NEW YORK, June 7, 2021--Recent studies suggest that new brain cells are being formed every day in response to injury, physical exercise, and mental stimulation. Glial cells, and in particular the ones called oligodendrocyte progenitors, are highly responsive to external signals and injuries. They can detect changes in the nervous system and form new myelin, which wraps around nerves and provides metabolic support and accurate transmission of electrical signals. As we age, however, less myelin is formed in response to external signals, and this progressive decline has been linked to the age-related cognitive and motor deficits detected in older people in the general population. Impaired ...

Just a few bacterial taxa found in ecosystems across the planet are responsible for more than half of carbon cycling in soils. These new findings, made by researchers at Northern Arizona University and published in END ...

In a white ocean, well above sea level, the algae thrive. Normally invisible to the naked eye, they are often spotted by hikers trekking through the mountains in late spring as strikingly coloured stretches of snow, in shades of ochre, orange and red. Known as "glacier blood", this colouring is the result of the punctual multiplication (or bloom) of the microalgae that inhabit the snow. But apart from this impressive phenomenon, the life and organisation of mountain microalgae communities remains a secret. It is this still unknown ecosystem, now threatened by global warming, that needs to be explored. The ALPALGA* consortium aims to meet this challenge by organising and pooling research efforts on snow microalgae, and it has already received support from the Agence nationale ...

Mental health visits for new mothers were 30% higher during the COVID-19 pandemic than before the pandemic, particularly in the first 3 months after giving birth, found new research in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.210151 "Increased visit rates began in March 2020, although the state of emergency was declared only midway through the month, suggesting that distress related to the pandemic translated into an increased need for care very quickly," writes Dr. Simone Vigod, chief of psychiatry, senior scientist and interim vice president of academics at Women's College Hospital (WCH), and senior adjunct scientist at ...

New research indicates that patients hospitalized with active cancer were more likely to die from COVID-19 than those with a history of cancer or those without any cancer diagnosis. The findings published by END ...

A traditional Vietnamese meat snack could hold the key to developing a safe and natural food preservative, addressing the twin global problems of food waste and food-borne illnesses. Key Points Bacteria-killing compound discovered in Nem Chua, a fermented pork snack Toxic to bacteria but safe for humans, it's a natural alternative to artificial food preservatives New study reveals ideal growth conditions to potentially make the bacteria-killer at industrial scales The fermented pork snack, Nem Chua, is eaten raw but does not cause food poisoning when prepared correctly. This is because friendly bacteria that thrive in the fermented meat make a special compound that destroys more dangerous bacteria. Now ...

Once viewed merely as a producer of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) bathing the brain and spinal cord, the choroid plexus is now known to be a key player in brain development and immunity. These fronds of brain tissue, located in the CSF-filled brain cavities known as ventricles, secrete instructive cues into the CSF to regulate brain development. They also function as an important barrier between the brain and the rest of the body. Maria Lehtinen, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital has done much of the pioneering work in understanding this once-obscure tissue. In new work published in Cell, Lehtinen, Neil Dani, PhD, and other colleagues at Boston Children's and the Broad Institute created ...

The friendship paradox is the observation that the degrees of the neighbors of a node within any network will, on average, be greater than the degree of the node itself. In other words: your friends probably have more friends than you do. While the standard framing of the friendship paradox is essentially about averages, significant variations occur too. In the Journal of Complex Networks, Santa Fe Institute and University of Michigan researchers George Cantwell, Alec Kirkley, and Mark Newman address this by developing the mathematical theory ...

Carried like stowaways in the guts of international travelers, new and potentially deadly strains of antimicrobial resistant superbugs may be coming to a community near you, suggests new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, we knew that international travel was contributing to the rapid global increase and spread of antimicrobial resistance," said Alaric D'Souza, an MD/PhD student at Washington University and a co-first author of the study to be published June 6 in Genome Medicine. "But what's new here is that we've found numerous completely novel genes associated with antimicrobial ...

Climate experts warn that, without urgent action, climate change will continue to cause an increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall that can lead to severe flooding. An international research team have concluded that increases in extreme rainfall and associated flooding are projected to continue as global temperatures continue to rise. Efforts to limit warming to +1.5C will help limit changes in extreme rainfall, though some societal adaptations will still be required. Sharing their findings in a new ScienceBrief Review, published today (7 June), scientists ...

Niigata, Japan - A comprehensive investigation on cells and colony motion offers new insight into the proliferative and epithelial regenerative capacities of human primary oral keratinocyte cultures with implications for quality control of engineered cells used in regenerative medicine. Dr. Kenji Izumi and his colleagues, Dr. Emi Hoshikawa and Dr. Taisuke Sato, modified the optical flow (OF) protocol originally presented in their 2019 paper to add the capacity to determine the threshold of the cells/colony motion speed required to differentiate substandard oral keratinocyte populations before manufacturing a tissue-engineered oral mucosa tissue construct. ...

The world is one step closer to ultimately secure conference calls, thanks to a collaboration between Quantum Communications Hub researchers and their German colleagues, enabling a quantum-secure conversation to take place between four parties simultaneously. The demonstration, led by Hub researchers based at Heriot-Watt University and published in Science Advances, is a timely advance, given the global reliance on remote collaborative working, including conference calls, since the start of the C19 pandemic. There have been reports of significant escalation of cyber-attacks on popular teleconferencing platforms in the last year. This advance in quantum secured communications could lead to conference calls with inherent unhackable security measures, underpinned by the principles of ...

In the Kumano Sea, off the southeast coast of Japan, an evolutionary mystery lay in wait. Researchers collected samples from the muddy sea floor, including hermit crabs, mollusks and discarded shells. Here, in and on these shells, they found scale worms living mostly in pairs with a striking difference compared to the almost 900 already known species of scale worms: one was a quarter the size of its mate. The discovery was published on March 29 as the cover of the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research. "The species is characterized by males being dwarf, with their minute bodies always riding on the dorsal side of females," said paper author Naoto Jimi, postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Polar Research, Research ...

(Geneva, 5 June 2021) Mass screening of school age children has led to significantly higher numbers of coeliac disease cases being diagnosed, according to a new study presented today at the 6th World Congress of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. Researchers in Italy found double the number of cases of the autoimmune disease - where the body produces antibodies to gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye - in school children compared to a similar study by the same group 25 years ago. A new screening programme of 7,760 children aged from five ...

(Geneva, 5 June 2021) Procedures to prevent the direct transmission of hepatitis B virus (HBV) from mother to child, particularly during and after pregnancy, have significant fragmentation and gaps, a new survey presented at the 6th World Congress of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition has shown. The results, based on 76 delivery hospitals from ten major European countries*, identified significant variances in maternal HBV screening frequency during pregnancy: 53% in the first trimester, 1% in the second trimester and 46% in the third trimester. Alarmingly, only 38% of those women who tested positive with high HBV-DNA levels were treated ...

MADISON, Wis. -- If you're wearing gold jewelry right now, there's a good chance it came from an illegal mining operation in the tropics and surfaced only after some rainforest was sacrificed, according to a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and alumni who studied regulatory efforts to curb some of these environmentally damaging activities in the Amazon. The researchers, including UW-Madison geography Professor Lisa Naughton, investigated mining-related deforestation in a biodiverse and ecologically sensitive area of the Peruvian Amazon to see whether formalizing and legalizing these mining operations might curb some of their negative effects. Their study, published June 2 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, was co-authored by a group including UW-Madison ...

In a large, international retrospective study, men at high risk for death from prostate cancer had a significant reduction in all-cause mortality if treated with radiation shortly after surgery. Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer among men, and about 1-in-8 of them will be diagnosed with it during their lifetime. While most men are cured with available treatment, there remains a group at high risk for death. In the United States in 2020, 33,330 men died from the disease, making prostate cancer the second leading cause of cancer death for men in this country. Therefore, among those at highest risk of recurrence, metastasis, and death from prostate cancer, understanding what steps can be taken to lower these risks could save and extend lives. Early ...

Oak Brook, IL - The June edition of SLAS Discovery features the cover article, "A Perspective on Synthetic Biology in Drug Discovery and Development--Current Impact and Future Opportunities" by Florian David, Ph.D. (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden), Andrew M. Davis, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, Cambridge, England, UK). Michael Gossing, Ph.D., Martin A. Hayes, Ph.D., and Elvira Romero, Ph.D., and Louis H. Scott, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, Gothenburg, Sweden), and Mark J. Wigglesworth, Ph.D. (AstraZeneca, London, England, UK). In January 2021, a survey of immunologists, infectious-disease researchers and virologists found that 90% of respondents believe SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic, continuing to circulate in pockets of the global population ...

An international subject pool was studied to confirm the effectiveness of a whole food complete vitamin and meal replacement product, IQed. The article, co-authored by Lisa Geng; Francine Hamel, EdD, SLP-CCC; Doreen Lewis, Ph.D., appeared in the peer-reviewed journal, Alternative Therapies (Altern Ther Health Med 2021 Mar;27(2):11-20(. The findings indicate that the carefully developed nutritional supplement, IQed Smart Nutrition, can help bolster key functions for people with a wide range of prevalent diagnoses including Autism, Apraxia, ...

Oak Brook, IL - The June edition of SLAS Technology is a Special Issue entitled, "Emerging Trends in 3D Cell Culture: High-Throughput Screening, Disease Modeling and Translational Medicine." Free online access to the articles in this collection is courtesy of Corning Life Sciences, the issue's sponsor. Precision medicine is becoming an increasingly popular and powerful way to target and treat human diseases. Patient-derived cellular models ushered in high-throughput screenings (HTS) in laboratory automation. While the upkeep and expansion of cells for HTS is predominantly manual, this special issue explores an automated avenue for HTS in research settings that considers the expansion of cells. This design is flexible for research and development ...

At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury. This type of language loss is called aphasia, a long-term neurological disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for language production and processing that impacts over a million people in the US. "It's a huge problem," says Swathi Kiran, director of BU's Aphasia Research Lab, and College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate dean for research and ...

The new drug sotorasib reduces tumor size and shows promise in improving survival among patients with lung tumors caused by a specific DNA mutation, according to results of a global phase 2 clinical trial. The drug is designed to shut down the effects of the mutation, which is found in about 13% of patients with lung adenocarcinoma, a common type of non-small-cell lung cancer. The Food and Drug Administration approved sotorasib May 28 as a targeted therapy for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer whose tumors express a specific mutation -- called ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- A new study of monsoon rainfall on the Indian subcontinent over the past million years provides vital clues about how the monsoons will respond to future climate change. The study, published in Science Advances, found that periodic changes in the intensity of monsoon rainfall over the past 900,000 years were associated with fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), continental ice volume and moisture import from the southern hemisphere Indian Ocean. The findings bolster climate model predictions that rising CO2 and higher global temperatures will lead to stronger monsoon seasons. "We show that over the last 900,000 years, higher CO2 levels along with associated changes in ice volume and moisture ...

Accurate soft tissue measurements are critical when making reconstructions of human ancestors, a new study from the University of Adelaide and Arizona State University has found. "Reconstructing extinct members of the Hominidae, or hominids, including their facial soft tissue, has become increasingly popular with many approximations of their faces presented in museum exhibitions, popular science publications and at conference presentations worldwide," said lead author PhD student Ryan M. Campbell from the University of Adelaide. "It is essential that accurate facial soft tissue thickness measurements are used when reconstructing the faces of hominids to reduce the variability exhibited in reconstructions of the same individuals." Hominids have been readily accepted ...

A new study shows that substantial amounts of carbon dioxide were released during the last millennium because of crop cultivation on peatlands in the Northern Hemisphere. Only about half of the carbon released through the conversion of peat to croplands was compensated by continuous carbon absorption in natural northern peatlands. Peatlands are a type of wetland which store more organic carbon than any other type of land ecosystem in the world. Due to waterlogged conditions, dead plant materials do not fully decay and carbon accumulates in peatlands over thousands of years. Therefore, natural peatlands help to cool the climate by capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere ...