Scientists have discovered how a single ingredient can create glossy, tasty, melt-in-the-mouth chocolate without having to go through the complex and lengthy tempering process. One of two phospholipids added to cocoa butter or molten chocolate in miniscule amounts promote the formation of the desirable chocolate crystal structure, called form V. This crystal form is crucial […]

How flowers form properly within a limited time frame has been a mystery, at least until now. Researchers from Japan and China have discovered how a multi-tasking protein helps flowers to develop as expected. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., researchers from Nanjing University and Nara Institute of Science […]

A new study by Tel Aviv University and University of California, Berkeley proposes a model according to which the establishment of seaweed farms in river estuaries significantly reduces nitrogen concentrations in the estuary and prevents pollution in estuarine and marine environments. The study was headed by doctoral student Meiron Zollmann, under the joint supervision of […]

Anxiety, addiction, and other psychiatric disorders are often characterized by intense states of what scientists call arousal: The heart races, blood pressure readings rise, breaths shorten, and “bad” decisions are made. In an effort to understand how these states influence the brain’s decision-making processes, scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai analyzed […]

Hispanic people with a high percentage of American Indigenous ancestry are at increased risk of an omega-3 nutritional deficiency that could affect their heart health and contribute to harmful inflammation, new research suggests. Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and their collaborators have linked American Indigenous ancestry with increased risk of omega-3 […]

Reports of grant applications being rejected by the Australian Research Council for citing preprint studies have sparked an outcry from the academic community. For its 2021 funding calls, the ARC introduced a rule that bars applicants from citing preprint material in their grant applications. Nature reports that more than 20 applications were deemed ineligible because […]

A new paper co-written by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholar who studies the legal and ethical implications of advanced biotechnologies outlines an unexplored tool to regulate the medically and ethically dubious practice of heritable human-genome editing: patent law. Applied judiciously, patent law could create an “ethical thicket” around human genome editing that ultimately discourages […]

Wind energy continues to see strong growth, solid performance, and low prices in the U.S., according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). With levelized costs of just over $30 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for newly built projects, the cost of wind is […]

A single glass of wine can quickly – significantly – raise the drinker’s risk for atrial fibrillation, according to new research by UC San Francisco. The study provides the first evidence that alcohol consumption substantially increases the chance of the heart rhythm condition occurring within a few hours. The findings might run counter to a […]

In a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, researchers at Public Health England and the MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, found that the estimated risk of hospital admission was two times higher for individuals diagnosed with the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, compared to those with the Alpha variant, after adjusting for […]