance to nibble the fruit and slurp the nectar. In the process, the frogs become covered in sticky pollen grains -- and might inadvertently pollinate the plants, too. It's the first time a frog -- or any amphibian -- has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported last month in Food Webs. Scientists long thought only insects and birds served as pollinators, but research has revealed that some reptiles and mammals are more than up to the task. Now, scientists must consider whether amphibians are also capable of getting the job done. It's likely that the nectar-loving frogs, also known as Izecksohn's Brazilian tree frogs, are transferring pollen as they move from flower to flower, the authors say. But more research is needed, they add, to confirm that frogs have joined the planet's pantheon of pollinators.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Fast-rising fungal attacks on the world's most important crops threaten the planet's future food supply, scientists have said, warning that failing to tackle fungal pathogens could lead to a "global health catastrophe." Fungi are already by far the biggest destroyer of crops. They are highly resilient, travel long distances on the wind and can feast on large fields of a single crop. They are also extremely adaptable and many have developed resistance to common fungicides. The impact of fungal disease is expected to worsen, the researchers say, as the climate crisis results in temperatures rising and fungal infections moving steadily polewards. Since the 1990s, fungal pathogens have been moving to higher latitudes at a rate of about 7km a year. Wheat stem rust infections, normally found in the tropics, have already been reported in England and Ireland. Higher temperatures also drive the emergence of new variants of the fungal pathogens, while more extreme storms can spread their spores further afield, the scientists say. The scientists said there was also a risk that global heating would increase the heat tolerance of fungi, raising the possibility of them hopping hosts to infect warm-blooded animals and humans. The warning, issued in an article in the scientific journal Nature, said growers already lost between 10% and 23% of their crops to fungal disease. Across the five most important crops -- rice, wheat, maize, soya beans and potatoes -- infections cause annual losses that could feed hundreds of millions of people. Fungi made up the top six in a recent list of pests and pathogens with the biggest impact. Fungi are incredibly resilient, the researchers say, remaining viable in soil for up to 40 years, and their airborne spores can travel between continents. Fungicides are widely used but the pathogens are well equipped to rapidly evolve resistance to treatments that target only a single cellular process. Existing fungicides and conventional breeding for disease resistance are no longer enough, the researchers say. One solution is planting seed mixtures that carry a range of genes that are resistant to fungal infection, rather than monocultures of a single strain. In 2022, about a quarter of wheat in Denmark was grown in this way. Technology may also help, the scientists say, with drones and artificial intelligence allowing earlier detection and control of outbreaks. New pesticides are being developed, with a team at the University of Exeter recently discovering compounds that could lead to chemicals that target several biological processes within the fungi, making resistance much harder to develop. The approach has already been shown to be useful against fungi infecting wheat, rice, corn and bananas. "While that storyline is science fiction, we are warning that we could see a global health catastrophe caused by the rapid global spread of fungal infections," said Sarah Gurr, professor at the University of Exeter and co-author of the report. "The imminent threat here is not about zombies, but about global starvation."

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Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material. From a report: The removal makes "a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education," says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials. The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India's 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a "content rationalization" process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was "irrelevant" in the "present context.") NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India's Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A research team has turned the bodies of dead mice into vivid 3D maps of anatomy, with tissues, nerves, and vessels highlighted in color. The technique, which renders the corpses transparent and then exposes them to fluorescent antibodies that label distinct cell types, could help everything from drug development to understanding the spread of cancer, its creators and other scientists say. The developers, at the Helmholtz Munich research institute, call their technique wildDISCO -- wild because it can work on any "wild type," or normal, mice, and DISCO for 3D imaging of solvent-cleared organs. Building on their previous success at making mouse bodies transparent, the new technique removes cholesterol from the bodies so that a vast array of existing antibodies can penetrate deep into the animals. "wildDISCO is a game changer -- it allows us to see the hidden highways and byways in the body," says Muzlifah Haniffa, a dermatologist and immunologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University's Biosciences Institute who was not involved in the research. The method should let scientists map a mouse at the cellular level and explore previously hidden links between tissues, like neural connections between organs, says neuroscientist Ali Erturk, director of Helmholtz Munich, who led the work, posted recently as a preprint. His group in Germany has already posted eye-catching videos of "flying" through the 3D anatomy of a mouse with different tissues labeled.

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According to new research published last month in PLOS ONE, moths are more efficient pollinators at night than day-flying pollinators such as bees. Phys.Org reports: Studying 10 sites in the South East of England throughout July 2021, [researchers from the University of Sussex] found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly. As a result, the researchers concluded that moths are more efficient pollinators than day-flying insects such as bees, which are traditionally thought of as "hard-working." While day-flying insects have more time available to transfer pollen, moths were making an important contribution during the short hours of darkness. Professor Fiona Mathews, Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex and co-author this latest research, says, "Bees are undoubtedly important, but our work has shown that moths pollinate flowers at a faster rate than day-flying insects. Sadly, many moths are in serious decline in Britain, affecting not just pollination but also food supplies for many other species ranging from bats to birds. Our work shows that simple steps, such as allowing patches of bramble to flower, can provide important food sources for moths, and we will be rewarded with a crop of blackberries. Everyone's a winner!"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers said on Wednesday they have discovered that parts of the brain region called the motor cortex that govern body movement are connected with a network involved in thinking, planning, mental arousal, pain, and control of internal organs, as well as functions such as blood pressure and heart rate. They identified a previously unknown system within the motor cortex manifested in multiple nodes that are located in between areas of the brain already known to be responsible for movement of specific body parts -- hands, feet and face -- and are engaged when many different body movements are performed together. The researchers called this system the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, and documented its connections to brain regions known to help set goals and plan actions. This network also was found to correspond with brain regions that, as shown in studies involving monkeys, are connected to internal organs including the stomach and adrenal glands, allowing these organs to change activity levels in anticipation of performing a certain action. That may explain physical responses like sweating or increased heart rate caused by merely pondering a difficult future task, they said. "Basically, we now have shown that the human motor system is not unitary. Instead, we believe there are two separate systems that control movement," said radiology professor Evan Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, lead author of the study. "One is for isolated movement of your hands, feet and face. This system is important, for example, for writing or speaking -movements that need to involve only the one body part. A second system, the SCAN, is more important for integrated, whole body movements, and is more connected to high-level planning regions of your brain," Gordon said. "Modern neuroscience does not include any kind of mind-body dualism. It's not compatible with being a serious neuroscientist nowadays. I'm not a philosopher, but one succinct statement I like is saying, 'The mind is what the brain does.' The sum of the bio-computational functions of the brain makes up 'the mind,'" said study senior author Nico Dosenbach, a neurology professor at Washington University School of Medicine. "Since this system, the SCAN, seems to integrate abstract plans-thoughts-motivations with actual movements and physiology, it provides additional neuroanatomical explanation for why 'the body' and 'the mind' aren't separate or separable." The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

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Dr Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, writing over the weekend: It was medical dogma: cancer tissue is sterile. That's what we had learned and taught in medical school for decades even though bacteria were detected in tumors more than 100 years ago. When studies were reported asserting that bacteria were present in tumor tissue, they were consistently debunked as representing contaminants. Then came new tools that include single-cell sequencing and sophisticated spatial profiling providing high-resolution portraits of tumors. The new dogma is that bacteria have a pervasive (yet variable) presence within and across solid tumors -- the "presence of intratumoral bacteria being designated a hallmark of cancer." Furthermore, where bacteria are more apt to be found within tumor regions, T cell recruitment and function is suppressed. These regions of tumor are micro-niches exhibiting immune evasion. Just as that has been determined, there was a new twist this week: engineering bacteria to induce a potent T cell immune response to kill the tumor. This can be viewed as the polar opposite. Instead of bacteria improving a tumor's ability to duck our immune response and spread, this represents clever ways to genetically manipulate bacteria (aka "designer bugs" with the schematic in the linked post) to make it considerably more antigenic, a new route to immunotherapy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Live Science: Scientists have discovered and synthesized an entirely new isotope of the highly radioactive element uranium. But it might last only 40 minutes before decaying into other elements. The new isotope, uranium-241, has 92 protons (as all uranium isotopes do) and 149 neutrons, making it the first new neutron-rich isotope of uranium discovered since 1979. While atoms of a given element always have the same number of protons, different isotopes, or versions, of those elements may hold different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. To be considered neutron-rich, an isotope must contain more neutrons than is common to that element. "We measured the masses of 19 different actinide isotopes with a high precision of one part per million level, including the discovery and identification of the new uranium isotope," Toshitaka Niwase(opens in new tab), a researcher at the High-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Wako Nuclear Science Center (WNSC) in Japan, told Live Science in an email. "This is the first new discovery of a uranium isotope on the neutron-rich side in over 40 years." Niwase is the lead author of a study on the new uranium isotope, which was published March 31 in the journal Physical Review Letters. Niwase and colleagues created the uranium-241 by firing a sample of uranium-238 at platinum-198 nuclei at Japan's RIKEN accelerator. The two isotopes then swapped neutrons and protons — a phenomenon called "multinucleon transfer." The team then measured the mass of the created isotopes by observing the time it took the resulting nuclei to travel a certain distance through a medium. The experiment also generated 18 new isotopes, all of which contained between 143 and 150 neutrons.

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