Recovering reef fish populations could nourish millions of additional people each year

A new study led by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Assistant Professor Jessica Zamborain-Mason shows that rebuilding depleted coral reef fish populations could significantly increase sustainable food supplies for millions of people worldwide. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the work provides the first global quantification of how much food is currently being lost due to degraded reef fish stocks and how much can be regained if reefs are restored to sustainable levels.

Drawing on one of the largest coral reef datasets assembled to date, the study analyzes more than 1,200 reef sites across 23 tropical jurisdictions. The findings come at a critical moment: reef ecosystems are experiencing widespread climate-driven impacts, and if reef fisheries are overexploited, ecosystem resilience and tropical food systems are at risk.  

“Our study provides clear, quantitative evidence of how much food tropical coastal communities are losing — and could regain — through sustainably managed reef fisheries,” said Zamborain-Mason. “These insights give governments the scientific foundation needed to strengthen food security and ecosystem resilience through effective fisheries management.” 

Plant science with a twist

Images of roots studied as part of new research exploring the molecular underpinnings to how plants twist their roots.
Image Credit: Dixit Lab / Washington University in St. Louis

From morning glories spiraling up fence posts to grape vines corkscrewing through arbors, twisted growth is a problem-solving tool found throughout the plant kingdom. Roots “do the twist” all the time, skewing hard right or left to avoid rocks and other debris.

Scientists have long known that mutations in certain genes affecting microtubules in plants can cause plants to grow in a twisting manner. In most cases, these are “null mutations,” meaning the twisting is often a consequence of the absence of a particular gene.

This still left a mystery for plant scientists like Ram Dixit, the George and Charmaine Mallinckrodt Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. The absence of a gene should cause all sorts of other problems for plants and yet twisted growth is an incredibly common evolutionary adaptation.

AI model predicts disease risk while you sleep

SleepFM utilizes diverse physiological data streams, highlighting the potential to improve disease forecasting and better understand health risks.
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / AI generated (Gemini)

The first artificial intelligence model of its kind can predict more than 100 health conditions from one night’s sleep.

A poor night’s sleep portends a bleary-eyed next day, but it could also hint at diseases that will strike years down the road. A new artificial intelligence model developed by Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues can use physiological recordings from one night’s sleep to predict a person’s risk of developing more than 100 health conditions.

Known as SleepFM, the model was trained on nearly 600,000 hours of sleep data collected from 65,000 participants. The sleep data comes from polysomnography, a comprehensive sleep assessment that uses various sensors to record brain activity, heart activity, respiratory signals, leg movements, eye movements, and more.

Young Galaxies Grow Up Fast

The 18 galaxies from the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST survey. Each picture shows the location of ionized gas (as traced by the hydrogen alpha line, the spectral signature of hot hydrogen gas) in the galaxies. Several of the pictured galaxies are interacting, meaning two or even three galaxies are in the process of merging.
Image Credit: Andreas Faisst (Caltech) and the ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey team

Astronomers have captured the most detailed look yet at faraway galaxies at the peak of their youth, an active time when the adolescent galaxies were fervently producing new stars. The observations focused on 18 galaxies located 12.5 billion light-years away. They were imaged across a range of wavelengths from ultraviolet to radio over the past eight years by a trio of telescopes: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope; NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile, of which the U.S. National Science Foundation National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a partner. Data from other ground-based telescopes were also used to make measurements, such as the total mass of stars in the galaxies.

"With this sample, we are uniquely poised to study galaxy evolution during a key epoch in the universe that has been hard to image until now," says Andreas Faisst, a staff scientist at IPAC, a science and data center for astronomy at Caltech. "Thanks to these exceptional telescopes, we have spatially resolved these galaxies and can observe the stages of star formation as they were happening and their chemical properties when our universe was less than a billion years old."

A new study finds Jupiter’s moon Europa’s quiet seafloor may still hold keys for life

A “black smoker” at the Piccard hydrothermal field, 5,000 meters below the surface, on the Mid-Cayman Rise.
Photo Credit: Chris German / ROV Jason, ©WHOI, 2012

The giant planet Jupiter has nearly 100 known moons, but none have captured the imagination of scientists quite like Europa. Scientists suspect Europa has a salty ocean beneath its icy crust, holding twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans combined. For decades, scientists have wondered whether that ocean could harbor the right conditions for life, placing Europa near the top of the list of solar system bodies to explore.

A new study,  led by Washington University and involving Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), indicates it may lack modern-day tectonic activity at the seafloor that sheds new light on this topic. Using models that account for Europa’s size, rocky core, and Jupiter’s gravity, the team concludes that the moon likely lacks the tectonic activity, or seafloor volcanism, that gives rise to dramatic “black smoker” hot springs on Earth.

Scientists discover key to solving an 80-year-old chemistry puzzle

Scientists have discovered a new way of making specific versions of asymmetrical chemicals.
Photo Credit: Michal Jarmoluk

New research from the University of Bath and the University of St Andrews, published in Nature Chemistry, has discovered the key to unlocking an 80-year-old chemical puzzle, which could have important ramifications for fine chemical processes like those involved in the manufacture of medicines. 

Chiral molecules are asymmetric or non-superimposable on their mirror image – each side is different, existing in “right hand” and “left hand” forms. Often only one of these “handed” forms has the desired chemical or biological activity, while the other may have unwanted side effects. 

Using a combination of lab experiments and quantum chemistry calculations, researchers have now discovered a new way to control the handedness of a notoriously difficult chemical process, known as the ‘[1,2]-Wittig rearrangement’ that will impact on how scientists design selective chemical reactions. 

Study Underscores Role of Sleep in Reducing Toll of Social Adversity on Breast Cancer Survivors’ Health

Photo Credit: Ivan Oboleninov

Where someone lives can affect their health. For breast cancer survivors, their neighborhood can influence their recovery from treatment.

Researchers in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) led a National Institutes of Health-funded study that found getting good sleep may buffer against the negative effects of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood, easing the transition from active treatment to survivorship.

Crystal Park, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, and Keith Bellizzi, professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS), explored whether factors within breast cancer survivors’ control would influence recovery from treatment. Their findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Current Oncology.

Sleep has been found to enhance physical recovery and regulate inflammation, and this study is the first to show that poor sleep may exacerbate the health impact of residential hardship among breast cancer survivors.

How a persistent chemical enters our surface waters

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are not called “forever chemicals” for nothing. These fluorine-containing organic molecules are difficult to break down and are likely to remain in the environment for decades or even centuries, where they can accumulate in humans and animals and may have harmful effects on health. This is a compelling reason to take precautionary measures. 

The PFAS class of substances comprises thousands of chemical compounds. Not all of them have been thoroughly studied. The release, spread, accumulation, and effects of numerous PFAS are the subject of ongoing research. Among other things, researchers are focusing on TFA, short for trifluoroacetic acid. The smallest molecule in the PFAS family is formed as a degradation product of various other substances, such as many fluorinated refrigerants and propellants. Once formed, TFA is hardly degraded in the environment. “TFA formed in the atmosphere quickly enters precipitation, and from there it travels into surface waters and then into groundwater,” says Empa researcher Stefan Reimann from the Air Pollutants / Environmental Technology laboratory. 

Earliest, hottest galaxy cluster gas on record could change our cosmological models

Artist’s impression of a forming galaxy cluster in the early universe: radio jets from active galaxies are embedded in a hot intracluster atmosphere (red), illustrating a large thermal reservoir of gas in the nascent cluster.
Image Credit: Lingxiao Yuan

The scorching cloud of gas threaded between clusters of galaxies is five times hotter than current models predict, highlighting gaps in our models of galaxy cluster formation.

An international team of astronomers led by Canadian researchers has found something the universe wasn’t supposed to have: a galaxy cluster blazing with hot gas just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, far earlier and hotter than theory predicts.  

The result, published in Nature, could upend current models of galaxy cluster formation, which predict such temperatures will occur only in more mature, stable galaxy clusters later in the universe’s life.  

“We didn’t expect to see such a hot cluster atmosphere so early in cosmic history,” said lead author Dazhi Zhou, a PhD candidate in the UBC department of physics and astronomy. “In fact, at first, I was skeptical about the signal as it was too strong to be real. But after months of verification, we’ve confirmed this gas is at least five times hotter than predicted, and even hotter and more energetic than what we find in many present-day clusters.”  

Meditation doesn’t rest the brain, it reshapes it

A Buddhist monk from the Thai forest tradition in a magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility. This image was created using a generative artificial intelligence program for illustrative purposes.
Image Credit: AI prompt by Karim Jerbi

To decode the subtle mechanisms of the meditative state, the researchers worked with 12 monks of the Thai Forest Tradition at Santacittarama monastery outside Rome, who between them had practiced an average of more than 15,000 hours of meditation each. 

At the MEG lab in Chieti-Pescara, in Abruzzo, the monks' brains were scanned while they meditated. Two techniques of meditation were studied: 

Samatha, a focused attention technique that concentrates on a specific object (such as breathing) to stabilize the mind and achieve a deep state of calm; and 

Vipassana, an open-monitoring technique that involves observing the present moment (sensations, thoughts, emotions) without selection or judgment to understand the nature of the mind. 

“With Samatha, you narrow your field of attention, somewhat like narrowing the beam of a flashlight; with Vipassana, on the contrary, you widen the beam,” said Jerbi, one of the study's co-authors. 

“Both practices actively engage attentional mechanisms," he said. "While Vipassana is more challenging for beginners, in mindfulness programs the two techniques are often practiced in alternation."