Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 3 seconds ago

How you can stop your cat from bringing home unwelcome pathogens
Outdoor-roaming pet cats have 3–5 times higher odds of carrying zoonotic pathogens than indoor-only cats and similar odds to feral cats, with ~100 zoonoses detected, including rabies, Toxoplasma and Salmonella. Free-roaming cats transmit pathogens via hunting and fecal contamination of shared spaces. Restricting unsupervised roaming, using enclosures or leashes, and maintaining vaccination and parasite control reduce risks to humans, wildlife and cats.

original article.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 11 minutes ago

Male manakins are not only showmen, but extraordinary athletes. In some species, their wing muscles are among the fastest-contracting in nature. A displaying male's heart can race from rest to near its limit in seconds, and males may spend up to 90% of the daylight hours performing, almost year-round. Such effort burns a lot of energy, and manakins draw it substantially from their fruit-based diets. But eating fruit is not necessarily straightforward for a bird: Many plants protect their unripe fruit with toxic compounds, making them tough to digest, and many birds cannot even taste sweetness, having lost the necessary receptor far back in their evolutionary history.

Remarkably, some bird species have found a way around these problems through independent evolutionary innovations.
Earlier research led by scientists has shown that hummingbirds, songbirds and woodpeckers re-evolved a sense of sweetness by chance modifications to the receptor for savory taste that happened to make it sugar responsive. The new study adds manakins to that list, confirmed by tests in lab-grown cells.
Manakins re-evolved a sweet sense of their own—and did it their own way, by altering a different part of the receptor than songbirds use.
Evolution kept arriving at the same answer along different paths. And taste sits within something larger: fruit in tropical forests is conspicuous and abundant year-round, likely providing the energy needed for females to raise the young alone and for males to put on their incredible displays.
A second key change was in digestion: The enzyme lactase—which in mammals breaks down milk sugar—has lost much of its activity in manakins. When active, lactase also breaks down certain plant compounds found in unripe fruit, releasing products that block sugar absorption. With reduced lactase activity, the manakins may pass these compounds through harmlessly and absorb more energy from the fruit.

The change traces back to when the manakins' lineage first turned to fruit. Mapping these changes onto a family tree of more than 1,300 related bird species revealed a clear order: The dietary changes came first, deep in the manakins' ancestry, and the elaborate mating system and displays followed much later.

Genomic and physiological changes in a sexually selected and frugivorous bird radiation, Current Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.05.021

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 17 minutes ago

Manakins' dazzling dances may owe their origins to an ancient diet shift

Few animals put on a show quite like manakins. In the rainforests of Central and South America, males of these small tropical birds, with strikingly bright plumage, often gather at communal display sites (leks), where they clear their own dance courts and spend much of their lives performing high-speed backflips, snapping their wings like firecrackers, and running through choreographed routines with other males, all to attract a mate.

Behind these seemingly effortless performances is far more than meets the eye: years of practice, females who raise the young alone, and—it turns out—a change in diet that began with their distant ancestors. A new paper on this topic appears in Current Biology.

Over millions of years, the relentless competition for mates is thought to have driven manakin plumage and dances to ever greater extremes through sexual selection, the evolutionary force behind extravagant features such as the peacock's tail and the stag's antlers. Only a small number of the most attractive males are usually chosen as mates, and across the generations, that intense selection by females pushes favored traits further.

In manakins, diet may also play a role in the evolution of these dazzling displays.
Researchers now uncovered a link between the birds' diet and changes in display behaviour.
The researchers sequenced the genomes of lek-mating manakins and observed genetic fingerprints of strong sexual selection as well as changes in taste and digestion. Through reconstruction of dietary patterns, genome-wide surveys, and lab experiments, they examined the order of those changes in the birds' evolutionary history to work out their timing.
Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 44 minutes ago

The researchers then focused on these neurons, selectively activating or inhibiting them while measuring pain-related behaviours.
They also recorded their neural activity while the animals experienced painful stimuli or received VNS. Finally, we traced the anatomical connections linking the spinal cord, the nucleus of the solitary tract, the periaqueductal gray, and downstream dopamine circuits.
Using various techniques to activate specific neurons, trace their connections and record neural activity, they were able to identify neurons that responded most strongly to pain. When they then exposed the mice to VNS, they could determine whether this intervention acted on these neurons and modified their activity.

They identified a specific brainstem pathway, from the caudal nucleus of the solitary tract to the periaqueductal gray, that converts pain signals into behavioural and emotional responses," Deng said.

Activating this pathway produced pain-like behaviours, while inhibiting it reduced pain behaviour. They also found that this pathway influences dopamine signals in the nucleus accumbens, suggesting a circuit mechanism through which VNS may affect both the sensory and emotional components of pain.
The results of this study offer valuable new insight into the neural processes by which VNS eases chronic pain.

Yuan Tang et al, A brainstem pathway underlying vagal modulation of somatic pain and affective states, Nature Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-026-02313-0.

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa 50 minutes ago

Vagus nerve stimulation may quiet pain through newly mapped brainstem pathway

Physical pain is essential for survival, as it allows animals to detect when they are injured or unwell, seek shelter and address their ailments. Yet when it becomes chronic, pain can also become highly distressing and debilitating.

While there are now several therapeutic strategies for managing chronic pain, an emerging one that has been found to be particularly promising is vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). VNS entails the delivery of mild electrical pulses to the nerve that connects the brain to organs throughout the body.

Past studies suggest that VNS based therapy can reduce the pain associated with various medical conditions, including chronic headaches, fibromyalgia and joint inflammation. The neural processes by which it can ease pain, however, are still poorly understood.

Researchers  carried out a study aimed at better understanding how VNS acts on pain, specifically focusing on neurons in the brainstem, a stalk-like structure at the base of the brain. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that VNS-based therapy acts on a previously unknown neural pathway involved in the processing of pain.

VNS has been used clinically for several neurological and psychiatric conditions, and growing evidence suggests that it can also help relieve pain

The main objective of this study was to identify specific populations of neurons and neural pathways that play a role in the effects of VNS on the sensory perception and emotional processing of pain. To achieve this, the researchers carried out a series of experiments involving adult mice.

Initially, the team examined the roles of different groups of neurons in a part of the brainstem known as the caudal nucleus of the solitary tract (cNTS). This allowed them to identify a specific set of neurons that appeared to play a role in pain-related perceptions and behaviours.

The neurons they identified had axons (i.e., long fiber-like extensions) that reached the periaqueductal gray (PAG). The PAG is a small, almond-shaped segment of the midbrain known to play a role in intense emotional experiences, pain modulation and fight-or-flight responses.

Part 1

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

One daily drink no longer looks harmless, as alcohol's risks rewrite moderate drinking rules
Alcohol consumption above one drink per day is associated with increased risks of mortality, disability, and chronic diseases, including cancer and heart disease. No significant protective health effects were observed at any level of alcohol intake, and risks outweigh potential benefits even at low consumption. The findings provide a quantitative benchmark, indicating that even moderate drinking elevates health risks.
After medical experts reviewed more than 7,200 scientific articles on alcohol-related diseases and injuries to determine the level of risk for each condition, the researchers applied those risks to large national health data sets. They then used statistical modeling to estimate how different drinking levels influence long-term health outcomes.
It turns out that two drinks per day, which might be considered 'moderate' from a social standpoint, is associated with a substantially elevated risk of a premature death caused by alcohol.
In addition to mortality risk, researchers examined how drinking patterns influence chronic and acute alcohol-related conditions such as cancer (e.g., esophageal, oral, and breast), cardiovascular disease, liver disease, and injury.

The study overturns a common misconception that alcohol can protect health. "We did not observe a significant protective effect of alcohol on health at any level of consumption," say the researchers.
At low levels, alcohol may be associated with a reduced risk of ischemic heart disease and stroke. But when you look across the full range of health outcomes, including cancer and other chronic diseases, those potential benefits are outweighed by the risks even at seven drinks per week.

Alcohol Intake and Health Study: No protective effect at low levels, with mortality increasing to 1 in 25 at 14 drinks per week, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (2026). doi.org/10.15288/jsad.25-00435

Alcohol policy, commercial influence, and the public health costs of ignoring evidence: The case of the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (2026). doi.org/10.15288/jsad.26-00142

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Sunday

Scientist creates 'mini‑universe' to measure time without a clock

A closed quantum system of 24,000 ultracold atoms was engineered to act as a “mini-universe,” in which an internal, entropic notion of time emerges without reference to an external clock. Changes in particle distribution define a time parameter that has a direction, orders events, and can speed up or slow down. A Schrödinger-like dynamics can be formulated in this entropic time, providing an experimental test bed for quantum cosmology and quantum gravity concepts.

Giovanni Barontini, Testing the problem of time with cold atoms, Physical Review Research (2026). DOI: 10.1103/1h9j-df4k

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Tool raises red flags on suspect journals
An online tool that tracks publishing patterns in academic journals could warn researchers about potentially problematic journals before they submit their work to them. The platform, called Journal Trends, allows users to get a breakdown of a journal’s published papers by country and year, which can raise any red flags such as a sudden surge in publications. These indicators alone don’t prove a journal is untrustworthy, but might indicate that researchers should investigate a journal further, says the tool’s developer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01707-1?utm_source=Live+...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Using blue light traps, researchers explored the routes taken by P. polycephalum when faced with a life-or-death situation.

The light traps used in this experiment look a bit like geometric stencil sheets you might've used as a child.

Blue light shines on the agar jelly surface, punctuated by gaps: regions without light that take the form of different two-dimensional geometric shapes (such as a triangle, square, or hexagon).
Scientists placed the starved slime molds into these light-free regions, trapping them – but only for a while.

Spurred by hunger, the molds started growing within an hour, then expanded their dense network of tubules with gusto to explore and fill the trap.
During this exploratory phase, slime mold movement is governed by a kind of localized cytoplasmic streaming, a flow of cellular fluid pushed along by molecular contractions.

Tentatively, seeking food and freedom, the molds extended small protrusions into the field of blue light in all directions. Most of these were quickly withdrawn, but some extended so far that the molds found a way to escape.

"Small protrusions emerge all around the trap boundary (exploration protrusions), yet escapes only happen close to the longest axis within the shape," the researchers explain.
By the 'longest axis', they mean the longest possible line that can be drawn across the shape. Which seems a little odd: Why take the longest path and not the shortest route?

The researchers think it has something to do with the way slime molds mobilize.

Only over the course of time does the organism ultimately settle on the contraction mode most efficient for transport, which coincides with the escape," the researchers explain.

Well, each time the slime mold is testing an escape route, it's effectively reorganizing its body, allowing the peristaltic contractions to course through its being, to find the most efficient way to move.
The longer the path, the more pressure the mold's peristaltic contractions can build up, which means it can push more of its gooey mass outward in one go.

"The trap shape ultimately sets the mode most efficient for transport, allowing pressure to build up along the longest axis and driving the plasmodial escape," the team explains.
So while it might seem that the slime mold is 'making decisions' about which way to move, this study suggests it actually hinges on mechanical processes involving fluid flows.

https://journals.aps.org/prxlife/abstract/10.1103/rv7g-d9kx

Part 2

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on Saturday

Physicists Discover How Slime Mold 'Makes Decisions' Without a Brain

Slime molds are slippery, nebulous beings.
They're not true molds. They're not even fungi. For most of their lives, they exist as either plasmodia or amoebae, and they refuse to be held back by the rigid structures that govern other life forms.

Slime molds are also renowned for somehow, without brains or even nervous systems, exhibiting behavior that could be described as intelligent.

But what coordinates that collective motion? Is there really a central force?

A new study suggests there is – but probably not the one you're thinking of.
The most famous slime mold, and the protagonist of many scientific experiments, is the vivid yellow Physarum polycephalum, a scientific name that loosely translates to 'the small bubble with many heads.'

That's pretty apt: As a plasmodium, its single-celled body plan is pretty much a big bag of cell nuclei and goo.

This branching, blobby lifestyle makes it more physically mobile than the fungi it was once mistaken for. When P. polycephalum runs out of food, it can crawl to the next juicy log.
But this strange locomotion isn't a blind search. Slime molds can somehow solve mazes in search of food and remember how to find it again.

And, in broad terms, they can 'make decisions', selecting a particular action against alternatives.
Now, scientists have begun to understand how this decentralized decision-making might work.

The slime mold is really averse to blue light, which means it's possible to 'trap' it inside a barrier made of nothing more than the beams of glowing 470 nm light waves.
However, as footage from the new study shows, a starving slime mold will try to escape its blue-light barriers in search of food, sending out small, localized protrusions to find a way through.

In the moments before it does, it looks as though it's bubbling, brewing, twitching, pulsing – until it rushes outward, free from the confines of the trap.

Unlike neural systems, P. polycephalum relies on rhythmic peristaltic contractions to drive internal flows and redistribute mass, allowing it to adapt to its environment
Part 1

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• …
• 1250
• Next ›
• Page