science

Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers.

New research finds that the lactic acid bacteria in kimchi could eliminate nanoplastics from the body.

The World Institute of Kimchi announced on Wednesday that it had injected lab mice with Leuconostoc mesenteroides CBA3656, a type of lactic acid bacteria isolated from kimchi, and found that their detected nanoplastic levels were more than twice as high as those of mice not injected with CBA3656.

Edit: Link to the paper

The mentioned publication:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260

Researchers have developed a high-tech system that rapidly scans ants and converts them into detailed 3D models. Using a synchrotron accelerator, X-ray imaging, robotics, and AI, the team scanned 2,000 specimens in just a week and produced models of 800 species. The images reveal microscopic anatomy that was previously difficult to study. The growing Antscan database could become a powerful digital library of biodiversity.

The ecology of pollination has always had classic protagonists: insects, birds, and bats. However, a recent scientific discovery in Brazil is forcing biology to rewrite its books. Researchers have recorded, for the first time in the history of science, an amphibian acting as a potential pollinator.

Until very recently, conservation biology had already expanded the range of unconventional pollinators to include small marsupials, rodents, and reptiles. The inclusion of amphibians in this select ecological group raises the level of complexity of mutualistic relationships in our ecosystems.

This finding reinforces a critical warning: the global population decline of amphibians (one of the most sensitive and threatened classes of vertebrates on the planet due to climate change) may have direct, silent and as yet unmeasured cascading effects on the reproduction of species of our native flora.

doi: 10.1126/science.adi5190 and doi: 10.1016/j.fooweb.2023.e00281

"Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches."

Science paper: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae3d33

Review article: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/10/seti_admits_its_search_for/

Broadening of specral lines info: http://www.hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Atomic/broaden.html

... although mental illness puts individuals at a greater risk for becoming homeless, poverty and a lack of affordable housing remain the principal causes of homelessness...

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Homelessness has definite psychological effects, ranging from the detrimental effects of disrupted sleep to the deep psychological trauma inflicted by chronic stress, instability, and exposure to violence. Sleep problems are rampant among homeless people living on the streets or in shelters, where there is constant noise, crowding, and interruption of sleep. On the severe end of negative effects, violent physical and sexual attacks are much more likely to be made on the homeless than on the general population. For example, a sexual assault is twenty times more likely to be made on a homeless woman than on a woman in the general population. These violent assaults result in considerable emotional and psychological trauma in survivors, often leading to post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, suicide attempts, substance abuse and addiction, and further psychiatric symptoms. The death rate among the homeless is also three times greater than that of the general population, with many homeless people dying from preventable or treatable illnesses or from unprovoked violence. Homeless people with mental illness are even more vulnerable than other homeless individuals to violent attacks and death.

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According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, most homeless individuals with mental illness do not require institutionalization but would benefit from a supported housing program that offers mental health care and treatment. However, the number of affordable housing and community treatment services is insufficient to accommodate all the homeless who suffer from mental diseases. Additional resources are urgently needed so that the mentally ill homeless can have access to continuous treatment and therapy.

China has proposed to increase its overall research and development (R&D) expenditure by at least 7% per year over the next five years

China’s R&D expenditure has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Last year, it exceeded 3.9 trillion yuan (US$567 billion). For the past five years, it has has increased by at least 8% a year.

The pipeline of new drugs to fight superbugs remains “worryingly thin” and has shrunk by 35% in the last five years, experts have warned, predicting the annual number of deaths linked to drug-resistant infections globally will double to 8 million by 2050.

The number of projects from large pharma companies has shrunk by 35% over the past five years, from 92 to 60 medicines in development, according to a report from the Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF), a Netherlands-based non-profit group, and the Wellcome Trust.

“Overall, however, the R&D pipeline remains worryingly thin, and industry investment has lost momentum,” said Jayasree K Iyer, the chief executive of AMF. She described drug resistance as the biggest single threat to healthcare worldwide.

More than 1 million people die each year directly from drug resistant infections but they contribute to 4 million deaths worldwide a year. Both figures are forecast to double by 2050 – to nearly 2 million and more than 8 million respectively.

Fake references make Waite’s job as a librarian “so much harder,” she added.

“I expect this on the wider internet, but not in reputable scientific journals,” she told us. “This is a problem both for the information literacy teaching and the clinical literature searching I do to inform evidence-based practice in my hospital. It’s really worrying.”