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In a world where water shortage is becoming an increasing concern, and where population increase seems inevitable, food shortage is an overwhelming concern for many. In this paper, the authors aim to characterize a drought-resistant strain of A. thaliana, investigating the cause for its water resistance. These and similar studies help us learn how plants could be engineered to improve their ability to flourish in a changing climate.

The authors created a board game to teach young children about healthy eating habits to see whether an interactive and family-oriented method would be effective at introducing and maintaining a love for fruits and veggies. Results showed that children developed a liking for fruits and vegetables, and none regressed. Half maintained their level of enjoyment for fruits and vegetables during the research period, while the other half had a positive increase. The results show that a simple interactive game can shape how young children relate to food and encourage them to maintain healthy habits.

Palermo et al. examined the effect of group size on drinking habits of college and high school students. The authors found that both high school and college students tended to consume the most alcohol in group sizes of 4 or more, independent of how frequently they drink. They also found that the proportion of college students that drink is nearly twice the proportion of high school students that drink. This study supports previous findings that underage drinking happens in large groups and suggests that effective intervention in underage drinking would be at the group level.

Foraminifera are a diverse phylum of marine protists that produce elaborate shells. Because of their abundance and morphological diversity, foraminiferal fossil assemblages are used for biostratigraphy, to accurately date sedimentary rocks and to characterize past ocean environments. In this paper, authors collected fossils within the Morozaki Group in central Honshu, Japan, to assess past marine environments and species diversity.

White pieces make the first move in chess games, and there are several opening strategies and consequent defense strategies that white and black pieces, respectively, can take . The author of this paper investigated whether taking a specific opening and defense strategy, as well as playing as white vs. black, can increase the chances of winning the game, by playing against various human and computer opponents.

In a common high school experiment to measure friction coefficients, a weighted mass attached to a spring scale is dragged across a surface at a constant velocity. While the constant velocity is necessary for an accurate measurement, it can be difficult to maintain and this can lead to large errors. Here, the authors designed a new experiment to measure friction coefficients in the classroom using only static force and show that their method has a lower standard deviation than the traditional experiment.

Disruption of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is related to many neurological disorders, and can be caused by oxidative stress to cerebral microvascular endothelial cells (CMECs) composing the BBB. The authors of the paper investigated the protective effects of the total saponins in the leaves of Panax notoginseng (LPNS) on oxidative-stress-induced damage in a mouse cerebral microvascular endothelial cell line.

Hydrogen sulfide is toxic at high concentrations, but at low concentrations may be helpful for plant growth. This study characterizes the effect of hydrogen sulfide exposure on leafy plant growth. Bok choy hearts were grown in the presence of hydrogen sulfide, and measured for new leaf growth and flowering.

This study examines the possibility of utilizing proteins from Drosophila melanogaster in early drug discovery. Structural and sequence analysis of five diverse Drosophila proteins and its human homologs were conducted. Drosophila proteins with high conservation of amino acids at functionally significant positions are better candidates for use as human surrogate in drug discovery efforts.

Machine learning systems are often expected to make fair decisions, yet the most widely used fairness criteria—independence, separation, and sufficiency—cannot generally be satisfied at the same time. In this study, students tested these criteria using a logistic regression model on a real-world student performance dataset and found that each criterion was met only at different prediction thresholds, with no threshold satisfying all three simultaneously. These results illustrate the inherent trade-offs in algorithmic fairness and highlight why achieving perfectly fair machine learning models is often impossible in practice.