Compared with heterosexual smokers, menthol cigarette smoking is higher among lesbian, gay and bisexual cigarette smokers, according to a Rutgers-led study, especially among bisexual and lesbian/gay female cigarette smokers. The study, published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, examined national data from 2015 to 2019 of individuals ages 18 years and older by sex and sexual identity and found that among smokers, 54 and 50 percent of bisexual and lesbian/gay females smokers preferred menthol cigarettes, respectively, compared with 39 percent of smokers overall. This study comes in the wake of plans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban menthol cigarettes; a move that researchers say is ...

Information-rich optical imaging can provide multidimensional information to enable observation and analysis of a detected target, contributing insights into mysterious and unknown worlds. With its ability to capture dynamic scenes on picosecond—and even femtosecond—timescales, ultrafast multidimensional optical imaging has important applications in the detection of the ultrafast phenomena in physics, chemistry, and biology. While pump-probe-based ultrafast imaging can acquire high-resolution multidimensional information, it cannot adequately capture unstable or irreversible transient scenes. Fortunately, compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), based ...

A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. It also suggests humans may share the same neural bias. The findings, published today, Tuesday, July 13, in the journal eLife, suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt. "We have found that the group identity ...

JUPITER, FL - The brain is wired for learning. With each experience, our neurons branch out to make new connections, laying down the circuitry of our long-term memories. Scientists call this trait plasticity, referring to an ability to adapt and change with experience. For plasticity to happen, our neurons' synapses, or connection points, must constantly remodel and adapt, too. The mechanics underlying neurons' synaptic plasticity have become clearer, thanks to new research from the lab of Scripps Research neuroscientist Sathya Puthanveettil, PhD. Scientists have learned that synaptic plasticity requires a complex relay from the neuron's cell body to its dendrite arms and its synapse junctions. Like a 24-hour port and highway network, an internal ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Direct farm marketing efforts, such as farmers markets and roadside stands, are more successful in communities with more nonprofits, social enterprises and creative industries, according to a team including Cornell University researchers, who created a nationwide database of assets to help municipalities craft community-specific development plans. While many municipalities seek to encourage direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing - an important factor in farmers' livelihoods - the success of their efforts hinges on a wide array of community resources, or capital assets, with natural and cultural ...

AMHERST, Mass. - Humans have known for over two thousand years that shipworms, a worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats, docks, dikes and piers. Yet new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst published in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that we still don't know the most basic thing about them: how they eat. "It's unbelievable," says Reuben Shipway, adjunct assistant professor in microbiology at UMass Amherst, research fellow at the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and one of the paper's authors. "The ancient Greeks wrote about them, Christopher Columbus lost his fleet due to what he called 'the havoc which the worm had wrought,' and, today, shipworms cause billions of dollars of damage a year." Shipworms ...

Middle- to older-aged adults who ate at least three servings of whole grains daily had smaller increases in waist size, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels over time compared to those who ate less than one-half serving per day, according to new research. Published July 13, 2021, in the Journal of Nutrition, the study by researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University examined how whole- and refined-grain intake over time impacted five risk factors of heart disease: Waist size, blood pressure, blood sugar, triglyceride, and HDL ("good") cholesterol. Using data from the Framingham Heart Study Offspring ...

Philadelphia, July 13, 2021 - Consumers may have less trust in food processes that they don't understand, and animal-based foods may be subject to more uninformed scrutiny than other foods due to consumers' perception of higher risk. Dairy producers can benefit from understanding how consumers interpret unfamiliar terms and claims on dairy product labels. In a new END ...

New research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has shown that the mutations arising in the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus seem to run in the family -- or at least the genus of coronaviruses most dangerous to humans. After comparing the early evolution of SARS-CoV-2 against that of its closest relatives, the betacoronaviruses, the Nebraska team found that SARS-CoV-2 mutations are occurring in essentially the same locations, both genetically and structurally. The mutational similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and its predecessors, including the human-infecting SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, could help inform predictions of how the COVID-causing virus will continue to evolve, the researchers ...

Amsterdam, July 13, 2021 - Mass spectrometry has emerged as an important analytical tool for gaining a better understanding of mechanisms underlying Huntington's disease (HD), alongside the increased availability of cell and animal models of the disease. This END ...

YorkU pain research finds what you say in the first minute after a vaccine can be key in reducing a child's future distress New study finds it's not just what say, but when you say it that can keep preschoolers calmer during vaccinations TORONTO, July 13, 2021 - As we look forward to a fall with hopefully one of the most important vaccination uptakes of children in a generation, a new study provides insights to help parents with reducing post-vaccination distress in younger kids. The study, published in END ...

WASHINGTON--In cities and towns across the United States, neighborhoods with more Black, Hispanic and Asian residents experience hotter temperatures during summer heatwaves than nearby white residents, a new study finds. It is the first to show that the trend, documented in some major cities, is widespread, even in small towns, nationwide.   According to the new nationwide study, these racial disparities exist because non-white neighborhoods tend to be more densely built up with buildings and pavement that trap heat and have fewer trees to cool the landscape.    "Urban climate is different from temperatures outside the city," said co-author Susanne Benz, an ...

Antimicrobials are used to kill or slow the growth of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms. They can be in the form of antibiotics, used to treat bodily infections, or as an additive or coating on commercial products used to keep germs at bay. These life-saving tools are essential to preventing and treating infections in humans, animals and plants, but they also pose a global threat to public health when microorganisms develop resistance to them, a concept known as antimicrobial resistance. One of the main drivers of antimicrobial resistance is the misuse and overuse of antimicrobial agents, which includes silver nanoparticles, ...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption to health care delivery, with resources shifted toward telehealth services and mass viral testing. While early studies in the pandemic highlighted differences in health care utilization among patients with commercial insurance, data from publicly insured or uninsured "safety-net" patient populations continue to emerge. A recent study from researchers at the University of Minnesota and Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute (HHRI) is among the first to examine how different socio-demographic groups used telehealth, outpatient (i.e., clinic), emergency department and inpatient (i.e., hospital) care to test for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. ...

In particle physics, a Majorana Fermion is charge neutral and its antiparticle is just itself. In condensed matter physics, a Majorana zero mode (MZM) is a quasi-particle excitation, which appears in the surfaces or edges of topological superconductors. Unlike the ordinary particles or quasi-particles that obey boson or fermion statistics, MZM obeys non-abelian statistics, a key property that makes MZM the building block for realizing topological quantum computation. Currently major experimental efforts focus on heterostructures made of superconductors and spin-orbit coupled systems (such as semiconducting nano-wires and topological insulators), where evidences of MZMs have been found. Unambiguous detection and manipulation of MZMs in these heterostructures, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have created insecticide-free, mosquito-resistant clothing using textile materials they confirmed to be bite-proof in experiments with live mosquitoes. They developed the materials using a computational model of their own design, which describes the biting behavior of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that carries viruses that cause human diseases like Zika, Dengue fever and yellow fever. Ultimately, the researchers reported in the journal Insects that they were able to prevent 100 percent of bites when a volunteer wore their clothing - a base layer undergarment and a combat shirt initially designed for the military - in a cage with 200 live, disease-free mosquitoes. Vector Textiles, an NC State startup company, ...

Contractile injection systems (CISs) are widely distributed in bacteria and archaea that can form a nanomachine resembling the contractile tails of bacteriophage (T4, P2, etc.) to translocate proteins and nucleic acids . The P. asymbiotica was shown to be involved in the human infection with severe skin lesions. The PVC loci within P. asymbiotica genome produce molecular needle complexes and encode several putative effector genes. It would be a candidate P. asymbiotica weapon that participates in the attack of mammalian cells, but substantial evidences will be needed to verify this hypothesis. In this study, researchers have characterized the PAU_RS16575 as a potent PVC effector, which is widely present in bacteria. ...

To extract the polarization information of incident light, polarization-sensitive photodetectors (PSPDs) exhibit significant practical application in both military and civil areas, like bio-imaging, remote sensing, night vision, and helmet-mounted sight for fighter plane. Optical filters combined with polarizers are usually needed for traditional photodetectors to realize polarized light detection. But it will increase the size and complexity of devices. To obtain a small-size PSPD, one-dimensional (1D) nanomaterials with geometrical anisotropy, such as nanowires, nanoribbons, and nanotubes, have been used as the sensitive materials for PSPDs, which can directly identify the polarization information of incident light without any optical filters and polarizers. However, it is not ...

Google searches related to infertility and coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines increased by 34,900% after a pair of physicians submitted a petition questioning the safety and efficacy data of the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine. Referencing the petition, anti-vaccine activists circulated claims that misconstrued the information regarding the possibility that the vaccine could impact fertility in women. The inaccurately represented information spread rapidly on social media channels, potentially influencing public perception and decision-making among pregnant patients or those ...

The human brain has extreme ability in thinking and computation, but it only requires a very low energy power of about 20W, which is much lower than that of electronic computers. The neuronal connections in the brain network have a globally sparse but locally compact modular topological characteristics, which greatly reduces the total resource consumption for establishing the connections. The spikes of each neuron in the brain are sparse and irregular, and the clustered firing of the neuronal populations has a certain degree of synchronization, forming neural avalanches with scale-free characteristics, and the network can sensitively respond to external stimuli. However, it is still not clear how the ...

While attending a conference at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City several years ago, Sharon Borja was struck by the story of a young man who, as a child, joined his parents repatriating to their native country of Mexico. Like millions of Mexican immigrants, the family had called the United States home for years, and having been born in the U.S., he was an American citizen. Walking one day in his newfound urban Mexican neighborhood, a couple carrying a wooden stick approached him on the street and encouraged him to ...

A new study from researchers at the University of Liverpool shows that decreasing local government funding over recent years probably contributed to declines in life expectancy in some areas of England, which was stalling even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Local government funding and life expectancy in England, a longitudinal ecological study published in The Lancet Public Health, linked annual local government funding data from the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government with life expectancy and mortality data from Public Health England between 2013 and 2017. Corresponding author Dr Alexandros ...

A USC analysis of deaths among individuals in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody found that ICE violated its own internal medical care standards in 78% of cases, potentially contributing to deaths in relatively young and healthy men. The study appears in END ...

New research from the University of Georgia finds that older Mexican Americans who live in low English-speaking neighborhoods are at greater risk for poor health and even an early death. Language barriers can be a significant deterrent to health. People who don't speak English well are less likely to seek health care or receive health information. This can lead to delay of care and missed health screenings for chronic disease and cancers. Language isolation is also linked to poor mental health. These issues only compound as non-English speakers age, said study co-author Kerstin Emerson, a clinical ...

A single dose of the Sputnik V vaccine may elicit significant antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2, finds a study published July 13 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine. "Due to limited vaccine supply and uneven vaccine distribution in many regions of the world, health authorities urgently need data on the immune response to vaccines to optimize vaccination strategies," says senior author Andrea Gamarnik (@GamarnikLab) of the Fundación Instituto Leloir-CONICET in Buenos Aires, Argentina. "The peer-reviewed data we present provide information for guiding public health decisions in light of the current global health emergency." Past research has shown that two doses of Sputnik V results in 92% efficacy against ...