Researchers at Texas A&M University are pushing organ-on-a-chip devices to new levels that could change the way clinicians approach cancer treatment, particularly ovarian cancer. A team has recently submitted a patent disclosure with the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.

California legislators have allocated UC San Diego $35 million to design and build a new coastal research vessel with a first-of-its-kind hydrogen-hybrid propulsion system. The new vessel, which will be operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, will serve as a platform for essential education and research dedicated to understanding the California coast and climate change impacts to the coastal ecosystem.

Humid tropical forests, vital in global efforts to limit rising temperatures, are under threat as a result of changes in land use and climate. Now, researchers reporting in the journal One Earth on July 23 have developed a new way to keep tabs on the vulnerability of these forests on a global scale using satellite data called the tropical forest vulnerability index (TFVI).

To meet an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, California's policymakers are relying in part on forests and shrublands to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, but researchers at the University of California, Irvine warn that future climate change may limit the ecosystem's ability to perform this service.

Restoration of degraded drylands is urgently needed to mitigate climate change, reverse desertification and secure livelihoods for the two billion people who live there, experts warn in a major new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists leading the Global Arid Zone Project examined restoration seeding outcomes at 174 sites on six continents, encompassing 594,065 observations of 671 plant species - with the lessons learned important to meeting ambitious future restoration targets.

Researchers from Osaka University have found that the attachment of a ubiquitin molecule to a protein called PCNA at the lysine 107 position causes gross chromosomal rearrangements. This lysine is located where two PCNA molecules interact, and the ubiquitin attachment to it may change the ring structure they form. The ubiquitin attachment occurs through the action of Rad8 (a ubiquitin ligase) and Mms2-Ubc4 (a ubiquitin conjugating enzyme). This implies that inhibiting the human equivalent of this ubiquitination could prevent cancer.