Participants in psychology studies are more likely than average to exhibit symptoms of personality disorders, potentially skewing the findings of such research ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281046 Article Title: Self-selection biases in psychological studies: Personality and affective disorders are prevalent among participants Author Countries: Poland, Spain, Italy Funding: To conduct Face-to-Face Studies IK was supported by grants 2017/01/X/HS6/02022 from the National Center of Science ...

New study finds obstacles can trap rolling microparticles in fluid Through simulations and experiments, physicists attribute the trapping effect to stagnant pockets of fluid, created by hydrodynamics Random motions of the molecules within the fluid then ‘kick’ the microroller into a stagnant pocket, effectively trapping it Size of the obstacle also controls how easy it is to trap a microroller and how long it remains trapped EVANSTON, Ill. — When physicists steered a tiny microparticle toward a cylindrical obstacle, they expected one of two outcomes to occur. The particle would either collide into the ...

Scientists from the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI) have shed new light on ageing processes in the brain. By linking the increased presence of specialised immune cells to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury for the first time, they have unearthed a possible new target for therapies aimed at treating age-related neurological diseases. The research, which benefited from a collaboration with experts at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and focused ...

Research in animal models has demonstrated that stem-cell derived heart tissues have promising potential for therapeutic applications to treat cardiac disease. But before such therapies are viable and safe for use in humans, scientists must first precisely understand on the cellular and molecular levels which factors are necessary for implanted stem-cell derived heart cells to properly grow and integrate in three dimensions within surrounding tissue. New findings from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) make it possible ...

Coffee is important to the economies of coffee producing regions. A study published in PLOS Climate by Doug Richardson at CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and colleagues suggests that climate change may significantly affect land where coffee is cultivated. Coffee plants are sensitive to climate variability and change. However, the impact of synchronous climate hazards occurring in multiple areas important for coffee production is unknown. In order to better understand how large-scale climate modes such as El Niño ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately. Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated memory retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures ...

New Haven, Conn. — The constant evolution of new COVID-19 variants makes it critical for clinicians to have multiple therapies in their arsenal for treating drug-resistant infections. Researchers have now discovered that a new class of oral drugs that acts directly on human cells can inhibit a diverse range of pathogenic SARS-CoV-2 strains. In their newly published study, the team found a novel mechanism through which the gene that expresses angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE-2)—the cellular receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 ...

March 8, 2023, Mountain View, CA – The SETI Institute and Swan Hellenic announce SETI Institute guest lecturers who will offer cruise guests expert insights into the history and latest discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics, astrobiology and planetary science, and the quest to find other forms of life within and beyond our solar system. This quest takes SETI Institute researchers to the planet’s most remote and inhospitable corners to explore life, including Antarctica, where the Swan Hellenic fleet is present for several months every year. Outlining ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA’s dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Topics this month include an analysis of geoscience job applications; Uturuncu volcano, Bolivia; Picture Gorge Basalt; and the Red Bluff Granite Suite. You can find these articles at https://geosphere.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Critical workforce skills for bachelor-level geoscientists: An analysis of geoscience job advertisements G.W. Shafer; K. Viskupic; A.E. Egger Understanding the skills ...

The European Innovation Council (EIC) has recently announced that it will award a Transition grant to SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH, a deep-tech startup based in Saxony, Germany.   The team from SpiNNcloud Systems GmbH, a spin-off from Professor Christian Mayr’s research group at Technische Universität Dresden, is receiving a grant of 2.5 million euros for their groundbreaking project, “SpiNNode: SpiNNaker2 on the edge.” “SpiNNaker2 is a bio-inspired supercomputer which was developed at my Chair in collaboration with Prof. Steve Furber’s research group at the University of Manchester as part ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: The Geological Society of America regularly publishes articles online ahead of print. GSA Bulletin topics studied this month include the nature and dynamics of China and Tibet; the Lower Mississippi Valley, USA; and the polarity of Mesozoic arcs along the western margin of North America. You can find these articles at https://bulletin.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Magmatic-hydrothermal evolution of long-lived Nb-Ta-(Sn) mineralization in Lianyunshan, NE Hunan, South China Nuerkanati Madayipu; Huan Li; Safiyanu Muhammad Elatikpo; Michael W. Förster; Hou-Xiang Zhou ... The ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Sticking with an exercise program can be tough, even during the best of times. But what about during a pandemic? A new study by the University of Missouri and Oklahoma State University found that even when gyms were closed and there were other COVID-19 restrictions limiting face-to-face meetings, older adults who completed the Stay Strong, Stay Healthy exercise program — created at MU in 2005 — continued to maintain long-term exercise habits independently, which resulted in improved lifestyle changes and an increase in both physical energy and self-confidence. “We ...

People with a recent diagnosis of atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common irregular heart rhythm, have a modestly higher risk of developing dementia than people without the condition, according to research published today. “Previous studies that have examined the link between atrial fibrillation and dementia have yielded conflicting results, and we hope that our study’s large sample size helps to establish confidence in our findings,” said Dr. Nisha Bansal, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “The study also included a community based, diverse population, which may increase the generalizability ...

UPTON, NY—Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are leading a new effort to land a radio telescope on the moon. If successful, the project will mark the first step towards exploring the Dark Ages of the universe. The Dark Ages are an early era of cosmological history starting about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. There were no stars or planets in the Dark Ages. It’s a point in time that scientists have never been able to observe. Though radio waves from the Dark Ages still linger in space, the abundance of radio interference on Earth has masked these signals from scientists seeking to study them. If ...

A new study shows for the first time a connection between a mitochondrial metabolite and the activation of an inflammatory response. Mitochondria are functional units of our cells that fulfil important tasks, i.e. chemical reactions, for the functioning of the cell. One of these tasks is the production of energy that is necessary for cell growth and reproduction. If certain chemical reactions in the mitochondrion change, diseases occur. For example, deficiencies in fumarate hydratase (FH) in the Krebs cycle, one of the most important metabolic pathways in mitochondria, ...

March 8, 2023 – Previous studies have reported high rates of death by suicide and drug overdose – including opioid overdose – in military service members with a history of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). A new study finds that those risks are highest among military members with mTBI who identify their racial/ethnic status as "Other," as opposed to standard racial/ethnic categories, reports the March/April issue of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation (JHTR). The official journal of the Brain Injury Association of America, JHTR is ...

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and Cancer Research UK have announced nine new research challenges aimed at tackling some of the most profound problems in cancer research. The global funding opportunity is part of the Cancer Grand Challenges program, an initiative launched by NCI and Cancer Research UK in 2020. The research initiative aims to inspire bold new ideas that have the greatest potential for advancing cancer research and improving outcomes for people affected by cancer. The new round of challenges, announced March 8, 2023, during the Cancer Grand Challenges Annual Scientific Summit in London, is open until June ...

The faba bean genome, which at 13 billion bases is more than four times the size of the human genome, has been sequenced for the first time and is published today (08 March 2023), in Nature. This is an extraordinary technical achievement and crucial to efforts to breed beans with optimum nutritional content and sustainability of production. A consortium of scientists from Europe and Australia, led by the University of Reading (UK), Aarhus University (Denmark) and the University of Helsinki (Finland), worked together on this large scale sequencing project. The project to fully decode the genome went on to test out its usefulness by searching for genes involved ...

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights showcases the latest breakthroughs in cancer care, research and prevention. These advances are made possible through seamless collaboration between MD Anderson’s world-leading clinicians and scientists, bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back. Recent developments include overlooked proteins from long noncoding RNAs that likely play a functional role in breast cancer, inhibiting tumor-associated neuronal cells to improve treatment response in pancreatic cancer, ...

Nearly two dozen experimental therapies targeting the immune system are in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease, a reflection of the growing recognition that immune processes play a key role in driving the brain damage that leads to confusion, memory loss and other debilitating symptoms. Many of the immunity-focused Alzheimer’s drugs under development are aimed at microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, which can injure brain tissue if they’re activated at the wrong time or in the wrong way. A new study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis ...

About The Study: Researchers found in this examination of newborn drug testing at a Midwestern academic medical center before and after statewide legalization of recreational cannabis that clinicians ordered newborn drug tests more frequently for Black newborns when no drug testing was done during pregnancy. These findings call for further exploration of how structural and institutional racism contribute to disproportionate testing and subsequent Child Protective Services investigation, surveillance, and criminalization of Black parents.  Authors: Lauren Oshman, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Michigan ...

The Bakken Shale Formation—a 200,000-square-mile shale deposit below parts of Canada and North Dakota—has supplied billions of barrels of oil and natural gas to North America for 70 years. A new discovery reveals that the rocks also open a uniquely informative window into Earth’s complicated geological history. A research team, which included geologists from the University of Maryland, George Mason University and the Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor, developed a new framework for analyzing paleontological and biogeochemical data extracted from the formation’s rock. Using this technique, the team pinpointed a major trigger of several closely spaced ...

New insights into the effects of a hormonal treatment for transgender men, discovered by Cedars-Sinai investigators, could have implications for the treatment of breast cancer.  Transgender men who were assigned female at birth and identify today as male may take hormones called androgens to induce physical changes that help them align their physical appearance with their identified gender. Androgens such as testosterone are involved primarily in the development of male traits, although females also produce androgens.  Molecular changes observed in the breast tissue of transgender men undergoing androgen therapy may signal the potential ...

At a glance: A small population of airway neurons alerts the brain about a flu infection, according to a new study in mice The results help explain how drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin reduce flu symptoms The findings could help scientists develop more-effective flu therapies A new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School illuminates how the brain becomes aware that there is an infection in the body. Studying mice, the team discovered that a small group of neurons in the airway plays a pivotal role in alerting the brain about ...

Scientists studying a nearby protostar have detected the presence of water in its circumstellar disk. The new observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) mark the first detection of water being inherited into a protoplanetary disk without significant changes to its composition. These results further suggest that the water in our Solar System formed billions of years before the Sun. The new observations are published today in Nature. V883 Orionis is a protostar located roughly 1,305 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion. ...