Male bladder cancer vulnerability could lead to a new treatment approach

Veterinarians, pet owners and breeders often have preconceived notions about each other, but by investigating these biases, experts at the University of Arizona College of Veterinary Medicine hope to improve both human communication and animal care. "Veterinary medicine may require us to treat the patient, but we are unable to improve pet patient outcomes without human client consent and trust. Communication is an essential component of veterinary practice," said Ryane Englar, an associate professor and the director of veterinary skills development for the college. "As an anecdotal example, vets and breeders don't always get along, but there was no research on these subjects. I wondered, what do the groups want and need? If ...

Washington, D.C. - April 28, 2021 - As of April 2021, more than 3 million people worldwide have died of COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, researchers developed accurate diagnostic tests and identified health conditions that correlated with worse outcomes. However, a clinical predictor of who faces the highest risk of being hospitalized, put on a ventilator or dying from the disease has remained largely out of reach. This week in mSphere, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers describe a two-step prognostic test that can help predict a patient's response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. The test combines a disease risk factor score with a test ...

LAWRENCE -- College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place. New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don't return to their universities for a second year in the United States. "We were interested ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Socially just policies aimed at limiting the Earth's human population hold tremendous potential for advancing equity while simultaneously helping to mitigate the effects of climate change, Oregon State University researchers say. In a paper published this week in Sustainability Science, William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of the OSU College of Forestry also note that fertility rates are a dramatically understudied and overlooked aspect of the climate emergency. That's especially true relative to the attention devoted to other climate-related topics including energy, short-lived pollutants and ...

Biologists use the term adaptive radiation to describe a phenomenon in which new species rapidly evolve from an ancestral species, often in response to changes in the local environment that lead to new biological niches becoming available. To understand this process, biologists often turn to the cichlids of Lake Victoria, in which over 500 species of the fish have evolved over the past 14,600 years. As Professor Masato Nikaido of Tokyo Tech explains, "The level of genetic differentiation among species is considered very low due to the short period of time after these different species began evolving, and this limited genetic differentiation provides us with a great opportunity to find candidate genes that have contributed to adaptive ...

Predatory bacteria--bacteria that eat other bacteria--grow faster and consume more resources than non-predators in the same soil, according to a new study out this week from Northern Arizona University. These active predators, which use wolfpack-like behavior, enzymes, and cytoskeletal 'fangs' to hunt and feast on other bacteria, wield important power in determining where soil nutrients go. The results of the study, published in the journal mBio this week, show predation is an important dynamic in the wild microbial realm, and suggest that these predators play an outsized role in how elements are stored in or released from soil. Like every other life form on earth, bacteria belong to intricate food webs in which organisms are connected ...

Constantina Theofanopoulou wanted to study oxytocin. Her graduate work had focused on how the hormone influences human speech development, and now she was preparing to use those findings to investigate how songbirds learn to sing. The problem was that birds do not have oxytocin. Or so she was told. "Everywhere that I looked in the genome," she says, "I was unable to find a gene called oxytocin in birds." Theofanopoulou eventually came across mesotocin, the analogue for oxytocin in birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But as she plumped the literature in Erich Jarvis's lab at Rockefeller, the waters grew muddier. If she and Jarvis wanted to find studies on oxytocin in fish, they ...

Researchers from Erasmus School of Economics, IESE Business School, and New York University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines what business schools do wrong when conducting academic research and what changes they can make so that research contributes to improving society. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective from and for Marketing" and is authored by Stefan Stremersch, Russell Winer, and Nuno Camacho. In February 2020, an article in ...

The flightless kakapo of New Zealand is in trouble. The world's heaviest parrot--representing one of the most ancestral branches of the parrot family tree--is nearly extinct, with barely 200 adults plodding the underbrush of four small islands. Whether the last of the kakapos had the genetic resilience to survive was a question that only high-quality genomic analysis could answer. But a high-quality genome assembly did not exist for the kakapo--nor for most of the 70,000 vertebrate species alive today. Questions about how best to prevent the extinction of species ranging ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Difficult-to-treat, chronic wounds in preclinical models healed with normal scar-free skin after treatment with an acellular product discovered at Mayo Clinic. Derived from platelets, the purified exosomal product, known as PEP, was used to deliver healing messages into cells of preclinical animal models of ischemic wounds. The Mayo Clinic research team documented restoration of skin integrity, hair follicles, sweat glands, skin oils and normal hydration. Ischemic wounds occur when arteries are clogged or blocked, preventing important nutrients and oxygen from reaching the skin to drive repair. This groundbreaking study titled, "TGF-β Donor Exosome Accelerates Ischemic ...