How the body uses fat to fight infection
Peer-Reviewed Publication
New research reveals how our immune cells use the body's fat stores to fight infection. The research could help develop new approaches to treating people with bacterial infections. And the team say their work could one day help treat infections in vulnerable and older people.
Mere spoonsful of soil pulled from Canada’s permafrost are opening vast windows into ancient life in the Yukon, revealing rich new information and rewriting previous beliefs about the extinction dynamics, dates and survival of megafauna like mammoths, horses and other long-lost life forms.
Reef fish, such as emperors, tropical snappers and rockcods, help keep numbers of crown-of-thorns starfish in check on the Great Barrier Reef. New research has found the abundance of the coral-eating starfish increases in places where fish species, particularly those who eat the starfish, are removed.
High levels of ingested microplastics in the human body have the potential to have harmful effects, a new study reveals. The research - the first of its kind to quantify the levels of microplastics which may lead to harmful effects in human cells - has been led by researchers at the Hull York Medical School and the University of Hull.
RaNNC (Rapid Neural Network Connector), automatic parallelization middleware for deep learning developed jointly by Data-driven Intelligent System Research Center (DIRECT), the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), and the University of Tokyo (President: FUJII Teruo), won first place at the PyTorch Annual Hackathon 2021 (PyTorch Developer Tools & Libraries category). PyTorch is the de facto standard framework for deep learning, and this hackathon is the only worldwide event that both awards PyTorch projects and is officially held by Facebook, the leading PyTorch developer (https://pytorch2021.devpost.com/). RaNNC drastically simplifies training of large-scale neural networks, which has been very difficult with existing functions of PyTorch. RaNNC is available as open-source software, and anyone can download and use it for free, even for commercial purposes.
Though discovered more than 45 years ago, fossils of Earth's largest flying animal, Quetzalcoatlus, were never thoroughly analyzed. Now, a scientific team provides the most complete picture yet of this dinosaur relative, its environment and behavior. The pterosaur, with a 40-foot wingspan, walked with a unique gait, but otherwise filled a niche much like herons today, says a UC Berkeley co-author. The researchers dispel ideas that it ate carrion and walked like a vampire bat.
Bumblebees waste no time enjoying the beauty of flowers – instead learning the bare minimum about where to land and find food, new research shows.