Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a health condition characterized by a group of risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, unhealthy cholesterol levels, and abdominal fat. These factors increase the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other serious health problems. Previous studies have shown that both genetics and lifestyle influence MetS. But human studies have found it challenging to pinpointing the disease’s exact genetic factors and how they interact with our environment – the differences between people’s diets and lifestyles have proven impossible to control. Now, scientists led by Johan Auwerx at EPFL have addressed ...

WhatsApp can be a highly effective tool to help older people overcome loneliness and depression, according to the findings of a study conducted in Guarulhos, the second-largest city in São Paulo state, Brazil.  An article on the study is published in the journal Nature Medicine. The co-corresponding author is Marcia Scazufca, a scientific researcher at Hospital das Clínicas (HC), the hospital complex run by the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP), and a professor at the school. “This was a randomized controlled trial involving 603 participants aged more than 60 and registered ...

The ocean, rich in mineral resources such as oil, natural gas, polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts, polymetallic sulfides, and rare earth ore, plays an increasingly important role in resource development and economic growth. It is also regarded as an essential strategic space for sustainable development with abundant wind, wave, tidal, and solar energy. Compared with onshore structures, however, offshore structures, being complex, bulky, and expensive, have to endure various random loads that change over time and space, including wind, waves, currents, tides, sea ice, and even coupled with ...

When college athletes are evaluated for a possible concussion, the diagnosis is based on an athletic trainer or team physician’s assessment of three things: the player’s symptoms, physical balance and cognitive skills.  Research published today suggests that almost half of athletes who are ultimately diagnosed with a concussion will test normally on the recommended cognitive-skills test.  “If you don’t do well on the cognitive exam, it suggests you have a concussion. But many people who are concussed do fine on the exam,” said Dr. Kimberly Harmon, the study’s lead author. She is a professor of family medicine ...

As long as humans have been traveling into space, astronauts have experienced significant health effects from the extreme conditions of space flight, notably the reduction of gravity. Two Buck scientists led a team that has revealed for the first time how the lack of gravity affects the cells of the immune system at single cell resolution. As co-senior authors, along with Christopher E. Mason, PhD of Weill Cornell Medical College, Associate Professor David Furman, PhD and Associate Professor Daniel Winer, MD, published in the ...

Food insecurity, low household income and not having private health insurance are associated with higher rates of prediabetes in adolescents, independent of race and ethnicity, according to a new JAMA Network Open study by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC researchers. The findings suggest that screening for social determinants of health — the non-medical factors that influence a person's health and risk of disease — may help identify youth at risk of prediabetes, which could ultimately improve early interventions that prevent progression to type 2 diabetes. “This study underscores the importance ...

The agility with which humans and animals move is an evolutionary marvel that no robot has yet been able to closely emulate. To help probe the mystery of how brains control movement, Harvard neuroscientists have created a virtual rat with an artificial brain that can move around just like a real rodent.   Bence Ölveczky, professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, led a group of researchers who collaborated with scientists at Google’s DeepMind AI lab to build a biomechanically realistic digital model of a rat. Using high-resolution data recorded from ...

Scientists unlock secrets of how the third form of life makes energy. An international scientific team has redefined our understanding of archaea, a microbial ancestor to humans from two billion years ago, by showing how they use hydrogen gas.  The findings, published today in Cell, explain how these tiny lifeforms make energy by consuming and producing hydrogen. This simple but dependable strategy has allowed them to thrive in some of Earth’s most hostile environments for billions of years. The paper, led by Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute scientists, including ...

The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL. The study, published in Nature Communications, is the largest analysis of kidney health in space flight to date and includes the first health dataset for commercial astronauts. It is published as part of a Nature special collection of papers on space and health. Researchers have known that space flight causes certain health issues since the 1970s, in the ...

Depressive symptoms are linked to subsequent memory decline in older people, while poorer memory is also linked to an increase in depressive symptoms later on, according to a new study led by researchers at UCL and Brighton and Sussex Medical School. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, looked at 16 years of longitudinal data from 8,268 adults in England with an average age of 64. The researchers concluded that depression and memory were closely interrelated, with both seeming to affect each other. Senior author Dr Dorina Cadar, of the UCL Department of Behavioural Science & Health and Brighton and Sussex Medical School, said: “It is ...

Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems in human health, drug discovery, and artificial intelligence millions of times faster than some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. A network of quantum computers could advance these discoveries even faster. But before that can happen, the computer industry will need a reliable way to string together billions of qubits – or quantum bits – with atomic precision.  Connecting qubits, however, has been challenging for the research community. Some methods form qubits by placing ...

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2024 – Today’s intelligent robots can accurately recognize many objects through vision and touch. Tactile information, obtained through sensors, along with machine learning algorithms, enables robots to identify objects previously handled. However, sensing is often confused when presented with objects similar in size and shape, or objects unknown to the robot. Other factors restrictive to robot perception include background noise and the same type of object with different shapes and sizes. In Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Tsinghua University worked to break through the difficulties ...

Researchers from Japan uncover the genetic diversity and regional patterns of CARD9 deficiency in patients susceptible to fungal diseases Tokyo, Japan – Fungal infections pose life-threatening risks, especially when vital organs or the central nervous system are affected. Individuals harboring variants in the CARD9 gene are particularly susceptible to invasive fungal infections, given that the protein coded by this gene serves as a critical regulator of the immune system. A recent discovery ...

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it sent shock waves across global supply chains. But manufacturers and other businesses weren’t the only ones hit hard: local and international aid organizations, tasked with providing humanitarian assistance during times of crisis, suddenly had a major crisis of their own. How would they get the supplies they needed to carry out their crucial work? According to a new study by the UBC Sauder School of Business, the organizations showed remarkable nimbleness and ingenuity — and while the pandemic was an unusual event, their approaches can provide powerful insights ...

Fukuoka, Japan—Researchers from Kyushu University have uncovered new variations to a traditional illusion, based on how we perceive the motion of flashing lights. Published on May 21 in i-Perception, the findings show that when three light flashes are presented in rapid succession in our side vision, our brain tends to perceive them in a straight line, with the second flash around the midpoint, no matter the actual location of the second flash. This research, which earned the journal’s Early Career Best Paper Prize this year, offers new perspectives on perceptual errors ...

Tsukuba, Japan—Viruses are ubiquitous in the environment, and organisms have developed various mechanisms to counter their threat. However, the genome of actinomycetes contains a highly conserved gene set encoding virus-like nanoparticles, although its biological significance has remained unclear. In this study, researchers examined Streptomyces davawensis, an actinomycete species, and discovered that it produces virus-like particles that facilitate host reproduction. Extracellular DNA, which serves as a scaffold for multicellular organization, was significantly reduced in the colonies of mutant S. davawensis strains ...

TORONTO, ON, June 11, 2024 — What scientists previously thought about where Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) come from is just the tip of the iceberg, according to new research led by astronomers at the University of Toronto. The mysteries of the millisecond-long cosmic explosions are unfolding with a new way of analyzing data from the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). Published today in The Astrophysical Journal, the study details the properties of polarized light from 128 non-repeating FRBs — those from sources that have ...

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2024 — Journalists who register for the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) will have access to about 10,000 presentations on topics including agriculture and food, energy and fuels, health and medicine, sustainability, and more. ACS Fall 2024 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in person in Denver on Aug. 18-22, with the theme “Elevating Chemistry.” ACS considers requests for press credentials and complimentary meeting registration from reporters (staff and freelance) and public information officers at government, nonprofit and educational institutions. Please ...

The furious exhaust heat generated by a fusing plasma in a commercial-scale reactor may not be as damaging to the vessel’s innards as once thought, according to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the ITER Organization (ITER). “This discovery fundamentally changes how we think about the way heat and particles travel between two critically important regions at the edge of a plasma during fusion,” said PPPL Managing Principal Research Physicist Choongseok Chang, who led ...

WASHINGTON—The Endocrine Society endorses the Right to IVF Act, which was introduced by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Patty Murray (D-WA) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) to protect and expand nationwide access to fertility treatment, including in vitro fertilization (IVF), and urges the Senate to pass the Right to IVF Act on June 12th to ensure that the freedom to start and grow a family is protected and accessible to everyone in the United States.    Infertility affects an increasing number of individuals. ...

The queen conch (Aliger gigas) is a prized delicacy long harvested for food and revered for its beautiful shell. With a lifespan between 25 to 40 years, the queen conch is second only to the spiny lobster fishery and is the most important molluscan fishery in the Caribbean region. Deeply rooted in the way of life in the Caribbean, many island communities depend on queen conch for their livelihoods. However, intensive fishing and habitat degradation from urbanization and climate change have caused conch populations ...

The toxic gas ethylene oxide, at levels thousand times higher than what is considered safe, was detected across parts of Louisiana with a cutting-edge mobile air-testing lab. The concentrations found dwarfed Environmental Protection Agency estimates for the region. The findings, led by Johns Hopkins University environmental engineers, suggest significantly higher cancer risks for people who live near facilities that manufacture and use ethylene oxide, as well as a need for more accurate and reliable tools to monitor emissions. “I don’t think there’s any census track in the area that wasn’t at higher risk for cancer than we would deem acceptable,” said ...

When soil microbes eat plant matter, the digested food follows one of two pathways. Either the microbe uses the food to build its own body, or it respires its meal as carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Now, a Northwestern University-led research team has, for the first time, tracked the pathways of a mixture of plant waste as it moves through bacteria’s metabolism to contribute to atmospheric CO2. The researchers discovered that microbes respire three times as much CO2 from lignin carbons (non-sugar aromatic units) compared to cellulose carbons (glucose sugar units), which both add structure and support ...

In a Review article, Claire Robertson and colleagues explore how human morality, which evolved in the context of small in-person groups, functions on the internet with over five billion users. Evolved human responses, such as compassion for victims and urges to punish transgressors, operate differently online, the authors argue. The internet exposes users to large quantities of extreme morally relevant stimuli in the form of 24-hour news and intentionally outrageous content from sometimes physically distant locations. Subjecting human brains to this ...

Consumer data shows people with obesity are more price-sensitive than others when it comes to buying unhealthy foods, suggesting a food tax could be an effective public health measure. Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages have become a commonly employed policy to improve public health. Less common are taxes on unhealthy foods, such as candy, cookies, or potato chips--and there is little data on whether such taxes would improve public health. Ying Bao and colleagues examined whether individuals of various ...