Most of Wine Country’s agricultural workers have been exposed to wildfires, new survey finds
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 26-Nov-2025 00:11 ET (26-Nov-2025 05:11 GMT/UTC)
Sonoma County is known for its rolling fields and famed vineyards, making the region a pillar in California’s wine industry. But a sweeping new survey from UC Berkeley has found that approximately 75% of agricultural workers there have worked during wildfires since 2017, raising questions about worker safety and a program that could further expose workers during wildfire evacuations.
A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows how RNA — normally just a messenger — gets hijacked to build liquid-like “droplet hubs” in the nucleus of cells. These hubs act as command centers, switching on growth-promoting genes. But the research team at Texas A&M University didn’t stop at observing this; they created a molecular switch to dissolve the hubs on demand, cutting off the cancer’s growth at its source.
A team of scientists from Chile and the United States discovered dozens of red cusk-eels, fish prized in Chilean seafood markets and celebrated in a poem by renowned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, embedded in a bushy thicket of tubeworms at a methane seep off the coast of central Chile. This is the first time this commercially important species has been documented using methane seeps as habitat.
Researchers at Lehigh University have identified differences in the protein composition of bone marrow extracted from the hip versus the shoulder—an insight that could help refine regenerative treatments for joint injuries. The study, published in ACS Omega, used machine learning models to analyze 109 proteins and found six that may distinguish between the two extraction sites. The findings highlight how the source of bone marrow aspirate can influence its biological makeup, offering a framework for more standardized analysis of bone marrow-based therapies and other biological tissues.