RUDN University professor and her colleagues from France proved that higher intake of magnesium and vitamin B6 helps to cope with the consequences of magnesium deficiency during pregnancy and in hormone-related conditions in women. Within four weeks, the painful symptoms become less severe, the quality of life improves, and the risks of miscarriage are reduced. The results of the study are published in Scientific Reports. Magnesium is involved in important processes in the human body -- from protein synthesis to respiration. The most common causes of magnesium imbalance are a lack of this element in the diet, diabetes, and hypertension. The problem of magnesium ...

The research team led by Prof. GUO Guangcan from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with Prof. Adam Gali from Wigner Research Centre for Physics, realized robust coherent control of solid-state spin qubits using anti-Strokes (AS) excitation, broadening the boundary of quantum information processing and quantum sensing. This study was published in Nature Communications. Solid-state color center spin qubits play an important role in quantum computing, quantum networks and high-sensitivity quantum sensing. Considered as the basis of quantum technology application, optically detected magnetic ...

Research, development, and production of novel materials depend heavily on the availability of fast and at the same time accurate simulation methods. Machine learning, in which artificial intelligence (AI) autonomously acquires and applies new knowledge, will soon enable researchers to develop complex material systems in a purely virtual environment. How does this work, and which applications will benefit? In an article published in the Nature Materials journal, a researcher from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and his colleagues from Göttingen and Toronto explain it all. (DOI: 10.1038/s41563-020-0777-6) Digitization and virtualization are becoming increasingly important in a wide range of scientific disciplines. One of these disciplines ...

A research team led by Professor Jianping Huang from Lanzhou University has launched a Global Prediction System for COVID-19 pandemic. Their recent work explored the periodicity and mutability in the evolutionary history of the COVID-19 pandemic and investigated the principle mechanisms behind them. They attributed the periodic oscillations of COVID-19 daily cases to seasonal modulations and reporting bias, and identified the unrestricted mass gatherings as the main culprit of the COVID-19 disaster. Their findings, entitled "The oscillation-outbreaks characteristic of the COVID-19 pandemic", were published in National Science Review. In this study, the influence ...

Bristle worms are found almost everywhere in seawater, they have populated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, some of their special features have only now been deciphered: Their jaws are made of remarkably stable material, and the secret of this stability can now be explained by experiments at TU Wien in cooperation with Max Perutz Labs. Metal atoms, which are incorporated into the protein structure of the material, play a decisive role. They make the material hard and flexible at the same time - very similar to ordinary metals. Further ...

X-rays are widely used to study the structures of various objects. New sources of x-rays, like Free Electron Lasers and 4th generation synchrotrons are being built around the Globe. The best optics for the new sources is usually made of the single crystal materials, such as silicon, germanium or diamond. However, the ideal periodicity of crystals leads to some unwanted diffraction losses - X-ray glitches. This effect causes dips in the intensity of the radiation transmitted through the optical element, down to zero. Scientists from the Immanuel Kant Baltic ...

Language is one of our species' most important skills, as it has enabled us to occupy nearly every corner of the planet. Among other things, language allows indigenous societies to use the biodiversity that surrounds them as a "living pharmacy" and to describe the medicinal properties of plants. Linguists estimate that there are nearly 7,400 languages in the world today. Most of these languages, however, are not recorded in writing, and many languages are not being passed on to the next generation. This has led linguists to estimate that 30 percent of all languages will disappear by the end of the 21st century. For indigenous cultures who mostly transmit knowledge orally, this ...

A research group at KAIST has engineered bacterial strains capable of producing three carotenoids and four violacein derivatives, completing the seven colors in the rainbow spectrum. The research team integrated systems metabolic engineering and membrane engineering strategies for the production of seven natural rainbow colorants in engineered Escherichia coli strains. The strategies will be also useful for the efficient production of other industrially important natural products used in the food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Colorants are widely used in our lives and are directly related to human health when we eat food additives and wear cosmetics. However, most of these colorants are made from petroleum, causing unexpected side effects and health problems. Furthermore, ...

Feelings of anxiety, pessimism and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic led middle-aged women in both Australia and the UK to stock up on alcohol, which was associated with drinking more, a new Flinders University-led study has found. The research, led by Dr Emma Miller in Flinders University's College of Medicine and Public Health, also found women in the UK were more likely to drink at risky levels than their Australian counterparts during lockdown, and were more likely to have stockpiled alcohol. Despite these differences, the research found the emotional responses to ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Ceramic materials that are resistant to cracking are used in a variety of industries from aerospace engineering to dentistry. Toughening them to improve their efficiency and safety is therefore an important area of investigation. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have used time-resolved X-ray diffraction to observe transformation toughening in zirconia ceramics during dynamic fracture. Their findings are published in Applied Physics Letters. Current methods of observation allow the formation of cracks in materials to be observed in situ while loads are applied. These close-up analyses ...

Human cells are kept healthy by the activity of millions of proteins. These proteins are modified in different ways, such as by adding sugar molecules to them, which can be crucial for them to function properly. Given this importance, defects in the sugar-adding process are often lethal at the very early stages of development. In rare cases, however, patients can develop sugar-adding deficiencies that result in a range of metabolic diseases, known collectively as 'congenital disorders of glycosylation' (CDG). These disorders are caused by defects in the enzymes involved in the sugar-adding process. For example, ALG2-CDG (or CDG-Ii) is a disorder caused by mutations in the ALG2 enzyme, ...

MELVILLE, N.Y., June 9, 2021 -- Designing a soundscape to improve the quality of life for an individual is centered on putting their perception at the heart of the process. It becomes trickier for people who have diminished cognitive capacities. During the 180th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will be held virtually June 8-10, Arezoo Talebzadeh, from Ghent University, will show how a personalized soundscape can help those with dementia by providing clues regarding time of day and place. The session, "Soundscape design for people with dementia; the correlation between psychoacoustic parameter and human perception," will take place Wednesday, June 9, ...

UPTON, NY--How do you spot a subatomic neutrino in a "haystack" of particles streaming from space? That's the daunting prospect facing physicists studying neutrinos with detectors near Earth's surface. With little to no shielding in such non-subterranean locations, surface-based neutrino detectors, usually searching for neutrinos produced by particle accelerators, are bombarded by cosmic rays--relentless showers of subatomic and nuclear particles produced in Earth's atmosphere by interactions with particles streaming from more-distant cosmic locations. These abundant travelers, mostly muons, create a web of crisscrossing particle tracks that can easily obscure a ...

Fruits, vegetables, red wine and chocolate are all rich in polyphenols, natural plant compounds that double as cancer-fighting antioxidants. We can access these foods' health benefits because the microbes in our guts happily feast on them, breaking them down into smaller chemical components. Microbiome scientists at Colorado State University wanted to know if microbes can also break down those same polyphenols in systems outside the human body, including the microbial wild west of soils. A research team led by Kelly Wrighton, associate professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences' Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, has uncovered new insights into the role of polyphenols in the soil microbiome, known as a black box for its complexity. They proffer an updated theory that soils ...

Los Angeles (June 8, 2021) -- IBDs, including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, are chronic conditions that occur when the intestinal immune system becomes overreactive, causing chronic diarrhea and other digestive symptoms. In a published survey at the beginning of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, 70% of IBD patients reported concern about side effects from the vaccines. "What we've learned is that if you have IBD, the side effects you're likely to experience after a vaccine are no different than they would be for anyone else," said Gil Melmed, MD, corresponding author of the study and director of Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Research at Cedars-Sinai. "If ...

Real-world data from Sleep Number® smart bed sleepers shows a potential model for predicting and tracking COVID-19 infection using sleep and biometric measures. Analysis of 18.2 million 360 smart bed sleep sessions finds heart rate variability differs with age, gender and day of the week. MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- June 9, 2021 -- Today, END ...

Deaths from suicide are rising in the United States. These rising trends are especially alarming because global trends in suicide are on a downward trajectory. Moreover, in the U.S., the major mode of suicide among young Americans is by firearms. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators explored trends in suicide by firearms in young white and black Americans (ages 5 to 24 years) from 1999 to 2018. Results, published in the journal Annals of Public Health and Research, showed that between 2008 and 2018, rates of suicide by firearms quadrupled in young Americans ages 5 to 14 ...

Chemical rings of carbon and hydrogen atoms curve to form relatively stable structures capable of conducting electricity and more -- but how do these curved systems change when new components are introduced? Researchers based in Japan found that, with just a few sub-atomic additions, the properties can pivot to vary system states and behaviors, as demonstrated through a new synthesized chemical compound. The results were published on April 26 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "In the past decade, open-shell molecules have attracted considerable attention not only in the field of reactive intermediates, but also in materials science," said paper author Manabu Abe, ...

In the first three quarters of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 30% fall in electronic and electrical equipment sales in low- and middle-income countries but only a 5% decline in high-income countries, highlighting and intensifying the digital divide between north and south, according to a new UN report. Worldwide, sales of heavy electric appliances like refrigerators, washing machines and ovens fell the hardest -- 6-8% -- while small IT and telecommunications equipment decreased by only 1.4%. Within the latter category, sales of laptops, cell phones and gaming equipment rose in high-income countries and on a global basis, but fell in low- and middle-income ...

To focus on what's new, we disregard what's not. A new study by researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory substantially advances understanding of how a mammalian brain enables this "visual recognition memory." Dismissing the things in a scene that have proven to be of no consequence is an essential function because it allows animals and people to quickly recognize the new things that need to be assessed, said Mark Bear, Picower Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and senior author of the study in the Journal of Neuroscience. "Everyone's appropriate behavioral response to an unexpected stimulus is to devote attentional resources to that," Bear said. "Maybe it means danger. Maybe it means food. But if you learn that this once-novel ...

For the first time, Australian scientists have confirmed a link between the role of regular fish oil to break down the ability of 'superbugs' to become resistant to antibiotics. The discovery, led by Flinders University and just published in international journal mBio, found that the antimicrobial powers of fish oil fatty acids could prove a simple and safe dietary supplement for people to take with antibiotics to make their fight against infection more effective. "Importantly, our studies indicate that a major antibiotic resistance mechanism in cells can be negatively impacted by the uptake of omega-3 dietary lipids," says microbiologist Dr Bart Eijkelkamp, who leads the Bacterial Host Adaptation Research Lab at ...

As many older adults get back to normal life across the United States thanks to high rates of vaccination and lower COVID-19 activity, a new poll suggests many should watch their alcohol intake. In all, 23% of adults over 50 who drink alcohol reported that they routinely had three or more drinks in one sitting, according to END ...

DALLAS, June 9, 2021 -- Many adults with a history of cardiovascular disease (CVD) continue to smoke cigarettes and/or use other tobacco products, despite knowing it increases their risk of having another cardiovascular event, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association. To understand how many adults with CVD continue to use tobacco products, investigators reviewed survey responses from the large, national Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (PATH) to compare tobacco use rates over time. The participants of the current study included 2,615 adults (ages 18 or older) with a self-reported history of heart attack, heart failure, stroke or other heart disease, ...

The field of ultrafast nonlinear photonics has now become the focus of numerous studies, as it enables a host of applications in advanced on-chip spectroscopy and information processing. The latter in particular requires a strongly intensity-dependent optical refractive index that can modulate optical pulses faster than even picosecond timescales and on sub-millimeter scales suitable for integrated photonics. Despite the tremendous progress made in this field, there is currently no platform providing such features for the ultraviolet (UV) spectral range, which is where broadband spectra generated by nonlinear modulation can be used for new on-chip ultrafast chemical and biochemical spectroscopy devices. Now, an ...

An international group of collaborators, including scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and The University of New Mexico, have discovered a new, temperate sub-Neptune sized exoplanet with a 24-day orbital period orbiting a nearby M dwarf star. The recent discovery offers exciting research opportunities thanks to the planet's substantial atmosphere, small star, and how fast the system is moving away from the Earth. The research, titled TOI-1231 b: A Temperate, Neptune-Sized Planet Transiting the Nearby M3 Dwarf NLTT 24399, will be published in a future issue of The Astronomical Journal. The exoplanet, TOI-1231 b, was detected ...