Many bacterial pathogens use small injection apparatuses to manipulate the cells of their hosts, such as humans, so that they can spread throughout the body. To do this, they need to fill their syringes with the relevant injection agent. A technique that tracks the individual movement of proteins revealed how bacteria accomplish this challenging task….

n Hawaiʻi and across much of Oceania, Pacific Islanders celebrate the connections between their islands and the ocean that surrounds them. “As descendants of the ocean, the dearth of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) in ocean science seems inconsonant,” writes a team of authors that includes University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa faculty, students,…

Plastic litter is a growing problem around the world, and new research shows that the bottom of Lake Tahoe is no exception. In one of the first studies to utilize scuba divers to collect litter from a lakebed, 673 plastic items were counted from just a small fraction of the lake. In the study, published…

Last year, Typhoon Hinnamnor — which caused 36 fatalities — gained notoriety as the first super typhoon that developed at a high latitude as 25°N since Korea Meteorological Administration records began. This year in Osong, Chungcheongbuk-do, an unanticipated intense downpour, caused rivers to suddenly overflow, resulting in numerous casualties. Earth’s rising temperatures are triggering unprecedented…

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have become a rapidly growing threat to public health. Each year, they account for more than 2.8 million infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without new antibiotics, even common injuries and infections harbor the potential to become lethal. Scientists are now one step closer to eliminating that threat,…

Tiny things matter — for instance, one amino acid can completely alter the architecture of the cell. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Warwick investigated the structure and mechanics of the main component of the cytoskeleton of the cell: a protein known as actin. Actin is found in all living cells where it has…

A new study led by scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History identifies five new species of soft-furred hedgehogs from Southeast Asia. The study, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, used DNA analysis and physical characteristics to describe two entirely new species of soft-furred hedgehogs and elevate three subspecies to…

There does not appear to be any profound differences between so-called exposure-based CBT and traditional CBT in the treatment of fibromyalgia, according to a study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet. Both forms of treatment produced a significant reduction in symptoms in people affected by the disease. The study is one of the largest to…

New research, publishing December 21 in the open access journal in PLOS Biology, shows that tears from women contain chemicals that block aggression in men. The study led by Shani Agron at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, finds that sniffing tears leads to reduced brain activity related to aggression, which results is less aggressive…

A new iguana joins Asia’s rich reptile fauna, officially described as new to science in the open-access journal ZooKeys. “From 2009 to 2022, we conducted a series of field surveys in South China and collected a number of specimens of the Calotes versicolor species complex, and found that the population of what we thought was…

Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres. The researchers propose that if a terrestrial planet has substantially less carbon dioxide in…

In November 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed a massive cluster of galaxies named MACS J0138.0-2155. Through an effect called gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, a distant galaxy named MRG-M0138 appears warped by the powerful gravity of the intervening galaxy cluster. In addition to warping and magnifying the distant galaxy, the gravitational…

At about the size of a pinkie nail, the jellyfish species Cladonema can regenerate an amputated tentacle in two to three days — but how? Regenerating functional tissue across species, including salamanders and insects, relies on the ability to form a blastema, a clump of undifferentiated cells that can repair damage and grow into the…