Skoltech scientists and their colleagues from Germany and the United States have analyzed the metabolomes of humans, chimpanzees, and macaques in muscle, kidney, and three different brain regions. The team discovered that the modern human genome undergoes mutation which makes the adenylosuccinate lyase enzyme less stable, leading to a decrease in purine synthesis. This mutation did not occur in Neanderthals, so the scientists believe that it affected metabolism in brain tissues and thereby strongly contributed to modern humans evolving into a separate species. The research was published in the journal eLife. The predecessors of modern humans split from their closest evolutionary relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, about 600,000 ...

A new low-cost and sustainable technique would boost the possibilities for hospitals and clinics to deliver therapeutics with aerogels, a foam-like material now found in such high-tech applications as insulation for spacesuits and breathable plasters. With the help of an ordinary kitchen freezer, this newest form of aerogel was made from all natural ingredients, including plant cellulose and algae, says Jowan Rostami, a researcher in fibre technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Rostami says that the aerogel's low density and favorable surface area make it ideal for a wide range of uses, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Scientists report that it is possible to detect and predict heat damage in crops by measuring the fluorescent light signature of plant leaves experiencing heat stress. If collected via satellite, this fluorescent signal could support widespread monitoring of growth and crop yield under the heat stress of climate change, the researchers say. Their study measures sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence - or SIF - to monitor a plant's photosynthetic health and establish a connection between heat stress and crop yield. The findings are published in the journal Global Change Biology. Sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence occurs when a portion of photosynthetic energy, in the form of near-infrared light, is emitted from plant leaves, the researchers said. "There ...

Fifty-six million years ago, as the Earth's climate warmed by five to eight degrees C, new land mammals evolved, tropical forests expanded, giant insects and reptiles appeared and the chemistry of the ocean changed. Through it all, bacteria in the ocean in what is now New Jersey kept a record of the changes in their environment through forming tiny magnetic particles. Now, those particles and their record are all that's left of these microorganisms. Thanks to new research tools, that record is finally being read. In research published in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, researchers including University of Utah doctoral student Courtney Wagner and associate professor Peter Lippert report the climate clues that can ...

By making a game out of getting their daily steps, new research points to the possibility that people with diabetes could be nudged toward increasing their physical activity, with changes lasting for a full year. Since many now use apps or other digital means to manage their diabetes, this program - which utilized tools like wearable step counters and electronic scales with personalized goals - could potentially be integrated to help individuals achieve greater success. Findings from the study, conducted by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine ...

Carbon is vital to the existence of all living organisms, since it forms the basis of all organic molecules that, in turn, form the basis of all living beings. While that alone is pretty impressive, it has recently found surprisingly novel applications in disciplines such as aerospace and civil engineering with the development of carbon fibers that are stronger, stiffer, and lighter than steel. Consequently, carbon fibers have taken over steel in high-performance products like aircrafts, racecars, and sports equipment. Carbon fibers are usually combined with other materials to form ...

Scientists studying a special kind of semimetals have found a material with an unusually pristine nature that could be crucial for developing powerful new quantum technologies and discovering new phases of matter. In an open access paper published in Science Advances, Johns Hopkins physicists and colleagues at Rice University, the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), present experimental evidence of naturally occurring quantum criticality in a material. Criticality is the point at which a material hovers between two phases--like the slushy transition between water and ice--without ever settling. Useful materials often exploit this point. For example, air conditioners use compressors to change refrigerant ...

In order to understand foodways and subsistence strategies of humans in the past, as well as distributions of ancient animal species, it is critical for archaeologists to accurately identify animal taxa in archaeological sites. Many sites across sub-Saharan Africa have fragmented and poorly preserved animal bones, leaving the majority of specimens unidentifiable. Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to the greatest diversity of bovids on Earth, including African buffalo, wildebeest, eland, and duikers, as well as domestic sheep, goat, and cattle. The sheer number of osteologically similar animals in Africa presents a major challenge for identifying animal bones. During the past decade, archaeologists have increasingly used a bone ...

Des Plaines, IL - For acute mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), there were no differences in recovery or health care utilization outcomes with prescribed early light exercise compared to standard care. These are the results of a study titled A randomized trial comparing prescribed light exercise to standard management for emergency department patients with acute mild traumatic brain injury, to be published in the May issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) journal, a peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). Findings of the study suggest that early light exercise may be encouraged as tolerated at emergency department discharge following mTBI, but this guidance is not sufficient ...

HOUSTON ? Several Phase II clinical trials conducted by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center show promising results for patients with melanoma, breast cancer, HER2-positive tumors and ovarian cancer. The results of these studies, which will be presented at the virtual 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, highlight new advances in drug therapy research to improve patient outcomes. Combination therapy of nivolumab and relatlimab before and after surgery is effective against melanoma (Abstract #9502) In a Phase II study, MD Anderson researchers showed that a regimen of neoadjuvant and ...

Iahikawa, Japan - Humans benefit from playing games more than some might realize. Games can be a relaxed approach to learning or honing our problem-solving skills while relieving stress. However, game playing generally carries a considerable amount of decision-making, involving mathematical and statistical considerations that we make to decide on what we think is the best move. Thus, games showcase many of the impressive faculties and inner workings of the human brain, which in turns makes them a great testbed and playground for research on artificial intelligence (AI). One aspect common to many games is decision making based on uncertain information about current and potential ...

Months after recovering from mild cases of COVID-19, people still have immune cells in their body pumping out antibodies against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Such cells could persist for a lifetime, churning out antibodies all the while. The findings, published May 24 in the journal Nature, suggest that mild cases of COVID-19 leave those infected with lasting antibody protection and that repeated bouts of illness are likely to be uncommon. "Last fall, there were reports that antibodies wane quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived," said senior author Ali Ellebedy, PhD, an associate professor ...

A critical process in the infection cycle of viruses has been revealed for the first time in dynamic detail using pioneering plant-based technology. Evidence about the process of virus maturation revealed in the research could help us develop new methods for treating viral infections. Maturation plays a critical role for all animal and bacterial viruses and is required to produce infectious virions or particles. Though the outlines of the process have been determined for many groups of viruses, detailed mechanistic studies have not been reported. To provide the first detailed mechanistic study of maturation, Roger Castells-Graells, ...

The research team led by Prof. DU Pingwu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) first successfully synthesized an all-phenylene bismacrocycle (bis- means two) with Siamese-twin structure and used fullerene as guest molecules to assemble a peanut-shaped supramolecular complex. This study was published in Angewandte Chemie. As a new type of carbon material, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted widespread attention because of their outstanding mechanical and photophysical properties. However, the synthesis of CNTs or CNTs fragments with selective simple structure is still a challenge. This study reported a conjugated highly strained all-phenylene Siamese-twin bismacrocycle, SCPP[10]. Two phenylene nanorings, [10]CPP, conjoined ...

Research co-led by Newcastle University has shed new light on important microscopic scale interactions between algae and bacteria predicated on the mutually beneficial exchange of nutrients. The research was carried out at the University of Cambridge and the Nordsim laboratory at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm by Dr Hannah Laeverenz Schlogelhofer, now at the University of Exeter, and a team led by Dr Ottavio Croze, of Newcastle University's School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics. They have used an advanced high-spatial resolution isotope mapping technique called 'SIMS' (secondary ion mass spectrometry) to chart for the first time how long it takes for labelled carbon produced by microalgae to be transferred ...

A supersensitised brain connection has been identified in people who suffer from misophonia, an extreme reaction to "trigger" sounds. For the first time, researchers led by Newcastle University, have discovered increased connectivity in the brain between the auditory cortex and the motor control areas related to the face, mouth and throat. Publishing today, in the Journal of Neuroscience, lead author Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, Newcastle University Research Fellow in the Biosciences Institute said: "Our findings indicate that for people with misophonia there is abnormal communication between the auditory and motor ...

Posts to Reddit forum "SuicideWatch" spike in the early hours of Monday morning New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has found that people on a social media suicide support forum are most likely to post to the site during the early hours of Monday morning. The study, which has been published in BMC Psychiatry, suggests that there is a clear variation in behaviour throughout the week and throughout the day. The researchers hope that this means that targeted support to at risk populations can be made more readily available to those most in need. The researchers looked at the timings at which users of the Reddit ...

The study, published in the journal Nature Aging and led by the laboratories of Dr. Alberto Pascual (CSIC), from the Neuronal Maintenance Mechanisms Group, and Prof. Javier Vitorica (University of Seville/CIBERNED) of the Physiopathology of Alzheimer's Disease Group at IBiS, demonstrates for the first time that low oxygen levels in the so-called senile plaques in the brain reduces the immune system's defensive capacity against the disease. The study also suggests that this lack of oxygen in the brain enhances the action of disorders associated with Alzheimer's disease that are characterised by low systemic oxygen levels, such as atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular diseases. What happens ...

Forensic archaeologists and anthropologists from Cranfield University have started to recover the bodies of victims executed by the Franco regime at the end of the Spanish Civil War during an excavation in the Ciudad Real region of Spain. The team from Cranfield is working with partners from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and social anthropologists from Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) to search for, exhume and identify those executed and buried in the civil cemetery at Almagro between 1939 and 1940. Several bodies with gunshot wounds to the head, personal effects and parts of clothing ...

For many diseases, overweight and obesity are risk factors. But now a study shows that a higher BMI may be linked to higher survival rates in patients hospitalized for severe bacterial infections. Scientists at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, and Skaraborg Hospital in Skövde carried out the research, and their study has now been published in the journal PLOS ONE. The data were collected before the COVID-19 pandemic. The population-based study involved observations, over a nine-month period, of all 2,196 individual adults receiving care for suspected severe bacterial ...

In his most recent published research, appearing in Applied Thermal Engineering, City, University of London's Dr Martin White explores a novel organic Rankine cycle system, based on a two-phase expansion through numerical simulations of the system. His paper, Cycle and turbine optimisation for an ORC operating with two-phase expansion, considers the use of modern fluids whose properties could help to mitigate concerns around turbine damage, whilst allowing the benefits of two-phase expansion to be realised. Waste heat from a range of industries, ranging from iron and steel to food and drink, ...

It has been documented over hundreds of years that various electromagnetic anomalies occur during a few weeks before the occurrence of a large earthquake. These electromagnetic anomalies are variations that appear in telluric current, geomagnetism, electromagnetic waves etc. before the earthquake. Although there are various models to explain the mechanism, the large current generated at the source was not fully explained. For example, many researchers thought that the stress applied to the fault produced an electric current, but the stress applied to the fault takes place over hundreds or thousands of years before the occurrence of the earthquake. It is a common belief among seismologists ...

Telomeres are protective caps on DNA that shorten as we grow older. Now, one of the first studies to examine telomere length (TL) in childhood finds that the initial setting of TL during prenatal development and in the first years of life may determine one's TL throughout childhood and potentially even into adulthood or older age. The study also finds that TL decreases most rapidly from birth to age 3, followed by a period of maintenance into the pre-puberty period, although it was sometimes seen to lengthen. The study, which followed children from birth to age 9, was led by researchers ...

AMHERST, Mass. - New developments in recreational fishing technology--from the use of aerial drones and social media scouting reports to advances in hook design--are creating challenges for fisheries management and effective policy making, according to a new study co-authored by University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher Andy Danylchuk. With the opening of the spring fishing season, millions of recreational fishing aficionados across North America are dusting off their tackleboxes, fitting together their rods, and heading to the bait and tackle shop to purchase the latest ...

(Boston)--Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is caused by diabetes and hypertension. In 2017, the global prevalence of CKD was 9.1 percent, which is approximately 700 million cases. Chronic kidney damage is assessed by scoring the amount of interstitial fibrosis and tubular atrophy (IFTA) in a renal biopsy sample. Although image digitization and morphometric (measuring external shapes and dimensions) techniques can better quantify the extent of histologic damage, a more widely applicable way to stratify kidney disease severity is needed. Now, researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have developed a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to predict the grade of IFTA, a known structural ...