Physical activity might help people with substance use disorders to reduce or cease their usage, with 75% of studies that evaluated it showing a relationship

The non-invasive FLASH system, inspired by lizard skin, electronically stimulates key hunger hormone Nature is the greatest teacher. A bizarre-looking lizard with intimidating spikes covering its body helped a team of investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and New York University, develop an innovative ingestible capsule that can modify ghrelin, a hunger-regulating hormone, in pigs. Their results, published in Science Robotics, showed for the first time that the ingestible electronic fluid-wicking capsule for active stimulation and hormone modulation (FLASH) ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Hormones released by the stomach, such as ghrelin, play a key role in stimulating appetite. These hormones are produced by endocrine cells that are part of the enteric nervous system, which controls hunger, nausea, and feelings of fullness. MIT engineers have now shown that they can stimulate these endocrine cells to produce ghrelin, using an ingestible capsule that delivers an electrical current to the cells. This approach could prove useful for treating diseases that involve nausea or loss of appetite, such as cachexia (loss of body mass that can occur in patients with cancer or other chronic diseases). In ...

The world’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. Aging can lead to various types of cognitive decline, posing a serious burden to families and society. Therefore, it is crucial to develop effective interventions to promote healthy aging. One promising approach is musical training, which is accessible to the majority of the population. Besides the musically rewarding and aesthetic experience of musical training, it also provides potential benefits to the brain, especially for the elderly. In a study published as a cover story in Science Advances, a research team led by Dr. DU Yi from the Institute ...

Why do some animals regenerate lost tissues after injury while others don’t? Researchers from the lab of Kerstin Bartscherer (Osnabrück University and formerly Hubrecht Institute) and Ashley Seifert (University of Kentucky) studied spiny mice, which have a remarkable regenerative capacity, to answer this question. They compared and modulated the injury responses of these mice and common laboratory mice, that show scarring upon injury. This revealed that ERK signalling is a crucial molecular switch between scarring and regeneration. The results of this study will be published on April 26th in the scientific journal Science Advances and imply that ...

Ikoma, Japan – Cell membranes play a critical role by serving as containment units and separating the inner cellular space from the extracellular environment. Proteins with distinct functional units play a key role in facilitating protein-membrane interactions. For instance, “Bin-Amphiphysin-Rvs” (“BAR”) domain proteins are involved in regulating cell membrane curvature. This physical bending of cell membranes helps cells carry out various biologically important processes such as endocytosis and cell motility. Although BAR proteins drive membrane curvature ...

Philadelphia, April 26, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and Princeton University have discovered a novel genetic disorder associated with neurodevelopmental differences. The discovery identified the disorder in 21 families from all over the world. The findings were published today in Science Advances. The as-yet unnamed disorder is the result of a series of rare variants in the MAP4K4 gene, which is involved in many signaling pathways, including the RAS pathway ...

Almost one in three adults aged 45 and older who had both TB and COVID-19 died during a pandemic cohort study in NYC between March 2020 and June 2022.  #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001758 Article Title: Cohort study of the mortality among patients in New York City with tuberculosis and COVID-19, March 2020 to June 2022 Author Countries: USA Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) are using nanoparticles to develop new sources of light that will allow us to “peel back the curtain” into the world of extremely small objects – thousands of times smaller than a human hair – with major gains for medical and other technologies.  The findings, published in Science Advances, could have major implications for medical science by offering an affordable and effective solution to analyse tiny objects that are too small for microscopes to see, let alone the human eye. The work could also be beneficial for the semiconductor industry ...

Keeping tree diversity intact in Canada’s many forests over the long term can help increase carbon capture and mitigate climate change, according to a new University of Alberta study.  The study, published in Nature, is the first of its kind to show the sustained benefits of tree diversity on a large spatial scale, in terms of storing carbon and nitrogen in the soil. It reinforces the importance of biodiversity conservation in forests, says Xinli Chen, lead author on the paper and postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Agricultural, ...

Andy Weir’s bestselling 2011 book, The Martian, features botanist Mark Watney’s efforts to grow food on Mars after he becomes stranded there. While Watney’s initial efforts focus on growing potatoes, new research presented at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by a team of interdisciplinary researchers from the U of A suggests future Martian botanists like Watney may have a better option: growing rice. As outlined in the team’s abstract, Rice Can Grow and Survive in Martian ...