New test to study language development in youth with Down syndrome

Cyberbullying already accounts for one in four cases of bullying and, according to the latest UNICEF report issued on the occasion of 'Safer Internet Day', it affects at least two students per class in Spanish schools. In this regard, the Laboratory of Studies on Coexistence and Violence Prevention at the University of Cordoba, under the direction of professors Rosario Ortega-Ruiz and Eva M. Romera, has just published a study examining family communication and its impact on cyber-gossip and the excessive use of social media-two of the main factors with the greatest influence on cyber-bullying. Their results point in the same direction: an atmosphere of trust in the family is an antidote to this type of behaviour, reducing the risk of schoolchildren engaging inproblematic ...

Calibration and validation (CAL/VAL) is a key technology for quantitative application of space-borne remote sensing data. However, the complex space environment can cause many uncertainties and degrade the calibration accuracy. In-flight calibration is always needed. The thermal emission of the Moon is stable over hundreds of years because there is no atmosphere and no significant physical or chemical change on its surface. The deep space view of the Microwave Humidity Sounder onboard NOAA-18 has viewed the Moon many times every year. Under solar illumination, the lunar surface shows stable and periodical variation in microwave brightness temperature (TB). The Moon is a potential calibration source for thermal calibration The ...

A decade ago, the discovery of quasiparticles called magnetic skyrmions provided important new clues into how microscopic spin textures will enable spintronics, a new class of electronics that use the orientation of an electron's spin rather than its charge to encode data. But although scientists have made big advances in this very young field, they still don't fully understand how to design spintronics materials that would allow for ultrasmall, ultrafast, low-power devices. Skyrmions may seem promising, but scientists have long treated skyrmions as merely 2D objects. Recent studies, however, have suggested that 2D skyrmions could actually be the genesis of a 3D spin pattern called hopfions. ...

In all adult vertebrates, neural stem cells can be recruited to produce new neurons in the brain. However, little is known about these so-called "activation" processes. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, CNRS, and Tel Aviv University working in collaboration with the École Polytechnique and INRAE have successfully performed 3D visualization and spatial and temporal distribution analysis of neural stem cell activation in the adult brain of a zebrafish vertebrate model. Their findings demonstrate for the first time that activation events for these cells are coordinated ...

Powerful algorithms used by Netflix, Amazon and Facebook can 'predict' the biological language of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, scientists have found. Big data produced during decades of research was fed into a computer language model to see if artificial intelligence can make more advanced discoveries than humans. Academics based at St John's College, University of Cambridge, found the machine-learning technology could decipher the 'biological language' of cancer, Alzheimer's, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Their ground-breaking study has been published in the scientific journal PNAS today (April 8 2021) and could be used in the future to 'correct the grammatical mistakes inside cells that cause disease'. Professor Tuomas Knowles, lead ...

The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in preschool and school children is an important benchmark for deciding whether to open kindergartens and schools. The screening study "Fr1da" led by Anette-Gabriele Ziegler tests children in Bavaria for an early stage of type 1 diabetes. These tests include the collection of blood samples. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers had decided to use the valuable study infrastructure of the Fr1da study to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections, too. For this, they developed a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test with particularly high accuracy. During the first ...

The rainfall over the Yangtze River Valley (YRV) in June 2020 broke the record since 1979 (Figure 1). As of June 28, the People's Daily Online reported that there were more than 12 million people affected by flood disasters related to this torrential rain, with deaths or disappearances of 78 persons and a direct economic loss of more than 25 billion CNY. Recently, scientists from South China Sea Institute of Oceanology (SCSIO), Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the cause of the record-breaking rainfall over the YRV. According to their study published in Science China Earth Sciences on March 19, 2021, all three oceans of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) demonstrate an mRNA delivery system that effectively produces BDNF protein in rat brain to protect neurons from ischemia Tokyo - A lack of oxygen to brain tissue--known as ischemia--leads to the death of neurons, which results in stroke. Despite considerable research, there are currently no treatments that successfully prevent neuronal death. Now, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) researchers have reported a way of delivering mRNA to produce a therapeutic protein that protects neurons. Their findings, demonstrated in rats, ...

Cycling at moderate intensity during dialysis could drastically improve the heart health of patients with kidney failure and result in significant savings for the NHS, according to new research by the University of Leicester supported by the charity Kidney Research UK and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre. Patients in the CYCLE-HD study were offered 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise on a specially adapted bicycle during their regular dialysis sessions. Dialysis can lead to long-term scarring of the heart, which can accumulate over time and lead to heart failure. The study set out to examine ...

Ensuring sustainability of crop and timber production would mitigate the greatest drivers of terrestrial wildlife decline, responsible for 40% of the overall extinction risk of amphibians, birds and mammals, according to a paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. These results were generated using a new metric which, for the first time, allows business, governments and civil society to assess their potential contributions to stemming global species loss, and can be used to calculate national, regional, sector-based, or institution-specific targets. The work was led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Post-2020 Taskforce, hosted by Newcastle ...