Peer-reviewed multidisciplinary journal of the US National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), publishing research across the biological, physical and social sciences.
Researchers led by Université de Montréal found 45 people from Montreal's Notre-Dame Cemetery consistent with 100% European ancestry, mostly French. The result tests accounts of settler-Indigenous mixing in New France, for one burial ground only.
Reality
Biologists at four US universities found identical genetic changes in jellyfish lineages separated by more than 600 million years. Most did not track the eyes and other traits that also evolved repeatedly, the authors report.
Reality
PNAS review reports the contiguous US lost about 300 of its 1,450-plus mid-century glaciers and 35% of glacier area. Rockies survivors persist in shaded niches, and the author writes that shrinkage continues, perhaps faster.
Reality
Chinese researchers who sequenced 16 new mayfly genomes report that mayflies and dragonflies form one group, Palaeoptera, sister to wing-folding insects. Their fossil-calibrated clock puts crown-group winged insects in the Early Devonian.
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North Carolina State University researchers say calcium makes the protein Sfi1 go slack, tightening a fishnet of myonemes around a single-celled ciliate. They are still working out what starts the calcium signal and how the cell resets to fire again.
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A study in PNAS puts the biggest constraint on cocoa yields on heavy rain while trees are flowering, and the researcher who led it says that makes the risk forecastable. The response it calls for is drainage work on smallholder farms.
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Structural work on RE.2.2 from Gao George Fu's laboratory finds tighter receptor binding, a reshuffled antibody escape profile and a spike glycan at N529 that has not been seen in earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants.
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Storms crossing the weakest prestorm temperature gradients ended up around 40% stronger than those crossing the sharpest, which hands forecasters a predictor their coupled ocean models cannot yet resolve.
Reality