Low levels of omega-3 associated with higher risk of psychosis

The routine use of the glycosylated hemoglobin test to track blood sugar levels in the general population can identify individuals with more advanced atherosclerotic disease. Currently used in the diagnosis and management of diabetes, glycosylated hemoglobin can provide a useful estimate of atherosclerotic disease, and therefore of cardiovascular risk, in individuals without diabetes with or without possible prediabetes. This is the main finding of a study carried out by scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC). The advance heralded by the CNIC study is the use of this blood-sugar measure in apparently healthy middle-aged ...

Skoltech researchers used the resources of the university's Zhores supercomputer to study a new method of generating gamma-ray combs for nuclear and X-ray photonics and spectroscopy of new materials. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review Letters. A gamma-ray comb is a series of short bursts that, when plotted as intensity versus frequency, look like sharp and equally spaced teeth of a comb. Generating these combs at high brightness in the gamma-ray domain has been challenging because of something called ponderomotive spectral broadening - an effect that destroys the monochromaticity that allows gamma-ray sources to be used in nuclear spectroscopy, medicine, and other applications. Sergey ...

The intriguing chemistry and biology of sulfur?containing natural products from marine microorganisms (1987-2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s42995-021-00101-2 Announcing a new publication for Marine Life Science & Technology journal. In this review article the authors Yang Hai, Mei?Yan Wei, Chang?Yun Wang, Yu?Cheng Gu and Chang?Lun Shao from Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China and Syngenta Jealott's Hill International Research Centre, Berkshire, UK consider the chemistry and biology of sulfur?containing natural products from marine microorganisms. Natural products derived ...

The National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) publishes Polar Science, a peer-reviewed quarterly journal dealing with polar science in collaboration with the Elsevier B. V.. The most recent issue (Vol. 27 published in March 2021) was a special issue entitled "Arctic Challenge for Sustainability Project (ArCS)," which featured the former national (nation-wide) Arctic research project in Japan. The full text of this issue is freely accessible worldwide for a limited time until 10 September 2021. The Arctic Research Project "Arctic Challenge for Sustainability (ArCS)" was carried out from September 2015 to March 2020 as a national flagship project funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, ...

In past studies, researchers have found that C. elegans gonads generate more germ cells than needed and that only half of them grow to become oocytes, while the rest shrinks and die by physiological apoptosis, a programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms. Now, scientists from the Biotechnology Center of the TU Dresden (BIOTEC), the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at the TU Dresden, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS), the Flatiron Institute, NY, and the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence to answer the question of what triggers this cell fate decision between life and death in the germline. Prior studies ...

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have developed a novel set of tools for designing vitamin D clinical trials that capture large seasonal and population-wide differences in vitamin D status, typically seen in individuals. Their study published in the journal Scientific Reports (today, Monday 31st May 2021) provides a framework for clinical trials to establish whether vitamin D supplementation is effective against a given disease. The study also reveals that many trials which failed to find any association between vitamin D and disease prevention may have been underpowered or conducted without enough subjects to detect a benefit of vitamin D. You can read the full journal paper here: https://go.nature.com/3uERjgO The ...

YouTube is a treasure trove of virtual reality fails: users tripping, colliding into walls and smacking inanimate and animate objects. By investigating these "VR Fails" on YouTube, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have sought to learn more about when and why things go sideways for users and how to improve VR design and experiences so as to avoid accidents. Millions of YouTube viewers have enjoyed hearty laughs watching others getting hurt using virtual reality - people wearing VR headsets, falling, screaming, crashing into walls and TV sets, or knocking spectators to the floor. Some of us have even been that failing someone. Now, videos of virtual reality mishaps, called "VR Fails", ...

Redox-flow batteries store electrical energy in chemical compounds that are dissolved in an electrolyte. They are a particularly promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries as stationary energy storage. A team headed by Prof. Dr. Ingo Krossing from the Institute of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Freiburg has succeeded in developing a non-aqueous All-Manganese Flow battery (All-MFB) that uses sustainable manganese as its active material and has a long cycle life. The researchers present the results of their work in the latest edition of Advanced Energy Materials. Active materials are ...

Energy communities will play a key role in building the more decentralised, less carbon intensive, and fairer energy systems of the future. Such communities enable local prosumers (consumers with own generation and storage) to generate, store and trade energy with each other -- using locally owned assets, such as wind turbines, rooftop solar panels and batteries. In turn, this enables the community to use more locally generated renewable generation, and shifts the market power from large utility companies to individual prosumers. Energy community projects often involve jointly-owned assets such as community-owned wind turbines or shared battery storage. Yet, this raises the question of how these assets should be controlled - often in real time, and how the energy outputs jointly-owned ...

Thyroid nodules are a common pathology having a prevalence of 19-76% when screened with ultrasound, with higher frequencies in women. Current medical methods used to assess the malignancy of a nodule consist in performing an ultrasound, followed by a Doppler ultrasound, and then a biopsy. However, unfortunately, these methods present both low specificity and low sensitivity. This insufficient effectiveness in accurately being able to diagnose thyroid tumors leads to many unclear or unnoticed cases as well as many others that undergo unnecessary surgeries (false positives) and increase the cost ...