Conclusive evidence of chicken breeding in the Yayoi period of Japan has been discovered from the Karako-Kagi site. The chicken is one of the most common domesticated animals, with a current estimated population of over 33 billion individuals. They are reared for their meat and eggs, and may be kept as pets. The chicken is believed to have been domesticated in Southeast Asia about 3500 years ago, following which they were carried to all corners of the world. The exact date of introduction of chicken breeding to Japan is under debate, as there are no historical records and archeological evidence ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. (April 20, 2023) – In the spiraling cycle that can lead to vision loss in premature newborns, Medical College of Georgia scientists have found a new target and drug that together appear to stop the destruction in its tracks. In babies, the development of the blood vessels of the retina should be complete by birth. But with preterm birth, the still-immature retina can develop a potentially blinding eye disorder known as retinopathy of prematurity. When premature babies transition from inside the womb, where ...

Imagine the view from the western coastline of southern Africa during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) over twenty thousand years ago: in the distance you would see at least fifteen large islands – the largest 300 square kilometres in area – swarming with hundreds of millions of marine birds and penguin colonies. Now imagine sea levels rising up to a hundred metres between fifteen to seven thousand years ago, gradually covering these large islands until only small hill tops and outcrops remained above water. Over the past 22 000 years this resulted in a tenfold ...

Like many neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a thief that hacks into human operating systems and corrupts their cognitive hard drives until they can no longer control their movements or perform activities of daily living.  Often, in its later stages, Parkinson’s disease steals data too, leading to memory loss, confusion and dementia. Both the cause and cure of Parkinson’s disease remain elusive, but research has helped afflicted individuals manage their symptoms and lead healthier post-diagnosis lives. Individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s ...

Last year, nursing schools across the country were forced to turn away more than 90,000 qualified applicants. The reason: a lack of faculty members to teach them and clinical sites to train them.   A team of University of Texas at Arlington faculty led by Ann Eckhardt, clinical associate professor and interim chair of graduate nursing programs in the College of Nursing and Health Innovation (CONHI), received a state grant to help reverse that trend and increase the pool of nursing faculty, preceptors and simulation coordinators.   “There ...

UC Davis Health researchers have dosed the second participant in their clinical trial looking to identify a potential cure for HIV utilizing CAR T-cell therapy. The novel study uses immunotherapy. It involves taking a patient's own white blood cells, called T-cells, and modifying them so they can identify and target HIV cells to control the virus without medication. The first participant was dosed with anti-HIV duoCAR T cells at UC Davis Medical Center in mid-August. The trial is the first-in-human clinical study investigating the duoCAR T-cell therapy for the treatment of HIV. “We have reached ...

A set of recent studies demonstrates for the first time that learning multiple new tasks carries benefits for cognition long after the learning has been completed. The finding affirms a long-held assertion of the lead researcher, Rachel Wu, who is an associate professor of psychology at UC Riverside. That is, older adults can learn new tasks and improve their cognition in the process, if they approach learning as a child does. “Our findings provide evidence that simultaneously learning real-world skills can lead to long-term improvements in cognition during older adulthood,” ...

Earthquakes cost the nation an estimated $14.7 billion annually in building damage and associated losses according to a new report released jointly today by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Emergency Management Agency at the annual Seismological Society of America meeting. The new estimate is twice that of previous annual estimates due to increased building value and the fact that the report incorporates the latest hazards as well as improvements to building inventories. Earthquake losses from the last few decades in the U.S. have ranged about $1.5-$3 billion per year depending upon the timeframe. While ...

New York (April 19, 2022) — The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the AGS Health in Aging Foundation (HiAF) today announced that the 2023 Thomas and Catherine Yoshikawa Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in Clinical Investigation will be awarded to Dae Kim, MD, MPH, ScD,  Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Scientist at the Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife, and Attending Geriatrician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.  The award will be presented at the AGS 2023 Annual Scientific Meeting (#AGS23), May 4-6 ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil have shown for the first time that gestational obesity associated with infection by zika virus influences the placenta’s antiviral response, weakening the organ’s capacity to attack the pathogen and protect the fetus. The study was supported by FAPESP. Its results are reported in an article published in the journal Viruses.  According to the authors, the findings underscore the importance of adequate ...

Functional movement/conversion disorder (FMD), part of the spectrum of Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), is a neuropsychiatric condition marked by a range of neurological symptoms, including tremors, muscular spasms and cognitive difficulties. Despite being the second most common cause of referrals to neurology outpatient clinics after headache, scientists have struggled to pin down the disorder’s root cause. Female sex and a history of childhood trauma are factors associated with higher risk of developing FMD, but it’s been unclear why. A new study from investigators of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, ...

How an organization reacts to a nearby competitor adopting an important innovation may be influenced by the type and difficulty of problems it handles for its customers, according to a new study published in Strategic Management Journal. The researchers found that organizations serving more difficult customer needs tend to defer investment in response to a competitor’s technology adoption, while those who address less difficult problems are likely to accelerate adoption of that same technology. The study, led by Shirish Sundaresan, an assistant professor at Georgia State University, stresses ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – A drug called teriflunomide may delay first symptoms for people whose magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans show signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) even though they do not yet have symptoms of the disease. The preliminary study, released April 19, 2023, will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 75th Annual Meeting, being held in person in Boston and live online from April 22-27, 2023. Called radiologically isolated syndrome, the condition is diagnosed in people who do not have MS symptoms but who have abnormalities in the brain or spinal cord called lesions, similar to those seen in MS. MS ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – In people with no thinking and memory problems, a simple test may predict the risk of developing cognitive impairment years later, according to a study published in the April 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “There is increasing evidence that some people with no thinking and memory problems may actually have very subtle signs of early cognitive impairment,” said study author Ellen Grober, PhD, of Albert Einstein ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – People with epilepsy living in disadvantaged neighborhoods—areas with higher poverty levels and fewer educational and employment opportunities— may be more likely to have memory, thinking, and mental health problems compared to people with epilepsy living in neighborhoods with fewer disadvantages, according to new research published in the April 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that living in disadvantaged neighborhoods causes ...

Surgery to relieve leg pain and disability in some people with sciatica may be better than other non-surgical treatments, but the benefits are short-lived, lasting only up to 12 months, finds an analysis of the latest evidence published by The BMJ today. What’s more, the certainty of available evidence is low to very low, prompting the researchers to suggest that surgery might only be a worthwhile option for people who feel that the rapid relief outweighs the costs and potential risks associated with surgery. Sciatica refers to pain that travels along the path of the sciatic nerve, from the lower back and down the leg. In some people, sciatica occurs ...

The long-spined sea urchin Diadema antillarum is a keystone species. Coral reefs rely on healthy sea urchins to eat algae so coral can thrive. Healthy coral means healthy fish, and their positive impacts continue up the food chain. In early 2022, long-spined sea urchins in St. Thomas began to quickly die in large numbers. Scientists rushed in to find the cause and have discovered that a microscopic parasite swarms the body and spines of the urchins, eating them alive. The culprit, a microscopic organism called a scuticociliate, appears most similar to Philaster apodigitiformis, a type of protozoan parasite. It began decimating sea urchin populations around the Caribbean, ...

The human body naturally produces opioid-like substances, such as endorphins, which block the perception of pain and increase the feeling of well-being. Similarly, opioid drugs, including morphine or fentanyl, are widely used for alleviating severe pain. However, their use is associated with a high risk of dependence and addiction, and their excessive misuse causes over 350,000 annual deaths worldwide. Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have compared the action of natural and therapeutic opioids. The latter penetrate inside the cells ...

Linguists have long been interested in language variation. What are common or universal patterns across languages? What limits the possible variation between them? Grambank, the world's largest and most comprehensive database of language structure, enables researchers to answer some of these questions. Grambank was constructed in an international collaboration between the Max Planck institutes in Leipzig and Nijmegen, the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, Harvard University, ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Cancer drugs that stimulate the body’s immune system to attack tumors are a promising way to treat many types of cancer. However, some of these drugs produce too much systemic inflammation when delivered intravenously, making them harmful to use in patients. MIT researchers have now come up with a possible way to get around that obstacle. In a new study, they showed that when immunostimulatory prodrugs — inactive drugs that require activation in the body — are tuned for optimal activation timing, the drugs provoke the immune system to attack tumors without the side effects that occur when the ...

MADISON – Today, foldable phones are ubiquitous. Now, using models that predict how well a flexible electronic device will conform to spherical surfaces, University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Texas at Austin engineers could usher in a new era in which these bendy devices can integrate seamlessly with parts of the human body.  In the future, for example, a flexible bioelectronic artificial retina implanted in a person’s eyeball could help restore vision, or a smart contact lens could continuously sense glucose levels in ...

Deadly heatwaves fuelled by climate change in 2022 made almost 90 percent of Indians more vulnerable to public health issues, food shortages and increased risks of death, a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge reported in PLOS Climate. India currently uses a national Climate Vulnerability Indicator (CVI) to measure climate vulnerability and make plans for adaptation. The CVI includes many different socioeconomic, biophysical, institutional, and infrastructural factors. But it doesn't ...

There is a growing body of evidence that iron in the brain may play a role in Alzheimer’s disease. Lending weight to that idea, a new imaging probe has for the first time shown that in the same regions of the brain where the amyloid beta plaques associated with Alzheimer’s occur, there is also an increase in iron redox, meaning the iron in these regions is more reactive in the presence of oxygen. Their imaging probe could yield even more details about the causes of Alzheimer’s and help in the search for new drugs to treat it. A ...

TAMPA, Fla. (APRIL 19, 2023) – The search for the 2022 killer that decimated the long-spined sea urchin population in the Caribbean and along Florida’s east coast is over. A team of researchers organized by Mya Breitbart, Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, identified a single-celled organism called a ciliate as the cause of a massive die-off event to a marine animal vital to coral reef health. Their findings were reported in Science Advances. “We’re beyond ...

APRIL 19, 2023 As Covid roared through prisons in 2020, the U.S. prison population fell by as much as 30 percent, creating the largest, fastest reduction in prison population in American history. But this decarceration disproportionately benefited white incarcerated people, sharply increasing the fraction of incarcerated Black and Latino people. A new study in Nature shows that this increased racial disparity in U.S. prisons stems in large part from a long-standing problem with the justice system: Non-white people tend ...