Study shows Pinterest users pin healthy recipes, are more likely to make unhealthy ones

An international team of scientists from the Menzies Health Institute Queensland (MHIQ) at Griffith University and from City of Hope, a research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases in the U.S., have developed an experimental direct-acting antiviral therapy to treat COVID-19. Traditional antivirals reduce symptoms and help people recover earlier. Examples include Tamiflu®, zanamivir and remdesivir. This next-generation antiviral approach used gene-silencing RNA technology called siRNA (small-interfering RNA) to attack the virus' genome directly, which stops ...

ATLANTA - MAY 18, 2021 - A new study finds breast cancer survivors in general have higher risk of new cancer diagnosis compared to healthy individuals. The article, which appears in CANCER, states that compared to the general population in the United States, the risk of new cancer diagnoses among survivors was 20% higher for those with hormone receptor (HR) positive cancers and 44% higher for those with HR-negative cancers. Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed and prevalent cancer among women in the U.S., with over 3.9 million living breast cancer survivors as of 2019. The number of survivors is expected to increase with the aging population and advances in breast cancer treatment. Subsequent primary cancer (SPC) after breast cancer is a well-known late effect, but the ...

PULLMAN, Wash. - Alterations in the epigenetic programming of hatchery-raised steelhead trout could account for their reduced fertility, abnormal health and lower survival rates compared to wild fish, according to a new Washington State University study. The study, published May 18 in Environmental Epigenetics, establishes a link between feeding practices that promote faster growth, as well as other environmental factors in fish hatcheries, and epigenetic changes found in the sperm and red blood cells of of steelhead trout. The research was done at a national fish hatchery on the Methow River in Winthrop, Washington and at another hatchery ...

An international research team headed by Michal Hocek of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) and Charles University and Ciara K. O'Sullivan of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Spain have developed a novel method for labeling DNA, which in the future can be used for sequencing DNA by means of electrochemical detection. The researchers presented their results in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. A DNA molecule comprises four basic building blocks, nucleotides. The genetic information carried within the molecule is determined by the order of the nucleotides. Knowledge of the order of these building blocks, which is known ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new coronavirus test can get accurate results from a saliva sample in less than 30 minutes, researchers report in the journal Nature Communications. Many of the components of the hand-held device used in this technology can be 3D-printed, and the test can detect as little as one viral particle per 1-microliter drop of fluid. "We developed a rapid, highly sensitive and accurate assay, and a portable, battery-powered device for COVID-19 testing that can be used anywhere at any time," said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Huimin Zhao, who led the research. Though it is still in the ...

A new study published in Nature Communications provides an important new basis for comparing the effectiveness of different tuberculosis treatments. Tuberculosis, a disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is typically the leading infectious cause of death globally, killing 1.2 million people each year. The availability of a new way to evaluate treatments can save lives. In the study, faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus partnered with the University of California ...

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have tapped into a poltergeist-like property of electrons to design devices that can capture excess heat from their environment--and turn it into usable electricity. The researchers have described their new "optical rectennas" in a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications. These devices, which are too small to see with the naked eye, are roughly 100 times more efficient than similar tools used for energy harvesting. And they achieve that feat through a mysterious process called "resonant ...

Ants are renowned in the insect world for their complex social structure and behaviors. Workers and foragers support the queen, faithfully carrying out their social roles for the overall health of the colony. This complex "superorganism" ---as scientists have dubbed it --- has become a prime model to explore the genetic and behavioral roots of social organisms. Remarkably, there are also rare instances of ants not playing well with others and shrugging off their societal duties to become free-loading parasites amongst their free-living relatives. Now, in a new study published in Nature ...

Information flows in a well-defined direction in the brain: Chemical and electrical signals are passed from one neuron to the other across the synapse, from the pre-synaptic to the post-synaptic neuron. Now, Peter Jonas and his group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) show that information also travels in the opposite direction at a key synapse in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for learning and memory. At the so-called mossy fiber synapse, the post-synaptic CA3 neuron influences how the pre-synaptic neuron, the so-called mossy fiber neuron, fires. "We have shown, for the first time, that a retrograde information flow ...

BOSTON - In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States experienced higher rates of heart disease and cerebrovascular disease deaths, relative to the corresponding months the previous year. While a large body of evidence has shown that Black and Hispanic communities have borne a disproportionately high burden of disease and death from COVID-19, little is known about whether the rise in cardiovascular deaths during the pandemic has been disproportionately concentrated among racial and ethnic minority populations. A new study led by clinician-researchers at the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research in Cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) characterized heart disease ...