Alcohol withdrawal rates in hospitalized patients during COVID-19 pandemic

What The Study Did: Researchers in this randomized clinical trial examined the effectiveness of incentives offered for laboratory-confirmed abstinence from alcohol among American Indian and Alaska Native adults diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Authors: Michael G. McDonell, Ph.D., of Washington State University in Spokane, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.4768) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding and support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...

What The Study Did: This study combined the results of 27 studies with 10,000 participants to investigate the association between cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes and high blood pressure and cognitive impairment in people with schizophrenia. Authors: Christoph U. Correll, M.D., of the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0015) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest ...

Water levels in the world's ponds, lakes and human-managed reservoirs rise and fall from season to season. But until now, it has been difficult to parse out exactly how much of that variation is caused by humans as opposed to natural cycles. Analysis of new satellite data published March 3 in Nature shows fully 57 percent of the seasonal variability in Earth's surface water storage now occurs in dammed reservoirs and other water bodies managed by people. "Humans have a dominant effect on Earth's water cycle," said lead author Sarah Cooley, a postdoctoral scholar ...

Researchers from Bremen, together with their colleagues from the Max Planck Genome Center in Cologne and the aquatic research institute Eawag from Switzerland, have discovered a unique bacterium that lives inside a unicellular eukaryote and provides it with energy. Unlike mitochondria, this so-called endosymbiont derives energy from the respiration of nitrate, not oxygen. "Such partnership is completely new," says Jana Milucka, the senior author on the Nature. "A symbiosis that is based on respiration and transfer of energy is to this date unprecedented". In general, among eukaryotes, symbioses ...

An international research group led by the University of Basel has developed a promising strategy for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Using two different viruses as vehicles, they administered specific tumor components in experiments on mice with cancer in order to stimulate their immune system to attack the tumor. The approach is now being tested in clinical studies. Making use of the immune system as an ally in the fight against cancer forms the basis of a wide range of modern cancer therapies. One of these is therapeutic cancer vaccination: following diagnosis, specialists set about determining which components of the tumor could function as an identifying feature for the immune system. The patient is then administered ...

The universe was created by a giant bang; the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and then it started to expand. The expansion is ongoing: it is still being stretched out in all directions like a balloon being inflated. Physicists agree on this much, but something is wrong. Measuring the expansion rate of the universe in different ways leads to different results. So, is something wrong with the methods of measurement? Or is something going on in the universe that physicists have not yet discovered and therefore have not taken into account? It could very well be the latter, according to several physicists, i.a. Martin S. Sloth, Professor of Cosmology at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). In a new scientific article, he and his SDU ...

A new software tool allows researchers to quickly query datasets generated from single-cell sequencing. Users can identify which cell types any combination of genes are active in. Published in Nature Methods on 1st March, the open-access 'scfind' software enables swift analysis of multiple datasets containing millions of cells by a wide range of users, on a standard computer. Processing times for such datasets are just a few seconds, saving time and computing costs. The tool, developed by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, can be used much like a search engine, as users can input free text as well as gene names. Techniques to sequence the genetic material from an individual cell have advanced ...

Information is encoded in data. This is true for most aspects of modern everyday life, but it is also true in most branches of contemporary physics, and extracting useful and meaningful information from very large data sets is a key mission for many physicists. In statistical mechanics, large data sets are daily business. A classic example is the partition function, a complex mathematical object that describes physical systems at equilibrium. This mathematical object can be seen as made up by many points, each describing a degree of freedom of a physical system, that is, the minimum number of data that can describe all of its properties. An ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Boron, a metalloid element that sits next to carbon in the periodic table, has many traits that make it potentially useful as a drug component. Nonetheless, only five FDA-approved drugs contain boron, largely because molecules that contain boron are unstable in the presence of molecular oxygen. MIT chemists have now designed a boron-containing chemical group that is 10,000 times more stable than its predecessors. This could make it possible to incorporate boron into drugs and potentially improve the drugs' ability to bind their targets, the researchers say. "It's an entity ...

Judging by its massive, bone-crushing teeth, gigantic skull and powerful jaw, there is no doubt that the Anteosaurus, a premammalian reptile that roamed the African continent 265 to 260 million years ago - during a period known as the middle Permian - was a ferocious carnivore. However, while it was previously thought that this beast of a creature - that grew to about the size of an adult hippo or rhino, and featuring a thick crocodilian tail - was too heavy and sluggish to be an effective hunter, a new study has shown that the Anteosaurus would have been able to outrun, track down and kill its prey effectively. Despite its name and fierce appearance, ...