University of Pittsburgh researchers have shown for the first time how Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV), which causes an aggressive skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma, initiates DNA replication in host cells. Published today in the journal PNAS, the study sheds light on the fundamental question of how viruses override their host cells’ carefully regulated DNA replicating system to make hundreds of new copies of themselves. “Understanding how MCV replicates gives us really important clues about ...

Benjamin Franklin may be best known as the creator of bifocals and the lightning rod, but a group of University of Notre Dame researchers suggest he should also be known for his innovative ways of making (literal) money. During his career, Franklin printed nearly 2,500,000 money notes for the American Colonies using what the researchers have identified as highly original techniques, as reported in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research team, led by Khachatur ...

Research Highlights: An analysis of more than two million adults in the U.S. found that present day heart failure risk was higher among Black adults who lived in zip codes historically impacted by redlining compared to Black adults living in non-redlined areas. Redlining did not have the same impact on heart failure risk among white adults living in historically redlined zip codes. Among Black adults living in historically redlined communities, approximately half of the excess risk of heart failure appeared to be explained by higher levels of socioeconomic distress. Embargoed until 1 p.m. CT/2 p.m. ET Monday, July 17, ...

Black patients with implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) have a significantly higher burden of disease than white patients with the same device, according to a new study from University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) cardiology researchers. Analyzing data from clinical trials conducted over a 20-year period by the Clinical Cardiovascular Research Center (CCRC) at URMC, investigators concluded that not only did Black patients with ICDs tend to be significantly younger than white patients, but they also had a higher ...

SAN ANTONIO — July 17, 2023 —A team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has found that NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter frequently encounters giant swirling waves at the boundary between the solar wind and Jupiter’s magnetosphere. The waves are an important process for transferring energy and mass from the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun, to planetary space environments. Jake Montgomery, a doctoral student in the joint space physics program ...

The cells of the immune system circulate mainly in the blood and migrate into the body's tissues after an inflammation. Some types of immune cells, however, are permanently located in the tissues, where they come together to form three-dimensional networks. How do these networks form and how are they maintained? For the long-lived macrophages (phagocytes), the answer is already known: They settle in so-called niches. These are environments of connective tissue cells that supply the macrophages with nutrients and keep them ...

NEW YORK, NY--A pair of new studies led by researchers at Columbia University explains why babies get so many common respiratory infections and identifies a specialized cluster of immune cells found only in babies that help them better cope with new pathogens.  “We know little about how the immune system develops throughout life, and most of what we know about immune system development in children comes from animal studies,” says Donna Farber, PhD, an expert in immune system development at Columbia University ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. –  For many busy families, online access to a child’s health provider for medical advice, health records or prescription refills is likely a convenient option. Yet, only 43% of parents have set their child up for a patient portal – an online tool allowing communication between patients and medical providers – and others may not be optimizing portal use, suggests the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. “Patient portals offer a wide range of benefits, including decreasing unnecessary hassles for providers and patients and improving access to both the medical ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, July 17, 2023                          Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu ## The Missing Americans: Unprecedented US Mortality Far Exceeds Other Wealthy Nations A new study found that more than one million US deaths a year—including many young and working-age adults—could be avoided if the US had mortality rates similar to its peer nations. In 2021, 1.1 million deaths would have been averted ...

As the world's population continues to grow, ensuring access to clean and safe water has become an increasingly important concern, yet little is known about how surface water quality will change in the future. Recent scientific research has shed light on the potential challenges that surface water quality may face in the coming years, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. “While surface water quality is projected to improve in most developed countries, there is an important caveat: the outlook for the poorest nations is bleak”.  A recent study, published in Nature Water, has projected an increase in surface water pollution in Sub-Saharan Africa. These findings ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In a lab at The Ohio State University masquerading as a playroom, pairs of kids ages 8 to 12 participating in a study found a variety of toys and games to play with – as well as a mysterious file cabinet.   Inside one of the drawers of the unlocked cabinet were two disabled 9-mm handguns.   As they played in the room, nearly all the children eventually found the guns. But some kids in the study were much more likely to tell an adult they found a gun, less likely to touch the gun, and were less reckless if they did touch it – and they were the kids who had watched a one-minute gun safety video a week earlier.   The study may be the ...

NNew research appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology answers important questions about the viability of treatments that seek to replace diseased and aged cells in the central nervous system with healthy ones.  Its findings have implications for a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders—including Huntington’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and schizophrenia—that have been linked to glia, a population of cells that support brain health and function.  “A broad variety of disorders we associate with neuronal loss now appear to be caused ...

Griffith University researchers have played a key role in using DNA ‘origami’ templates to control the way viruses are assembled. The global team behind the research, published in Nature Nanotechnology, developed a way to direct the assembly of virus capsids – the protein shell of viruses - at physiological conditions in a precise and programmable manner. Dr Frank Sainsbury and Dr Donna McNeale from the Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery were part of the research team and said forcing viruses to assemble onto DNA folded into different shapes “like origami” was a question that this project answered. “We achieved control over the virus protein ...

Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use if international climate change targets are to be met, warn researchers.   The big challenge is to identify the fairest and most equitable way that governments can curtail energy use, a process known as energy demand reduction.    Writing in the journal Nature Energy, the research team - led by Milena Büchs, Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the University of Leeds - analysed several scenarios to identify a potential ...

About The Study: This study found that large increases in mortality with Alzheimer disease and related dementias as an underlying or contributing cause of death occurred in COVID-19 pandemic year 1 but were largely mitigated in pandemic year 2. The most pronounced declines were observed for deaths in nursing home/long-term care settings. Conversely, excess deaths at home and in medical facilities remained high in year 2.  Authors: M. Maria Glymour, Sc.D., of the Boston University School of Public Health ...

About The Study: History of present illnesses generated by a chatbot or written by senior internal medicine residents were graded similarly by internal medicine attending physicians. These findings underscore the potential of chatbots to aid clinicians with medical documentation.  Authors: Ashwin Nayak, M.D., M.S., of Stanford University in Stanford, California, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.2561) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

A new study proposes ways to better incorporate adaptation in climate change research, addressing the uneven distribution of adaptation capacities and needs worldwide. Research on adaptation to the risks posed by climate change has witnessed significant growth in the past decade, with increasing recognition of its urgency in policy agendas at the international, national, and local levels. Adaptation needs and capacities are not evenly distributed worldwide, with countries in the Global South generally experiencing the highest challenges. ...

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that repetitive heading during a professional soccer career is associated with an increased risk of cognitive impairment in later life. Further study is needed to establish the upper threshold for heading frequency to mitigate this risk.  Authors: Weiya Zhang, Ph.D., of the University of Nottingham in Nottingham, United Kingdom, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.23822) Editor’s Note: Please ...

Deaths among older adults with dementia fell starkly in nursing homes and long-term care centers after COVID-19 vaccinations became available, yet remained high for those living at home, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco.     The nationwide study published July 17, 2023 in JAMA Neurology, is the first to use data from 2019 to 2022 to quantify “excess” deaths – or those above what would have been anticipated had there been no pandemic – taking into account age, sex, racial and ethnic groups, as well as the settings where people died.  In the first year, there were 509,179 dementia-related ...

Bioengineers have found a way to program the size and shape of virus particles by combining viral protein building blocks and templates made from DNA. The resulting nanostructures could have applications in vaccine development and transporting drugs inside the body. Virus capsid proteins—the proteins that shield the genome of a virus—can be used to build precisely structured protein assemblies. Their shapes and geometry, however, depend largely on the virus strain. Reprogramming these assemblies, no matter the original ...

Penicillin allergy affects more than 25 million people in the United States (up to 1 in 10 Americans) and has been shown to lead to particularly poor health outcomes in pregnant women and surgical patients. It is also a public health threat, leading to antibiotic resistance and infections in hospitalized patients that can be life threatening. Seventy-five% or more penicillin allergy labels come on by age 3 due to, for example, confusion with a viral rash. The majority of these rashes were never allergic, but the labels ‘stick’ into adulthood and carry many adverse consequences.”   Many low-risk patients with a penicillin allergy were able to have their ...

Scent dogs may represent a cheaper, faster and more effective way to detect COVID-19, and could be a key tool in future pandemics, a new review of recent research suggests. The review, published in De Gruyter’s Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, found that scent dogs are as effective, or even more effective, than conventional COVID-19 tests such as RT-PCR. Dogs possess up to 300 million olfactory cells, compared to just 5 or 6 million in humans, and use one-third of their brains to process scent information, ...

“Detecting and sensing our environment is essential for understanding how to interact with it effectively,” says Sonja Groß. An important factor for interactions with objects is their shape. “This determines how we can perform certain tasks,” says the researcher from the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at TUM. In addition, physical properties of objects, such as their hardness and flexibility, influence how we can grasp and manipulate them, for example. Artificial hand: interaction with the robotic system The ...

Chitin hydrogel is recognized as a promising material for a variety of biomedical applications. Its biocompatibility and biodegradability make it useful in tissue repair, artificial organs, and wound healing. Yet scientists continue to face challenges in fabricating chitin hydrogel. A team of researchers has developed a green, efficient and scalable preparation method for chitin hydrogels.   The team’s work provides a rational strategy to fabricate chitin hydrogels and paves the way for its practical applications as a superior biomedical material.   Their ...

Improving diagnosis in health care is a moral, professional and public health imperative, according to the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. However, little is known about the full scope of harms related to medical misdiagnosis — current estimates range widely. Using novel methods, a team from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence and partners from the Risk Management Foundation of the Harvard Medical Institutions sought to derive what is believed to be the first rigorous national estimate of permanent disability and death from diagnostic error.   The original research article ...