Researchers uncover key mechanisms in gene regulation that may lead to better design of RNA-based medicines. 

New, groundbreaking research shows how, at a local scale, agricultural research and development led to improved crop varieties that resulted in global benefits to the environment and food system sustainability. The Purdue University study appears in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“At the global level, we see a reduction in cropland use from these technology improvements leading to gains in terrestrial carbon stock and avoided loss of threatened plant and animal species,” reported the team led by Purdue’s Uris Baldos, research associate professor of agricultural economics.

Hannah Dailey ’02 ’06G ’09 PhD, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named a 2024 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by the Biden administration. The award recognizes exceptional professionals in the fields of science and engineering and is the highest such honor given by the U.S. government.

Rui Zhu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award to uncover the mechanisms behind cardiac arrhythmias.

A team led by a Rutgers-New Brunswick scientist has concluded water did not arrive as early during Earth’s formation as previously thought, an insight that bears directly on the question of when life originated on the planet.

The finding, reported in the science journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, is significant because the data reported by the study support the idea that water arrived towards the final stages of Earth’s development into a planet from dust and gas, what geologists refer to as late accretion.

Scientists have translated nanoscale experimental and computational data into precise 3D representations of bacteria, yeast and human epithelial, breast and breast cancer cells in Minecraft, a video game that allows players to explore, build and manipulate structures in three dimensions. The innovation will allow researchers and students of all ages to navigate biological cells, puncturing through the membranes of organelles to view their interiors or wandering across the cytoplasm to see how the various structures are distributed within the cell.

A new study of satellite imagery and high-resolution climate model data by scientists at the University of Rochester upends previous assumptions and provides insight about how the atmosphere and ocean weather patterns interact.

Some biologists speculate that animals will get smaller with global warming to reduce heat stress. While this may be true of warm-blooded animals, what about exotherms like insects? Thanks to a 65-year-old grasshopper collection, scientists have documented that some species — those overwintering as juveniles — got larger over the years, helped by an earlier green spring. Grasshoppers with other lifestyles got smaller. Much of this can be predicted given what biologists know of insect life cycles.