There’s a sweet spot for the amount of daily steps you need to counteract a highly sedentary lifestyle, and research indicates what it is.

Four decades ago, researchers raced to image proteins with electron microscopes cooled with liquid helium to near absolute zero. They hoped the extreme cold would reduce the radiation damage produced by the microscopes’ electron beams, resulting in sharper views. But inexplicably the images invariably came back fuzzier than when the machines ran at warmer liquid nitrogen temperatures. After years of frustration, helium cooling was all but abandoned. Now, researchers in the United Kingdom have finally figured out the problem: The lower temperature causes ice surrounding the proteins to buckle, distorting the images. And they’ve come up with a workaround to prevent the buckling and sharpen the resolution.

“It’s great they managed to get this to work,” says Peter Denes, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Elspeth Garman, a structural biologist at the University of Oxford, adds that the resolution improvement “will feed into getting better detail of bigger protein complexes and smaller protein components within these complexes,” she says.

How can dusty snowmelt influence future water flow in the Colorado River, which is responsible for supplying water to approximately 40 million people? This | Earth And The Environment

Commvault flaw CVE-2025–34028 enables pre-auth SSRF leading to code execution; fix in 11.38.20+ versions.

Irritable bowel syndrome, chronic itching, asthma and migraine are in many cases hard-to-treat conditions. They have in common that they are triggered by an excessive immune response—which in severe cases can be life-threatening.

A team of researchers led by the University of Bonn has now identified a promising bioactive compound that could effectively reduce symptoms and slash fatality risk. The compound blocks a receptor on certain defense cells, thus preventing a derailed immune response. The study findings have been published in the journal Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.

If you have ever been bitten by a mosquito, you will know how annoying the resulting itching can be. This is in large part due to mast cells— immune cells found in the skin and mucous membranes that are full of inflammatory messengers. When a person is bitten, antibodies bind to substances in the mosquito’s saliva, and this complex can activate the mast cells, which then release their payload all at once. This leads to the symptoms of redness, swelling and itching, which usually subside after a short while, or even quicker, using the right ointment.

They used declassified US documents to develop the technology.

Imagine if a plant in a farmer’s field could warn a grower that it needs water? Or if a farmer could signal to plants that dry weather lies ahead, thereby prompting the plants to conserve water?

It may sound extraordinary, but researchers at the Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS) have taken a major step toward advancing such two-way communication with plants.

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has solved a century-old conundrum of how plants internally signal stress. By understanding how plant communication systems work, the team may then begin to exploit those signals to create plants that can communicate with people and each other, and be programmed to respond to specific stressors.

Lake sediment cores in Guatemala reveal directional ground shaking from the 1976 earthquake, offering rare insight into seismic directivity and helping reconstruct a 4,000-year paleoseismic history. Sediment cores collected from four lakes in Guatemala have captured evidence of the direction in w