Newspapers regularly carry stories of terrifying shark attacks, but in a paper published today, Oxford-led researchers reveal their discovery of a 3,000-year-old victim - attacked by a shark in the Seto Inland Sea of the Japanese archipelago. The research in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, shows that this body is the earliest direct evidence for a shark attack on a human and an international research team has carefully recreated what happened - using a combination of archaeological science and forensic techniques. The grim discovery of the victim was made by Oxford researchers, J. Alyssa White and Professor Rick Schulting, while investigating evidence for violent trauma on the skeletal remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherers at ...

SAN ANTONIO, June 23, 2021 - A typical Western high-fat diet can increase the risk of painful disorders common in people with conditions such as diabetes or obesity, according to a groundbreaking paper authored by a team led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, also referred to as UT Health San Antonio. Moreover, changes in diet may significantly reduce or even reverse pain from conditions causing either inflammatory pain - such as arthritis, trauma or surgery - or neuropathic pain, such as diabetes. The novel finding could help treat chronic-pain patients by simply altering diet or developing drugs that block ...

By José Tadeu Arantes | Agência FAPESP – Mathematical models that describe the physical behavior of magnetic materials can also be used to describe the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This is the conclusion of a study conducted in Brazil by researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Rio Claro and Ilha Solteira and reported in an article published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. The study was part of a project led by Mariano de Souza, a professor at UNESP’s Rio Claro Physics Department, and of the PhD research of Isys Mello, whose thesis advisor is Souza, last author of the article. Another co-author is Antonio Seridonio, a professor at UNESP’s Ilha Solteira Physics ...

Only 1 in 10 older adults in a large national survey who were found to have cognitive impairment consistent with dementia reported a formal medical diagnosis of the condition. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study to develop a nationally representative sample of roughly 6 million Americans age 65 or older, researchers at the University of Michigan, North Dakota State University and Ohio University found that 91% of people with cognitive impairment consistent with dementia told questioners they had a formal medical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or dementia. "(The discrepancy) was higher than I was expecting," ...

Flavoring can change how the brain responds to e-cigarette aerosols that contain nicotine, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Andrea Hobkirk and her team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to understand how the brain's reward areas react to e-cigarette aerosol with and without flavor. "There are nearly 12 million e-cigarette users in the United States," Hobkirk, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at Penn State College of Medicine, said. "The vast majority use e-cigarettes with menthol, mint, fruity and dessert-type flavors. Although regulations that limit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes may help curb use among youth, they might also stop adults from using e-cigarettes as a smoking ...

Researchers from Bentley University have been exploring how readers at partisan news sites respond to news events that challenge their worldview. In a forthcoming paper in the journal ACM Transactions on Social Computing, they report results of a study that examines reader comments on stories surrounding the 2017 Roy Moore Alabama senate race at two partisan news sites: a left-leaning news site (Daily Kos) and a right-leaning news site (Breitbart). They consider the alleged sexual misconduct of Mr. Moore as a challenging news event for the right-leaning readers; and the subsequent nomination of Mr. Moore as the Republican candidate as a challenging news event for the left-leaning readers. Their analysis identifies the obstacles that readers face as they try to make sense ...

NEW YORK CITY, June 23, 2021 -- From amoebas to zebras, all living things evolve. They change over time as pressures from the environment cause individuals with certain traits to become more common in a population while those with other traits become less common. Cancer is no different. Within a growing tumor, cancer cells with the best ability to compete for resources and withstand environmental stressors will come to dominate in frequency. It's "survival of the fittest" on a microscopic scale. But fitness -- how well suited any particular individual is to its environment -- isn't set in stone; it can change when the environment changes. The cancer cells that might do best in an environment saturated ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--June 23, 2021--A healthy heart is a pliable, ever-moving organ. But under stress--from injury, cardiovascular disease, or aging--the heart thickens and stiffens in a process known as fibrosis, which involves diffuse scar-like tissue. Slowing or stopping fibrosis to treat and prevent heart failure has long been a goal of cardiologists. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have discovered a master switch for fibrosis in the heart. When the heart is under stress, they found, the gene MEOX1 is turned on in cells called fibroblasts, spurring fibrosis. Their new study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that blocking ...

HOUSTON - (June 23, 2021) - Bone cancer is hard to treat and prone to metastasis. Research teams at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have a new strategy to attack it. Chemist Han Xiao at Rice and biologist Xiang Zhang at Baylor and their labs have developed an antibody conjugate called BonTarg that delivers drugs to bone tumors and inhibits metastasis. Their open-access study, which appears in Science Advances, shows how Xiao's pClick technology can be used to link bone-targeting antibodies and therapeutic molecules. In experiments, they used pClick to couple a molecule used to treat osteoporosis, alendronate, with the HER2-targeting antibody trastuzumab used to treat breast cancer and found it significantly enhanced the concentration ...

Most survivors of squamous cell head and neck cancers report that their sense of taste is dulled, changed or lost during radiation treatment, causing them to lose interest in eating and diminishing their quality of life. In a study of taste and smell dysfunction with 40 cancer survivors, scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that the tips of these individuals' tongues were significantly less sensitive to bitter, salty or sweet tastes than peers in the control group who had never been diagnosed with cancer. In a paper published in the journal Chemical Senses, the U. of I. team said this diminished taste sensitivity suggested that the taste ...

In New England, constraints in the supply of natural gas have led to nearly a quarter of all unscheduled power plant outages. In a new study, researchers used data from power plant failures in the 2010s to develop a supply curve of the costs required for generators to mitigate fuel shortages in the region. The study found that storing both oil and gas on-site could reduce dependence by power plants on gas grids in geographic areas with few pipelines. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), The Pennsylvania State University, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. It is published in The Electricity Journal. "Gas ...

Toronto - Last winter, Goldman Sachs reported it was working to make things better after a group of junior analysts revolted against 100-hour work weeks. That's a smart thing to do, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Drawing from more than 6,000 employee reviews of their workplaces and data on their firms' forecasting accuracy, the research shows that making improvements to hardworking analysts' work-life balance produces dividends for the company and for the analysts' careers. "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but here we provide large-scale evidence that supports the recent push to grant these employees at least some reprieve from the extremes of their jobs," said Ole-Kristian Hope, who is the Deloitte Professor of Accounting ...

The Gerontological Society of America's highly cited, peer-reviewed journals are continuing to publish scientific articles on COVID-19. The following were published between May 4 and June 14; all are free to access: Cardiometabolic therapy and mortality in very old patients with diabetes hospitalized due to COVID-19: Research article in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences by Jose Manuel Ramos-Rincón, MD, PhD, Luis M. Pérez-Belmonte, MD, PhD, Francisco Javier Carrasco-Sánchez, MD, PhD, Sergio Jansen-Chaparro, MD, PhD, Mercedes De-Sousa-Baena, MD, José Bueno-Fonseca, MD, ...

Best known for its presence in house cats and a tendency to infect and alter the behaviors of rodents and humans, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) is also associated with bold behavior among wild hyena cubs and risk of death during interactions with lions, finds new research from the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published this week in Nature Communications, reinforce previous research which has found the parasite can prompt profound behavioral changes in its hosts, and potentially in the 2 billion people worldwide estimated to be infected by it. While T. gondii has been well studied in laboratory settings with humans and wild-caught ...

Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of California in San Francisco were able to show for the first time that a very low calorie diet significantly alters the composition of the microbiota present in the human gut. In a current Nature* publication, the researchers report that dieting results in an increase of specific bacteria - notably Clostridioides difficile, which is associated with antibiotic-induced diarrhea and colitis. These bacteria apparently affect the body's energy balance by exerting an influence on the absorption of nutrients ...

WHAT: National Institutes of Health scientists and their collaborators have identified an internal communication network in mammals that may regulate tissue repair and inflammation, providing new insights on how diseases such as obesity and inflammatory skin disorders develop. The new research is published in Cell. The billions of organisms living on body surfaces such as the skin of mammals--collectively called microbiota--communicate with each other and the host immune system in a sophisticated network. According to the study, viruses integrated in the host genome, remnants of previous infections called endogenous retroviruses, can ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science and the RIKEN BioResource Research Center in Japan, along with collaborators at the State University of New York at Buffalo, have created a mouse model that allows the study of naturally occurring melatonin. Published in the Journal of Pineal Research, these first experiments using the new mice showed that natural melatonin was linked to a pre-hibernation state that allows mice to slow down their metabolism and survive when food is scarce, or temperatures are cold. Melatonin is called "the hormone of darkness" because it's released by the brain in the dark, which usually means at night. It tells the body when it's dark outside so that the body can switch to 'night mode'. Although other hormones are easily studied in the laboratory, ...

How many tree species are there in the forest? How are the trees scattered throughout? How high are the individual tree crowns? Are there fallen trees or hollowed-out tree trunks? Forest scientists characterize forests according to structural factors. "Structural richness is very important for biodiversity in forests. But forests used for forestry are generally poor in terms of structure," says Tristan Eckerter from the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology at the University of Freiburg. Therefore, together with research teams from the Chair of Silviculture and the Black Forest National Park, he investigated ...

A new article published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research presents a neural model of maladaptive consumption. Consumption (of, for instance, substances, food, and online media) is driven mainly by expected rewards that stem from the ability of the consumption act to satisfy intrinsic (e.g., curiosity) and extrinsic (e.g., job performance) needs. In the article, "A Triple-System Neural Model of Maladaptive Consumption," the authors define maladaptive consumption as a state of compulsive seeking and consumption of rewarding products or experiences, which are sustained despite the negative consequences of such behaviors. "Understanding the neural basis of maladaptive ...

Pairing blueberry pie with a scoop of ice cream is a nice summer treat. Aside from being tasty, this combination might also help people take up more of the "superfruit's" nutrients, such as anthocyanins. Researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry show that α-casein, a protein found in cow's milk, helped rats absorb more blueberry anthocyanins and their byproducts, boosting accessibility to these good-for-you nutrients. In studies, anthocyanins have been shown to have antioxidant properties, lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of developing some cancers. However, only small amounts of these nutrients are absorbed ...

For patients who have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), the condition is literally a pain in the gut. Chronic -- or long-term -- abdominal pain is common, and there are currently no effective treatment options for this debilitating symptom. In a new study in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, researchers identify a new potential source of relief: a molecule derived from spider venom. In experiments with mice, they found that one dose could stop symptoms associated with IBS pain. The sensation of pain originates in electrical signals carried from the body to the brain by cells called ...

Air quality varies greatly within regions and cities around the world, and exposure to air pollution can have severe health impacts. In the U.S., people of color are disproportionately exposed to poor air quality. A cover story in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, highlights how scientists and community activists are using new technologies to gather data that could help address this inequity. Despite the success of the U.S. Clean Air Act in improving ambient air quality over the past 50 years, discriminatory housing, loan ...

Over recent years, the retina has established its position as one of the most promising biomarkers for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Moving on from the debate as to the retina becoming thinner or thicker, researchers from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Hospital Clínico San Carlos are focusing their attention on the roughness of the ten retinal layers. The study, published in Scientific Reports, "proves innovative" in three aspects according to José Manuel Ramírez, Director of the IIORC (Ramón Castroviejo Institute of Ophthalmologic Research) at the UCM. "This is the first study to propose studying the roughness of the retina and its ten constituent layers. They have devised a mathematical method to measure the degree of wrinkling, through the fractal ...

Children with obstructive sleep apnea are nearly three times more likely to develop high blood pressure when they become teenagers than children who never experience sleep apnea, according to a new study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. However, children whose sleep apnea improves as they grow into adolescence do not show an increased chance of having high blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for heart disease. The long-term study, one of the largest of its kind in the pediatric population, underscores the seriousness of sleep apnea in children and the importance of early treatment, the researchers said. Their findings appear online in the journal JAMA Cardiology. Obstructive sleep apnea, ...

Previous research was falsely reassuring; captured only 2% of cirrhosis patients Findings underscore lack of access to health care for Black patients Cirrhosis is leading cause of death and affects more than 600,000 people in U.S. CHICAGO --- Black patients with cirrhosis - late-stage liver disease - are about 25% more likely to die compared to non-Hispanic white patients and four times less likely to receive a liver transplant, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. Estimates of racial disparity in cirrhosis have been limited by a lack of large-scale longitudinal data, which track patients from diagnosis to death and/or transplant. The paper is one of the first to link all seven large liver centers in Chicago with the death registry and transplant registry to examine ...