June 1, 2021 -- Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, Brazil found that when health workers were trained to promote infant healthy feeding practices to pregnant women their children consumed less fats and carbohydrates at 3 years of age and had lower measures of body fat at the age of 6. The study is the first to show that the roots for obesity start in the first year of life, after mothers stop breastfeeding. The findings are published online in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics. "The first year after ...

Aging is associated with an overall decline in health and increased frailty, and is a major risk factor for multiple chronic diseases. Frailty syndrome, characterized by weakness, fatigue and low physical activity, affects more than 30% of the elderly population. Increasing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the aging process is a top priority to facilitate the development of interventions that will lead to the preservation of health and improvements on survival and lifespan. Cumulative evidence suggests that diet and metabolism are key targetable regulators of healthy lifespan. Prof. Haim Cohen, Director of the Sagol Healthy Human Longevity Center at Bar-Ilan University, ...

This is the main finding of new research involving more than 50,000 participants in 97 samples, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The findings show that the more extreme choices and decisions of men can be both positive and negative. "The question of whether men and women make systematically different choices and decisions is one on the most fundamental (and controversial) questions in psychological research," Associate Professor Stefan Volk from the University of Sydney Business School said. "We found men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, either acting very ...

Investigators from Trinity College Dublin, the Irish Mycobacteria Reference Laboratory, St James's Hospital, and the Department of Public Health HSE East believe tuberculosis (TB) care in Irish Prisons should be supported, considering the findings of their study which is published today (Tuesday, 1st June, 2021) in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. The study describes an investigation into a large outbreak of tuberculosis which occurred in an Irish prison in 2011. This resulted in 34 people contracting active TB from a single infectious case. The use of Whole Genome Sequencing enabled ...

Researchers working under the leadership of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have conducted the first precise and comprehensive measurements of sea level rises in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. A new method now makes it possible to determine sea level changes with millimeter accuracy even in coastal areas and in case of sea ice coverage. This is of vital importance for planning protective measures. For the billions of people who live in coastal areas, rising sea levels driven by climate change can pose an existential threat. "To protect people and infrastructure - for example by building flood protection structures, securing ports or making ...

Cells have to constantly adapt to their surroundings in order to survive. A sudden increase in the environmental levels of an osmolyte, such as salt, causes cells to lose water and shrink. In a matter of seconds, they activate a mechanism that allows them to recover their initial water volume and avoid dying. Finding out which genes are involved in surviving osmotic stress was the subject of a study led by the laboratories of Dr. Posas and Dr. de Nadal at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and Dr. Valverde at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in collaboration with a group led by Dr. Moffat from the University of Toronto (Canada). wide-genome genetic screening, the scientists discovered the central role of a gene known as LRRC8A in cellular ...

In a joint effort, ct.qmat scientists from Dresden, Rostock, and Würzburg have accomplished non-Hermitian topological states of matter in topolectric circuits. The latter acronym refers to topological and electrical, giving a name to the realization of synthetic topological matter in electric circuit networks. The main motif of topological matter is its role in hosting particularly stable and robust features immune to local perturbations, which might be a pivotal ingredient for future quantum technologies. The current ct.qmat results promise a knowledge transfer from electric circuits to alternative optical platforms, and have just been published in Physical Review Letters. Topological defect tuning in non-Hermitian systems At the center of the currently reported work is the ...

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is used to disinfect minor cuts at home and for oxidative reactions in industrial manufacturing. Now, the pandemic has further fueled demand for this chemical and its antiseptic properties. While affordable at the grocery store, H2O2 is actually difficult and expensive to manufacture at scale. A team led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has demonstrated a more efficient and environmentally friendly method to produce H2O2, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "While the two ingredients--hydrogen and oxygen--are either inexpensive or freely available from the atmosphere, hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive and unstable, which makes it very hard to produce," said first author Tomas ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Moffitt Cancer Center, a national leader in cancer care and research and the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center based in Florida, is presenting new data from dozens of clinical research studies at this year's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, the world's largest clinical cancer research meeting. Moffitt investigators will lead 25 abstract presentations, five education sessions, two cancer-based panels and two clinical science symposia. The virtual meeting is June 4-8. Highlights include: Oral Presentations: Dr. Bijal Shah will ...

Physicists at the University of Bath in the UK, in collaboration with researchers from the USA, have uncovered a new mechanism for enabling magnetism and superconductivity to co-exist in the same material. Until now, scientists could only guess how this unusual coexistence might be possible. The discovery could lead to applications in green energy technologies and in the development of superconducting devices, such as next-generation computer hardware. As a rule, superconductivity (the ability of a material to pass an electrical current with perfect efficiency) and magnetism (seen at work in fridge magnets) make poor bedfellows because the alignment of the tiny electronic magnetic particles in ferromagnets ...

A catastrophic drop in atmospheric ozone levels around the tropics is likely to have contributed to a bottleneck in the human population around 60 to 100,000 years ago, an international research team has suggested. The ozone loss, triggered by the eruption of the Toba supervolcano located in present-day Indonesia, might solve an evolutionary puzzle that scientists have been debating for decades. "Toba has long been posited as a cause of the bottleneck, but initial investigations into the climate variables of temperature and precipitation provided no concrete ...

In interstellar dust clouds, turbulence must first dissipate before a star can form through gravity. A German-French research team has now discovered that the kinetic energy of the turbulence comes to rest in a space that is very small on cosmic scales, ranging from one to several light-years in extent. The group also arrived at new results in the mathematical method: Previously, the turbulent structure of the interstellar medium was described as self-similar - or fractal. The researchers found that it is not enough to describe the structure mathematically as a single fractal, a self-similar structure as known from the Mandelbrot set. Instead, they added several different fractals, so-called multifractals. The new methods can thus be used to resolve ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new state-of-the-art method for controlling how artificial intelligence (AI) systems create images. The work has applications for fields from autonomous robotics to AI training. At issue is a type of AI task called conditional image generation, in which AI systems create images that meet a specific set of conditions. For example, a system could be trained to create original images of cats or dogs, depending on which animal the user requested. More recent techniques have built on this to incorporate conditions regarding an image layout. This allows users to specify which types of objects they want to appear in particular places on the screen. ...

Amsterdam, June 1, 2021 - The Treatabolome project is a research initiative to develop a freely available, interoperable online platform dedicated to disseminating rare disease and gene-specific treatment information to healthcare professionals regardless of their level of specialized expertise. Developed under the Solve-RD European Research Project, it is intended to reduce treatment delays for patients with rare diseases by directly linking diagnosis and treatment information. This initiative is highly relevant to neuromuscular disorders as they are rare diseases by definition. In this special issue of the Journal of Neuromuscular Diseases, experts contribute Treatabolome-feeding systematic literature reviews on rare neurological ...

Neutrons - Space ice, un-Earthly cold Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully created amorphous ice, similar to ice in interstellar space and on icy worlds in our solar system. They documented that its disordered atomic behavior is unlike any ice on Earth. The findings could help interpret data from future NASA missions such as Europa Clipper, which will assess the habitability of Jupiter's moon, Europa. Using the Spallation Neutron Source's SNAP instrument, the scientists replicated the cold vacuum of space and added a few molecules ...

Single atomic defect is the smallest structural unit of solid material. The construction of devices based on single defect can reach the limit of miniaturization of semiconductor devices. In the past decades, the creation and manipulation of single defects in semiconductors opened a new research field, and could be used to physically realize "qubits" of solid-state quantum computation through spin or electron charge. Most interest have focused on the studies of spin quantum computing. However, the spin manipulation need an optical and magnetic field. On the contrary, multiple ...

Leipzig. The smoke from the extreme forest fires on the US West Coast in September 2020 travelled over many thousands of kilometres to Central Europe, where it continued to affect the atmosphere for days afterwards. A comparison of ground and satellite measurements now shows: The forest fire aerosol disturbed the free troposphere over Leipzig in Germany as never before. An evaluation by an international research team led by the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) revealed an extraordinary optical thickness on 11 September 2020, which attenuated ...

Oncotarget published "Development of a ghrelin receptor inverse agonist for positron emission tomograph" which reported that imaging of Ghrelin receptors in vivo provides unique potential to gain deeper understanding on Ghrelin and its receptors in health and disease, in particular, in cancer. Ghrelin, an octanoylated 28-mer peptide hormone, activates the constitutively active growth hormone secretagogue receptor type 1a with nanomolar activity. The authors developed novel compounds, derived from the potent inverse agonist K- -FwLL-NH2 but structurally varied by lysine conjugation ...

Oncotarget published "Global DNA hypermethylation pattern and unique gene expression signature in liver cancer from patients with Indigenous American ancestry" which reported that contrasting with this pattern, the age structure of HCC in Andean people displays a bimodal distribution with half of the patients developing HCC in adolescence and early adulthood. To deepen the understanding of the molecular determinants of the disease in this population, the authors conducted an integrative analysis of gene expression and DNA methylation in HCC developed by 74 Peruvian patients, including 39 adolescents and young adults. While genome-wide hypomethylation ...

New research from the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, The Ohio State University, and San Jose State University finds that during COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, parental stress was higher during the workday compared to after the workday and lower during weekends than during weekdays. Previous research compares parental stress before and during the pandemic, but none has measured it during stay-at-home orders. In this study, scientists assessed how time-varying and day-varying factors are related to parents' level of stress. In specific, stress was examined 3 times a day for 14 days for survey participants in Ohio from April to May 2020. Specific findings include: Parents ...

University of Queensland scientists working to unlock the mysteries Australia's deadly stonefish have made a discovery which could change how sting victims are treated in the future. Stonefish are the most venomous fish in world and are found throughout shallow coastal waters of the northern half of Australia. Study co-author Associate Professor Bryan Fry said previous studies have not been able to uncover all of the mechanisms at play in stonefish venom because of the way the venom was tested. "There's a couple of reasons previous studies haven't been able to thoroughly decipher the toxicological mysteries of stonefish venom," Dr Fry said. "But ...

Oncotarget published "Multi-modal effects of 1B3, a novel synthetic miR-193a-3p mimic, support strong potential for therapeutic intervention in oncology" which reported that the authors comprehensively investigated miRNA-193a-3p's mode of action in a panel of human cancer cell lines, with a variety of genetic backgrounds, using 1B3, a synthetic microRNA mimic. Interestingly, the exact mechanism through which 1B3 reduced cell proliferation varied between cell lines. 1B3 efficiently reduced target gene expression, leading to reduced cell proliferation/survival, cell cycle arrest, induction of apoptosis, increased cell senescence, DNA damage, and inhibition of migration. SiRNA ...

A local research team, comprised of members of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials(KIMM) under the Ministry of Science and ICT and UNIST, developed a metamaterial absorber that significantly enhances the detection of harmful substances or biomolecules, and published their results in Small Methods. The joint research team led by Principal Researcher Dr. Joo-Yun Jung of the Nano-Convergence Mechanical Systems Research Division at KIMM and Professor Jongwon Lee of UNIST developed a metamaterial that enhances infrared absorption spectroscopy through 100-fold amplification of detection signals. The proposed metamaterial is a special functional material with vertical nanogaps of a smaller size than infrared wavelength. Infrared spectroscopy is a technique that identifies ...

Recently, the research team led by Prof. KONG Lingtao from Institute of Solid State Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) prepared a highly active single iron atom catalyst (Fe-ISAs@CN) which can activate H2O2 to generate free radicals, achieving rapid removal of sulfadiazine pollutants in aqueous. The relevant results were published in Journal of Colloid and Interface Science. Sulfadiazine (SDZ), a kind of synthetic sulfadiazine antibiotic, is widely used in clinical and animal husbandry industries. However, due to its large-scale use and unqualified discharge of wastewater, more and more antibiotic residues ...

Recently, the research team led by Prof. KONG Lingtao from Institute of Solid State Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) prepared a highly active single iron atom catalyst (Fe-ISAs@CN) which can activate H2O2 to generate free radicals, achieving rapid removal of sulfadiazine pollutants in aqueous. The relevant results were published in Journal of Colloid and Interface Science. Sulfadiazine (SDZ), a kind of synthetic sulfadiazine antibiotic, is widely used in clinical and animal husbandry industries. However, due to its large-scale use and unqualified discharge of wastewater, more and more antibiotic residues are detected in the ...