Concerns have been raised about the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines regarding very rare but potentially fatal side effects related to low blood platelet counts and blood clots. Recently, reports also emerged that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may cause a rare yet serious side effect: heart inflammation. Concerns about side effects may trigger vaccine hesitancy, which the WHO considers one of 'Ten threats to global health'. Securing sufficient acceptance of vaccines is a key challenge in defeating the coronavirus pandemic, both now and in the future. How ...

What happens when climate change affects the abundance and distribution of fish? Fishers and fishing communities in the Northeast United States have adapted to those changes in three specific ways, according to new research published in Frontiers in Marine Science. Becca Selden, Wellesley College assistant professor of biological sciences, and a team of colleagues examined how fishing communities have responded to documented shifts in the location of fluke and of red and silver hake. The team found that fishers made three distinct changes to their approaches: following the fish to a new location; fishing for a different kind of fish; and bringing their catch to shore at another port of landing. Selden began this research as a postdoctoral ...

July 8, 2021 - Until relatively recently, opioids were a mainstay of treatment for pain following total hip or knee replacement. Today, a growing body of evidence supports the use of multimodal analgesia - combinations of different techniques and medications to optimize pain management while reducing the use and risks of opioids, according to a paper in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer. "Multimodal analgesia has become the standard of care for total joint arthroplasty as it provides superior analgesia with fewer side effects than opioid-only protocols," write Javad Parvizi, ...

Augmented reality (AR) is poised to revolutionise the way people complete essential everyday tasks, yet older adults - who have much to gain from the technology - will be excluded from using it unless more thought goes into designing software that makes sense to them. The danger of older adults falling through the gaps has been highlighted by research carried out by scientists at the UK's University of Bath and the Bath-based charity Designability. A Paper describing their work has received an honourable mention at this year's Human Computer Interaction Conference (CHI2021) - the world's largest conference of its kind. The study concludes that adults aged 50+ are more likely to be successful at completing AR-prompted tasks (such as 'pick up the cube' followed by 'move the cube to the blue ...

Skoltech biologists and their colleagues from Koltzov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russia, and the Chemistry Department of Taras Shevchenko University in Ukraine have discovered fairly unlikely drug candidates for treating liver fibrosis and other pathologies -- among pest control chemicals. In addition, the team looked at modifications of the medication called hymecromone, deeming them promising for anti-fibrotic drugs, too. Published in Glycobiology, the study also sheds light on the possible mechanism of action of the investigated compounds, all of which inhibit the synthesis of hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is an important biological compound that is a key component ...

The plates of the Earth's crust perform complicated movements that can be attributed to quite simple mechanisms. That is the short version of the explanation of a rift that began to tear the world apart over a length of several thousand kilometers 105 million years ago. The scientific explanation appears today in the journal Nature Geoscience. According to the paper, a super volcano split the Earth's crust over a length of 7,500 kilometers, pushing the Indian Plate away from the African Plate. The cause was a "plume" in the Earth's mantle, i.e. a surge of hot material that wells upwards like an atomic mushroom cloud in super slow motion. It has long been known that the ...

WASHINGTON--Tidal stresses may be causing constant icequakes on Saturn's sixth largest moon Enceladus, a world of interest in the search for life beyond Earth, according to a new study. A better understanding of seismic activity could reveal what's under the moon's icy crust and provide clues to the habitability of its ocean. Enceladus is about 500 kilometers in diameter and almost entirely covered in ice. The moon is nearly 10 times as far away from the Sun as Earth and its bright surface reflects most sunlight, making it very cold, yet researchers have long ...

Newborn infants and babies aged up to three months should be stimulated to manipulate objects and observe adults performing everyday tasks. This incentive helps their social, motor and cognitive development, researchers note in an article published in the May 2021 issue of the journal Infant Behavior & Development. According to the authors, from the earliest age babies watch adults carrying out activities such as handling utensils and putting them away in drawers or closets. They should themselves have frequent contact with objects to develop the ability to hold things and reach out for them. Through social interaction, ...

Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure in the United States, but identifying type 1 or type 2 diabetes patients at high risk for progressive kidney disease has never had a sure science behind it. Historically, assessing kidney function meant looking at estimated glomerular filtration rate, a calculation that determines how well blood is filtered by the kidneys, and urine albumin excretion, a urine test to detect the amount of the protein albumin, which is filtered by the kidneys. However, both tests have limited predictive power in early stage diabetes when kidney function is normal. The therapeutic approach to both type 1 and type 2 diabetic ...

A multi-institutional study has discovered spontaneous mutations in RNF2 (RING2) gene as the underlying cause of a novel neurological disorder. This Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) study was led by Dr. Shinya Yamamoto, investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (NRI) at Texas Children's Hospital and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Vandana Shashi at Duke University Medical Center. Using a combination of comprehensive clinical tests, trio genome sequencing and functional studies in the fruit flies, and global gene matchmaking efforts, the teams found ...

Amsterdam, July 8, 2021 - While the literature on the digital divide has widely addressed the digital gender gap, its potential implications for electronic government (e-government) / digital government research and practice have hardly been studied. In this Special Issue of Information Polity experts characterize the current state of understanding of the issues surrounding digital government and gender and present an agenda for future research. Gender is a neglected topic in the literature on digital government. According to the International Telecommunications Union, women are lagging behind men in making ...

demic have already had a dramatic impact on the prevailing oral health care model and will continue to do so. The paper "Advocacy for a Digital Oral Health That Leaves No One Behind," published in the JDR Clinical & Translational Research (JDR CTR), promotes the use of digital tools to offer opportunities to improve healthy behavior, lower risk factors common to oral diseases and other noncommunicable diseases and contribute to reducing oral health inequalities. To mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, systems were quickly put in place in most countries to respond to dental emergencies, ...

Consuming a protein supplement, specifically protein hydrolysate, during carbohydrate-restricted training was helpful for improving training intensity in women, but not in men. That's according to new research which will be part of a presentation this week at The Physiological Society's Annual Conference Physiology 2021. Most nutrition guidelines for athletes are based on research in men only. This study, by Tanja Oosthuyse and her colleagues, emphasizes that this shouldn't be the case, because nutritional research findings in men don't always apply to women. While the protein supplement helped training intensity in women, it did not improve training intensity and instead resulted in modest negative effect in men. It made exercise ...

July 8, 2021 - Women with recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs) experience frustration related to their treatment - particularly the risks from repeated use of antibiotics, according to a focus group study in The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "This study was prompted by our experience treating countless women with recurrent UTIs referred to our specialized Female Pelvic Medicine and Reconstructive Surgery center," comments senior author Ja-Hong Kim, MD, of UCLA Center of Women's Pelvic Health. "The vast majority were understandably dissatisfied with their care pathway, which was primarily antibiotic-focused ...

Ibaraki, Japan - Most kids dream of growing up to be astronauts; but the downside of spending extended amounts of time in low gravity is that astronauts' muscles tend to shrink and weaken through disuse. Now, researchers from Japan have identified a protein that affects how muscles respond to space flight. In a study published in June 2021 in Communications Biology, researchers from the University of Tsukuba have revealed that nuclear factor E2-related factor 2, or NRF2, helps keep muscles from becoming weak in low gravity. Muscle atrophy, or weakening, is a common feature of disease and aging. It can also occur after a long period of inactivity, such as during space flight, when astronauts don't need to use their muscles as much as they do on Earth to support ...

Thanks to the rapid development of nanotechnology, a research team led by Profs. NIE Guangjun, WU Yan and ZHAO Yuliang from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) recently designed personalized tumor vaccines based on bacterial cytoplasmic membranes and cell membranes from resected tumor tissue. This work was published in Science Translational Medicine. Cancer vaccines are an effective anti-tumor therapeutic option that utilize tumor antigens to stimulate patients' immune response and specifically kill tumor cells. Postoperative recurrence and metastasis after surgery can thus be effectively inhibited by the activated immune system. Therefore, ...

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a method for secure communication that uses quantum mechanics to encrypt information. While the security of QKD is unbreakable in principle, if it is incorrectly implemented, vital information could still be stolen by attackers. These are known as side-channel attacks, where the attackers exploit weaknesses in the setup of the information system to eavesdrop on the exchange of secret keys. Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed two methods, one theoretical and one experimental, to ensure that QKD communications cannot be attacked in this way. The first is an ultra-secure cryptography protocol that can be deployed in any communication network that needs long-term ...

Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have developed the Families Sharing Health Assessment and Risk Evaluation (SHARE) workbook, which helps people use their family history to assess their risk for heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. Since 2012, Laura Koehly, Ph.D., and her research team have measured the accessibility and usability of the workbook by working with communities and continually updating the workbook to address issues. Koehly is the chief of the Social ...

A joint research group from KAIST and Institut Pasteur Korea has identified repurposed drugs for COVID-19 treatment through virtual screening and cell-based assays. The research team suggested the strategy for virtual screening with greatly reduced false positives by incorporating pre-docking filtering based on shape similarity and post-docking filtering based on interaction similarity. This strategy will help develop therapeutic medications for COVID-19 and other antiviral diseases more rapidly. This study was reported at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of ...

Washington, DC (July 6, 2021) --The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was founded to regulate whaling. Today, it also increasingly focuses on the value of live whales for planetary health. A new workshop report confirms the great ecological value of whales to help mitigate climate change, transport nutrients, enhance marine productivity, and promote biodiversity in marine ecosystems. The world's leading experts gathered for a three-day workshop in April that was co-hosted by the IWC and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). The meeting came in response to a 2016 IWC resolution, introduced by the government of Chile, to compile scientific information about the ecological roles of cetaceans (whales and dolphins). The workshop discussions ...

Researchers at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Japan show that excessive blood pressure reduction for acute intracerebral hemorrhage is risky in people with decreased kidney function Suita, Japan -- Stroke and chronic kidney disease are both difficult to handle in their own rights, but having a stroke when your kidneys are already poor is more than just double the trouble. A new study led by Kazunori Toyoda at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (NCVC) in Japan shows that excessive blood pressure reduction for acute intracerebral hemorrhage can have dire consequences when kidney function is low. The study was published in the scientific journal Neurology®. Intracerebral hemorrhage is a disease for which effective treatment is expected ...

Rare-earth compounds have fascinated researchers for decades due to the unique quantum properties they display, which have so far remained totally out of reach of everyday compounds. One of the most remarkable and exotic properties of those materials is the emergence of exotic superconducting states, and particularly the superconducting states required to build future topological quantum computers. While these specific rare-earth compounds, known as heavy fermion superconductors, have been known for decades, making usable quantum technologies out of them has remained a critically ...

A new study suggests sea discoloration data obtained from satellite images as a novel criterion in predicting if eruption looms for an underwater volcano. There have been frequent eruptions of submarine volcanoes in recent years. The past two years alone recorded the explosions of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia, White Island in New Zealand, and Nishinoshima Island in Japan. Observing signs of volcanic unrest is crucial in providing life-saving information and ensuring that air and maritime travel are safe in the area. Although predicting when a volcano will erupt can be difficult as each behaves differently, scientists are on the lookout for these telltale signs: heightened seismic activity, expansion of magma pools, increases in volcanic gas release, ...

A pioneering cultivation strategy that recreates a mangrove environment in the lab has enabled identification of novel bacteria residing in Red Sea mangroves and will help improve understanding of mangrove ecosystem stability, resilience and sustainability. Mangroves are highly productive, dominant coastal ecosystems that line between 60-70 percent of the world's tropical and subtropical coastlines. They harbor diverse microbial communities thought to make up 80 percent of the ecosystem's biomass. Many of the microbial species, families and taxa are unknown to science. The cultivation strategy was developed by a team of KAUST researchers, including Fatmah Sefrji and Ramona Marasco. "Red Sea mangroves are particularly interesting because they represent an extreme and unique ...

The aconitase superfamily currently contains four functional enzymes including the archetypical aconitase (referred to as "other aconitase enzymes"), and one hypothetical aconitase X (AcnX). The aconitase enzymes catalyze the homologous stereospecific isomerization, and their three-dimensional structures and catalytic mechanisms including the [4Fe-4S] iron-sulfur cluster are very similar each other (Fig. 1a). Therefore, the aconitase superfamily (enzymes) is a typical example that is suitable for the so-called "recruitment hypothesis of enzyme evolution"; the gene duplication of multi-specific enzymes, followed by the narrowing of substrate specificity (ref. 1). AcnX (subfamily) is further classified into "AcnXType-I" consisting of a single ...