Boston - Pregnant women with symptomatic COVID-19 have a higher risk of intensive care unit admissions, mechanical ventilation and death compared to non-pregnant reproductive age women. Increases in preterm birth and still birth have also been observed in pregnancies complicated by the viral infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that people who are pregnant may choose to be vaccinated at their own discretion with their healthcare provider. However, pregnant and lactating women were not included in Phase 3 vaccine efficacy trials; thus, data on vaccine safety and immunogenicity in this population is limited. In a new study from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), ...

Despite having been driven nearly to extinction, the California condor has a high degree of genetic diversity that bodes well for its long-term survival, according to a new analysis by University of California researchers. Nearly 40 years ago, the state's wild condor population was down to a perilous 22. That led to inbreeding that could have jeopardized the population's health and narrowed the bird's genetic diversity, which can reduce its ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In comparing the complete genomes of two California condors with those of an Andean condor and a turkey vulture, UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley scientists did find genetic evidence of inbreeding over the past few centuries, but, overall, a ...

TORONTO, ON - A team of evolutionary biologists from the University of Toronto has shown that Anolis lizards, or anoles, are able to breathe underwater with the aid of a bubble clinging to their snouts. Anoles are a diverse group of lizards found throughout the tropical Americas. Some anoles are stream specialists, and these semi-aquatic species frequently dive underwater to avoid predators, where they can remain submerged for as long as 18 minutes. "We found that semi-aquatic anoles exhale air into a bubble that clings to their skin," says Chris Boccia, a recent Master of Science graduate from the Faculty of Arts & Science's Department of Ecology ...

Traffic noise leads to inaccuracies and delays in the development of song learning in young birds. They also suffer from a suppressed immune system, which is an indicator of chronic stress. A new study by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and colleagues shows that young zebra finches, just like children, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of noise because of its potential to interfere with learning at a critical developmental stage. Traffic noise is a pervasive pollutant that adversely affects the health and well-being ...

New Orleans, LA - Research conducted by an international team of scientists discovered a mechanism that leads to Herceptin resistance, representing a significant clinical obstacle to successfully treating HER2-positive breast cancer. They also identified a new approach to potentially overcome it. The work is published online in Nature Communications, available here. "This work attempts to understand why some HER2-positive breast cancer patients do not benefit from treatment with Herceptin, which is a generally effective HER2-targeted therapy," explains Bolin Liu, MD, Professor of Genetics at LSU Health New Orleans' School of Medicine and Stanley S. Scott Cancer Center. The researchers found increased signaling by IGF2/IRS1 (genes involved in ...

MAROANTSETRA, Madagascar (May 13, 2021) - A new study by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) looks at the prevalence of human consumption of lemur and fossa (Madagascar's largest predator) in villages within and around Makira Natural Park, northeastern Madagascar, providing up-to-date estimates of the percentage of households who eat meat from these protected species. Authors from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) describe their findings in the journal Conservation Science and Practice. In Madagascar, the consumption of endangered and protected species, in particular lemurs, ...

Two recent papers from Hungarian researchers highlight the so far underrated relevance of pet dog biobanking in molecular research and introduce their initiative to make pioneering steps in this field. The Hungarian Canine Brain and Tissue Bank (CBTB) was established by the research team of the Senior Family Dog Project in 2017, following the examples of human tissue banks. In a recent paper, the team reports findings, which would not have been possible without the CBTB, and may augment further progress in dog aging and biomarker research. Even though dogs have a much shorter average lifespan than humans, the aging path of the two species has remarkable similarities. Hence our best friends have attracted the attention ...

Clinicians and scientists have long observed that cells in overstressed hearts have high levels of the simple sugar O-GlcNAc modifying thousands of proteins within cells. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have found evidence in mouse experiments that these excess sugars could well be a cause, not merely a consequence or marker of heart failure. Their research found that elevated levels of O-GlcNAc made mice more prone to heart failure, but lowering levels of O-GlcNAc restored the animals' risk of death and heart function to normal. Together, the investigators say, the new findings, described online in the April ...

In a study conducted by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), cumulative opioid use was reduced by 30% in a patient group that received duloxetine after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) compared with patients who received placebo. Patients who received duloxetine also reported higher pain management satisfaction and less pain interference with mood, walking, normal sleep, and work activities. These findings were presented at the 2021 Spring American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine (ASRA) Annual Meeting.1 Studies have demonstrated that many patients report joint pain two weeks after ...

Millions of people suffer from psoriasis, a chronic, autoimmune disorder that causes scaly patches on the skin and often precedes psoriatic arthritis. While no cure exists, treatments range from topical creams to injected medications that block inflammation. To improve treatment options, scientists need to better understand the dysregulation of the immune system that leads to these lesions. Using advanced computational genomic analysis of immune cells from mouse models, a researcher at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago and her collaborators ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - When Ram Raghavan heard from a former colleague at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that a 7-year-old girl had died from Rocky Mountain spotted fever as the result of a tick bite, he thought of his own daughter, also 7 years old at the time, and the potentially fatal danger posed to vulnerable populations by tick-borne diseases. Now a professor at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine and School of Health Professions, Raghavan is an epidemiologist studying how ticks, mosquitos and other arthropods spread disease that impact people, pets and livestock over time in various geographical regions. In a recent study, the most comprehensive of its kind in the Midwest region of the United States, Raghavan and former graduate ...

Anti-NMDA receptor (NMDAR) encephalitis was first reported to develop in female young adults with ovarian teratoma. However, another study with a larger cohort reported that more than one-third of all patients with anti-NMDAR encephalitis were aged under 18 years, suggesting that this encephalitis might be more common in children than originally expected. A clinical diagnostic approach to autoimmune encephalitis was proposed in 2016, and included diagnostic criteria for probable and definite anti-NMDAR encephalitis. For a diagnosis of probable anti-NMDAR encephalitis, the criteria require rapid onset ( END ...

Tokyo, Japan - Materials in a glassy state are everywhere in our lives and have contributed to humanity for many years. Today, they play a critical role in various technologies, including optical fibers. Although we believe that glass is highly stable, it sometimes crystallizes, resulting in loss of transparency and isotropy, essential characteristics of glass, which has been a significant problem in industrial applications. The reason why crystallization occurs in a solid-state with almost no molecular movement has been a great mystery. Its understanding may help to prevent or optimize crystal growth at deep supercooling. In a study recently published in Nature Materials, researchers ...

A dengue virus vaccine candidate has passed an important milestone, with promising results in animal model testing providing hope to the 390 million people infected every year. The University of Queensland-developed vaccine candidate, applied to the skin via the high-density microarray patch (HD-MAP), has produced a protective immune response in dengue-infected mice. UQ PhD candidate Jovin Choo said the result could lead to a readily administered vaccine that could help halt the devastation of dengue fever globally. "Dengue is the most significant mosquito-borne viral disease in the world's ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., May 12, 2021--A new theorem from the field of quantum machine learning has poked a major hole in the accepted understanding about information scrambling. "Our theorem implies that we are not going to be able to use quantum machine learning to learn typical random or chaotic processes, such as black holes. In this sense, it places a fundamental limit on the learnability of unknown processes," said Zoe Holmes, a post-doc at Los Alamos National Laboratory and coauthor of the paper describing the work published today in Physical Review Letters. "Thankfully, because most physically interesting processes are sufficiently simple or structured so that they do not resemble ...

A new study, by researchers from Simon Fraser University and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, reveals the trade-offs of fish biodiversity--its costs and benefits to mixed-stock fisheries--and points to a potential way to harness the benefits while avoiding costs to fishery performance. Many Pacific salmon fisheries catch fish that come from multiple stocks (management units), often representing locally-adapted populations, in so-called mixed-stock fisheries. Fish are intercepted in the ocean as they migrate along the coast, returning to different rivers to spawn. The study used computer models of hypothetical fisheries and case studies of three actual sockeye salmon fisheries, including BC's Fraser River fishery, to explore how fish biodiversity within mixed-stock ...

PASADENA, Calif. -- Among cancer patients with health coverage in Southern California, those who were diagnosed and treated at Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health care organization, had better survival rates, especially Black and Latino patients, according to Kaiser Permanente research published in The American Journal of Managed Care. "Kaiser Permanente is committed to finding and addressing health care inequities," said the study's senior author, Reina Haque, PhD, a cancer epidemiologist in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. "We investigated survival among insured patients with cancer ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--May 12, 2021--Following the minuscule movements of every cell in a petri dish would be a painstaking task for any human. But teach a set of computer programs to do the job, and they can complete it quickly and even observe things that the human eye would miss. Scientists at Gladstone Institutes have developed such an approach, which uses "neural nets"--artificial intelligence programs that can detect patterns--to analyze the locations of hundreds of cells growing together in a colony. When they applied the technique to a group of stem cells, the program revealed that a small number of cells act as "leaders," able to direct the movements of their neighbors. "This technique gives us a much more comprehensive view of how cells behave, how they work cooperatively, and how ...

White evangelicals are best persuaded to mask up through messages that stress the Christian doctrine of "love thy neighbor," according to a UCR-authored study published Tuesday. The study yielded a second effective way to persuade white evangelicals - but only if they are Republican. That is, messaging from former President Donald Trump that aligns mask-wearing with patriotism. The lessons learned from the study can be borrowed for pro-vaccine messaging, said study author Jennifer Merolla, a UCR professor of political science. About 45% of white evangelicals do not plan on getting vaccinated against COVID-19, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Health officials have said persuading the 41 million white evangelical ...

A person's stance on abortion is linked to their, often inaccurate, belief about when a fetus can feel pain, a University of Otago study has found. Lead author Emma Harcourt, PhD candidate in Otago's Centre for Science Communication, says misinformation about abortion and pregnancy is common and potentially harmful. "The current medical consensus is that it is unlikely that fetal pain perception is possible before the 29th or 30th weeks of pregnancy. However, we found that most people believe that the capacity to feel pain develops much earlier and that this was particularly evident in participants with anti-abortion views," she says. The study, published in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, recruited 374 ...

Numerous compelling evidences from astroparticle physics and cosmology indicate that the major matter component in the Universe is dark matter, accounting for about 85% with the remaining 15% is the ordinary matter. Nevertheless, people still know little about the dark matter, including its mass and other properties. Many models predict dark matter particles could couple to ordinary particle at weak interaction level, so it is possible to capture the signal of dark matter particle in the direct detection experiment. The scientific goals of the China ...

The evolution of ankle and foot bones into different shapes and sizes helped mammals adapt and thrive after the extinction of the dinosaurs, a study suggests. A surge of evolution following the mass extinction 66 million years ago enabled mammals to diversify and prosper during a period of major global change, researchers say. Analysis of bones that form part of the ankle and the heel of the foot reveal that mammals during this time - the Paleocene Period - were less primitive than previously thought. Palaeontologists from the University of Edinburgh made the discovery by comparing the anatomy of Paleocene mammals with species from the earlier Cretaceous ...

As we move through the world, what we see is seamlessly integrated with our memory of the broader spatial environment. How does the brain accomplish this feat? A new study from Dartmouth College reveals that three regions of the brain in the posterior cerebral cortex, which the researchers call "place-memory areas," form a link between the brain's perceptual and memory systems. The findings are published in Nature Communications. "As we navigate our surroundings, information enters the visual cortex and somehow ends up as knowledge of where we are - the question is where this transformation into spatial ...

A research group has developed an ion-selective smart porous membrane that can respond to outer stimuli, potentially paving the way for new applications in molecular separation and sensing applications. Porous thin films have attracted the attention of scientists because of their potential use in sensors, energy harvesting, and ion/molecular separation. Nanostructure properties, such as pore size, thickness, and film density, affect molecular selectivity and molecular permeability. Surface properties also have a significant impact on molecular selectivity. Thus it is important to be able to control both the 3D nanostructures and surface properties of ultrathin porous films. Previous research shed light on smart porous membranes, which are covered with molecules that can respond ...

Eating a diet rich in fruit and vegetables is associated with less stress, according to new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU). The study examined the link between fruit and vegetable intake and stress levels of more than 8,600 Australians aged between 25 and 91 participating in the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle (AusDiab) Study from Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. The findings revealed people who ate at least 470 grams of fruit and vegetables daily had 10 per cent lower stress levels than those who consumed less than 230 grams. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends ...