The rapidly-growing bottled water industry can undermine progress towards a key sustainable development goal: safe water for all, says a new United Nations report.   Based on an analysis of literature and data from 109 countries, the report says that in just five decades bottled water has developed into “a major and essentially standalone economic sector,” experiencing 73% growth from 2010 to 2020. And sales are expected to almost double by 2030, from US$ 270 billion to $500 billion. Released ...

(WASHINGTON, March 16, 2023) – While research has long established disparities in health outcomes among individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD), few studies have quantified these gaps. A new study published in Blood Advances finds that the average life expectancy of publicly insured patients living with SCD is roughly 52.6 years. In contrast, the CDC reports that the average life expectancy in the United States is 73.5 years for men and 79.3 years for women, demonstrating the considerable ...

The western chimpanzees of Guinea are threatened by mining activities. Using a novel genetic approach, UZH researchers and an international team have collected information on population size and community structure of the endangered species. These data provide an important baseline to assess the impact of mining. The western chimpanzee is listed as “Critically Endangered” on the Red List of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site, located on the borders of Guinea, Liberia and Côte ...

The future of wireless communications is set to take a giant leap with the advent of sixth-generation (6G) wireless technology. A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) invented a groundbreaking tunable terahertz (THz) meta-device that can control the radiation direction and coverage area of THz beams. By rotating its metasurface, the device can promptly direct the 6G signal only to a designated recipient, minimizing power leakage and enhancing privacy. It is expected to provide a highly adjustable, directional and secure means for future 6G communications systems. The potential of THz band technology ...

New Orleans, Louisiana – Ochsner Health is leading the way for precision medicine nationwide by becoming one of the first hospital systems to standardize genomic testing, significantly advancing ways in which care teams can treat cancer patients. This change helps providers determine individualized treatment by understanding how patients will react to certain drugs, thereby lowering risk of adverse side effects, improving patient experience, and bettering patient outcomes. Pharmacogenomics, or PGx, testing guides physicians how patients metabolize certain drugs and warns of possible side effects so they may ...

  Photos There's been a well-documented shift toward earlier springtime flowering in many plants as the world warms. The trend alarms biologists because it has the potential to disrupt carefully choreographed interactions between plants and the creatures—butterflies, bees, birds, bats and others—that pollinate them.   But much less attention has been paid to changes in other floral traits, such as flower size, that can also affect plant-pollinator interactions, at a time when many insect pollinators are in global decline.   In ...

B lymphocytes – also known simply as B cells – play a central role in the immune system. If pathogens enter the body, B cells are activated and develop into plasma cells, which then release antibodies. One important step in this process is the germinal center reaction. If the B cells’ maturation into plasma cells is disrupted, multiple myeloma can develop – one of the most common blood cancers. This disease has a variety of subtypes and is not yet curable. Multiple myelomas develop very slowly and in several stages. The process is initiated by spontaneous genetic aberrations that occur ...

What are the key research priorities that will help tackle the global challenges of climate change, the biodiversity crises and feed a growing population in a sustainable way? Ten years after these priorities were first debated and summarised by a panel of scientists and published in New Phytologist, the panel reflects on the changes to plant science and the progress made to address these research areas, published on 16 March in a Letter in New Phytologist. To re-evaluate research priorities, a new panel was formed in 2022 to provide an international perspective on the important areas for plant science research. This project, ...

LOS ANGELES — More than 37 million Americans have diabetes, and approximately 90-95% have Type 2 diabetes. Diabetes is a chronic condition where the body does not produce or effectively use insulin. A lack of insulin leads to raised blood glucose (sugar) levels, which can cause heart disease and stroke, kidney disease, nerve damage and other severe complications. Keck Medicine of USC has launched a Phase 2 clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of a new outpatient, nonsurgical endoscopic procedure in stabilizing blood glucose levels for patients.  “Currently, the only treatment for diabetes ...

New UC Riverside research makes it likely that proteins responsible for activating mosquito sperm can be shut down, preventing them from swimming to or fertilizing eggs. The study could help control populations of Culex, the common house mosquito that transmits brain-swelling encephalitis and West Nile Virus.  “During mating, mosquitoes couple tail to tail, and the males transfer sperm into the female reproductive tract. It can be stored there awhile, but it still has to get from point A to point B to complete fertilization,” said Cathy Thaler, UCR cell biologist and the study’s first author.  Key to completing that journey are the specialized proteins secreted ...

Arlington, Va., March 16, 2023 – Findings from a new study published in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC), highlight perceptions of and barriers to reliable hand hygiene among specific clinician subgroups. The results, from the first study of its kind, provide insights that can be used to design and implement future, targeted interventions to optimize hand hygiene reliability among medical professionals. “While prior studies focused on challenges to hand hygiene reliability by healthcare role, we believe our study is the first to highlight key differences in perceived barriers ...

Many people keen to reduce their meat consumption are turning to substitutes made of legumes packed with protein, vitamins, and fiber. But allergies to legumes like soy or peanuts are both common and dangerous. Are patients allergic to particular legumes at risk from meat-free proteins made of legumes even if they contain different legumes? Dr Mark Smits and a team of scientists at University Medical Center Utrecht set out to investigate. “Both protein consumption and the world’s population are increasing which leads to an urgent demand for sustainable ...

A small nucleus in the brainstem called locus coeruleus (literally the “blue spot,”) is the primary source of a major neuromodulator, norepinephrine (NE), an important mediator of the ‘fight or flight’ response in animals. However, very little is known about the local connections of this small albeit critically important group of neurons. A recent pioneering study published in eLife from the laboratory of Dr. Xiaolong Jiang, investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) ...

More donated hearts could be suitable for transplantation if they are kept functioning within the body for a short time following the death of the donor, new research has concluded. The organs are kept functioning by restarting local circulation to the heart, lungs and abdominal organs – but, crucially, not to the brain – of patients whose hearts have stopped beating for five minutes or longer and have been declared dead by circulatory criteria (donation after circulatory death, or DCD). It is hoped that this technique could increase the number of usable donated hearts by as much as 30% in the future, helping address ...

**Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April). Please credit the congress if you use this story** Embargo – 2301H UK time Wednesday 15 March A review from WHO on the number of new antibiotics currently in the pipeline shows that just 12 new antibiotics have entered the market in the five years from 2017-21.  And there are far too few (just 27) under development in clinical trials against pathogens considered critical* by WHO such as Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. ...

Sophia Antipolis, 16 March 2023:  Sleeping less than five hours a night is associated with a 74% raised likelihood of developing peripheral artery disease (PAD) compared with seven to eight hours. That’s the finding of a study published today in European Heart Journal – Open, a journal of the ESC.1   “Our study suggests that sleeping for seven to eight hours a night is a good habit for lowering the risk of PAD,” said study author Dr. Shuai Yuan of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, ...

A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA. Researchers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine say that while UK life expectancy has increased in absolute terms over recent decades, other, similar countries are experiencing larger increases. In 1952, when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne, the UK had one of the longest life expectancies in the world, ranking seventh globally behind countries such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark. ...

The Tasmanian devil roams the island state of Australia as the apex predator of the land, feeding on whatever it pleases as the top dog – or the top devil. But some of these marsupial scavengers could be starting to miss out on a few items from the menu. According to a study led by UNSW Sydney, living in human-modified landscapes could be narrowing the diet of the Tasmanian devil. The research, published recently in Scientific Reports, suggests devils have access to vastly different cuisines depending on the type of environment they live in. “We found Tasmanian devil ...

They were a group of young, scrappy, but brilliant University of Utah computer science students and professors who changed the world. Ed Catmull. John Warnock. Jim Clark. Alan Kay. Ivan Sutherland. Martin Newell. They are a just a handful of the luminaries in the late 1960s and 1970s who revolutionized computer graphics by inventing technologies that have aided and shaped countless industries today. For the first time ever, these and other legends of that time will be reuniting on the U campus Thursday, March 23, and Friday March 24, to commemorate their roles as ...

CHICAGO — March 16, 2023 — In science, findings generated from studying small animals often are generalized and applied to humans, which are orders of magnitude larger. New research, which was led by Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Physiology, not only is the first to directly measure human muscle contractile properties; it also is the first to show that extrapolating such information to humans based on animal measurements generates incorrect predictions. The discovery occurred initially when researchers leveraged a unique surgical technique in which a human patient’s ...

The nation’s opioid crisis, which kills thousands of Americans annually, is best viewed as an ecosystem where all parts of the vexing problem are interconnected, underscoring the need for holistic solutions that address the broad needs of those battling addiction, their families and the communities where they live, according to a new report from the nonprofit RAND Corporation.   Too often different actors in the ecosystem focus primarily on addressing just one part of the problem, with each component of the system having its own priorities and initiatives ...

Trust in information given out by the government on cancer fell sharply among the Black population, by almost half, during the COVID-19 pandemic findings of a national US study have shown.  Experts are warning the vital need to monitor if this mistrust has persisted beyond the pandemic and whether it could potentially cause an upsurge in late or fatal diagnoses – following a lack of uptake of important cancer prevention measures such as routine screening and human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccinations.   The findings, published today in the peer-reviewed ...

A new texting intervention that University of British Columbia researchers helped develop is more effective at promoting healthy sexual decision-making and reducing pregnancies among sexual minority teens than most existing interventions in the U.S. Girl2Girl, developed and tested by the Center for Innovative Public Health Research (CIPHR) in San Clemente, Calif., in partnership with UBC’s Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre, is the first texting-based intervention specifically aimed at lesbian and bisexual teens. “For more than 30 years, research ...

Heavy workloads make employees feel a greater need for a break, but new research finds they may actually discourage employees from taking breaks at work despite causing high levels of stress, fatigue, and poor performance. Researchers from the University of Waterloo found employees often kept working despite wanting to pause. One potential reason is employees may have felt pressure to continue working to get everything done on time.  “Our research provides a comprehensive account of the processes involved in the decision to take a break and provides insights into how employees and managers can make more effective use of breaks at work, ...

“Considering the cost and quality of life to the individual, we believe our study has important implications for management of age-related sarcopenia.” BUFFALO, NY- March 15, 2023 – A new research paper was published on the cover of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 5, entitled, “AAV1.NT-3 gene therapy prevents age-related sarcopenia.” Sarcopenia is progressive loss of muscle mass and strength occurring during normal aging with significant consequences on the quality of life for elderly. Neurotrophin 3 (NT-3) is an important autocrine factor supporting ...