First detection of neutrinos made at a particle collider

The FASER (Forward Search Experiment) detector in the tunnel of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva.
Photo Credit: © 2021-2023 CERN

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that played an important role in the early phase of the universe. They are key to learning more about the fundamental laws of nature, including how particles acquire mass and why there is more matter than antimatter. Despite being among the most abundant particles in the universe they are very difficult to detect because they pass through matter with almost no interaction. They are therefore often called “ghost particles”.

Neutrinos have been known for several decades and were very important for establishing the standard model of particle physics. But most neutrinos studied by physicists so far have been low-energy neutrinos. Previously, no neutrino produced at a particle collider had ever been detected by an experiment. Now, an international team including researchers from the Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP) of the University of Bern has succeeded in doing just that. Using the FASER particle detector at CERN in Geneva, the team was able to detect very high energy neutrinos produced by brand a new source: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The international FASER collaboration announced this result on March 19 at the MORIOND EW conference in La Thuile, Italy.

Parasites alter likelihood of fish being caught by anglers

Itsuro Koizumi (second from left) and Ryota Hasegawa (first from right), authors of the paper, with Taro Matsuda of Setsunan University (center), and Masashiro Naka (first from left) and Chiharu Furusawa (second from right) of the Koizumi lab
Photo Credit: Itsuro Koizumi

Parasitic infections in salmonid fish can increase or decrease their vulnerability to angling, depending on their body condition.

Angling, a type of fishing, is a popular pastime across the world, and is known to be 40,000 years old. Angling usually takes place in natural bodies of water, which may have populations of wild fish, or be stocked with cultured fish. Fish caught by angling may either be consumed, or may be immediately released.

Parasites are very common in nature, found everywhere that their hosts are found. Parasites are known to alter the susceptibility of fish to predators. Angling can be considered predation of fish; however, there has been almost no in-depth research on how parasites affect the susceptibility of fish to angling.

Associate Professor Itsuro Koizumi at the Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, and graduate student Ryota Hasegawa have investigated how a mouth and gill parasite of the whitespotted char, a salmonid fish, affects its vulnerability to angling. Their findings were published in the journal The Science of Nature.

New way to study molecular drivers of cancer

Ch4 kinases.

Clearer understanding about the markers and drivers of cancer cell proliferation has emerged from research that identifies new opportunities to overcome convergence with complex enzymes, known as kinases.

The work paves the way for new approaches to study the molecular drivers of disease states such as cancer.

Kinases are a specific family of proteins that add phosphates to other molecules – a process called phosphorylation, which can change the function of their substrates (target proteins). In humans, more than 500 kinases phosphorylate approximately 15% of all proteins. However, more than one kinase can phosphorylate the same substrate, and this can occur at the same or different sites. This is known as convergence, and can often make it difficult to study a specific kinase or substrate, as the activity of multiple kinases can hamper analysis.

Understanding the complex kinase network is important, as dysregulation of these proteins can drive disease, such as the survival and spread of cancer cells or their resistance to therapeutics.

While most kinase research has tended to focus on characterizing phosphorylation networks between kinases and their substrates, researchers in the Janovjak Lab at Flinders University’s College of Medicine and Public Health have taken a different tack by analyzing how common convergence is across all human kinases, and using these insights to dissect it experimentally.

New study counts the environmental cost of managing knotweed

Invasive Knotweed
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Swansea University

New Swansea University research has looked at the long-term environmental impact of different methods to control Japanese knotweed.

The invasive species has been calculated to cost more than £165 million to manage every year in the UK alone. Its presence can blight property purchases for households across the country.

This has led to the development of different ways of trying to control it but with sustainability becoming increasingly important, understanding the effect of these management methods is vital.

A new study, led by biosciences lecturer Dr Sophie Hocking and looking at the entire life cycle and long-term impacts of different management approaches, has just been published in online journal Scientific Reports.

Dr Hocking said: “In light of the current climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, invasive species management and sustainability have never been so important.

New Study Provides First Comprehensive Look at Oxygen Loss on Coral Reefs

Coral reefs at a study site off Taiping Island, South China Sea.
Photo Credit: Yi Bei Liang

Scripps Oceanography scientists and collaborators provide first-of-its-kind assessment of hypoxia, or low oxygen levels, across 32 coral reef sites around the world

A new study is providing an unprecedented examination of oxygen loss on coral reefs around the globe under ocean warming. Led by researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a large team of national and international colleagues, the study captures the current state of hypoxia—or low oxygen levels—at 32 different sites, and reveals that hypoxia is already pervasive on many reefs.

The overall decline of oxygen content across the world’s oceans and coastal waters—a process known as ocean deoxygenation—has been well documented, but hypoxia on coral reefs has been relatively underexplored. Oxygen loss in the ocean is predicted to threaten marine ecosystems globally, though more research is needed to better understand the biological impacts on tropical corals and coral reefs.

The study, published March 16 in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to document oxygen conditions on coral reef ecosystems at this scale.

Study Sheds Light on Ancient Microbial Dark Matter

Photo Credit: Apex 360

Bacteria are literally everywhere – in oceans, in soils, in extreme environments like hot springs, and even alongside and inside other organisms including humans. They’re nearly invisible, yet they play a big role in almost every facet of life on Earth.

Despite their abundance, surprisingly little is known about many microorganisms that have existed for billions of years.

This includes an entire lineage of nano-sized bacteria dubbed Omnitrophota. These bacteria, first discovered based on short fragments of DNA just 25 years ago, are common in many environments around the world but have been poorly understood. Until now.

An international research team produced the first large-scale analysis of more than 400 newly sequenced and existing Omnitrophota genomes, uncovering new details about their biology and behavior. The team’s findings are reported in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature Microbiology.

I say dog, you say chicken? New study explores why we disagree so often

Celeste Kidd, assistant professor of psychology and the study’s principal investigator.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Celeste Kidd | University of California, Berkeley

Is a dog more similar to a chicken or an eagle? Is a penguin noisy? Is a whale friendly?

Psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, say these absurd-sounding questions might help us better understand what’s at the heart of some of society’s most vexing arguments. 

Research published online Thursday in the journal Open Mind shows that our concepts about and associations with even the most basic words vary widely. At the same time, people tend to significantly overestimate how many others hold the same conceptual beliefs — the mental groupings we create as shortcuts for understanding similar objects, words or events.

It’s a mismatch that researchers say gets at the heart of the most heated debates, from the courtroom to the dinner table.

“The results offer an explanation for why people talk past each other,” said Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the study’s principal investigator. “When people are disagreeing, it may not always be about what they think it is. It could be stemming from something as simple as their concepts not being aligned.”

Simple questions like, “What do you mean?” can go a long way in preventing a dispute from going off the rails, Kidd said. In other words, she said, “Just hash it out.”

‘Terminator zones’ on distant planets could harbor life

Some exoplanets have one side permanently facing their star while the other side is in perpetual darkness. The ring-shaped border between these permanent day and night regions is called a “terminator zone.” In a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal, physics and astronomy researchers at UC Irvine say this area has the potential to support extraterrestrial life.
Illustration Credit: Ana Lobo / University of California, Irvine

In a new study, University of California, Irvine astronomers describe how extraterrestrial life has the potential to exist on distant exoplanets inside a special area called the “terminator zone,” which is a ring on planets that have one side that always faces its star and one side that is always dark.

“These planets have a permanent day side and a permanent night side,” said Ana Lobo, a postdoctoral researcher in the UCI Department of Physics & Astronomy who led the new work, which was just published in The Astrophysical Journal. Lobo added that such planets are particularly common because they exist around stars that make up about 70 percent of the stars seen in the night sky – so-called M-dwarf stars, which are relatively dimmer than our sun.

The terminator is the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet. Terminator zones could exist in that “just right” temperature zone between too hot and too cold.

“You want a planet that’s in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,” said Lobo, because liquid water, as far as scientists know, is an essential ingredient for life.

On the dark sides of terminator planets, perpetual night would yield plummeting temperatures that could cause any water to be frozen in ice. The side of the planet always facing its star could be too hot for water to remain in the open for long.

Dual immunotherapy plus chemotherapy before surgery improves patient outcomes in operable lung cancer

Tina Cascone, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of Thoracic/Head & Neck Medical Oncology
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

In a Phase II trial led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, adding ipilimumab to a neoadjuvant, or pre-surgical, combination of nivolumab plus platinum-based chemotherapy, resulted in a major pathologic response (MPR) in half of all treated patients with early-stage, resectable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

New findings from the NEOSTAR trial, published today in Nature Medicine, provide further support for neoadjuvant immunotherapy-based treatment as an approach to reduce viable tumor at surgery and to improve outcomes in NSCLC. The combination also was associated with an increase in immune cell infiltration and a favorable gut microbiome composition.

The current study reports on the latest two arms of the NEOSTAR trial, evaluating neoadjuvant nivolumab plus chemotherapy (double combination) and neoadjuvant ipilimumab plus nivolumab and chemotherapy (triple combination). Both treatment arms met their prespecified primary endpoint boundaries of six or more patients achieving MPR, defined as 10% or less residual viable tumor (RVT) in the resected tumor specimen at surgery, a candidate surrogate endpoint of improved survival outcomes from prior studies.

Climate change creates ‘win-win’ between bald eagles and farmers

Bald eagle
Photo Credit: Brian E. Kushner/Lab of Ornithology 

As they seek new foods because climate change has altered their traditional diet of salmon carcasses, bald eagles in northwestern Washington state have become a boon to dairy farmers, deterring pests and removing animal carcasses from their farms, a new study finds.

The mutually beneficial relationship is described in “A Win-Win Between Farmers and an Apex Predator: Investigating the Relationship Between Bald Eagles and Dairy Farms,” which published March 10 in the journal Ecosphere.

“The narrative around birds of prey and farmers has traditionally been negative and combative, mainly due to claims of livestock predation,” said lead author Ethan Duvall, a doctoral student in ecology and evolutionary biology. “However, dairy farmers in northwestern Washington do not consider the eagles threats. In fact, many farmers appreciate the services that the eagles provide such as carcass removal and pest-deterrence.”