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How the Moon Turned Itself Inside Out

Research articles

Highly biomimetic spiking neuron using SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors for energy-efficient neuromorphic systems

Hyangwoo Kim
Chang-Ki Baek

A hybrid particle swarm optimization algorithm for solving engineering problem

Jinwei Qiao
Guangyuan Wang

KMT2C mutation as a predictor of immunotherapeutic efficacy in colorectal cancer

Xiaohong Wang

Predicting attitudes toward ambiguity using natural language processing on free descriptions for open-ended question measurements

Jimpei Hitsuwari
Hirohito Okano
Michio Nomura

Deep learning assists in acute leukemia detection and cell classification via flow cytometry using the acute leukemia orientation tube

Fu-Ming Cheng
Shih-Chang Lo
Kai-Cheng Hsu

Chemical eye injuries: a 10 year retrospective review of acute presentations and clinical outcomes in Auckland, New Zealand

Natalie E. Allen
Alexandra Z. Crawford
Jay J. Meyer

Automated detection and classification of concealed objects using infrared thermography and convolutional neural networks

WeeLiam Khor
Yichen Kelly Chen
Francesco Ciampa

A new dynamic nomogram for predicting the risk of severe Mycoplasma pneumoniae pneumonia in children

Ruiyang Sun
Chunlan Song

Associations between corneal curvature and other anterior segment biometrics in young myopic adults

Comparison between accuracy of augmented reality computed tomography-based and portable augmented reality-based navigation systems for cup insertion in total hip arthroplasty

Masahiro Hasegawa
Yohei Naito
Akihiro Sudo

Late presentations and missed opportunities among newly diagnosed HIV patients presenting to a specialty clinic in Lebanon

Maya Mahmoud
Tala Ballouz
Nesrine Rizk

Oral versus intravenous antibiotic treatment of moderate-to-severe community-acquired pneumonia: a propensity score matched study

Anna G. Kaal
Cees van Nieuwkoop

Design, optimization, and comparative analysis of wide-band polarization conversion along with dual coding sequences for RCS reduction

Ashfaq Ahmad
Dong-You Choi

An easy to use tool for the analysis of subcellular mRNA transcript colocalisation in smFISH data

Calum Bentley-Abbot
Rhiannon Heslop
Annette MacLeod

Evaluating the effectiveness of sulfidated nano zerovalent iron and sludge co-application for reducing metal mobility in contaminated soil

Omolola Ojo
Zuzana Vaňková
Michael Komárek

A study on the significance of serine hydroxymethyl transferase expression and its role in bladder cancer

Jiong-Ming Li

A mathematical model to assess the effects of COVID-19 on the cardiocirculatory system

Andrea Tonini
Christian Vergara
Alfio Quarteroni

Activation of lateral preoptic neurons is associated with nest-building in male mice

Natsuki Tagawa
Hiromasa Funato

Social preferences and psychopathy in a sample of male prisoners—a pilot study

Benjamin J. Kuper-Smith
Alexander Voulgaris
Christoph W. Korn

Nonlinear recurrence analysis of piezo sensor placement for unmanned aerial vehicle motor failure diagnosis

Andrzej Koszewnik
Leszek Ambroziak
Olfa Kanoun

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Science News

These are the most-read science news stories of 2021.

The International Space Station spotted the origins of a bizarre type of upside-down lightning called a blue jet (illustrated) zipping up from a thundercloud into the stratosphere in 2019. The discovery ranked among Science News ' most-read stories of 2021.

DTU SPACE, DANIEL SCHMELLING/MOUNT VISUAL

2. A newfound quasicrystal formed in the first atomic bomb test

The first atomic bomb test, in 1945, forged a peculiar, glassy material called trinitite — and within it, a rare form of matter called a quasicrystal . Quasicrystals’ atoms are arranged in an orderly structure like normal crystals, but the structure’s pattern doesn’t repeat ( SN: 6/19/21, p. 12 ).

3. An Indigenous people in the Philippines have the most Denisovan DNA

The Ayta Magbukon people in the Philippines set the record for the highest known level of Denisovan ancestry — about 5 percent of their DNA comes from the ancient hominids . The finding suggests that several Denisovan populations independently reached Southeast Asia and interbred with Homo sapiens groups that arrived thousands of years later ( SN: 9/11/21, p. 16 ).

4. Astronomers may have seen a star gulp down a black hole and explode

In a first, astronomers caught a glimpse of a rare double cosmic cannibalism : A star swallowed a black hole or neutron star, which then gobbled that star from within, resulting in an astonishing explosion ( SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 6 ).

5. Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines

Skin stem cells plucked from frog embryos organized themselves into miniature living robots, dubbed “xenobots,” that can swim, move around debris and even self-heal . Xenobots may one day serve a useful purpose, but ethical questions need to be considered ( SN: 4/24/21, p. 8 ).

Favorite video

Acrobatic rabbits bewitched online readers in our most-viewed YouTube video posted this year. The video — accompanying the story “ A gene defect may make rabbits do handstands instead of hop ” ( SN: 4/24/21, p. 13 ) — shows a sauteur d’Alfort rabbit walking on its front paws (below). Such hop-less bunnies may have adopted the odd gait because of a mutation in a gene called RORB , scientists discovered.

2. Einstein’s theory of general relativity unveiled a dynamic and bizarre cosmos

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has served as the bedrock of our understanding of the cosmos. In the last 100 years, scientists have confirmed its most radical predictions, including black holes, gravitational waves and an expanding universe ( SN: 2/13/21, p. 16 ).

3. Chemists are reimagining recycling to keep plastics out of landfills

No matter people’s dedication to sorting and recycling plastics, most still end up in landfills because the materials are too difficult to transform into useful new products. Some chemists are trying to change that ( SN: 1/30/21, p. 20 ).

4. Psychology has struggled for a century to make sense of the mind

In the last 100 years, psychologists and other social scientists have dug into the muddy “science of us” and developed conflicting theories about human thought and behavior. From the messy, contentious research bloomed insights into what makes humans tick ( SN: 8/14/21, p. 18 ).

5. Fossils and ancient DNA paint a vibrant picture of human origins

From the Taung Child to Lucy, the last century of paleoanthropology has sketched a rough timeline of how humans came to be. Scientists now agree that human evolution has its roots in Africa, but many mysteries in our history remain to be solved ( SN: 9/25/21, p. 20 ).

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Research News

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Shots - Health News

In the womb, a brother's hormones can shape a sister's future.

April 9, 2024 • When siblings share a womb, sex hormones from a male fetus can cause lasting changes in a female littermate. This effect exists for all kinds of mammals — perhaps humans too.

The black-capped chickadee, seen here, is well known for its strong episodic memory. Dmitriy Aronov hide caption

The "barcodes" powering these tiny songbirds' memories may also help human memory

April 5, 2024 • Tiny, black-capped chickadees have big memories. They stash food in hundreds to thousands of locations in the wild – and then come back to these stashes when other food sources are low. Now, researchers at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute think neural activity that works like a barcode may be to thank for this impressive feat — and that it might be a clue for how memories work across species.

The "barcodes" powering these tiny songbirds' memories may also help human memory

"One second doesn't sound like much, but in today's interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems," geophysicist Duncan Agnew says. Here, an official clock is seen at a golf tournament in Cape Town, South Africa. Johan Rynners/Getty Images hide caption

Negative leap second: Climate change delays unusual step for time standard

March 30, 2024 • We're nearing a year when a negative leap second could be needed to shave time — an unprecedented step that would have unpredictable effects, a new study says.

A researcher holds up a sandy De Winton's golden mole. Nicky Souness/Endangered Wildlife Trust hide caption

Once lost to science, these "uncharismatic" animals are having their moment

March 29, 2024 • Historic numbers of animals across the globe have become endangered or pushed to extinction. But some of these species sit in limbo — not definitively extinct yet missing from the scientific record. Rediscovering a "lost" species is not easy. It can require trips to remote areas and canvassing a large area in search of only a handful of animals. But new technology and stronger partnerships with local communities have helped these hidden, "uncharismatic" creatures come to light.

Once lost to science, these "uncharismatic" animals are having their moment

The country's two biggest reservoirs are on the Colorado River. Water levels at Lake Powell have dropped steeply during the two-decade megadrought. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

The Colorado River rarely reaches the sea. Here's why

March 28, 2024 • More than half of the Colorado River's water is used to grow crops, primarily livestock feed, a new study finds. The river and its users are facing tough decisions as the climate warms.

A post-reproductive toothed whale mother and her son. David Ellifrit/Center for Whale Research hide caption

Most animals don't go through menopause. So why do these whales?

March 22, 2024 • Across the animal kingdom, menopause is something of an evolutionary blip. We humans are one of the few animals to experience it. But Sam Ellis , a researcher in animal behavior, argues that this isn't so surprising. "The best way to propagate your genes is to get as many offspring as possible into the next generation," says Ellis. "The best way to do that is almost always to reproduce your whole life."

A cicada perches on a picnic table in front of Nolde Mansion in Cumru Township, PA in May 2021. New research shows that these insects urinate in a surprising way. Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images hide caption

Scientists studied how cicadas pee. Their insights could shed light on fluid dynamics

March 20, 2024 • Cicadas, and the way they urinate, offer a 'perfect' lab for understanding fluid dynamics at very small scales, researchers say

Workers at the U.S. Embassy in Havana leave the building in September 2017. New research out of the National Institutes of Health finds no unusual pattern of damage in the brains of Havana syndrome patients. Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images hide caption

In Havana syndrome patients, NIH scientists find no physical trace of harm

March 18, 2024 • The mysterious ailments that became known as Havana syndrome left no physical evidence of injury or disease, according to two government studies.

This close-up of the Verona astrolabe shows Arabic and Hebrew markings. Federica Gigante hide caption

This medieval astrolabe has both Arabic and Hebrew markings. Here's what it means

March 16, 2024 • This discovery sheds new light on the rich history of scholarship and intellectual exchange between Muslims, Jews and Christians during a time of Muslim rule in medieval Spain.

Flares burn off methane and other hydrocarbons at an oil and gas facility in Lenorah, Texas in 2021. New research shows drillers emit about three times as much climate-warming methane as official estimates. David Goldman/AP hide caption

Oil and gas companies emit more climate-warming methane than EPA reports

March 13, 2024 • Oil and gas drillers are releasing more climate-warming methane than the government estimates, a new study shows.

This type of staghorn coral ( Acropora pulchra ) appeared to benefit from the presence of sea cucumbers ( Holothuria atra ), a new study finds. Terry Moore/Stocktrek Images / Science Source hide caption

This often-overlooked sea creature may be quietly protecting the planet's coral reefs

March 13, 2024 • The pickle-shaped bottom feeders may reduce the amount of microbes on the seafloor that could potentially sicken coral, scientists suggest

Millions of people are affected by long COVID, a disease that encompasses a range of symptoms — everything from brain fog to chronic fatigue — and that manifests differently across patients. The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Images hide caption

What we know about long COVID — from brain fog to physical fatigue

March 13, 2024 • "Long COVID has affected every part of my life," said Virginia resident Rachel Beale said at a recent Senate hearing. "I wake up every day feeling tired, nauseous and dizzy. I immediately start planning when I can lay down again." Beale is far from alone. Many of her experiences have been echoed by others dealing with long COVID. It's a constellation of debilitating symptoms that range from brain fog and intense physical fatigue to depression and anxiety. But there's new, promising research that sheds light onto some symptoms. NPR health correspondent Will Stone talks with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber about the state of long COVID research — what we know, what we don't and when we can expect treatments or even cures for it. Have more COVID questions you want us to cover? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you.

Maria E. Garay-Serratos holds a framed photograph of her mother, who died after suffering decades of domestic violence. Scientists are trying to understand how domestic violence damages the brain. Julio Serratos/Maria E. Garay-Serratos hide caption

Domestic violence may leave telltale damage in the brain. Scientists want to find it

March 8, 2024 • Traumatic brain injuries from intimate partner violence are common, and potentially more severe than those seen in sports.

Elephantnose Fish, Gnathonemus petersii, Congo ullstein bild hide caption

The "shocking" tactic electric fish use to collectively sense the world

March 8, 2024 • Neuroscientist Nathan Sawtell has spent a lot of time studying the electric elephantnose fish. These fish send and decipher weak electric signals, which Sawtell hopes will eventually help neuroscientists better understand how the brain filters sensory information about the outside world. As Sawtell has studied these electric critters, he's had a lingering question: why do they always seem to organize themselves in a particular orientation. At first, he couldn't figure out why, but a new study released this week in Nature may have an answer: the fish are creating an electrical network larger than any field a single fish can muster alone, and providing collective knowledge about potential dangers in the surrounding water.

The "shocking" tactic electric fish use to collectively sense the world

A digital illustration of a circle of hands extending from the edge of the image, each holding a sheet of paper. The papers overlap in the center and, like a puzzle, come together to reveal a drawing of a handgun. Oona Tempest/KFF Health News hide caption

Meet the public health researchers trying to rein in America's gun violence crisis

Kff health news.

March 6, 2024 • After the 1996 Dickey Amendment halted federal spending on gun violence research, a small group of academics pressed on, with little money or support. Now a new generation is taking up the charge.

This artist's concept shows the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by plasma, ionized gas (illustrated here as brownish haze). NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has a big glitch. Now, NASA must figure out how to fix it

March 6, 2024 • The Voyager 1 space probe is the farthest human-made object in space. It launched in 1977 with a golden record on board that carried assorted sounds of our home planet: greetings in many different languages, dogs barking, and the sound of two people kissing, to name but a few examples. The idea with this record was that someday, Voyager 1 might be our emissary to alien life – an audible time capsule of Earth's beings. Since its launch, it also managed to complete missions to Jupiter and Saturn. In 2012, it crossed into interstellar space.

A case of bronchitis in 2014 left Sanna Stella, a therapist who lives in the Chicago area, with debilitating fatigue. Stacey Wescott/Tribune News Service via Getty Images hide caption

Clues to a better understanding of chronic fatigue syndrome emerge from a major study

February 23, 2024 • After seven years of research, the findings shed light on the long-neglected illness. Scientists say the results could lead to future trials for potential treatments.

A 3D model of a short section of the stone wall. The scale at the bottom of the image measures 50 cm. Photos by Philipp Hoy, University of Rostock; model created using Agisoft Metashape by J. Auer, LAKD M-V hide caption

Scientists scanning the seafloor discover a long-lost Stone Age 'megastructure'

February 22, 2024 • The more than half mile long wall, called the Blinkerwall, was likely used by Stone Age hunter-gatherers to herd reindeer toward a shooting blind.

The sun emits a mid-level solar flare releasing a burst of solar material. NASA hide caption

In light of the solar maximum, a look at the biggest solar storm in recorded history

February 21, 2024 • We are at the height of the Sun's activity in its eleven year cycle, known to astronomers as the solar maximum. This means that over the next several months there's going to be a lot of solar activity. It's got us thinking back to 1859. That's when astronomer Richard Carrington was studying the Sun when he witnessed the most intense geomagnetic storm recorded in history. The storm, triggered by a giant solar flare, sent brilliant auroral displays across the globe causing electrical sparking and fires in telegraph stations. This encore episode, Regina talks to solar physicist Dr. Samaiyah Farid about what's now known as the Carrington event and about what may happen the next time a massive solar storm hits Earth.

One woolly mammoth's journey at the end of the Ice Age

February 19, 2024 • Lately, paleoecologist Audrey Rowe has been a bit preoccupied with a girl named Elma. That's because Elma is ... a woolly mammoth. And 14,000 years ago, when Elma was alive, her habitat in interior Alaska was rapidly changing. The Ice Age was coming to a close and human hunters were starting early settlements. Which leads to an intriguing question: Who, or what , killed her? In the search for answers, Audrey traces Elma's life and journey through — get this — a single tusk. Today, she shares her insights on what the mammoth extinction from thousands of years ago can teach us about megafauna extinctions today with guest host Nate Rott .

Tai chi has many health benefits. It improves flexibility, reduces stress and can help lower blood pressure. Ruth Jenkinson/Getty Images/Science Photo Library hide caption

Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise, study finds

February 14, 2024 • The slow-moving Chinese martial art tai chi is known to increase flexibility and balance. Now, research suggests it's more effective at reducing blood pressure than more vigorous forms of exercise.

Manny and Cayenne wrestle and kiss. LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

Manny loves Cayenne. Plus, 5 facts about queer animals for Valentine's Day

February 14, 2024 • In a Valentine's Day exclusive report, NPR has learned there is currently a gay anteater couple at Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Washington D.C.But this couple is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to queerness in the animal world – it's been documented in hundreds of species. We spoke with wildlife ecologist Christine Wilkinson of the "Queer is Natural" TikTok series to uncover the wildest, queerest animals of the bunch.

Articles on Scientific research

Displaying 1 - 20 of 88 articles.

Early COVID-19 research is riddled with poor methods and low-quality results − a problem for science the pandemic worsened but didn’t create

Dennis M. Gorman , Texas A&M University

Netflix’s You Are What You Eat uses a twin study. Here’s why studying twins is so important for science

Nathan Kettlewell , University of Technology Sydney

Fact-bombing by experts doesn’t change hearts and minds. But good science communication can

Tom Carruthers , The University of Western Australia ; Heather Bray , The University of Western Australia , and Matthew Nurse , Australian National University

Talking about science and technology has positive impacts on research and society

Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher , University of Waterloo ; Donna Strickland , University of Waterloo , and Mary Wells , University of Waterloo

Tenacious curiosity in the lab can lead to a Nobel Prize – mRNA research exemplifies the unpredictable value of basic scientific research

André O. Hudson , Rochester Institute of Technology

Pigs with human brain cells and biological chips: how lab-grown hybrid lifeforms bamboozle scientific ethics

Julian Koplin , Monash University

When Greenland was green: Ancient soil from beneath a mile of ice offers warnings for the future

Paul Bierman , University of Vermont and Tammy Rittenour , Utah State University

10 reasons humans kill animals – and why we can’t avoid it

Benjamin Allen , University of Southern Queensland

Hurricanes push heat deeper into the ocean than scientists realized, boosting long-term ocean warming, new research shows

Noel Gutiérrez Brizuela , University of California, San Diego and Sally Warner , Brandeis University

Colonialism has shaped scientific plant collections around the world – here’s why that matters

Daniel Park , Purdue University

You shed DNA everywhere you go – trace samples in the water, sand and air are enough to identify who you are, raising ethical questions about privacy

Jenny Whilde , University of Florida and Jessica Alice Farrell , University of Florida

Nigeria needs to take science more seriously - an agenda for the new president

Oyewale Tomori , Nigerian Academy of Science

Two decades of stagnant funding have rendered Canada uncompetitive in biomedical research. Here’s why it matters, and how to fix it.

Stephen L Archer , Queen's University, Ontario

How tracking technology is transforming our understanding of animal behaviour

Louise Gentle , Nottingham Trent University

What the world would lose with the demise of Twitter: Valuable eyewitness accounts and raw data on human behavior, as well as a habitat for trolls

Anjana Susarla , Michigan State University

There are 8 years left to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but is it enough time?

Rees Kassen , L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa and Ruth Morgan , UCL

‘Gain of function’ research can create experimental viruses. In light of COVID, it should be more strictly regulated – or banned

Colin D. Butler , Australian National University

By fact-checking Thoreau’s observations at Walden Pond, we showed how old diaries and specimens can inform modern research

Tara K. Miller , Boston University ; Abe Miller-Rushing , National Park Service , and Richard B. Primack , Boston University

New ‘ethics guidance’ for top science journals aims to root out harmful research – but can it succeed?

Cordelia Fine , The University of Melbourne

Expanding Alzheimer’s research with primates could overcome the problem with treatments that show promise in mice but don’t help humans

Agnès Lacreuse , UMass Amherst ; Allyson J. Bennett , University of Wisconsin-Madison , and Amanda M. Dettmer , Yale University

Top contributors

Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria

Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Science and Consultant, Vice Principal for Research and Graduate Education, University of Pretoria

Professor of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University

Honorary Professor, Australian National University

Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography, CQUniversity Australia

Professor, History & Philosophy of Science program, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

Associate Professor, University of Sydney

Postdoctoral Fellow in Chronobiology, National Institute for Medical Research

Professor of Medicine, Pharmacology and Biomedical Engineering, University of Illinois Chicago

Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology, Birkbeck, University of London; Honorary Associate Professor, UCL

Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics, University of York

Professor in High Medieval History, Durham University

Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology (Perception), University of Oxford

PhD Student and Trainee Clinical Psychologist at the Graduate Center, City University of New York

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Turk J Anaesthesiol Reanim
v.44(4); 2016 Aug

What is Scientific Research and How Can it be Done?

Scientific researches are studies that should be systematically planned before performing them. In this review, classification and description of scientific studies, planning stage randomisation and bias are explained.

Research conducted for the purpose of contributing towards science by the systematic collection, interpretation and evaluation of data and that, too, in a planned manner is called scientific research: a researcher is the one who conducts this research. The results obtained from a small group through scientific studies are socialised, and new information is revealed with respect to diagnosis, treatment and reliability of applications. The purpose of this review is to provide information about the definition, classification and methodology of scientific research.

Before beginning the scientific research, the researcher should determine the subject, do planning and specify the methodology. In the Declaration of Helsinki, it is stated that ‘the primary purpose of medical researches on volunteers is to understand the reasons, development and effects of diseases and develop protective, diagnostic and therapeutic interventions (method, operation and therapies). Even the best proven interventions should be evaluated continuously by investigations with regard to reliability, effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility and quality’ ( 1 ).

The questions, methods of response to questions and difficulties in scientific research may vary, but the design and structure are generally the same ( 2 ).

Classification of Scientific Research

Scientific research can be classified in several ways. Classification can be made according to the data collection techniques based on causality, relationship with time and the medium through which they are applied.

Observational
Experimental
Descriptive
Retrospective
Prospective
Cross-sectional
Social descriptive research ( 3 )

Another method is to classify the research according to its descriptive or analytical features. This review is written according to this classification method.

I. Descriptive research

Case series
Surveillance studies

II. Analytical research

Observational studies: cohort, case control and cross- sectional research
Interventional research: quasi-experimental and clinical research
Case Report: it is the most common type of descriptive study. It is the examination of a single case having a different quality in the society, e.g. conducting general anaesthesia in a pregnant patient with mucopolysaccharidosis.
Case Series: it is the description of repetitive cases having common features. For instance; case series involving interscapular pain related to neuraxial labour analgesia. Interestingly, malignant hyperthermia cases are not accepted as case series since they are rarely seen during historical development.
Surveillance Studies: these are the results obtained from the databases that follow and record a health problem for a certain time, e.g. the surveillance of cross-infections during anaesthesia in the intensive care unit.

Moreover, some studies may be experimental. After the researcher intervenes, the researcher waits for the result, observes and obtains data. Experimental studies are, more often, in the form of clinical trials or laboratory animal trials ( 2 ).

Analytical observational research can be classified as cohort, case-control and cross-sectional studies.

Firstly, the participants are controlled with regard to the disease under investigation. Patients are excluded from the study. Healthy participants are evaluated with regard to the exposure to the effect. Then, the group (cohort) is followed-up for a sufficient period of time with respect to the occurrence of disease, and the progress of disease is studied. The risk of the healthy participants getting sick is considered an incident. In cohort studies, the risk of disease between the groups exposed and not exposed to the effect is calculated and rated. This rate is called relative risk. Relative risk indicates the strength of exposure to the effect on the disease.

Cohort research may be observational and experimental. The follow-up of patients prospectively is called a prospective cohort study . The results are obtained after the research starts. The researcher’s following-up of cohort subjects from a certain point towards the past is called a retrospective cohort study . Prospective cohort studies are more valuable than retrospective cohort studies: this is because in the former, the researcher observes and records the data. The researcher plans the study before the research and determines what data will be used. On the other hand, in retrospective studies, the research is made on recorded data: no new data can be added.

In fact, retrospective and prospective studies are not observational. They determine the relationship between the date on which the researcher has begun the study and the disease development period. The most critical disadvantage of this type of research is that if the follow-up period is long, participants may leave the study at their own behest or due to physical conditions. Cohort studies that begin after exposure and before disease development are called ambidirectional studies . Public healthcare studies generally fall within this group, e.g. lung cancer development in smokers.

Case-Control Studies: these studies are retrospective cohort studies. They examine the cause and effect relationship from the effect to the cause. The detection or determination of data depends on the information recorded in the past. The researcher has no control over the data ( 2 ).

Cross-sectional studies are advantageous since they can be concluded relatively quickly. It may be difficult to obtain a reliable result from such studies for rare diseases ( 2 ).

Cross-sectional studies are characterised by timing. In such studies, the exposure and result are simultaneously evaluated. While cross-sectional studies are restrictedly used in studies involving anaesthesia (since the process of exposure is limited), they can be used in studies conducted in intensive care units.

Quasi-Experimental Research: they are conducted in cases in which a quick result is requested and the participants or research areas cannot be randomised, e.g. giving hand-wash training and comparing the frequency of nosocomial infections before and after hand wash.
Clinical Research: they are prospective studies carried out with a control group for the purpose of comparing the effect and value of an intervention in a clinical case. Clinical study and research have the same meaning. Drugs, invasive interventions, medical devices and operations, diets, physical therapy and diagnostic tools are relevant in this context ( 6 ).

Clinical studies are conducted by a responsible researcher, generally a physician. In the research team, there may be other healthcare staff besides physicians. Clinical studies may be financed by healthcare institutes, drug companies, academic medical centres, volunteer groups, physicians, healthcare service providers and other individuals. They may be conducted in several places including hospitals, universities, physicians’ offices and community clinics based on the researcher’s requirements. The participants are made aware of the duration of the study before their inclusion. Clinical studies should include the evaluation of recommendations (drug, device and surgical) for the treatment of a disease, syndrome or a comparison of one or more applications; finding different ways for recognition of a disease or case and prevention of their recurrence ( 7 ).

Clinical Research

In this review, clinical research is explained in more detail since it is the most valuable study in scientific research.

Clinical research starts with forming a hypothesis. A hypothesis can be defined as a claim put forward about the value of a population parameter based on sampling. There are two types of hypotheses in statistics.

H 0 hypothesis is called a control or null hypothesis. It is the hypothesis put forward in research, which implies that there is no difference between the groups under consideration. If this hypothesis is rejected at the end of the study, it indicates that a difference exists between the two treatments under consideration.
H 1 hypothesis is called an alternative hypothesis. It is hypothesised against a null hypothesis, which implies that a difference exists between the groups under consideration. For example, consider the following hypothesis: drug A has an analgesic effect. Control or null hypothesis (H 0 ): there is no difference between drug A and placebo with regard to the analgesic effect. The alternative hypothesis (H 1 ) is applicable if a difference exists between drug A and placebo with regard to the analgesic effect.

The planning phase comes after the determination of a hypothesis. A clinical research plan is called a protocol . In a protocol, the reasons for research, number and qualities of participants, tests to be applied, study duration and what information to be gathered from the participants should be found and conformity criteria should be developed.

The selection of participant groups to be included in the study is important. Inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study for the participants should be determined. Inclusion criteria should be defined in the form of demographic characteristics (age, gender, etc.) of the participant group and the exclusion criteria as the diseases that may influence the study, age ranges, cases involving pregnancy and lactation, continuously used drugs and participants’ cooperation.

The next stage is methodology. Methodology can be grouped under subheadings, namely, the calculation of number of subjects, blinding (masking), randomisation, selection of operation to be applied, use of placebo and criteria for stopping and changing the treatment.

I. Calculation of the Number of Subjects

The entire source from which the data are obtained is called a universe or population . A small group selected from a certain universe based on certain rules and which is accepted to highly represent the universe from which it is selected is called a sample and the characteristics of the population from which the data are collected are called variables. If data is collected from the entire population, such an instance is called a parameter . Conducting a study on the sample rather than the entire population is easier and less costly. Many factors influence the determination of the sample size. Firstly, the type of variable should be determined. Variables are classified as categorical (qualitative, non-numerical) or numerical (quantitative). Individuals in categorical variables are classified according to their characteristics. Categorical variables are indicated as nominal and ordinal (ordered). In nominal variables, the application of a category depends on the researcher’s preference. For instance, a female participant can be considered first and then the male participant, or vice versa. An ordinal (ordered) variable is ordered from small to large or vice versa (e.g. ordering obese patients based on their weights-from the lightest to the heaviest or vice versa). A categorical variable may have more than one characteristic: such variables are called binary or dichotomous (e.g. a participant may be both female and obese).

If the variable has numerical (quantitative) characteristics and these characteristics cannot be categorised, then it is called a numerical variable. Numerical variables are either discrete or continuous. For example, the number of operations with spinal anaesthesia represents a discrete variable. The haemoglobin value or height represents a continuous variable.

Statistical analyses that need to be employed depend on the type of variable. The determination of variables is necessary for selecting the statistical method as well as software in SPSS. While categorical variables are presented as numbers and percentages, numerical variables are represented using measures such as mean and standard deviation. It may be necessary to use mean in categorising some cases such as the following: even though the variable is categorical (qualitative, non-numerical) when Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) is used (since a numerical value is obtained), it is classified as a numerical variable: such variables are averaged.

Clinical research is carried out on the sample and generalised to the population. Accordingly, the number of samples should be correctly determined. Different sample size formulas are used on the basis of the statistical method to be used. When the sample size increases, error probability decreases. The sample size is calculated based on the primary hypothesis. The determination of a sample size before beginning the research specifies the power of the study. Power analysis enables the acquisition of realistic results in the research, and it is used for comparing two or more clinical research methods.

Because of the difference in the formulas used in calculating power analysis and number of samples for clinical research, it facilitates the use of computer programs for making calculations.

It is necessary to know certain parameters in order to calculate the number of samples by power analysis.

Type-I (α) and type-II (β) error levels
Difference between groups (d-difference) and effect size (ES)
Distribution ratio of groups
Direction of research hypothesis (H1)

a. Type-I (α) and Type-II (β) Error (β) Levels

Two types of errors can be made while accepting or rejecting H 0 hypothesis in a hypothesis test. Type-I error (α) level is the probability of finding a difference at the end of the research when there is no difference between the two applications. In other words, it is the rejection of the hypothesis when H 0 is actually correct and it is known as α error or p value. For instance, when the size is determined, type-I error level is accepted as 0.05 or 0.01.

Another error that can be made during a hypothesis test is a type-II error. It is the acceptance of a wrongly hypothesised H 0 hypothesis. In fact, it is the probability of failing to find a difference when there is a difference between the two applications. The power of a test is the ability of that test to find a difference that actually exists. Therefore, it is related to the type-II error level.

Since the type-II error risk is expressed as β, the power of the test is defined as 1–β. When a type-II error is 0.20, the power of the test is 0.80. Type-I (α) and type-II (β) errors can be intentional. The reason to intentionally make such an error is the necessity to look at the events from the opposite perspective.

b. Difference between Groups and ES

ES is defined as the state in which statistical difference also has clinically significance: ES≥0.5 is desirable. The difference between groups is the absolute difference between the groups compared in clinical research.

c. Allocation Ratio of Groups

The allocation ratio of groups is effective in determining the number of samples. If the number of samples is desired to be determined at the lowest level, the rate should be kept as 1/1.

d. Direction of Hypothesis (H1)

The direction of hypothesis in clinical research may be one-sided or two-sided. While one-sided hypotheses hypothesis test differences in the direction of size, two-sided hypotheses hypothesis test differences without direction. The power of the test in two-sided hypotheses is lower than one-sided hypotheses.

After these four variables are determined, they are entered in the appropriate computer program and the number of samples is calculated. Statistical packaged software programs such as Statistica, NCSS and G-Power may be used for power analysis and calculating the number of samples. When the samples size is calculated, if there is a decrease in α, difference between groups, ES and number of samples, then the standard deviation increases and power decreases. The power in two-sided hypothesis is lower. It is ethically appropriate to consider the determination of sample size, particularly in animal experiments, at the beginning of the study. The phase of the study is also important in the determination of number of subjects to be included in drug studies. Usually, phase-I studies are used to determine the safety profile of a drug or product, and they are generally conducted on a few healthy volunteers. If no unacceptable toxicity is detected during phase-I studies, phase-II studies may be carried out. Phase-II studies are proof-of-concept studies conducted on a larger number (100–500) of volunteer patients. When the effectiveness of the drug or product is evident in phase-II studies, phase-III studies can be initiated. These are randomised, double-blinded, placebo or standard treatment-controlled studies. Volunteer patients are periodically followed-up with respect to the effectiveness and side effects of the drug. It can generally last 1–4 years and is valuable during licensing and releasing the drug to the general market. Then, phase-IV studies begin in which long-term safety is investigated (indication, dose, mode of application, safety, effectiveness, etc.) on thousands of volunteer patients.

II. Blinding (Masking) and Randomisation Methods

When the methodology of clinical research is prepared, precautions should be taken to prevent taking sides. For this reason, techniques such as randomisation and blinding (masking) are used. Comparative studies are the most ideal ones in clinical research.

Blinding Method

A case in which the treatments applied to participants of clinical research should be kept unknown is called the blinding method . If the participant does not know what it receives, it is called a single-blind study; if even the researcher does not know, it is called a double-blind study. When there is a probability of knowing which drug is given in the order of application, when uninformed staff administers the drug, it is called in-house blinding. In case the study drug is known in its pharmaceutical form, a double-dummy blinding test is conducted. Intravenous drug is given to one group and a placebo tablet is given to the comparison group; then, the placebo tablet is given to the group that received the intravenous drug and intravenous drug in addition to placebo tablet is given to the comparison group. In this manner, each group receives both the intravenous and tablet forms of the drug. In case a third party interested in the study is involved and it also does not know about the drug (along with the statistician), it is called third-party blinding.

Randomisation Method

The selection of patients for the study groups should be random. Randomisation methods are used for such selection, which prevent conscious or unconscious manipulations in the selection of patients ( 8 ).

No factor pertaining to the patient should provide preference of one treatment to the other during randomisation. This characteristic is the most important difference separating randomised clinical studies from prospective and synchronous studies with experimental groups. Randomisation strengthens the study design and enables the determination of reliable scientific knowledge ( 2 ).

The easiest method is simple randomisation, e.g. determination of the type of anaesthesia to be administered to a patient by tossing a coin. In this method, when the number of samples is kept high, a balanced distribution is created. When the number of samples is low, there will be an imbalance between the groups. In this case, stratification and blocking have to be added to randomisation. Stratification is the classification of patients one or more times according to prognostic features determined by the researcher and blocking is the selection of a certain number of patients for each stratification process. The number of stratification processes should be determined at the beginning of the study.

As the number of stratification processes increases, performing the study and balancing the groups become difficult. For this reason, stratification characteristics and limitations should be effectively determined at the beginning of the study. It is not mandatory for the stratifications to have equal intervals. Despite all the precautions, an imbalance might occur between the groups before beginning the research. In such circumstances, post-stratification or restandardisation may be conducted according to the prognostic factors.

The main characteristic of applying blinding (masking) and randomisation is the prevention of bias. Therefore, it is worthwhile to comprehensively examine bias at this stage.

Bias and Chicanery

While conducting clinical research, errors can be introduced voluntarily or involuntarily at a number of stages, such as design, population selection, calculating the number of samples, non-compliance with study protocol, data entry and selection of statistical method. Bias is taking sides of individuals in line with their own decisions, views and ideological preferences ( 9 ). In order for an error to lead to bias, it has to be a systematic error. Systematic errors in controlled studies generally cause the results of one group to move in a different direction as compared to the other. It has to be understood that scientific research is generally prone to errors. However, random errors (or, in other words, ‘the luck factor’-in which bias is unintended-do not lead to bias ( 10 ).

Another issue, which is different from bias, is chicanery. It is defined as voluntarily changing the interventions, results and data of patients in an unethical manner or copying data from other studies. Comparatively, bias may not be done consciously.

In case unexpected results or outliers are found while the study is analysed, if possible, such data should be re-included into the study since the complete exclusion of data from a study endangers its reliability. In such a case, evaluation needs to be made with and without outliers. It is insignificant if no difference is found. However, if there is a difference, the results with outliers are re-evaluated. If there is no error, then the outlier is included in the study (as the outlier may be a result). It should be noted that re-evaluation of data in anaesthesiology is not possible.

Statistical evaluation methods should be determined at the design stage so as not to encounter unexpected results in clinical research. The data should be evaluated before the end of the study and without entering into details in research that are time-consuming and involve several samples. This is called an interim analysis . The date of interim analysis should be determined at the beginning of the study. The purpose of making interim analysis is to prevent unnecessary cost and effort since it may be necessary to conclude the research after the interim analysis, e.g. studies in which there is no possibility to validate the hypothesis at the end or the occurrence of different side effects of the drug to be used. The accuracy of the hypothesis and number of samples are compared. Statistical significance levels in interim analysis are very important. If the data level is significant, the hypothesis is validated even if the result turns out to be insignificant after the date of the analysis.

Another important point to be considered is the necessity to conclude the participants’ treatment within the period specified in the study protocol. When the result of the study is achieved earlier and unexpected situations develop, the treatment is concluded earlier. Moreover, the participant may quit the study at its own behest, may die or unpredictable situations (e.g. pregnancy) may develop. The participant can also quit the study whenever it wants, even if the study has not ended ( 7 ).

In case the results of a study are contrary to already known or expected results, the expected quality level of the study suggesting the contradiction may be higher than the studies supporting what is known in that subject. This type of bias is called confirmation bias. The presence of well-known mechanisms and logical inference from them may create problems in the evaluation of data. This is called plausibility bias.

Another type of bias is expectation bias. If a result different from the known results has been achieved and it is against the editor’s will, it can be challenged. Bias may be introduced during the publication of studies, such as publishing only positive results, selection of study results in a way to support a view or prevention of their publication. Some editors may only publish research that extols only the positive results or results that they desire.

Bias may be introduced for advertisement or economic reasons. Economic pressure may be applied on the editor, particularly in the cases of studies involving drugs and new medical devices. This is called commercial bias.

In recent years, before beginning a study, it has been recommended to record it on the Web site www.clinicaltrials.gov for the purpose of facilitating systematic interpretation and analysis in scientific research, informing other researchers, preventing bias, provision of writing in a standard format, enhancing contribution of research results to the general literature and enabling early intervention of an institution for support. This Web site is a service of the US National Institutes of Health.

The last stage in the methodology of clinical studies is the selection of intervention to be conducted. Placebo use assumes an important place in interventions. In Latin, placebo means ‘I will be fine’. In medical literature, it refers to substances that are not curative, do not have active ingredients and have various pharmaceutical forms. Although placebos do not have active drug characteristic, they have shown effective analgesic characteristics, particularly in algology applications; further, its use prevents bias in comparative studies. If a placebo has a positive impact on a participant, it is called the placebo effect ; on the contrary, if it has a negative impact, it is called the nocebo effect . Another type of therapy that can be used in clinical research is sham application. Although a researcher does not cure the patient, the researcher may compare those who receive therapy and undergo sham. It has been seen that sham therapies also exhibit a placebo effect. In particular, sham therapies are used in acupuncture applications ( 11 ). While placebo is a substance, sham is a type of clinical application.

Ethically, the patient has to receive appropriate therapy. For this reason, if its use prevents effective treatment, it causes great problem with regard to patient health and legalities.

Before medical research is conducted with human subjects, predictable risks, drawbacks and benefits must be evaluated for individuals or groups participating in the study. Precautions must be taken for reducing the risk to a minimum level. The risks during the study should be followed, evaluated and recorded by the researcher ( 1 ).

After the methodology for a clinical study is determined, dealing with the ‘Ethics Committee’ forms the next stage. The purpose of the ethics committee is to protect the rights, safety and well-being of volunteers taking part in the clinical research, considering the scientific method and concerns of society. The ethics committee examines the studies presented in time, comprehensively and independently, with regard to ethics and science; in line with the Declaration of Helsinki and following national and international standards concerning ‘Good Clinical Practice’. The method to be followed in the formation of the ethics committee should be developed without any kind of prejudice and to examine the applications with regard to ethics and science within the framework of the ethics committee, Regulation on Clinical Trials and Good Clinical Practice ( www.iku.com ). The necessary documents to be presented to the ethics committee are research protocol, volunteer consent form, budget contract, Declaration of Helsinki, curriculum vitae of researchers, similar or explanatory literature samples, supporting institution approval certificate and patient follow-up form.

Only one sister/brother, mother, father, son/daughter and wife/husband can take charge in the same ethics committee. A rector, vice rector, dean, deputy dean, provincial healthcare director and chief physician cannot be members of the ethics committee.

Members of the ethics committee can work as researchers or coordinators in clinical research. However, during research meetings in which members of the ethics committee are researchers or coordinators, they must leave the session and they cannot sign-off on decisions. If the number of members in the ethics committee for a particular research is so high that it is impossible to take a decision, the clinical research is presented to another ethics committee in the same province. If there is no ethics committee in the same province, an ethics committee in the closest settlement is found.

Thereafter, researchers need to inform the participants using an informed consent form. This form should explain the content of clinical study, potential benefits of the study, alternatives and risks (if any). It should be easy, comprehensible, conforming to spelling rules and written in plain language understandable by the participant.

This form assists the participants in taking a decision regarding participation in the study. It should aim to protect the participants. The participant should be included in the study only after it signs the informed consent form; the participant can quit the study whenever required, even when the study has not ended ( 7 ).

Peer-review: Externally peer-reviewed.

Author Contributions: Concept - C.Ö.Ç., A.D.; Design - C.Ö.Ç.; Supervision - A.D.; Resource - C.Ö.Ç., A.D.; Materials - C.Ö.Ç., A.D.; Analysis and/or Interpretation - C.Ö.Ç., A.D.; Literature Search - C.Ö.Ç.; Writing Manuscript - C.Ö.Ç.; Critical Review - A.D.; Other - C.Ö.Ç., A.D.

Conflict of Interest: No conflict of interest was declared by the authors.

Financial Disclosure: The authors declared that this study has received no financial support.

How to Read a Scholarly Article

Introduction

Article Text

References/Works Cited
2. Sections of a Scholarly Article: Humanities Article

Sections of a Scholarly Journal Article About Scientific Research

Let's look at the different parts of a scholarly article that presents scientific research:

Brief description of the article
You can read this to decide whether you want to read the entire article.

first page of a scholarly article with the abstract highlighted

Introduction:

Description of the problem, or the research question, and why this study is being done
Sometimes includes a short literature review

The main part of an article is its body text.
This is where the author analyzes the argument, research question, or problem. This section also includes analysis and criticism.
The author may use headings to divide this part of the article into sections.

Scientific research articles may include these sections:

Literature review (Discussion of other sources, such as books and articles, that informed the author(s) of this article)
Methods (Description of the way the research study was set up and how data was collected)
Results (Presentation of the research study results)
Discussion (Discussion of whether the results of the study answer the research question)

You may see some of these same sections in articles that present humanities scholarship.

Conclusion:

Wraps up the article.
This section isn't always labeled.
Description of how this article or research study contributes to or builds on the previous research of other scholars.
Also includes ideas for future research others might do on this topic.

References/Works Cited:

List of resources (books, articles, etc.) cited in this article.

page of a scholarly article with reference section highlighted

This example uses pages from this article: Sampson, L., Ettman, C., Abdalla, S., Colyer, E., Dukes, K., Lane, K., & Galea, S. (2021). Financial hardship and health risk behavior during COVID-19 in a large US national sample of women. SSM - Population Health, 13, 100734–100734 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2021.100734

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U.S. Science Agency Launches Program to Connect American and Taiwanese Startups

T he U.S. agency tasked with driving scientific research has launched a program to connect American startups with Taiwanese peers, backing the island’s ambitions to foster key players in strategic sectors like semiconductors, AI and beyond.

The National Science Foundation—one of the federal government’s biggest outfits for funding research—is for the first time sponsoring a series of workshops abroad to help U.S. startups work with their overseas counterparts. It chose to kick things off in Taiwan, which plays an increasingly pivotal role in chips and the technology supply chain. Its Ministry of Economic Affairs is backing the effort, which aims to discover and finance firms exploring “deep tech,” or cutting-edge arenas including biotechnology and quantum computing.

The U.S. agency intends to expand the program to U.S.-allied nations over time, NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan told Bloomberg News. While many of history’s most successful startups—including the likes of Nvidia Corp.—were born in the U.S., the bulk of hardware innovation now centers on Asia. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. alone makes about 90% of the most advanced logic chips. The U.S. Commerce Department has awarded TSMC $11.6 billion of grants and loans to build three plants in Arizona, underscoring its pivotal industry role.

“You just can’t do everything on your own or within the United States. You have supply chains and other things that are global,” said Michelle Meng-Hsiung Kiang, the co-founder of Impact Science Ventures who helped the U.S. agency conceive the program. She devised the program with David Horsley, a Northeastern University professor and chip researcher. “So you want to invest in those relationships early and also in different ways, so that these startups out of the United States are able to build a very strong global supply chain as well as a global business to continue to fuel the growth of the US economy.”

Taiwan’s technology startups, however, have struggled to raise funds the way their counterparts in Silicon Valley do. The government is looking to change that, said Wu Tsung-Tsong, the minister of the National Science and Technology Council. One of his missions is to help bridge the gap between academia and industry, not unlike the U.S. foundation. The council is also keen on attracting more overseas talent, for instance through a contest for global tech startups to be announced next month. That will offer winners a chance to turn their ideas into reality with Taiwanese companies including TSMC.

Last year, Taipei launched a program called “Chip-Based Innovation” with a $10 billion budget over 10 years.

“For Taiwan, manufacturing plays a very important role. But for innovations in different areas, we are still on the starting step,” Wu told Bloomberg News. “We think that if a lot of talent comes to Taiwan, then capital will come.”

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The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’

New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

P atient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness. Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived.

Dying seemed like such an important area of research – we all do it, after all – that Borjigin assumed other scientists had already developed a thorough understanding of what happens to the brain in the process of death. But when she looked at the scientific literature, she found little enlightenment. “To die is such an essential part of life,” she told me recently. “But we knew almost nothing about the dying brain.” So she decided to go back and figure out what had happened inside the brains of people who died at the University of Michigan neurointensive care unit. Among them was Patient One.

At the time Borjigin began her research into Patient One, the scientific understanding of death had reached an impasse. Since the 1960s, advances in resuscitation had helped to revive thousands of people who might otherwise have died. About 10% or 20% of those people brought with them stories of near-death experiences in which they felt their souls or selves departing from their bodies. A handful of those patients even claimed to witness, from above, doctors’ attempts to resuscitate them. According to several international surveys and studies, one in 10 people claims to have had a near-death experience involving cardiac arrest, or a similar experience in circumstances where they may have come close to death. That’s roughly 800 million souls worldwide who may have dipped a toe in the afterlife.

As remarkable as these near-death experiences sounded, they were consistent enough that some scientists began to believe there was truth to them: maybe people really did have minds or souls that existed separately from their living bodies. In the 1970s, a small network of cardiologists, psychiatrists, medical sociologists and social psychologists in North America and Europe began investigating whether near-death experiences proved that dying is not the end of being, and that consciousness can exist independently of the brain. The field of near-death studies was born.

Over the next 30 years, researchers collected thousands of case reports of people who had had near-death experiences. Meanwhile, new technologies and techniques were helping doctors revive more and more people who, in earlier periods of history, would have almost certainly been permanently deceased. “We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?” wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world’s leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.

But by 2015, experiments such as Parnia’s had yielded ambiguous results, and the field of near-death studies was not much closer to understanding death than it had been when it was founded four decades earlier. That’s when Borjigin, together with several colleagues, took the first close look at the record of electrical activity in the brain of Patient One after she was taken off life support. What they discovered – in results reported for the first time last year – was almost entirely unexpected, and has the potential to rewrite our understanding of death.

“I believe what we found is only the tip of a vast iceberg,” Borjigin told me. “What’s still beneath the surface is a full account of how dying actually takes place. Because there’s something happening in there, in the brain, that makes no sense.”

F or all that science has learned about the workings of life, death remains among the most intractable of mysteries. “At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure,” the philosopher William James wrote in 1909.

The first time that the question Borjigin began asking in 2015 was posed – about what happens to the brain during death – was a quarter of a millennium earlier. Around 1740, a French military physician reviewed the case of a famous apothecary who, after a “malign fever” and several blood-lettings, fell unconscious and thought he had travelled to the Kingdom of the Blessed . The physician speculated that the apothecary’s experience had been caused by a surge of blood to the brain. But between that early report and the mid-20th century, scientific interest in near-death experiences remained sporadic.

In 1892, the Swiss climber and geologist Albert Heim collected the first systematic accounts of near-death experiences from 30 fellow climbers who had suffered near-fatal falls. In many cases, the climbers underwent a sudden review of their entire past, heard beautiful music, and “fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets”, Heim wrote. “Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact.” There were a few more attempts to do research in the early 20th century, but little progress was made in understanding near-death experiences scientifically. Then, in 1975, an American medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called Life After Life.

Sunbeams behind clouds in vivid sunset sky reflecting in ocean water

In his book, Moody distilled the reports of 150 people who had had intense, life-altering experiences in the moments surrounding a cardiac arrest. Although the reports varied, he found that they often shared one or more common features or themes. The narrative arc of the most detailed of those reports – departing the body and travelling through a long tunnel, having an out-of-body experience, encountering spirits and a being of light, one’s whole life flashing before one’s eyes, and returning to the body from some outer limit – became so canonical that the art critic Robert Hughes could refer to it years later as “the familiar kitsch of near-death experience”. Moody’s book became an international bestseller.

In 1976, the New York Times reported on the burgeoning scientific interest in “life after death” and the “emerging field of thanatology”. The following year, Moody and several fellow thanatologists founded an organisation that became the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In 1981, they printed the inaugural issue of Vital Signs , a magazine for the general reader that was largely devoted to stories of near-death experiences. The following year they began producing the field’s first peer-reviewed journal, which became the Journal of Near-Death Studies . The field was growing, and taking on the trappings of scientific respectability. Reviewing its rise in 1988, the British Journal of Psychiatry captured the field’s animating spirit: “A grand hope has been expressed that, through NDE research, new insights can be gained into the ageless mystery of human mortality and its ultimate significance, and that, for the first time, empirical perspectives on the nature of death may be achieved.”

But near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine. As researchers, the spiritualists’ aim was to collect as many reports of near-death experience as possible, and to proselytise society about the reality of life after death. Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.

The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individual. Many of them were physicians and psychiatrists who had been deeply affected after hearing the near-death stories of patients they had treated in the ICU. Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.

Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain. (Indeed, many of the states reported by near-death experiencers can apparently be achieved by taking a hero’s dose of ketamine.) Their basic premise was: no functioning brain means no consciousness, and certainly no life after death. Their task, which Borjigin took up in 2015, was to discover what was happening during near-death experiences on a fundamentally physical level.

Slowly, the spiritualists left the field of research for the loftier domains of Christian talk radio, and the parapsychologists and physicalists started bringing near-death studies closer to the scientific mainstream. Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221. Those articles have appeared everywhere from the Canadian Urological Association Journal to the esteemed pages of The Lancet.

Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries. Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium who has done some of the best physicalist work on near-death experiences, hopes we will soon develop a new understanding of the relationship between the internal experience of consciousness and its outward manifestations, for example in coma patients. “We really are in a crucial moment where we have to disentangle consciousness from responsiveness, and maybe question every state that we consider unconscious,” she told me. Parnia, the resuscitation specialist, who studies the physical processes of dying but is also sympathetic to a parapsychological theory of consciousness, has a radically different take on what we are poised to find out. “I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

I f the field of near-death studies is at the threshold of new discoveries about consciousness and death, it is in large part because of a revolution in our ability to resuscitate people who have suffered cardiac arrest. Lance Becker has been a leader in resuscitation science for more than 30 years. As a young doctor attempting to revive people through CPR in the mid-1980s, senior physicians would often step in to declare patients dead. “At a certain point, they would just say, ‘OK, that’s enough. Let’s stop. This is unsuccessful. Time of death: 1.37pm,’” he recalled recently. “And that would be the last thing. And one of the things running through my head as a young doctor was, ‘Well, what really happened at 1.37?’”

In a medical setting, “clinical death” is said to occur at the moment the heart stops pumping blood, and the pulse stops. This is widely known as cardiac arrest. (It is different from a heart attack, in which there is a blockage in a heart that’s still pumping.) Loss of oxygen to the brain and other organs generally follows within seconds or minutes, although the complete cessation of activity in the heart and brain – which is often called “flatlining” or, in the case of the latter, “brain death” – may not occur for many minutes or even hours.

For almost all people at all times in history, cardiac arrest was basically the end of the line. That began to change in 1960, when the combination of mouth-to-mouth ventilation, chest compressions and external defibrillation known as cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was formalised. Shortly thereafter, a massive campaign was launched to educate clinicians and the public on CPR’s basic techniques , and soon people were being revived in previously unthinkable, if still modest, numbers.

As more and more people were resuscitated, scientists learned that, even in its acute final stages, death is not a point, but a process. After cardiac arrest, blood and oxygen stop circulating through the body, cells begin to break down, and normal electrical activity in the brain gets disrupted. But the organs don’t fail irreversibly right away, and the brain doesn’t necessarily cease functioning altogether. There is often still the possibility of a return to life. In some cases, cell death can be stopped or significantly slowed, the heart can be restarted, and brain function can be restored. In other words, the process of death can be reversed.

It is no longer unheard of for people to be revived even six hours after being declared clinically dead. In 2011, Japanese doctors reported the case of a young woman who was found in a forest one morning after an overdose stopped her heart the previous night; using advanced technology to circulate blood and oxygen through her body, the doctors were able to revive her more than six hours later, and she was able to walk out of the hospital after three weeks of care. In 2019, a British woman named Audrey Schoeman who was caught in a snowstorm spent six hours in cardiac arrest before doctors brought her back to life with no evident brain damage.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time for the field,” Becker told me. “We’re discovering new drugs, we’re discovering new devices, and we’re discovering new things about the brain.”

T he brain – that’s the tricky part. In January 2021, as the Covid-19 pandemic was surging toward what would become its deadliest week on record, Netflix released a documentary series called Surviving Death . In the first episode, some of near-death studies’ most prominent parapsychologists presented the core of their arguments for why they believe near-death experiences show that consciousness exists independently of the brain. “When the heart stops, within 20 seconds or so, you get flatlining, which means no brain activity,” Bruce Greyson, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and one of the founding members of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, says in the documentary. “And yet,” he goes on to claim, “people have near-death experiences when they’ve been (quote) ‘flatlined’ for longer than that.”

That is a key tenet of the parapsychologists’ arguments: if there is consciousness without brain activity, then consciousness must dwell somewhere beyond the brain. Some of the parapsychologists speculate that it is a “non-local” force that pervades the universe, like electromagnetism. This force is received by the brain, but is not generated by it, the way a television receives a broadcast.

In order for this argument to hold, something else has to be true: near-death experiences have to happen during death, after the brain shuts down. To prove this, parapsychologists point to a number of rare but astounding cases known as “veridical” near-death experiences, in which patients seem to report details from the operating room that they might have known only if they had conscious awareness during the time that they were clinically dead. Dozens of such reports exist. One of the most famous is about a woman who apparently travelled so far outside her body that she was able to spot a shoe on a window ledge in another part of the hospital where she went into cardiac arrest; the shoe was later reportedly found by a nurse.

an antique illustration of an ‘out of body experience’

At the very least, Parnia and his colleagues have written, such phenomena are “inexplicable through current neuroscientific models”. Unfortunately for the parapsychologists, however, none of the reports of post-death awareness holds up to strict scientific scrutiny. “There are many claims of this kind, but in my long decades of research into out-of-body and near-death experiences I never met any convincing evidence that this is true,” Sue Blackmore, a well-known researcher into parapsychology who had her own near-death experience as a young woman in 1970, has written .

The case of the shoe, Blackmore pointed out, relied solely on the report of the nurse who claimed to have found it. That’s far from the standard of proof the scientific community would require to accept a result as radical as that consciousness can travel beyond the body and exist after death. In other cases, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the experiences reported by cardiac arrest survivors happened when their brains were shut down, as opposed to in the period before or after they supposedly “flatlined”. “So far, there is no sufficiently rigorous, convincing empirical evidence that people can observe their surroundings during a near-death experience,” Charlotte Martial, the University of Liège neuroscientist, told me.

The parapsychologists tend to push back by arguing that even if each of the cases of veridical near-death experiences leaves room for scientific doubt, surely the accumulation of dozens of these reports must count for something. But that argument can be turned on its head: if there are so many genuine instances of consciousness surviving death, then why should it have so far proven impossible to catch one empirically?

P erhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was. Instead, it is that the process of dying is far stranger than scientists ever suspected. The spiritualists and parapsychologists are right to insist that something deeply weird is happening to people when they die, but they are wrong to assume it is happening in the next life rather than this one. At least, that is the implication of what Jimo Borjigin found when she investigated the case of Patient One.

In the moments after Patient One was taken off oxygen, there was a surge of activity in her dying brain. Areas that had been nearly silent while she was on life support suddenly thrummed with high-frequency electrical signals called gamma waves. In particular, the parts of the brain that scientists consider a “hot zone” for consciousness became dramatically alive. In one section, the signals remained detectable for more than six minutes. In another, they were 11 to 12 times higher than they had been before Patient One’s ventilator was removed.

“As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin told me. For about two minutes after her oxygen was cut off, there was an intense synchronisation of her brain waves, a state associated with many cognitive functions, including heightened attention and memory. The synchronisation dampened for about 18 seconds, then intensified again for more than four minutes. It faded for a minute, then came back for a third time.

In those same periods of dying, different parts of Patient One’s brain were suddenly in close communication with each other. The most intense connections started immediately after her oxygen stopped, and lasted for nearly four minutes. There was another burst of connectivity more than five minutes and 20 seconds after she was taken off life support. In particular, areas of her brain associated with processing conscious experience – areas that are active when we move through the waking world, and when we have vivid dreams – were communicating with those involved in memory formation. So were parts of the brain associated with empathy. Even as she slipped irrevocably deeper into death, something that looked astonishingly like life was taking place over several minutes in Patient One’s brain.

The shadows of anonymous people are seen on a wall

Those glimmers and flashes of something like life contradict the expectations of almost everyone working in the field of resuscitation science and near-death studies. The predominant belief – expressed by Greyson, the psychiatrist and co-founder of the International Association of Near Death Studies, in the Netflix series Surviving Death – was that as soon as oxygen stops going to the brain, neurological activity falls precipitously. Although a few earlier instances of brain waves had been reported in dying human brains, nothing as detailed and complex as what occurred in Patient One had ever been detected.

Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life. Of course, Patient One did not recover, so no one can prove that the extraordinary happenings in her dying brain had experiential counterparts. Greyson and one of the other grandees of near-death studies, a Dutch cardiologist named Pim van Lommel, have asserted that Patient One’s brain activity can shed no light on near-death experiences because her heart hadn’t fully flatlined, but that is a self-defeating argument: there is no rigorous empirical evidence that near-death experiences occur in people whose hearts have completely stopped.

At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death. “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest,” Borjigin said. Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.

B orjigin believes that understanding the dying brain is one of the “holy grails” of neuroscience. “The brain is so resilient, the heart is so resilient, that it takes years of abuse to kill them,” she pointed out. “Why then, without oxygen, can a perfectly healthy person die within 30 minutes, irreversibly?” Although most people would take that result for granted, Borjigin thinks that, on a physical level, it actually makes little sense.

Borjigin hopes that understanding the neurophysiology of death can help us to reverse it. She already has brain activity data from dozens of deceased patients that she is waiting to analyse. But because of the paranormal stigma associated with near-death studies, she says, few research agencies want to grant her funding. “Consciousness is almost a dirty word amongst funders,” she added. “Hardcore scientists think research into it should belong to maybe theology, philosophy, but not in hardcore science. Other people ask, ‘What’s the use? The patients are gonna die anyway, so why study that process? There’s nothing you can do about it.’”

Evidence is already emerging that even total brain death may someday be reversible. In 2019, scientists at Yale University harvested the brains of pigs that had been decapitated in a commercial slaughterhouse four hours earlier. Then they perfused the brains for six hours with a special cocktail of drugs and synthetic blood. Astoundingly, some of the cells in the brains began to show metabolic activity again, and some of the synapses even began firing. The pigs’ brain scans didn’t show the widespread electrical activity that we typically associate with sentience or consciousness. But the fact that there was any activity at all suggests the frontiers of life may one day extend much, much farther into the realms of death than most scientists currently imagine.

Other serious avenues of research into near-death experience are ongoing. Martial and her colleagues at the University of Liège are working on many issues relating to near-death experiences. One is whether people with a history of trauma, or with more creative minds, tend to have such experiences at higher rates than the general population. Another is on the evolutionary biology of near-death experiences. Why, evolutionarily speaking, should we have such experiences at all? Martial and her colleagues speculate that it may be a form of the phenomenon known as thanatosis, in which creatures throughout the animal kingdom feign death to escape mortal dangers. Other researchers have proposed that the surge of electrical activity in the moments after cardiac arrest is just the final seizure of a dying brain, or have hypothesised that it’s a last-ditch attempt by the brain to restart itself, like jump-starting the engine on a car.

Meanwhile, in parts of the culture where enthusiasm is reserved not for scientific discovery in this world, but for absolution or benediction in the next, the spiritualists, along with sundry other kooks and grifters, are busily peddling their tales of the afterlife. Forget the proverbial tunnel of light: in America in particular, a pipeline of money has been discovered from death’s door, through Christian media, to the New York Times bestseller list and thence to the fawning, gullible armchairs of the nation’s daytime talk shows. First stop, paradise; next stop, Dr Oz.

But there is something that binds many of these people – the physicalists, the parapsychologists, the spiritualists – together. It is the hope that by transcending the current limits of science and of our bodies, we will achieve not a deeper understanding of death, but a longer and more profound experience of life. That, perhaps, is the real attraction of the near-death experience: it shows us what is possible not in the next world, but in this one.

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October 1, 2023

How to Figure Out if Moderate Drinking Is Too Risky for You

New research shows any alcohol can harm your body, but the increased risk may not be huge

By Lydia Denworth

Illustration of wine being poured into a glass timer.

Wine with dinner is a lovely thing. I enjoy a glass or two, though rarely more. I have seen the terrible toll of alcohol use disorder and know the risks. Or I thought I did. I judged my drinking “moderate” and relatively benign.

A decade ago scientists and public health experts agreed with me. A drink or two a day was safely within most public health guidelines, and research even suggested that a little alcohol could protect against cardiovascular disease.

But earlier this year the World Health Organization (WHO) stated any amount of alcohol was dangerous. “There is no safe amount that does not affect health,” the group declared. Canadian authorities redefined moderate-risk drinking as three to six drinks a week, down from a daily level of two for women and three for men. The U.S. now recommends a limit of one drink a day for women (that is, 12 ounces of beer, five ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of spirits) and two for men. The message is clear: the chances of harm begin with the first drop.

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This radical shift in thinking made headlines. Then my own doctor advised me to cut back. I was willing, but I wanted to understand what, exactly, I was risking with each sip of sauvignon blanc.

Previous health advice was designed to stop people from becoming alcoholics, says psychologist Tim Stockwell of the University of Victoria, a former director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, who has helped develop guidelines for three countries over 25 years. “It wasn't so much how you protect your body from cancer, liver disease, or losing a few months or even years of life expectancy.”

Now a growing body of research says any alcohol raises the chance of premature death from a variety of causes. About half of cases of liver disease are attributed to drinking. Alcohol is also a potent carcinogen. It can cause cancer because it breaks down in the body to form a compound called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA. That damage can lead to at least seven types of cancer. Fifteen percent of breast cancers are linked to alcohol. And according to the WHO, half of cancers in Europe linked to alcohol are caused by “light” or “moderate” consumption.

These risks seem to cancel out evidence of alcohol's cardiovascular benefits, which was weakened anyway when researchers did more nuanced studies. The heart-protective theory was based on the finding that moderate drinkers had better cardiovascular health than both nondrinkers (by a little bit) and heavy drinkers (by a lot). But those studies lumped all nondrinkers together, including those who had quit because of substance use issues or illness. As a result, “abstainers” looked relatively unhealthy, and “moderate” drinkers, many of whom exercise and eat well, looked pretty good.

“The fundamental issue is who is in the comparison group,” says psychiatrist Sarah Hartz of Washington University in St. Louis. In 2018, when Hartz and her colleagues compared thousands of moderate and very light drinkers (one or two drinks per week), the advantages of moderate consumption basically disappeared. Other studies got similar results. By 2022 the World Heart Federation stated that alcohol did not protect people.

Still, the increased risk for light and moderate drinkers must be considered in context. The Canadian guidelines estimate one additional premature death in 1,000 could be attributed to alcohol for those who have two drinks a week. That risk increases to one in 100 among people who have six drinks weekly. People take similar risks every day. The lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are one in 93, yet we still drive. We eat bacon. We even go skydiving. “We choose those things because we want to do them in spite of the known risks,” Hartz says. “That's where alcohol needs to be lumped.”

The choice is personal. (For people with alcohol use disorder, the option is abstinence.) People have long derived pleasure from alcohol. I am one of them, although my definition of “moderation” has shifted with the guidelines. I recognize that wine is not benign, and I have cut my consumption in half. But the occasional glass is a risk worth taking—for me.

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These Scientists Rock. Literally.

The Pasteur Institute in Paris, known for its world-altering scientific research, has been making advancements in another field: the musical arts.

A group of people dancing in a dimly lit room. One person, left, is holding a tambourine.

By Jessica Roy

Reporting from Paris

The Pasteur Institute, since opening in the 15th Arrondissement in Paris in the late 1880s, has been recognized for world-altering scientific discoveries. The institute, named for Louis Pasteur, the pioneering French scientist who founded it, has contributed to the production of vaccines for tetanus and the flu and was at the forefront of discovering the virus that causes AIDS .

In recent years, the Pasteur Institute has made advancements in another field — the musical arts — as some of its scientists have formed bands and other acts involving colleagues as well as students who have studied there. That cohort has honed its musical passion and ability at an on-site studio they call the music lab.

On a Friday evening in March, three acts developed in the lab headlined an event held at the institute’s cafeteria. They included Polaris and also Billie and the What?!, both blues-rock bands, and an a cappella group, Les Papillons, or “the butterflies” in English.

Moody purple light bathed the room, which was decorated with balloons and streamers in shades of pink, gold and white. It was filled with more than a hundred people, as well as with an array of equipment, including mics, speakers, guitars and an elaborate drum kit.

The drums belonged to Germano Cecere, a member of Billie and the What?! and a lab director at the Pasteur Institute whose research specializes in mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance. His job involves researching how organisms “don’t get only DNA from our parents, but also other stuff,” he said, using laymen’s terms.

Mr. Cecere, 44, was born in a small village near Naples, Italy. He started playing drums at age 9 and aspired to play professionally. In college and graduate school, he played in bands that toured across Italy. “I wanted to do music but my family said music is for fun — do something else,” he said.

That “something else” was earning a Ph.D. in human biology and genetics at the University of Rome, after which came some postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York. He joined the Pasteur Institute staff in 2015.

Mr. Cecere has copper-colored hair that he wears pulled back into a low ponytail. He can talk animatedly for hours about topics that excite him, which include epigenetics, jazz and Neapolitan food. He is the kind of person who is good at a lot of things: In 2006, while he was completing his Ph.D., he made a short film called “ Borderline ” that premiered at a film festival in Rome and received a best cinematography award.

Mr. Cecere said that the Pasteur Institute has attracted many people who could play a guitar riff and explain the complexities of biochemistry with similar ease. Among them: Pedro Hernandez-Cerda, a developmental biologist and bass player who helped convince the institute’s leadership to create the music lab. (Mr. Hernandez-Cerda, who has since left the Pasteur Institute, lobbied for the lab with Camille Baussay, a singer and former human resources lawyer at the institute.)

The lab started as a place where employees who dabbled in music could meet up to jam. But it wasn’t long before those employees were forming musical groups and performing at department retreats and other work events.

Georg Braune, a member of Les Papillons a cappella group, described the lab as a sort of refuge. “You really have a lot of equipment,” said Mr. Braune, a 22-year-old master’s student researching brain development at the Pasteur Institute. “In the middle of the day we can go there, we can play. We can do whatever we want.”

Mr. Cecere said the lab has helped foster a stronger sense of community between the institute’s directors like himself and students or scientists in temporary programs. His band includes two other directors: Gérard Eberl, whose research is in microenvironments and immunity, plays guitar; Javier Pizarro-Cerda, whose research is in systems biology of bacterial infections, plays bass. Two doctoral students, Ana Choi and Alice Billie Libri, perform as vocalists.

Ms. Libri, 27, who is completing a Ph.D. in DNA repair, immunodeficiency and cancer, said the Pasteur Institute facilitated other activities like theater and drawing. “But I think music is the main activity,” she said. “There’s a choir, there are guitar lessons and stuff. It’s really nice.”

About halfway through the March event at the cafeteria, which was held to mark the 21st anniversary of a social committee at the institute, someone started handing out glow sticks. The crowd was grooving to covers performed by Billie and the What?! of songs like “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish and “Smooth” by Santana as members of Les Papillons, who were costumed in butterfly wings, led a dance circle.

Pizzas and a towering cake made of doughnuts were served, along with beer and, of course, Champagne.

Before Billie and the What?! performed, Ms. Libri, who goes by Billie and whose name inspired that of the band, said that music is a way for her to escape when she’s “disappointed with science.”

And then, she added, “I can always go back to science when I’m disappointed with music.”

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After 37 years of successful airborne science missions, NASA’s DC-8 aircraft completed its final mission and returned to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703 in Palmdale, California, on April 1.

The DC-8 and crew were welcomed back with a celebratory water salute by the U.S Air Force Plant 42 Fire Department after completing an air quality study, the Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality, or ASIA-AQ mission . The aircraft is set to retire after concluding operations in May.

As the largest flying science laboratory in the world, the DC-8 has been used to support the agency’s Airborne Science mission since 1987. This unique aircraft was first acquired by NASA in 1985 and collected data for experiments in support of scientific projects serving the world’s scientific community – including scientists, researchers, and students from NASA and other federal, state, academic, and foreign institutions.

The DC-8 will continue its educational legacy as it retires to its new home at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, where it will be used to train future aircraft technicians by providing real-world experience in the college’s Aircraft Maintenance Technology Program.

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Texas A&M AgriLife turfgrass program leads through innovation

From backyards, football fields and golf courses, science is reshaping the turfgrass experience.

April 9, 2024

The science of turfgrass has come a long way in recent decades.

Whether turfgrass breeders and programs produced varieties for a carpet-like lawn, the perfect ball roll on a golf putting green, or to support the weight and athleticism of 300-pound football players, science has guided the way to innovative new turfgrasses and helped train the next generation of high demand turf scientists.

Today, the Texas A&M Turfgrass Program is a partnership among Texas A&M AgriLife Research , the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences . The turfgrass program continues to meld boundary-pushing methods and technologies to create and improve turfgrass varieties. Program scientists are improving turfgrass’s environmental and economic sustainability while meeting ever-increasing aesthetic and performance demands from end-users.

“The Aggie turf program has a strong history, but it has really developed into a world-class research juggernaut that is making consistent breakthroughs in addressing big picture challenges,” said David Baltensperger, Ph.D., professor and head of the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences. “Our researchers are leading innovation, and we are also investing in our extension efforts to engage with stakeholders and deliver turfgrass science, whether that be management data, tips and tools, or new and exciting turfgrasses.”

Science of turfgrass: Responding to challenges

Turfgrass is an important part of daily life. It is so present that it can be easy to overlook what turfgrass provides us mentally and physically despite our constant interaction with it in urban, suburban and rural environments. Turfgrass straddles many roles in our daily lives, and science continues to evolve its environmental and economic sustainability while providing safe, reliable surfaces for leisure and sports, in addition to creating many new career opportunities in Texas.

“The turfgrass program brings together nationally and internationally recognized experts from across Texas A&M to pursue leading-edge innovations and thriving turfgrasses that improve lives and livelihoods,” said G. Cliff Lamb, director of AgriLife Research .

More than 80% of Texans now live in urban areas, and turfgrass covers as much as 50% of Texas’ urban area. At the same time, rural homes, schools, businesses and playing fields also use turfgrass for ground cover.

“We’re all tackling challenges in different but interconnected ways. There is tremendous work being done in the turfgrass program, and delivering positive impacts within the industry…is what we are passionate about.”

Ambika Chandra, Ph.D. Texas A&M AgriLife Research

Texas is No. 2 in sod production in the U.S. with more than 56,000 acres of turfgrass being grown by 127 sod-producing farms. Annual sod production revenues exceed $150 million.

The Texas turfgrass industry continues to experience higher demands for urban turfgrass solutions as the state’s population continues to boom, said Ambika Chandra, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and AgriLife Research leader of the Turfgrass Breeding and Urban Landscapes Program at Dallas .

At the same time, homeowners are looking for lower-maintenance varieties that require fewer inputs like fertilizer, pesticides and water. The expansion of urban turfgrass areas and changing environments have created challenges for the turfgrass industry, including stricter water restrictions and lower water quality for irrigation.

Future water regulations could increase challenges to managing warm-season turfgrasses, which comprise the most prolific varieties across Texas, Chandra said. While the health benefits of green spaces are well documented, she said, natural turfgrass is being replaced by alternative landscapes and synthetic turfgrasses in response to water restrictions.

Turfgrass breeding provides economic, environmental sustainability

The Texas A&M Turfgrass Program is taking a synergistic approach to provide sustainable turfgrass solutions for the industry and consumers, Chandra said. Research, technology and applied science continue to lead the way.

“We are working with breeding technologies like gene editing and genomics and developing those tools to improve our ability to identify and express turfgrass characteristics that meet challenges,” she said. “At the same time, we’re also interacting with homeowners, turfgrass managers and producers, cities and municipalities.”

The Texas A&M AgriLife turfgrass program germplasm collection includes more than 700 unique ecotypes used within its breeding program. Chandra’s work as a turfgrass breeder focuses on crossing cultivars that feature quality aesthetic characteristics with those expressing other desirable characteristics like drought and/or disease resistance to create hybrids.

This genetic collection has allowed the program to develop and commercialize 21 turfgrass varieties since 1980. Some of those varieties are grown in Texas and 15 other U.S. states, as well as Brazil, Australia and Italy.

In 2022, the program introduced Cobalt , a drought-resistant St. Augustine grass variety that directly addresses water conservation, requiring nearly half the amount of irrigation of other industry standard varieties, Chandra said. Cobalt also provides the aesthetic and sensory characteristics desired by consumers.

The program is also breeding warm-season turfgrasses like zoysias for cold-hardiness. Cold tolerance in turfgrasses provides end-users in colder parts of the country with varieties that balance aesthetics, optimal end-use performance, and input requirements with winter kill prevention.

“The program is tackling a variety of challenges within the turfgrass industry and much of them relate to sustainable management practices,” she said. “We are not developing a new variety just to have a new variety. We are developing them with a clearly defined goal when it comes to its potential end use. Our expertise and ability to meet the range of environmental and performance challenges has positioned us to be a leader in this space.”

Research, technology and applied science steering program

Across Texas, a multidisciplinary team of turfgrass experts of The Texas A&M University System brings together research, teaching and extension work to develop and disseminate technologies, practices and improved turfgrass cultivars that tolerate increasingly extreme environments.

This team includes Chase Straw, Ph.D., AgriLife Research turfgrass management scientist and assistant professor; Ben Wherley, Ph.D., AgriLife Research turfgrass ecologist and professor; and Manuel Chavarria, Ph.D., AgriLife Extension turf specialist and assistant professor, all in Bryan-College Station. Staff as well as undergraduate and graduate students also support the program’s efforts.

Program experts collaborate on turfgrass initiatives with other land-grant universities across the U.S. as well as public entities like the Texas Department of Agriculture , U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Institute of Food and Agriculture , in addition to parks and recreation departments around the state and country. Texas A&M turfgrass experts also work with a range of stakeholders, including industry and professional organizations like the U.S. Golf Association , USGA; Sports Field Management Association ; and the Texas Nursery and Landscape Association .

Team members focus on a range of turfgrass and related topics from sports field design and construction to athlete safety and performance to best-management practices leading to greater resource-use efficiency, Wherley said.

Wherley’s primary focus is water quality. He studies the full spectrum of cause and effect – from reducing lawn and landscape runoff to management practices that help turfgrasses tolerate prolonged drought or more efficiently take up applied fertilizer nutrients.

For instance, for more than a decade, he’s worked with the USGA on course construction methods that allow golf courses to maintain improved playability and performance when poor quality irrigation water containing elevated salts and bicarbonates is used, he said.

Wherley and a team that includes faculty from the Texas A&M College of Engineering also designed a patented landscape irrigation runoff mitigation system that has been shown to reduce runoff by up to 50%.

“A lot of what we do centers around efficient use of water and nutrient resources, and we are continually evaluating best-management practices to determine how to best manage natural turfgrass systems with fewer inputs,” he said. “When it comes to conserving resources like water and managing turfgrass’s overall impact to the environment, sustainability requires a holistic approach.”

Genome sequencing, big data analytics, unmanned aerial vehicles, advanced spectral sensors and autonomous management equipment are all helping advance how turfgrasses are bred, grown and maintained.

Technology is also guiding end-user interaction with turfgrasses. Instrumentation like sensors read soil moisture and compaction levels, or hardness, and wearable technologies like vests, shoe insoles and ankle accelerometers, and helmet and mouthpiece sensors are measuring biomechanical interactions with turfgrasses, Straw said.

These technologies allow researchers to collect data that guides turfgrass varietal selection, and how sports fields are maintained in relation to outcomes like player safety and surface maintenance, Straw said.

Several individuals standing on a putting green. There is a small maroon flag in a hole.

Responding to consumer demand

Research and outreach by the turfgrass program is heavily driven by end-user preference, Straw said. Whether the goal is a homeowner’s desire to walk barefoot on a lawn or meet an athlete’s performance and safety needs, turfgrasses increasingly demand less management and fewer inputs while providing higher performance and quicker recovery periods after traffic.

Straw’s research covers everything related to turfgrass maintenance – cultivation, fertility, pesticide applications – but he’s also testing new technologies to quantify the benefits of emerging methods for sports field turfgrass managers.

Safety is the No. 1 priority for turfgrasses when it comes to sports field applications, he said. The idea is to provide a playing surface that does not impact any aspect of the game being played or inhibit athletic performance.

Playing surfaces can vary based on factors like turfgrass variety, mowing height, irrigation and compaction. An extreme example, Straw said, would be comparing athletic performances on a concrete playing surface to a sandy beach. Straw’s research tries to find sports field uniformity and management recommendations that turfgrass managers can apply for specific performance outcomes.

Straw and other turfgrass research team members work with faculty in fields like kinesiology and sports medicine and management to better understand surfaces’ impact on athletic performance, safety and health.

Innovative technologies are used to analyze and quantify the impact on the athlete and the playing surface. Straw said wearable technologies like ankle accelerometers measure the force of impact as athletes run, jump, accelerate and decelerate.

Research studies by Straw use this type of biomechanical data collected during experiments featuring a range of turfgrass variety and environmental factor combinations. Experimentation helps guide his recommendations for sports field managers. For example, these data-driven assessments can help managers adjust playing surfaces for soreness in athletes in simple ways like increasing mowing height and/or irrigation based on feedback and data, Straw said.

This type of data collection is filling a major research void related to sports fields, especially quantifying the differences between natural turfgrass under a range of conditions in comparison to various synthetic turfs, Straw said.

The research will help sports field managers weigh the pros and cons of what surface is applied, he said. Scientific data will answer questions about player safety, initial installment costs, maintenance over the surface’s lifetime and impacts to the environment.

“Our program is a leader because of our world-class research faculty and facilities in Dallas and here in College Station, but it’s successful because of collaboration,” Straw said. “Turfgrass is an interdisciplinary field with huge social, economic and environmental impacts, so we work with a lot of faculty across the university, but also in collaboration with other universities and stakeholders.”

Making turfgrass better

The program is focused on producing new varieties and understanding how turfgrasses can be improved to meet increasing demands and challenges. It is also dedicated to outreach and teaching the next generation of turfgrass experts. A technological shift within the industry is influencing how the research data is disseminated to stakeholders and taught to industry professionals and future leaders, Straw said.

Educating undergraduate and graduate students and informing industry insiders, including golf course managers, municipal planners, landscape professionals and consumers, are critical aspects of the program’s mission, he said.

Baltensperger said the program’s students and staff are sought by industry and other universities because of their exposure to top-tier expert faculty and hands-on learning opportunities.

Straw cited an uptick in enrollment within the turfgrass program in recent years. He said he believes the trend is related to cutting-edge facilities, technologies and research opportunities like those available through turfgrass education at Texas A&M. Students and prospective students are also becoming aware of the broad range of career paths they could explore.

“It’s extremely important to teach and train the next generation of professionals with these newer techniques and technologies so that we continue to lead,” he said. “We place a strong emphasis on integrating those into the research we do and how we teach and train our students. We have a strong, innovative program, and the success of our students reinforces that reputation.”

Texas A&M’s turfgrass team not only educates students, but it also supports the industry, turfgrass management professionals and consumers. The program added AgriLife Extension turfgrass specialist Pablo Boeri, Ph.D., in Dallas to support those outreach efforts alongside Chavarria.

Chavarria said he and Boeri are the public interface for the program with industry professionals, residential developers and homeowner groups. Engagement with end-users is a critical piece of the program at all levels because it provides real-world feedback that can fuel the innovations needed to meet challenges and improve user experiences.

All team members contribute to research and education, but Chavarria and Boeri spend much of their time engaging with homeowners and homeowner associations, including groups like the Texas Master Gardeners and landscape professionals, to provide science-based turfgrass information and recommendations. They teach courses in English and Spanish throughout the state with much of their time dedicated to major population centers between Dallas, San Antonio and Houston.

“The bilingual component of what we do is relatively new but a very important aspect of our AgriLife Extension outreach,” he said. “We’re educating industry professionals, municipalities, sports field managers and homeowners, and overcoming language barriers helps us reach people who are hungry to learn. Turfgrass is a big part of Texans’ lives, and we want to meet the demands of our audience.”

Beyond economics, aesthetics and resource conservation, Chandra believes the Texas A&M Turfgrass Program can deliver broader impacts on daily life. She called turfgrass “an ever-present stage” upon which people’s lives play out.

“We’re all tackling challenges in different but interconnected ways,” Chandra said. “There is tremendous work being done in the turfgrass program, and delivering positive impacts within the industry, for growers and for consumers, is what we are passionate about. Turfgrass plays such a big role in our lives, why not make it better?”

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Collection 12 March 2021

2020 Top 50 Life and Biological Sciences Articles

We are pleased to share with you the 50 most downloaded Nature Communications articles* in the life and biological sciences published in 2020. (Please note we have a separate collection on the Top 50 SARS-CoV-2 papers .) Featuring authors from around the world, these papers highlight valuable research from an international community.

Browse all Top 50 subject area collections here .

* Data obtained from SN Insights (based on Digital Science's Dimensions) and has been normalised to account for articles published later in the year.

Vitamin D metabolites and the gut microbiome in older men

Here, the authors investigate associations of vitamin D metabolites with gut microbiome in a cross-sectional analysis of 567 elderly men enrolled in the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men (MrOS) Study and find larger alpha-diversity correlates with high 1,25(OH)2D and high 24,25(OH)2D and higher ratios of activation and catabolism.

Robert L. Thomas
Lingjing Jiang
Deborah M. Kado

The misuse of colour in science communication

The accurate representation of data is essential in science communication, however, colour maps that visually distort data through uneven colour gradients or are unreadable to those with colour vision deficiency remain prevalent. Here, the authors present a simple guide for the scientific use of colour and highlight ways for the scientific community to identify and prevent the misuse of colour in science.

Fabio Crameri
Grace E. Shephard
Philip J. Heron

Effect of gut microbiota on depressive-like behaviors in mice is mediated by the endocannabinoid system

The gut microbiota may contribute to depression, but the underlying mechanism is not well understood. Here the authors use a mouse model of stress induced depression to demonstrate that behavioural changes conferred by fecal transplant from stressed to naïve mice require the endocannabinoid system.

Grégoire Chevalier
Eleni Siopi
Pierre-Marie Lledo

The default network of the human brain is associated with perceived social isolation

Here, using pattern-learning analyses of structural, functional, and diffusion brain scans in ~40,000 UK Biobank participants, the authors provide population-scale evidence that the default network is associated with perceived social isolation.

R. Nathan Spreng
Emile Dimas
Danilo Bzdok

Non-invasive early detection of cancer four years before conventional diagnosis using a blood test

Patients whose disease is diagnosed in its early stages have better outcomes. In this study, the authors develop a non invasive blood test based on circulating tumor DNA methylation that can potentially detect cancer occurrence even in asymptomatic patients.

Xingdong Chen
Jeffrey Gole

Deep learning suggests that gene expression is encoded in all parts of a co-evolving interacting gene regulatory structure

Regulatory and coding regions of genes are shaped by evolution to control expression levels. Here, the authors use deep learning to identify rules controlling gene expression levels and suggest that all parts of the gene regulatory structure interact in this.

Christoph S. Börlin
Aleksej Zelezniak

A systematic review of antibody mediated immunity to coronaviruses: kinetics, correlates of protection, and association with severity

Antibody mediated immunity to SARS-CoV-2 will affect future transmission and disease severity. This systematic review on antibody response to coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and endemic coronaviruses provides insights into kinetics, correlates of protection, and association with disease severity.

Angkana T. Huang
Bernardo Garcia-Carreras
Derek A. T. Cummings

Biomineral armor in leaf-cutter ants

Biomineral armour is known in a number of diverse creatures but has not previously been observed in insects. Here, the authors report on the discovery and characterization of high-magnesium calcite armour which overlays the exoskeletons of leaf-cutter ants.

Chang-Yu Sun
Cameron R. Currie

Senolytics prevent mt-DNA-induced inflammation and promote the survival of aged organs following transplantation

Organ transplantation involving aged donors is often confounded by reduced post-transplantation organ survival. By studying both human organs and mouse transplantation models, here the authors show that pretreating the donors with senolytics to reduce mitochondria DNA and pro-inflammatory dendritic cells may help promote survival of aged organs.

Jasper Iske
Midas Seyda
Stefan G. Tullius

Fasting mimicking diet as an adjunct to neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer in the multicentre randomized phase 2 DIRECT trial

Preclinical evidence suggests that a fasting mimicking diet (FMD) can make cancer cells more vulnerable to chemotherapy, while protecting normal cells. In this randomized phase II clinical trial of 131 patients with HER2 negative early stage breast cancer, the authors demonstrate that FMD is safe and enhances the effects of neoadjuvant chemotherapy on radiological and pathological tumor response.

Stefanie de Groot
Rieneke T. Lugtenberg
Dutch Breast Cancer Research Group (BOOG)

Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years

The discovery of aerobic microbial communities in nutrient-poor sediments below the seafloor begs the question of the mechanisms for their persistence. Here the authors investigate subseafloor sediment in the South Pacific Gyre abyssal plain, showing that aerobic microbial life can be revived and retain metabolic potential even from 101.5 Ma-old sediment.

Yuki Morono
Fumio Inagaki

The auxin-inducible degron 2 technology provides sharp degradation control in yeast, mammalian cells, and mice

Auxin-inducible degron systems can be leaky and require high doses of auxin. Here the authors establish AID2 which uses an OsTIR1 mutant and the ligand 5-Ph-IAA to overcome these problems and establish AID-mediated target depletion in mice.

Aisha Yesbolatova
Yuichiro Saito
Masato T. Kanemaki

Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China

Bats are a likely reservoir of zoonotic coronaviruses (CoVs). Here, analyzing bat CoV sequences in China, the authors find that alpha-CoVs have switched hosts more frequently than betaCoVs, identify a bat family and genus that are highly involved in host-switching, and define hotspots of CoV evolutionary diversity.

Alice Latinne
Peter Daszak

Multivariate genomic scan implicates novel loci and haem metabolism in human ageing

Ageing phenotypes are of great interest but are difficult to study genetically, partly due to the sample sizes required. Here, the authors present a multivariate framework to combine GWAS summary statistics and increase statistical power, identifying additional loci enriched for aging.

Paul R. H. J. Timmers
James F. Wilson
Joris Deelen

A microsporidian impairs Plasmodium falciparum transmission in Anopheles arabiensis mosquitoes

Mircobial symbionts of mosquitoes can affect transmission of human pathogens. Here, Herren et al . identify a microsporidian symbiont in Anopheles gambiae that impairs transmission without affecting mosquito fecundity or survival.

Jeremy K. Herren
Lilian Mbaisi
Steven P. Sinkins

Gene editing and elimination of latent herpes simplex virus in vivo

Herpes simplex virus establishes lifelong latency in ganglionic neurons, which are the source for recurrent infection. Here Aubert et al. report a promising antiviral therapy based on gene editing with adeno-associated virus-delivered meganucleases, which leads to a significant reduction in ganglionic HSV loads and HSV reactivation.

Martine Aubert
Daniel E. Strongin
Keith R. Jerome

A predictive index for health status using species-level gut microbiome profiling

A biologically-interpretable and robust metric that provides insight into one’s health status from a gut microbiome sample is an important clinical goal in current human microbiome research. Herein, the authors introduce a species-level index that predicts the likelihood of having a disease.

Vinod K. Gupta
Jaeyun Sung

Bacterial nanotubes as a manifestation of cell death

Bacterial nanotubes and other similar membranous structures have been reported to function as conduits between cells to exchange DNA, proteins, and nutrients. Here the authors provide evidence that bacterial nanotubes are formed only by dead or dying cells, thus questioning their previously proposed functions.

Jiří Pospíšil
Dragana Vítovská
Libor Krásný

Gut microbiota mediates intermittent-fasting alleviation of diabetes-induced cognitive impairment

Intermittent fasting (IF) has been shown beneficial in reducing metabolic diseases. Here, using a multi-omics approach in a T2D mouse model, the authors report that IF alters the composition of the gut microbiota and improves metabolic phenotypes that correlate with cognitive behavior.

Zhigang Liu
Xiaoshuang Dai

Transient non-integrative expression of nuclear reprogramming factors promotes multifaceted amelioration of aging in human cells

Aging involves gradual loss of tissue function, and transcription factor (TF) expression can ameliorate this in progeroid mice. Here the authors show that transient TF expression reverses age-associated epigenetic marks, inflammatory profiles and restores regenerative potential in naturally aged human cells.

Tapash Jay Sarkar
Marco Quarta
Vittorio Sebastiano

Mitochondrial TCA cycle metabolites control physiology and disease

Mitochondrial metabolites contribute to more than biosynthesis, and it is clear that they influence multiple cellular functions in a variety of ways. Here, Martínez-Reyes and Chandel review key metabolites and describe their effects on processes involved in physiology and disease including chromatin dynamics, immunity, and hypoxia.

Inmaculada Martínez-Reyes
Navdeep S. Chandel

A deep learning model to predict RNA-Seq expression of tumours from whole slide images

RNA-sequencing of tumour tissue can provide important diagnostic and prognostic information but this is costly and not routinely performed in all clinical settings. Here, the authors show that whole slide histology slides—part of routine care—can be used to predict RNA-sequencing data and thus reduce the need for additional analyses.

Benoît Schmauch
Alberto Romagnoni
Gilles Wainrib

Circadian regulation of mitochondrial uncoupling and lifespan

Disruption of different components of molecular circadian clocks has varying effects on health and lifespan of model organisms. Here the authors show that loss of period extends life in drosophila melanogaster.

Matt Ulgherait
Mimi Shirasu-Hiza

Circadian control of brain glymphatic and lymphatic fluid flow

Glymphatic function is increased during the rest phase while more cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drains directly to the lymphatic system during the active phase. The water channel aquaporin-4 supports these endogenous, circadian rhythms in CSF distribution.

Lauren M. Hablitz
Virginia Plá
Maiken Nedergaard

Brain-inspired replay for continual learning with artificial neural networks

One challenge that faces artificial intelligence is the inability of deep neural networks to continuously learn new information without catastrophically forgetting what has been learnt before. To solve this problem, here the authors propose a replay-based algorithm for deep learning without the need to store data.

Gido M. van de Ven
Hava T. Siegelmann
Andreas S. Tolias

Single-cell RNA-seq reveals that glioblastoma recapitulates a normal neurodevelopmental hierarchy

Glioblastoma is thought to arise from neural stem cells. Here, to investigate this, the authors use single-cell RNA-sequencing to compare glioblastoma to the fetal human brain, and find a similarity between glial progenitor cells and a subpopulation of glioblastoma cells.

Charles P. Couturier
Shamini Ayyadhury
Kevin Petrecca

Deep learning for genomics using Janggu

Deep learning is becoming a popular approach for understanding biological processes but can be hard to adapt to new questions. Here, the authors develop Janggu, a python library that aims to ease data acquisition and model evaluation and facilitate deep learning applications in genomics.

Wolfgang Kopp
Altuna Akalin

Versatile whole-organ/body staining and imaging based on electrolyte-gel properties of biological tissues

Tissue clearing has revolutionised histology, but limited penetration of antibodies and stains into thick tissue segments is still a bottleneck. Here, the authors characterise optically cleared tissue as an electrolyte gel and apply this knowledge to stain the entirety of thick tissue samples.

Etsuo A. Susaki
Chika Shimizu
Hiroki R. Ueda

Sestrins are evolutionarily conserved mediators of exercise benefits

Exercise improves metabolic health and physical condition, particularly important for health in aged individuals. Here, the authors identify that Sestrins, proteins induced by exercise, are key mediators of the metabolic adaptation to exercise and increase endurance through the AKT and PGC1a axes.

Myungjin Kim
Alyson Sujkowski
Jun Hee Lee

Synergistic effect of fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C against KRAS mutated cancers

Fasting diets are emerging as an approach to delay tumor progression and improve cancer therapies. Here, the authors show that the combination of fasting-mimicking diet with vitamin C decreases tumor development and increases chemotherapy efficacy in KRAS-mutant cancer.

Maira Di Tano
Franca Raucci
Valter D. Longo

Single-cell RNA sequencing demonstrates the molecular and cellular reprogramming of metastatic lung adenocarcinoma

Understanding the mechanisms that lead to lung adenocarcinoma metastasis is important for identifying new therapeutics. Here, the authors document the changes in the transcriptome of human lung adenocarcinoma using single-cell sequencing and link cancer cell signatures to immune cell dynamics.

Nayoung Kim
Hong Kwan Kim
Hae-Ock Lee

A deep learning system accurately classifies primary and metastatic cancers using passenger mutation patterns

Some cancer patients first present with metastases where the location of the primary is unidentified; these are difficult to treat. In this study, using machine learning, the authors develop a method to determine the tissue of origin of a cancer based on whole sequencing data.

Gurnit Atwal
PCAWG Consortium

Single-cell RNA-sequencing of differentiating iPS cells reveals dynamic genetic effects on gene expression

Studying the genetic effects on early stages of human development is challenging due to a scarcity of biological material. Here, the authors utilise induced pluripotent stem cells from 125 donors to track gene expression changes and expression quantitative trait loci at single cell resolution during in vitro endoderm differentiation.

Anna S. E. Cuomo
Daniel D. Seaton
Oliver Stegle

Trajectory-based differential expression analysis for single-cell sequencing data

Downstream of trajectory inference for cell lineages based on scRNA-seq data, differential expression analysis yields insight into biological processes. Here, Van den Berge et al. develop tradeSeq, a framework for the inference of within and between-lineage differential expression, based on negative binomial generalized additive models.

Koen Van den Berge
Hector Roux de Bézieux
Lieven Clement

Large-scale genome-wide analysis links lactic acid bacteria from food with the gut microbiome

Here, Pasolli et al. perform a large-scale genome-wide comparative analysis of publicly available and newly sequenced food and human metagenomes to investigate the prevalence and diversity of lactic acid bacteria (LAB), indicating food as a major source of LAB species in the human gut.

Edoardo Pasolli
Francesca De Filippis
Danilo Ercolini

Genetic history from the Middle Neolithic to present on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia

Ancient DNA analysis of early European farmers has found a high level of genetic affinity with present-day Sardinians. Here, the authors generate genome-wide capture data for 70 individuals from Sardinia spanning the Middle Neolithic to Medieval period to reveal relationships with mainland European populations shifting over time.

Joseph H. Marcus
Cosimo Posth
John Novembre

Sex and APOE ε4 genotype modify the Alzheimer’s disease serum metabolome

Sex and the APOE ε4 genotype are important risk factors for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In the current study, the authors investigate how sex and APOE ε4 genotype modify the association between Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers and metabolites in serum.

Matthias Arnold
Kwangsik Nho
Gabi Kastenmüller

Integrative pathway enrichment analysis of multivariate omics data

Multi-omics datasets pose major challenges to data interpretation and hypothesis generation owing to their high-dimensional molecular profiles. Here, the authors develop ActivePathways method, which uses data fusion techniques for integrative pathway analysis of multi-omics data and candidate gene discovery.

Marta Paczkowska
Jonathan Barenboim

Mitochondrial uncoupler BAM15 reverses diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance in mice

Obesity is a global pandemic with limited treatment options. Here, the authors show evidence in mice that the mitochondrial uncoupler BAM15 effectively induces fat loss without affecting food intake or compromising lean body mass.

Stephanie J. Alexopoulos
Sing-Young Chen
Kyle L. Hoehn

Restriction of essential amino acids dictates the systemic metabolic response to dietary protein dilution

Dietary protein dilution, where protein is reduced and replaced by other nutrient sources without caloric restriction, promotes metabolic health via the hepatokine Fgf21. Here, the authors show that essential amino acids threonine and tryptophan are necessary and sufficient to induce these effects.

Yann W. Yap
Patricia M. Rusu
Adam J. Rose

Multiplexed CRISPR technologies for gene editing and transcriptional regulation

Multiplexed CRISPR technologies have recently emerged as powerful approaches for genetic editing and transcriptional regulation. Here the authors review this emerging technology and discuss challenges and considerations for future studies.

Nicholas S. McCarty
Alicia E. Graham
Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro

Determining sequencing depth in a single-cell RNA-seq experiment

For single-cell RNA-seq experiments the sequencing budget is limited, and how it should be optimally allocated to maximize information is not clear. Here the authors develop a mathematical framework to show that, for estimating many gene properties, the optimal allocation is to sequence at the depth of one read per cell per gene.

Martin Jinye Zhang
Vasilis Ntranos

Sphingolipids produced by gut bacteria enter host metabolic pathways impacting ceramide levels

Ceramides are a type of sphingolipid (SL) that have been shown to play a role in several metabolic disorders. Here, the authors investigate the effect of SL-production by gut Bacteroides on host SL homeostasis and show that microbiome-derived SLs enter host circulation and alter ceramide production.

Elizabeth L. Johnson
Stacey L. Heaver
Ruth E. Ley

Ancient genomes reveal social and genetic structure of Late Neolithic Switzerland

European populations underwent strong genetic changes during the Neolithic. Here, Furtwängler et al. provide ancient nuclear and mitochondrial genomic data from the region of Switzerland during the end of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age that reveal a complex genetic turnover during the arrival of steppe ancestry.

Anja Furtwängler
A. B. Rohrlach
Johannes Krause

Brain insulin sensitivity is linked to adiposity and body fat distribution

Brain insulin action regulates eating behavior and whole-body energy fluxes, however the impact of brain insulin resistance on long-term weight and body fat composition is unknown. Here, the authors show that high brain insulin sensitivity is linked to weight loss during lifestyle intervention and associates with a favorable body fat distribution.

Stephanie Kullmann
Vera Valenta
Martin Heni

Macrophages directly contribute collagen to scar formation during zebrafish heart regeneration and mouse heart repair

Macrophages mediate the fibrotic response after a heart attack by extracellular matrix turnover and cardiac fibroblasts activation. Here the authors identify an evolutionarily-conserved function of macrophages that contributes directly to the forming post-injury scar through cell-autonomous deposition of collagen.

Filipa C. Simões
Thomas J. Cahill
Paul R. Riley

Sexual-dimorphism in human immune system aging

Whether the immune system aging differs between men and women is barely known. Here the authors characterize gene expression, chromatin state and immune subset composition in the blood of healthy humans 22 to 93 years of age, uncovering shared as well as sex-unique alterations, and create a web resource to interactively explore the data.

Eladio J. Márquez
Cheng-han Chung

Collagen-producing lung cell atlas identifies multiple subsets with distinct localization and relevance to fibrosis

Collagen production by lung cells is critical to maintain organ architecture but can also drive pathological scarring. Here the authors perform single cell RNA sequencing of collagen-producing lung cells identifying a subset of pathologic fibroblasts characterized by Cthrc1 expression which are concentrated within fibroblastic foci in fibrotic lungs and show a pro-fibrotic phenotype.

Tatsuya Tsukui
Kai-Hui Sun
Dean Sheppard

Pathway and network analysis of more than 2500 whole cancer genomes

Understanding deregulation of biological pathways in cancer can provide insight into disease etiology and potential therapies. Here, as part of the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) consortium, the authors present pathway and network analysis of 2583 whole cancer genomes from 27 tumour types.

Matthew A. Reyna

Single-cell transcriptomics identifies an effectorness gradient shaping the response of CD4 + T cells to cytokines

Cytokines critically control the differentiation and functions of activated naïve and memory T cells. Here the authors show, using multi-omics and single-cell analyses, that naïve and memory T cells exhibit distinct cytokine responses, in which an ‘effectorness gradient’ is depicted by a transcriptional continuum, which shapes the downstream genetic programs.

Eddie Cano-Gamez
Blagoje Soskic
Gosia Trynka

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UMD Graduate Student Sadia Nourin Awarded 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Computer science graduate student Sadia Nourin (B.S. ’23, computer science; B.S. ’23, finance) is among nine current students and recent alumni of the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences who have been awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship honors outstanding graduate students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Across the university, 22 current students and recent alums were among the 2024 fellowship winners announced by the NSF. The college’s nine awardees include four current graduate students and five recent alums.

Nourin's research focuses on security, network privacy and developing methodologies for measuring and circumventing censorship. Her work highlights the critical role of technology in tackling modern issues, and she is deeply engaged in exploring the intersection of technology, global challenges and human rights. In May 2023 , Nourin received an Internet Society Pulse Research Fellowship , her proposal standing out among a competitive pool from 35 countries.

NSF fellows receive three years of support, including a $37,000 annual stipend, a $16,000 cost-of-education allowance for tuition and fees, and access to opportunities for professional development.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.

Since 1952, NSF has funded more than 60,000 Graduate Research Fellowships out of more than 500,000 applicants. At least 42 fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates and more than 450 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences.

—Story by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications

The Department welcomes comments, suggestions and corrections. Send email to editor [-at-] cs [dot] umd [dot] edu .

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