Our gut microbiome -- the ever-changing "rainforest" of bacteria living in our intestines -- is primarily affected by our lifestyle, including what we eat or the medications we take, most studies show. But a University of Notre Dame study has found a much greater genetic component at play than was once known. In the study, published recently in END ...

Nonprofits and companies planting trees in the tropics may often pick species for their commercial rather than ecological value, researchers found in a new analysis of organizations' publicly available data. They also found many may not have tracked the trees' survival. Tree planting is a promising, but controversial, restoration strategy for fighting climate change. A new study in the journal Biological Conservation provides a detailed look at what restoration organizations across the tropics are actually doing on the ground. "We found some organizations placed an emphasis on biological diversity and forest restoration in their mission statements. When we looked at the species they reported ...

Major ecosystem changes like sea-level rise, desertification and lake warming are fueling uncertainty about the future. Many initiatives - such as those fighting to fully eradicate non-native species, or to combat wildfires - focus on actively resisting change to preserve a slice of the past. However, resisting ecosystem transformation is not always a feasible approach. According to a new paper published today in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, accepting and directing ecosystem change are also viable responses, and should not necessarily be viewed as fallback options or as last resorts. The paper presents a set of guiding principles for applying a "RAD" strategy - a framework that involves ...

BENGALURU, India (July 8, 2021) - A new study led by WCS-India documents how a big cat deity worshipped by Indigenous Peoples facilitates coexistence between humans and leopards. The study, published in a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science: Human-Wildlife Dynamics called Understanding Coexistence with Wildlife documents how the Indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra, India, worship Waghoba, a leopard/tiger deity to gain protection from leopards, and how they have lived side-by-side with them for centuries (formerly tigers, too). The researchers have identified over 150 shrines dedicated ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that a type of echocardiogram, a common test to evaluate whether a person's heart is pumping properly, may be useful in predicting which patients with COVID-19 are most at risk of developing atrial fibrillation -- an irregular heartbeat that can increase a person's risk for heart failure and stroke, among other heart issues. The new findings, END ...

Ever since the 1986 discovery that copper oxide materials, or cuprates, could carry electrical current with no loss at unexpectedly high temperatures, scientists have been looking for other unconventional superconductors that could operate even closer to room temperature. This would allow for a host of everyday applications that could transform society by making energy transmission more efficient, for instance. Nickel oxides, or nickelates, seemed like a promising candidate. They're based on nickel, which sits next to copper on the periodic table, and the two elements have some common characteristics. It ...

Conditions in the tropical ocean affect weather patterns worldwide. The most well-known examples are El Niño or La Niña events, but scientists believe other key elements of the tropical climate remain undiscovered. In a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists from the University of Washington and NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory use remotely-piloted sailboats to gather data on cold air pools, or pockets of cooler air that form below tropical storm clouds. "Atmospheric cold pools are cold air masses that flow outward beneath intense thunderstorms and alter the surrounding environment," ...

In a critical next step toward room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure, Paul Chu, Founding Director and Chief Scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH), Liangzi Deng, research assistant professor of physics at TcSUH, and their colleagues at TcSUH conceived and developed a pressure-quench (PQ) technique that retains the pressure-enhanced and/or -induced high transition temperature (Tc) phase even after the removal of the applied pressure that generates this phase. Pengcheng Dai, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and his group, and Yanming Ma, Dean of the College of Physics ...

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), one of China's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities, has accurately measured the brightness over 3.5 orders of magnitude of the standard candle in high-energy astronomy, thus calibrating a new standard for ultra-high-energy (UHE) gamma-ray sources. The standard candle is the famous Crab Nebula, which evolved from the "guest star" recorded by the imperial astronomers of China's Song Dynasty. LHAASO has also discovered a photon with an energy of 1.1 PeV (1 PeV = one quadrillion electronvolts), indicating the presence of an extremely powerful electron accelerator--about one-tenth the size of the solar system--located in the core ...

As tectonic plates slip past each other, the rivers that cross fault lines change shape. The shifting ground stretches the river channels until the water breaks its course and flows onto new paths. In a study published July 9 in Science, researchers at UC Santa Cruz created a model that helps predict this process. It provides broad context to how rivers and faults interact to shape the nearby topography. The group originally planned to use the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain of California to study how fault movement shapes the landscapes near rivers. But after spending hours pouring over aerial imagery and remote topographic data, their understanding of how the terrain evolves began to change. They realized that rivers play a more active ...

For the first time, Princess Margaret researchers have mapped out where and how leukemia begins and develops in infants with Down syndrome in preclinical models, paving the way to potentially prevent this cancer in the future. Children with Down syndrome have a 150-fold increased risk of developing myeloid leukemia within the first five years of their life. Yet the mechanism by which the extra copy of chromosome 21 predisposes to leukemia remains unclear. Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by a random error in cell division in early human development that results in an extra copy of chromosome 21. This extra copy is what causes the developmental changes and physical ...

Proactive, frequent rapid testing of all students for COVID-19 is more effective at preventing large transmission clusters in schools than measures that are only initiated when someone develops symptoms and then tests positive, Simon Fraser University researchers have found. Professors Caroline Colijn and Paul Tupper used a mathematical model to simulate COVID-19's spread in the classroom and published their research results today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The simulations showed that, in a classroom with 25 students, anywhere from zero to 20 students might be infected after exposure, depending on even small adjustments ...

(BOSTON) -- Current clinical interventions for infectious diseases are facing increasing challenges due to the ever-rising number of drug-resistant microbial infections, epidemic outbreaks of pathogenic bacteria, and the continued possibility of new biothreats that might emerge in the future. Effective vaccines could act as a bulwark to prevent many bacterial infections and some of their most severe consequences, including sepsis. According to the END ...

Feeling anxious about health, family or money is normal for most people--especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. But for those with anxiety disorders, these everyday worries tend to heighten even when there is little or no reason to be concerned. Researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine recently studied the behaviors associated with anxiety--published in Psychopharmacology--examining how biological factors impact anxiety disorders, specifically in females. They found that anxiety in females intensifies when there's a specific, life-relevant condition. The team, led by Thatiane De Oliveira Sergio, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Woody Hopf, PhD, professor of ...

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual Veterans from the Vietnam era report PTSD and poorer mental health more often than their heterosexual counterparts, according to an analysis of data from the Vietnam Era Health Retrospective Observational Study (VE-HEROeS). A greater burden of potentially traumatic events among LGB Veterans, such as childhood physical abuse, adult physical assault, and sexual assault, was associated with the differences. "This study is the first to document sexual orientation differences in trauma experiences, probable PTSD, and health-related quality of life in LGB Veterans using a nationally representative sample," said Dr. John Blosnich, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Placing rodent traps and bait stations based on rat and mouse behavior could protect the food supply more effectively than the current standard of placing them set distances apart, according to new research from Cornell University. Rodents cause billions of dollars in losses to the food supply each year, and carry pathogens that can sicken and kill humans, including salmonella, E. coli and Leptospira. In the 1940s and 50s, scientists recommended that farmers, food manufacturers and distributors evenly space rodent traps or bait boxes in their facilities. But in fact, a new study finds placement based on rat and mouse behavior is more effective. "From there, it just became a mantra without anybody scientifically evaluating it to see whether this ...

The new study, titled "Liposomal Extravasation and Accumulation in Tumors as Studied by Fluorescence Microscopy and Imaging Depend on the Fluorescent Label," was published on July 1, 2021, in the prestigious journal of the American Chemical Society, ACS Nano. Liposomes, a type of nanoparticle, are tiny, fat-soluble vesicles (small, fluid-filled sacs) made from lipids, or fats. They are mainly used to deliver cancer-fighting drugs to tumors, since liposomes are not water soluble and can protect some drugs against breaking down in the body. Comparing fluorescent labels on liposomes ...

The recent extreme heat in the Western United States and Canada may seem remarkable now, but events like these are made more likely, and more severe, under climate change. The consequences are likely to be far-reaching, with overwhelmingly negative impacts on land and ocean ecosystems, biodiversity, food production and the built environment. "The main lever we have to slow global warming is the rate at which CO2 is added to the atmosphere," said Marcus Thomson, a postdoctoral scholar at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. Thomson is a co-author of a research article just published in Nature ...

When people see a toothbrush, a car, a tree -- any individual object -- their brain automatically associates it with other things it naturally occurs with, allowing humans to build context for their surroundings and set expectations for the world. By using machine-learning and brain imaging, researchers measured the extent of the "co-occurrence" phenomenon and identified the brain region involved. The findings appear in Nature Communications. "When we see a refrigerator, we think we're just looking at a refrigerator, but in our mind, we're also calling up all the other things in a kitchen that we associate with a refrigerator," said corresponding author Mick Bonner, a Johns Hopkins University cognitive scientist. "This is the first time anyone has quantified this and identified ...

A team of the University of Barcelona has analysed for the first time what the dry and hot periods could be like in the area of the Pyrenees depending on different greenhouse emission scenarios. The results, published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, show that under an intermediate scenario, where these emissions that accelerate the climate change could be limited, there would not be a rise in long-lasting dry episodes, but temperatures would rise during these periods. On the other hand, if those emissions were not reduced during the 21st century, the summer no-rain periods would last an average ...

In a new study assessing the potential of a single-dose, intranasal COVID-19 vaccine, a team from the University of Iowa and the University of Georgia found that the vaccine fully protects mice against lethal COVID-19 infection. The vaccine also blocks animal-to-animal transmission of the virus. The findings were published July 2 in the journal Science Advances. "The currently available vaccines against COVID-19 are very successful, but the majority of the world's population is still unvaccinated and there is a critical need for more vaccines that are easy to use and effective at stopping disease and transmission," says Paul McCray, MD, professor of pediatrics-pulmonary medicine, and microbiology and immunology ...

Philadelphia, July 8, 2021 - Fifty-five percent of Midwest university students had tried a plant-based meat alternative and attributed this choice to the enjoyment of new food, curiosity about the products, and environmental concern, according to a new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier. For several decades, there has been a steady growth in consumer concerns about the environmental sustainability of the global food supply, animal welfare ethics, and human health consequences of red meat intakes. To assess the prevalence of plant-based alternatives to meat consumption in students; describe associations between demographics, environmental concern attitudes, and consumption; ...

A new study has linked a July 2015 ceasefire of conflict violence in Colombia with better pregnancy outcomes for women who conceived after the ceasefire began. Giancarlo Buitrago of Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia, and Rodrigo Moreno-Serra of the University of York, U.K., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. Previous research has suggested the possibility that women living in areas with armed violence experience adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, methodological problems or inappropriate data have hampered prior investigations into these associations. To better understand these associations, Buitrago and Moreno-Serra examined pregnancy outcome data for women who conceived before and after a ceasefire of conflict violence was declared ...

Scientists at the University of Groningen have trained an Artificial Intelligence system to recognize a specific pattern in skin biopsies of patients with the blistering disease epidermolysis bullosa acquisita. The pattern is characteristic of a specific variant of the disease which can cause scarring of the skin and mucous membranes and may lead to blindness. The new system is easy to use and is better than most doctors in making the diagnosis. A description of this AI system is published in the American Journal of Pathology. In patients with epidermolysis bullosa, layers of the skin get detached, causing large blisters. There are different forms of blistering diseases affecting different layers ...

Thyroid hormones are amino acid-based molecules produced by the thyroid gland. Involved in direct or indirect regulation of key metabolic pathways, these molecules play critical roles in the development and normal functioning of the body. The mechanism of how thyroid hormones exert their effect on each other as well as on other metabolic pathways is complex, but a two-way feedback loop is central to their biological activity. Dysregulation of the feedback loop that controls their production affects other biochemical pathways, causing various ailments including those related to the cardiovascular system, liver function, or bone development. Several clinical studies have shown the effect of thyroid hormones on lipid levels: that treating the patients with thyroid hormone analogs helps ...