While exercise is great for both your mental and physical health, new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has found that exercise intensity could result in changes to the internal gut biome.

A joint study by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, published as the cover article in ACS Nano, revealed that water dramatically changes the structure of desalination membranes. Using advanced cryo-TEM tomography, the researchers showed that membranes expand by about 30% or more when hydrated—findings that challenge decades of research based only on dry membranes. This breakthrough provides new insights into reverse osmosis, the leading desalination technology, and is expected to improve the design and efficiency of membranes for clean water production. The study was led by Dr. Tamar Segal-Peretz, Dr. Guy Ramon, Prof. Manish Kumar, and Dr. Adi Ben-Zvi, with support from Israeli and U.S. funding bodies.

A research team has developed 3D-NOD, a spatiotemporal deep learning framework that leverages 3D point cloud data to identify new plant organs with exceptional precision.

A research team has developed a hybrid evaluation method that integrates a radiative transfer model with multidimensional imaging data, offering more precise monitoring of rice canopy traits linked to water stress.

A research team has developed a cost-effective method to measure wheat plant height in unprecedented detail using drone-based cross-circling oblique (CCO) imaging and 3D canopy modeling.

A CMCC-led study shows that simple behavioral interventions, such as a personalized water-saving report, not only help save water but also trigger positive spillovers on other resources, such as electricity.

Recent advancements in monocot transformation, using leaf tissue as explant material, have expanded the number of grass species capable of transgenesis. However, the complexity of vectors and reliance on inducible excision of essential morphogenic regulators have limited widespread application. Work by researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) provides an important proof-of-concept for the use of both altruistic vectors and viral-expressed morphogenic regulators for improving plant transformation. This study showed that these technologies can be combined to increase efficiencies of embryonic calli formation, a limiting step in monocot leaf transformation, to improve protocol efficiencies and reduce experimental complexity. Continued improvement of leaf transformation protocols in monocot species has the potential to impact crop production worldwide.

A research team has developed PlantCaFo, an advanced few-shot plant disease recognition model powered by foundation models, capable of achieving high accuracy with only a handful of training images.