Opioid use disorder is associated with more than 350,000 deaths annually worldwide. Guided by the need for an increased understanding of critical neurobiological features of addiction, researchers have now found a unique molecular signature and genes in the orbitofrontal cortex associated with heroin-seeking behavior. A preclinical rodent model implicated a gene called Shisa7 as the key predictor. A new study in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, provides valuable insights into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying heroin addiction and may have implications for the development of innovative strategies to combat the ongoing opioid epidemic.

Getting zapped with millions of volts of electricity may not sound like a healthy activity, but for some trees, it is. A new study, published in New Phytologist, reports that some tropical tree species are not only able to tolerate lightning strikes, but benefit from them. The trees may have even evolved to act as lightning rods. The research was led by Evan Gora, a forest ecologist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Gora studies how lightning impacts biodiversity and carbon storage in Panama’s tropical forests.

A new study analyzed nearly four decades of deep ocean observations to reveal significant cooling and freshening of deep water in the Subtropical North Atlantic. The results suggest that warmer, saltier deep waters observed across other parts of the Atlantic may reach the region within the next 10 years, potentially influencing large-scale sea level changes and altering the flow of ocean currents in the region.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly increased the computational load on data centers, resulting in substantial carbon emissions. To mitigate these emissions, future data centers should be strategically planned and operated to fully utilize renewable energy resources while meeting growing computational demands. This study aims to investigate how much carbon emission reduction can be achieved by using a carbon-oriented demand response to guide the optimal planning and operation of data centers. An empirical study based on the proposed models is conducted on real-world data from China. The results from the empirical analysis show that newly constructed data centers are recommended to be built in Gansu Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Sichuan Province, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and Qinghai Province, accounting for 57% of the total national increase in server capacity. 33% of the computational load from Eastern China should be transferred to the West, which could reduce the overall load carbon emissions by 26%.