‘Routine’ infanticide of newborns by married parents in early modern Europe was a much more widespread practice than previously thought, a new book posits. This fresh insight sits at the heart of a new book, Death Control in the West 1500–1800: Sex Ratios at Baptism in Italy, France and England, by Gregory Hanlon and contributors. The French-trained behavioural historian explains: “In most cases, infanticide was a crime leaving no aggrieved party seeking revenge if it was committed right away. It could be overlooked and forgotten with the passage of time.” Widespread infanticide Hanlon, who is Distinguished Research Professor at Dalhousie University in ...

Growing evidence supports prescribing psychostimulant medications to help reduce use of illegal stimulants such as methamphetamine, authors write in a CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) commentaryhttps://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.230266. Illegal stimulant use is rising, judging by the presence of these drugs in at least half of all opioid deaths in Canada in 2022. Following evidence from clinical trials in Australia, Europe and the United States, physicians and nurse practitioners in Canada and other countries are increasingly prescribing psychostimulants as harm reduction for stimulant use disorder. "This emerging ...

Commercial, rather than patient interests, often drive cancer care and research and patients deserve better, argue a group of global oncologists and patient advocates in a Comment published in The Lancet Oncology journal. The authors also establish core guidelines for the development of a new patient-centred movement in cancer care - Common Sense Oncology.   The Comment says there has been a shift over the past few decades from predominantly publicly funded clinical trials designed to answer questions important to patients, to industry-funded trials which aim to achieve ...

Both ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions for ADHD medication have increased significantly over the past two decades, except in children under five, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The research, published in BJPsych Open, reviewed data from 7 million individuals aged three to 99, from IQVIA Medical Research Data, a UK primary care database, between 2000 and 2018. Of these individuals, 35,877 had an ADHD diagnosis and 18,518 received prescriptions for ADHD medication from their GP. Although the number of individuals receiving medication for ADHD is still relatively low, the researchers found ...

Today at the International Alzheimer's Congress (AAIC) in Amsterdam, new guidelines for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease developed by clinicians and researchers from around the world were presented. In these criteria, the disease is diagnosed in the clinic through the use of blood biomarkers, just as with other major diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.   A blood test has been developed for this purpose in recent years that gives very good results, according to recent research. Charlotte Teunissen, professor of neurochemistry at Amsterdam ...

Researchers have cracked how a particular type of immune cell develops in the body and protects against infection and disease. And the discovery could help in the development of more preventive treatments, according to a new study. The research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Federation University Australia, has uncovered how these specialised white blood cells operate and can produce an immune response.  Associate Professor Dan Pellicci said by understanding the function of these cells, they could be harnessed to help prevent cancer and highly infectious diseases such as ...

Criegee intermediates are produced in the ozonolysis of unsaturated compounds in the atmosphere. These intermediates are especially importanct because they contribute to the formation of OH radical during the night and to formation of secondary organic aerosols. The OH radicals increase the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere, and the aerosols may reflect or absorb sunlight and contribute to cloud formation. Criegee intermediates also lay key roles in conversion of sulfur dioxide into sulfur trioxide, finally resulting in the formation ...

Tokyo, Japan – Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have shown that 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) helps bypass deficiencies in Complex I (CI), the first in a series of protein complexes that transport electrons and help power the mitochondria. They showed that fruit flies missing the analogous protein showed improved health when given a cocktail of drugs including 5-ALA. CI deficiency is responsible for the majority of mitochondrial disorders; the team’s findings might lead to new therapies. Mitochondrial diseases arise from problems in the mitochondria, a small organelle in cells which produces adenosine triphosphate (ATP), ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- When Sara Estrapala started her career as a high school paraeducator supporting students with disabilities such as autism, down syndrome, learning disorders and challenging behaviors, she quickly recognized a challenge — her teenage students desire to make their own decisions and their teachers’ struggle to keep them engaged and following directions. Now an assistant research professor in the University of Missouri College of Education and Human Development, Estrapala is leading a four-year, $519,939 early career development and mentoring ...

Oceanic islands provide useful models for ecology, biogeography and evolutionary research. Many ground-breaking findings – including Darwin's theory of evolution – have emerged from the study of species on islands and their interplay with their living and non-living environment. Now, an international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the flora of the Canary Island of Tenerife. The results were surprising: the island's plant-life exhibits a remarkable diversity ...

The European university network Enlight has been renewed: the EU has funded the Enlight Network consisting of the University of Göttingen with nine other research-oriented universities for four more years with a total of around 14.4 million euros. The Network plans to use a large part of the funds for academic initiatives, underlining its commitment to supporting researchers and students. In addition to the University of Göttingen, the Network includes the Universities of Ghent, Groningen, Uppsala and Tartu, the University of the Basque Country, the Universities of Bordeaux and Galway as well as Comenius University Bratislava; and Enlight's tenth and ...

The discovery that football players were unknowingly acquiring permanent brain damage as they racked up head hits throughout their professional careers created a rush to design better head protection. One of these inventions is nanofoam, the material on the inside of football helmets. Thanks to mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Baoxing Xu at the University of Virginia and his research team, nanofoam just received a big upgrade and protective sports equipment could, too. This newly invented design integrates nanofoam with “non-wetting ionized liquid," a ...

The range of COVID-19 symptoms varies—some feel a mild cold, others are hospitalized, while others perish. Many studies have linked the severity of COVID-19 symptoms with an individual’s biological factors, but less is known about the impact of non-biological factors, such as the environment in which people live. A new study that published on June 14, 2023, in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first to show that the neighborhood-built environment might pose an independent risk determining the individuals hospitalized due to COVID-19 illness. The authors found that in a cohort of more than 18,000 individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infections, living in ...

Many landscapes in the tropics consist of a mosaic of different types of land use. How people make use of these different ecosystems, with their particular plant communities, was unclear until now. Researchers, many of them from Madagascar, have now investigated this in an interdisciplinary Malagasy research project at the University of Göttingen. When considering biodiversity, forests often get the most attention. But this research shows that rural households use a wide range of plant species ...

Neuroscientists from the Faculty of Medicine of the Catholic University, Rome Campus, and the A. Gemelli IRCCS Polyclinic Foundation found that intensive exercise could slow the course of Parkinson's disease and described the biological mechanisms. The finding could pave the way for new non-drug approaches. The study "Intensive exercise ameliorates motor and cognitive symptoms in experimental Parkinson's disease by restoring striatal synaptic plasticity" is published in the journal Science Advances. The research was led by Catholic University, Rome Campus ...

Using an approach based on computer vision technology, researchers can work back from COVID-19 mortality data to see how infection rates changed on the day a lockdown or similar measure was introduced. The approach could be generally useful in future epidemics and pandemics. The work is published July 14 in Science Advances.  Coauthors Leonor Saiz, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis, and Jose Vilar, University of the Basque Country, Spain, wanted to see the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, lockdowns and masking in the first year of the pandemic. They looked at daily death reports from European ...

Block ciphers, a branch of modern cryptography, are playing a more prominent role in protecting information security as 5G technology develops. Although encryption algorithms of the traditional Feistel structure have great advantages in terms of consistent encryption and decryption, they have poor diffusion effects. Besides, they cannot adapt to the high throughput communication environment and resource-constrained devices. The S-box is the crucial nonlinear component in the block cipher and significantly determines the security of an algorithm. Unfortunately, the vast proportion of S-boxes exist in a static manner, which ...

CHICAGO --- Aerobic glycolysis, the process by which cells transform glucose into lactate, is key for eye development in mammals, according to a new Northwestern Medicine study published in Nature Communications. While it has been well known that retinal cells use lactate during cell differentiation, the exact role that this process plays in early eye development was not previously understood. The findings further the field’s understanding of the metabolic pathways underlying organ development, according to ...

July 14, 2023 – High rates of smoking among people with HIV are associated with high rates of comorbid health problems – which are associated with characteristics including gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, according to a study in the July issue of The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (JANAC). The official journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, JANAC is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "People with HIV who smoke are at high risk of accompanying physical and mental health conditions," comments lead author Jessica L. Elf, PhD, of Colorado ...

“[...] in many cases [of chronic sinusitis] only symptom control is achieved.” BUFFALO, NY- July 14, 2023 – A new research perspective was published in Oncoscience (Volume 10) on May 27, 2023, entitled, “Think outside the box – atypical infections in chronic sinusitis.” Inflammations of the paranasal sinuses represent a common clinical picture. The annual prevalence of chronic sinusitis in Europe is up to 10%. Sinusitis can be divided into acute and chronic forms. In particular, the chronic forms (>12 weeks duration) are often challenging in the context of therapy.  Generally, all ventilation disorders of the paranasal sinuses (concha bullosa, ...

CLEVELAND – A new study from University Hospitals (UH) Connor Whole Health describes the scope and integration of their music therapy program within10 UH medical centers. The study, entitled “Effectiveness of Medical Music Therapy Practice: Integrative Research using the Electronic Health Record (EMMPIRE): Rationale, Design, and Population Characteristics” is the largest such observational study of medical music therapy practice to date. Unlike other music therapy programs, which may be limited to specific hospital units, the program at UH Connor ...

A team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Leicester have discovered that the genes required for learning, memory, aggression and other complex behaviours originated around 650 million years ago. The findings led by Dr Roberto Feuda, from the Neurogenetic group in the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology and other colleagues from the University of Leicester and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), have now been published in Nature Communications. Dr Feuda said: “We’ve known for a long ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Monitoring dairy calves with precision technologies based on the “internet of things,” or IoT, leads to the earlier diagnosis of calf-killing bovine respiratory disease, according to a new study. The novel approach — a result of crosscutting collaboration by a team of researchers from Penn State, University of Kentucky and University of Vermont —will offer dairy producers an opportunity to improve the economies of their farms, according to researchers.  This ...

An estimated 1,200 Americans, on average, are diagnosed with Lyme disease each day. Some of those patients continue to experience negative effects, even after treatment. Lyme disease researcher Brandon Jutras, associate professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and affiliated faculty of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, recently received a $2.7 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to study what causes the disease to linger long after treatment. “Using a series of sophisticated molecular techniques, in combination with both bacterial and host genetics, we’re working ...

(Boston)—Noyan Gokce, MD, professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has been awarded a $453,750 National Institutes of Health (NIH) R-21 grant for his research study “Impact of Per/Polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) pollutants on vascular disease mechanisms.” This work will be performed in collaboration with co-investigator Jennifer Schlezinger, PhD from the Boston University School of Public Health.   Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are manmade chemicals that are extensively used in industrial and consumer products such as stain- and ...