What a Philippine court ruling means for transgenic Golden Rice, once hailed as a dietary breakthrough
Golden Rice seemed to be on the cusp of fulfilling its promise. Decades ago, researchers created the genetically modified (GM) rice variety to combat vitamin A deficiency, a scourge of the developing world that can cause blindness and even lead to death. But for more than 20 years activists opposed to GM crops kept Golden Rice confined to laboratories and test plots.
But in 2021, the government of the Philippines granted a permit allowing the commercial planting of Malusog Rice, a Golden Rice variety tailored for local conditions and tastes. Farmers began to grow limited amounts of the grain in 2022. Officials hoped...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 3, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Questionable firms tempt young doctors with ‘easy’ publications
Last year, physician Rupak Desai co-authored
more than three dozen conference abstracts
in
Circulation
, the American Heart Association’s (AHA’s) flagship journal. The works marked a modest fraction of
his publications in 2023
, which totaled 162. But Desai, scholarly productivity notwithstanding, is not employed by a hospital, university, nor any other type of scientific institution.
Based in Atlanta, Desai runs a business that offers junior doctors from around the world a chance to beef up their CVs before applying for coveted residency or fellowship positions at hospitals or physi...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 3, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Orangutan plays doctor, heals himself
Like other great apes, orangutans have many humanlike habits: They use
tools
, put roofs over their nests, and even build
umbrellas
. Now, researchers have observed another stunning similarity: an orangutan in Sumatra using a medicinal plant to heal a wound. The find, published today in
Scientific Reports
, marks the
first documented case of an ape using a plant with scientifically proven medicinal properties to treat a fresh wound
.
“It really is a nicely documented study,” says Michael Huffman, a primatologist at the Institute for Tropical Medicine at Nagasa...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 2, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
News at a glance: Infrared telescope debuts, GM rice stumbles, and maternal mortality drops
ASTRONOMY
Highest scope opens its infrared eyes
After 26 years of planning and construction, the world’s highest telescope began operating in Chile this week, offering a rare opportunity to make ground-based observations far into the infrared part of the spectrum. The University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory’s (TAO’s) 6.5-meter telescope is not especially large but benefits from its lofty position 5560 meters high on Cerro Chajnantor, a peak in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Moisture in the atmosphere blocks much of the infrared spectrum, and telescopes equipped to record it—such as NAS...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 2, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Cheap catalyst could help turn carbon dioxide into fuels
Imagine if carbon dioxide (CO
2
)—the primary cause of global warming—could be collected from smokestacks and turned back into fuel. Now, chemists report the discovery of a potentially cheap and stable catalyst that can efficiently split CO
2
into carbon monoxide (CO), a molecular starting point for plastics, diesel, and jet fuels. Because renewable electricity can power these reactions, the catalyst could help make commodity chemicals without burning fossil fuels. It could also help create a market for the vast amounts of CO
2
that companies are planning on capturing not just from smokest...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 2, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
A scientist is likely to win Mexico ’s presidency. Not all researchers are rejoicing
Mexico City—
Earlier this year, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo stood before thousands of people gathered here in the
Zócalo
, one of the world’s largest city squares, to kick off her campaign for Mexico’s presidency. “We will make Mexico a scientific and innovation power,” she vowed during her 1 March address. “To do this, we will support the basic, natural, social sciences, and the humanities. And we will link them with priority areas and sectors of the country.”
Sheinbaum Pardo, a 61-year-old environmental engineer who has served as Mexico City’s mayor and its environment secretary, has a h...
Source: ScienceNOW - May 2, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Intricate leaf veins may be an ancient protection against hungry insects
The “loopy” patterns of a fossilized seed fern’s (
Linopteris subbrongniartii
) leaf veins (shown above) may represent an early plant defense against being eaten by insects. About 340 million years ago, leaves sported veins that branched like a tree, with a main “trunk” subdividing into multiple branches. Some 23 million years later, more complex networks had evolved with multiple intersecting paths connecting veins to the stalk of the leaf. During that intervening time, insects had begun chomping down on leaves.
Did leaves’ veins shift in response? To find out, paleontologists traced and digiti...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 30, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘Daredevil’ running could help astronauts maintain muscles in low gravity
Spending an extended period of time in lower gravity can weaken muscles and cause bones to deteriorate. To combat this, astronauts must exercise every day. Running while harnessed to a treadmill is one tried-and-true option that astronauts aboard the International Space Station have employed for years. But running in low gravity is awkward and doesn’t provide the same workout as striding under the full weight of Earth’s gravitational pull.
Minetti
et al.,
Royal Society Open Science
(2024)
But what if jogging astronauts could mimic Earth’s...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 30, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Ancient crystals suggest early Earth had land and freshwater
Tiny grains of a mineral called zircon might have witnessed the fall of rain on Earth’s earliest dry land some 4 billion years ago, when oceans likely covered most of the planet. The chemical composition of the crystals, plucked from rocks in Australia, hint that they formed from magmas doped with freshwater, a team of scientists argues. That would only have been possible on terra firma, they say.
“We found evidence for two things: There was land above sea level and, at the same, that this land interacted with freshwater,” says Hamed Gamaleldien, a geochemist at Khalifa University who
presented the results...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 30, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Major budget cuts to two high-profile NIH efforts leave researchers reeling
When the U.S. government’s spending bills for this year were belatedly finalized in March, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) largely escaped the major cuts that struck some other several science agencies. But because of a quirk in their funding arrangement, two high-profile NIH programs in neuroscience and genomic medicine will be cut by more than one-third, receiving $462 million less than their 2023 total of $1.2 billion.
For the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, a decade-old project to map neural circuitry and develop devices to treat or prevent brain di...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 30, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Which wild animals carry the COVID-19 virus? An ambitious U.S. project aims to find out
Mission Creek Preserve in California—
Near a field lab at the base of barren desert mountains, a helicopter roared in with an unusual cargo: four desert bighorn sheep, each in a bag, dangling like lanterns from the aircraft’s belly. A specialized crew had captured the animals just over a mountain ridge in the distance. Now, workers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife lugged the sheep from the landing pad to the lab, where they weighed them, measured their horns, ran sonograms on pregnant ewes, clamped on GPS collars, swabbed noses, and drew blood.
The November 2023 operation was part of a dec...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 29, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Injectable antibody drug protects children from malaria in Mali trial
A single dose of an experimental antibody drug protects children from malaria for up to 6 months, according to a clinical study published today in
The New England Journal of Medicine
.
The therapy, an injectable monoclonal antibody called L9LS that has
already shown success in adults
, reduced infections and clinical disease in 6- to 10-year-olds in Mali. Although the drug is still undergoing clinical testing, the results suggest monoclonal antibodies could be an important addition to the arsenal against this deadly disease, researchers say.
Malaria caused an estimated 608,000 deaths in 2022...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
AI transcription tools ‘hallucinate,’ too
By now, the tendency for chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to occasionally make stuff up, or “hallucinate,” has been well documented. Chatbots have generated
medical misinformation
, invented
fake legal cases
, and fabricated
citations
. Now,
a new study
has found that AI models are not only seeing things, but hearing things: OpenAI’s Whisper, an AI model trained to transcribe audio input, made up sentences in about 1.4% of the transcriptions of audio recordings tested. Disconcertingly, a large portion of the fabricated sentences contained offensive or potentiall...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 26, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Where do elbows and knees come from? Biologists track them back to our boneless, sharklike ancestors
Ask an older person where painful arthritis strikes and most will point to their joints—knees, hips, and fingers. That’s because as people age, those joints lose the cartilage and viscous fluid, known as synovial fluid, that keeps them supple. Sharks and skates have no bones—and no arthritis—but they apparently have the same kind of joints we do. Once thought to exist only in bony vertebrates, these so-called
synovial joints actually evolved in the much older ancestor of cartilaginous and bony fish
, researchers reported earlier this month in a preprint on bioRxiv.
“They very convincingly show tha...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
The U.S. government is taking action to stop ‘cow flu.’ Is it too little, too late?
The U.S. government announced new measures yesterday to slow the spread of the H5N1 influenza virus among cattle, following the revelation that milk sold commercially in 10 states contained fragments of the virus. An order issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) restricts the movement of dairy cattle between states and mandates the reporting of infected cows.
The
order
comes as new genetic evidence suggests cattle infections with the virus, first announced on 25 March, may have started as early as the fall of 2023, and that the virus has likely circulated far beyond the 33 farms in eight states ...
Source: ScienceNOW - April 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
