Led by Professor Robert Read and Dr Jay Laver from the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre and the University of Southampton, the work is the first of its kind. Together they inserted a gene into a harmless type of a bacteria, that allows it to remain in the nose and trigger an immune response. They then introduced these bacteria into the noses of healthy volunteers via nose drops. The results, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, showed a strong immune response against bacteria that cause meningitis. Published in ...

Through a complex, self-reinforcing feedback mechanism, colorectal cancer cells make room for their own expansion by driving surrounding healthy intestinal cells to death - while simultaneously fueling their own growth. This feedback loop is driven by an activator of the innate immune system. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the University of Heidelberg discovered this mechanism in the intestinal tissue of fruit flies. Maintaining the well-functioning state of an organ or tissue requires a balance of cell growth and differentiation on the one hand, and the elimination of defective cells on the other. The intestinal epithelium is a well-studied example of this balance, termed "tissue homeostasis": Stem cells ...

North Carolina State University researchers found that a four-week training course made a substantial difference in helping special education teachers anticipate different ways students with learning disabilities might solve math problems. The findings suggest that the training would help instructors more quickly identify and respond to a student's needs. Published in the Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, researchers say their findings could help teachers in special education develop strategies to respond to kids' math reasoning and questions in advance. They also say the findings point to the importance of mathematics education preparation for special education teachers - an area where researchers ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- As typical social and academic interaction screeched to a halt last year, many young people began experiencing declines in mental health, a problem that appeared to be worse for those whose connections to family and friends weren't as tight, a new study has found. In June 2020, researchers invited participants in an ongoing study of teenage boys and young men in urban and Appalachian Ohio to complete a survey examining changes to mood, anxiety, closeness to family and friends, and other ways the pandemic affected their lives. The study, co-led by researchers at The Ohio State University and Kenyon College, appears in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Nearly a third of the 571 participants reported that their mood ...

Chemotherapy is widely used to treat cancer patients. During the treatment, chemotherapeutic agents affect various biochemical processes to kill or reduce the growth of cancer cells, which divide uncontrollably in patients. However, the cell-damaging effect of chemotherapy affects cancer cells but also in principle many other cell types, including cycling blood cells. This puts the hematopoietic system under severe stress and pushes hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the bone marrow to produce fresh cells and replenish the stable pool of differentiated blood cells in the body. Researchers from the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, together with colleagues from the University of Freiburg, Lyon, Oxford, and St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, now discovered ...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Some LGBTQ+ people want to be part of faith communities. And though they have concerns about inclusion, they hope to find a faith community that feels like a home, based on West Virginia University research. Megan Gandy, BSW program director at the WVU School of Social Work, is a lesbian and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian whose personal experiences told a story that differed from research available in 2015 when she conceptualized her study. Gandy said the existing research either focused on the positive impacts of faith communities (which excluded LGBTQ+ people) ...

LAWRENCE -- Substance use disorder has long been considered a key factor in cases of parental neglect. But new research from the University of Kansas shows that such substance abuse does not happen in a vacuum. When examining whether parents investigated by Child Protective Services engaged in neglectful behaviors over the past year, a picture emerges that suggests case workers should look at substance misuse within the context of other factors, like mental health and social supports, to better prevent child neglect and help families. KU researchers analyzed data of parents investigated ...

Proteomics produces enormous amounts of data, which can be very complex to analyze and interpret. The free software platform MaxQuant has proven to be invaluable for data analysis of shotgun proteomics over the past decade. Now, Jürgen Cox, group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and his team present the new version 2.0. It provides an improved computational workflow for data-independent acquisition (DIA) proteomics, called MaxDIA. MaxDIA includes library-based and library-free DIA proteomics and permits highly sensitive and accurate data analysis. Uniting data-dependent and data-independent acquisition into one world, MaxQuant 2.0 is a big step towards improving applications ...

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from the University of Southern California have performed genetic analysis of a Russian sunflower collection and identified genetic markers that can help predict the oil's fatty acid composition. The research was published in BMC Genomics. Genomic selection, which helps quickly create new crop varieties, has been a much-discussed topic worldwide for the last 10 years. DNA sequencing and extensive genotyping have been applied to obtain genetic profiles of crops. When analyzed and compared to field data, those profiles help identify genetic ...

A study by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found that as the type of COVID-19 misinformation rectified by Singapore's mainstream news media evolved over the course of the pandemic, the role played by the media in debunking those myths became increasingly important to citizens in the nation's fight to manage the outbreak. Out of 2,000 news articles on COVID-19 published between 1 January to 30 April 2020, the NTU team analysed 164 news articles. The team observed that news reports correcting science and health-related COVID-19 misinformation were dominant at the start of the outbreak ...

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Secretariat today released the first official draft of a new Global Biodiversity Framework to guide actions worldwide through 2030 to preserve and protect Nature and its essential services to people. The framework includes 21 targets for 2030 that call for, among other things: At least 30% of land and sea areas global (especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and its contributions to people) conserved through effective, equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas (and other effective area-based conservation measures) A 50% of greater reduction in the rate of introduction of invasive ...

Children living in urban areas with high levels of air pollution, noise and traffic may be at higher risk of childhood obesity, according to a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal)--a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation--and the University Institute for Primary Care Research Jordi Gol (IDIAP Jordi Gol). The study was funded by the La Marató de TV3 Foundation. Published in Environment International, the study analysed data on 2,213 children aged 9 to 12 years in the city of Sabadell (Barcelona) who were participating in the ECHOCAT and INMA projects. ...

For 30 years, University of Tokyo Associate Professor Hisayoshi Nozaki has traveled an hour west of Tokyo to visit the Sagami River and collect algal samples to understand how living things evolved different sexes. Through new analysis of samples collected in 2007 and 2013 from dam lakes along the river, Lake Sagami and Lake Tsukui, researchers identified a species of freshwater algae that evolved three different sexes, all of which can breed in pairs with each other. This phenomenon of three sexes is slightly different from hermaphroditism. In species that normally have two sexes, a hermaphroditic individual who can produce both the male and female sex cells usually exists due to unusual gene expression. Many plants and some invertebrate species have three ...

China's first meteorological satellite launched in 1988. It was named Fengyun, which roughly translates to "wind and cloud". Since then, 17 more Fengyun meteorological satellites were launched, with seven still in operation, to monitor Earth's wind, clouds and, more recently, extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires. With more than 30 years of Earth observational data freely available to international partners, the Fengyun Meteorological Satellite program works as part of Earth's operational observation system, along with the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites and Europe's polar orbiting meteorological satellite series to provide ...

RUDN University mathematicians have developed a model for calculating the density of 5G stations needed to achieve the required network parameters. The results are published in Computer Communications. Network slicing (NS) is one of the key technologies that the new 5G communication standard relies on. Several virtual networks, or layers, are deployed on the same physical infrastructure (the same base stations). Each layer is allocated to a separate group of users, devices, or applications. To slice the network, one need the NR (New Radio) technology, which operates on millimetre waves. Most of the research in this area is aimed at creating an infrastructure of NR stations ...

"All living beings, including us, depend on photosynthesis," says Prof. Wataru Sakamoto of the Institute of Plant Science and Resources at Okayama University, Japan, as he begins to explain the core concepts behind a recent breakthrough in understanding plant physiology, which he was involved in. "Photosynthesis produces the energy needed to sustain plants and the oxygen we breathe. This reaction occurs in two steps, the first of which involves capturing light energy and producing oxygen. This step takes place in a cell organelle in the plant cells called the chloroplast: specifically, ...

RUDN and Shahid Beheshti University (SBU) chemist proposed a protocol for converting cellulose into a catalyst for the synthesis of oxadiazoles. The new approach makes the catalyst 3 times more stable compared to the same catalyst obtained by the traditional method. The results are published in Carbohydrate Polymers One of the directions of green chemistry is the biopolymers functionalization. Chemists modify polymers obtained from plants and animals -- they add functional molecular groups to them to get useful substances. For example, the catalysts for oxadiazoles synthesis are created from cellulose. They are necessary to produce polymers, dyes, medicines, and photographic ...

Tel Aviv University's new and groundbreaking technology inspires hope among people who have lost their sense of touch in the nerves of a limb following amputation or injury. The technology involves a tiny sensor that is implanted in the nerve of the injured limb, for example in the finger, and is connected directly to a healthy nerve. Each time the limb touches an object, the sensor is activated and conducts an electric current to the functioning nerve, which recreates the feeling of touch. The researchers emphasize that this is a tested and safe technology that is suited to the human body and could be implanted anywhere inside of it once clinical trials will be done. The technology was developed under the leadership of a team of experts from Tel Aviv University: Dr. Ben M. Maoz, ...

For quite some time, farmers and researchers have been focusing on how to bind carbon to soil. Doing so makes food crops more nutritious and increases yields. However, because carbon is converted into CO2 when it enters the atmosphere, there is a significant climate benefit to capturing carbon in soil as well. Too much carbon finds its way into the atmosphere. Should we fail to reverse this unfortunate trend, we will fail to achieve the Paris Agreement's goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030, according to CONCITO, Denmark's Green Think Tank. As such, it is important to find new ways of sequestering carbon in soil. This ...

A Moon-scanning method that can automatically classify important lunar features from telescope images could significantly improve the efficiency of selecting sites for exploration. There is more than meets the eye to picking a landing or exploration site on the Moon. The visible area of the lunar surface is larger than Russia and is pockmarked by thousands of craters and crisscrossed by canyon-like rilles. The choice of future landing and exploration sites may come down to the most promising prospective locations for construction, minerals or potential energy resources. However, scanning by eye across such a large area, looking for features perhaps a few hundred meters across, is laborious and often inaccurate, which makes it difficult ...

Smoking among young teens has become an increasingly challenging and costly public healthcare issue. Despite legislation to prevent the marketing of tobacco products to children, tobacco companies have shrewdly adapted their advertising tactics to circumvent the ban and maintain their access to this impressionable--and growing--market share. How they do it is the subject of a recent study led by Dr. Yael Bar-Zeev at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)'s Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine at HU-Hadassah Medical Center. She also serves as Chair ...

Forest clearance in Southeast Asia is accelerating, leading to unprecedented increases in carbon emissions, according to new research. The findings, revealed by a research team including University of Leeds academics, show that forests are being cut down at increasingly higher altitudes and on steeper slopes in order to make way for agricultural intensification. As a result, more than 400 million metric tons of carbon are released into the atmosphere every year as forests are cleared in the region, with that emissions figure increasing in recent ...

A Sussex team - including university mathematicians - have created a new modelling toolkit which predicts the impact of COVID-19 at a local level with unprecedented accuracy. The details are published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, and are available for other local authorities to use online, just as the UK looks as though it may head into another wave of infections. The study used the local Sussex hospital and healthcare daily COVID-19 situation reports, including admissions, discharges, bed occupancy and deaths. Through the pandemic, the newly-published modelling has been used by local NHS and public ...

Humans can easily identify sweet-tasting foods - and with pleasure. However, many carnivorous animals lack this ability, and whether birds, descendants of meat-eating dinosaurs, can taste sweet was previously unclear. An international team of researchers led by Max Planck Institute for Ornithology including Dr Simon SIN from Research Division for Ecology and Biodiversity, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has now shown that songbirds, a group containing over 4,000 species, can sense sweetness regardless of their primary diets. The study highlights a specific event in the songbird ancestors ...

In the vicinity of black holes, space is so warped that even light rays may curve around them several times. This phenomenon may enable us to see multiple versions of the same thing. While this has been known for decades, only now do we have an exact, mathematical expression, thanks to Albert Sneppen, student at the Niels Bohr Institute. The result, which even is more useful in realistic black holes, has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. You have probably heard of black holes -- the marvelous lumps of gravity from which not even light can escape. You may also have heard that space itself and even time behave oddly near black holes; space is warped. In the vicinity of a black hole, space ...