Certain proteins found in the human brain have long been known to be critical to controlling how brain cells communicate with each other. So-called GABAA receptors are proteins that control the flow of ions into and out of cells. As they play such a vital role in how neurons slow down or stop firing, they have become the targets of many drugs for conditions such as epilepsy, anxiety, depression and insomnia. Yet due to technical limitations and the delicate nature of studying human brain tissue, scientists have lacked a complete picture of how GABAA receptors, and their 19 subunits, ...

People whose parents divorced during their childhood may be at a greater risk of stroke later in life, according to a new study published January 22, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Esme Fuller-Thomson of University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues.  Each year, approximately 795,000 individuals in the U.S. have a stroke. Previous work has established many sociodemographic risk factors for stroke, as well as connections between adverse childhood events and stroke. In the new study, researchers looked specifically at the ...

Data on almost 57,000 people from 65 countries suggests that the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)—a widely used research tool—generally holds up well when applied across diverse groups of people, underscoring its potential value in research and policymaking. Viren Swami of Anglia Ruskin University, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on January 22, 2025. Life satisfaction is linked to a broad range of life areas, such as physical health, employment, and mortality. The SWLS is a questionnaire that measures an individual’s life ...

TORONTO, ON – A recent study by researchers from the University of Toronto, Tyndale University and the University of Texas at Arlington found that older adults are at greater risk of having a stroke if they experienced their parents divorcing during childhood.   Among Americans aged 65 and older, one in nine whose parents had divorced reported that they had been diagnosed with a stroke, compared to one in 15 of those whose parents had not divorced during their childhood. “Our study indicates that ...

A new study suggests that countries with stronger commitments to protect the natural environment—regardless of national oil dependence or other economic interests—are more likely to see the establishment of counter climate change groups that aim to obstruct climate change action. Jared Furuta and Patricia Bromley of Stanford University, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on January 22, 2025. Prior research has highlighted how the fossil fuel industry and conservative think tanks and philanthropists have stoked climate change skepticism in the U.S. in order to serve their economic ...

Some coral "walk" towards blue or white light, using rolling, sliding or pulsing movements to migrate, per experiments with free-living mushroom coral Cycloseris cyclolites     Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0315623 Article title: Walking coral: Complex phototactic mobility in the free-living coral Cycloseris cyclolites Author countries: Australia, Saudi Arabia Funding: The authors declare the research was funded by an Australian Research ...

A research group led by Kazunobu Sawamoto, a professor at Nagoya City University and National Institute for Physiological Sciences, and Koya Kawase, a pediatric doctor at Nagoya City University Hospital, has elucidated the significance of birth in the maintenance of neural stem cells (NSCs).  Birth is one of the most significant life events for animals. The transition from the intrauterine to the extrauterine environment causes various metabolic changes in individuals. Despite its significance, the role of birth in the developmental process remains incompletely understood. In the adult mammalian brain, NSCs are retained in the ...

An understanding of the relationship between severe weather and power outages in our changing climate will be critical for hazard response plans, according to a study published January 22, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Vivian Do of Columbia University, New York and colleagues. Throughout the United States, large-scale power outages commonly occur alongside severe weather events. These combined events can be associated with major economic costs and health risks, as loss of power can disrupt medical equipment, heating or air conditioning, and other important systems. As severe weather ...

Osaka, Japan – Imaging live cells with fluorescent proteins has long been a crucial technique for understanding cellular behavior. While bioluminescent proteins offer several advantages over fluorescent proteins, the limited availability of color variants has made it difficult to observe multiple targets simultaneously. Now, researchers from SANKEN (The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research) at Osaka University have developed a groundbreaking method to expand the color palette of bioluminescent protein to 20 distinct colors, enabling advanced simultaneous multi-color imaging. Cells are the fundamental building blocks of life. Understanding how they function is essential ...

When it comes time to migrate, QUT research has found how a free-living coral ignores the classic advice and goes straight towards the light. The research – led by Dr Brett Lewis from the QUT School of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences and Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, and published in PLOS One – investigated how the free-living mushroom coral Cycloseris cyclolites moves, navigates and responds to light in its natural environments. “Not all corals are attached to the substrate; some are solitary and free-living, allowing them to migrate into preferred habitats,” ...

An understanding of the relationship between severe weather and power outages in our changing climate will be critical for hazard response plans, according to a study led by a researcher at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The study is published in the open-access journal PLOS Climate. Throughout the U.S., large-scale power outages commonly occur alongside severe weather events. These combined events can be associated with major economic costs and health risks, as loss of power can disrupt medical equipment, heating or air conditioning, and other important systems. As severe weather events increase in severity and frequency ...

Engineering and medical researchers at Penn have developed a groundbreaking framework that can determine the best and most computationally optimized distribution strategy for COVID-19 vaccinations in any given community. Published in PLOS One, this study addresses one of the most critical challenges in pandemic response — how to prioritize vaccination efforts in communities with individuals of different risk levels when supplies are scarce and the stakes are high. The research team, comprised of Saswati Sarkar, Professor ...

TUCSON, Arizona — A new study led by University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health researchers in collaboration with fire service partners and other researchers around the country through the Fire Fighter Cancer Cohort Study showed that post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety are associated with lower levels of anti-Müllerian hormone, a marker of ovarian reserve, among women firefighters. The ovarian reserve is the number of healthy eggs in a woman’s ovaries that ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (1/22/2025) — A research team from the University of Minnesota Medical School recently received a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as a treatment for youth with Tourette syndrome and other tic disorders.  These conditions affect one in every 50 children and are characterized by involuntary movements or sounds called “tics.” Tics are often painful, distressing and interfere with daily life activities. In some cases, tics can be quite disabling. The research team recently completed the first phase of this clinical trial ...

Enzymes are crucial to life. They are nature’s little catalysts. In the gut, they help us digest food. They can enhance perfumes or get laundry cleaner with less energy. Enzymes also make potent drugs to treat disease. Scientists naturally are eager to create new enzymes. They imagine them doing everything from drawing greenhouse gases out of the skies to degrading harmful toxins in the environment.  That age-old quest for new enzymes just got a whole lot easier. A team of bioengineers and synthetic biologists has developed a computational workflow that can design thousands of new enzymes, predict how they will behave in the real world, and test their performance ...

SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 22, 2025 – Females have a 31% higher associated risk of developing long COVID, with women aged 40 to 55 years having the highest propensity, according to a study led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) funded by the National Institutes of Health. The findings are part of a nationwide initiative launched by NIH, called Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER, to understand the long-term health effects of COVID-19. The latest ...

Macquarie University researchers have worked with an international team of scientists to achieve a major milestone in synthetic biology by completing the creation of the final chromosome in the world's first synthetic yeast genome. This achievement represents the completion of the global Sc2.0 project to create the world's first synthetic eukaryotic genome from Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast) and a new-to-nature tRNA neochromosome. Using cutting-edge genome-editing techniques, including the CRISPR D-BUGS protocol, the team identified and corrected genetic errors that impacted yeast growth. These changes restored the strain’s ability to grow on glycerol, ...

Researchers at Emory University have developed a groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) model capable of accurately predicting the likelihood of blood transfusion in non-traumatic intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Published in Health Data Science, the study addresses longstanding challenges in predicting transfusion needs across diverse patient groups with varying medical conditions​.   Blood transfusions are critical in managing anemia and coagulopathy in ICU settings, yet current clinical decision support systems often ...

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. Novel allogeneic NK cell therapy from induced pluripotent stem cells shows encouraging efficacy in relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphoma patients Patients ...

CHICAGO, IL (January 22, 2025) — Scholastica, a leading software solutions provider for academic journals, has released a new integration with Crossmark by Crossref, the industry standard mechanism for reporting updates to published research. The Crossmark integration is now available to journals subscribed to the Scholastica Open Access Publishing Platform that are published by a Crossref member organization participating in the Crossmark service. “Clearly communicating article updates and retractions is critical to maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record, and with this ...

Women are born with two X chromosomes and inherit one from each parent. But in every cell of their body, just one X chromosome is needed – so the other is randomly inactivated. Some cells use only a maternal X chromosome; others rely only on the paternal X.   Now, UC San Francisco researchers have found that when the brain cells of female mice express only a maternal X chromosome, their memory and cognitive skills deteriorate faster than female mice that express both maternal and paternal X chromosomes.   The discovery, which appears Jan. 22 in Nature, could explain the variation in brain aging between the sexes, since males inherit only a maternal X, as ...

Deeply hidden in Earth’s mantle there are two huge ‘islands’ with the size of a continent. New research from Utrecht University shows that these regions are not only hotter than the surrounding graveyard of cold sunken tectonic plates, but also that they must be ancient: at least half a billion years old, perhaps even older. These observations contradict the idea of a well-mixed and fast flowing Earth’s mantle, a theory that is becoming more and more questioned. “There is less flow in Earth’s ...

Complete recombination map of the human genome,  a major step in genetics Scientists at deCODE genetics/Amgen have constructed a complete map of how human DNA is mixed as it is passed down during reproduction. The map marks a major step in the understanding of genetic diversity and its impact on health and fertility. It continues 25 years of research at deCODE genetics into how new diversity is generated in the human genome, and its relationship to health and disease. The new map, appearing today in the online edition of Nature, is the first to incorporate shorter-scale shuffling, ...

Like humans, mice will compete over territory and mates, and show increased confidence in their fighting skills the more they win. At first, a brain chemical called dopamine is essential for young males to master this behavior. But as they gain experience, the chemical grows less important in promoting aggression, a new study shows. Dopamine has been linked to male aggression for decades. How past experiences might influence this relationship, however, had until now been unclear. In experiments in rodents, a team led by researchers at NYU Langone Health boosted activity in dopamine-releasing cells in a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area. The findings revealed that in ...

About The Study: Following landmark clinical trials and changes in guideline recommendations, self-reported primary prevention aspirin use decreased among older adults and adults with low atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk for whom aspirin was not recommended, but also decreased among adults with higher ASCVD risk for whom aspirin may still be recommended. Despite these reductions, many patients with limited likelihood to benefit reported continuing to take aspirin.  Corresponding Author: To contact the ...