In the arid regions of the American Southwest, an unseen world lies beneath our feet. Biocrusts, or biological soil crusts, are communities of living organisms. These industrious microbes include cyanobacteria, green algae, fungi, lichens, and mosses, forming a thin layer on the surface of soils in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Biocrusts play a crucial role in maintaining soil health and ecosystem sustainability, but they are currently under assault. Human activities including agriculture, urbanization, and off-road ...

The rate of suspected suicide attempts by poisoning among children and adolescents ages 10-19 reported to U.S. poison centers increased 30% during 2021 – the COVID-19 pandemic’s first full year – compared with 2019, a new UVA Health study found. The rate of suspected suicide attempts by poisoning among children ages 10-12 increased 73% during 2021 compared with 2019. Among adolescents ages 13-15, the rate of suspected suicide attempts by poisoning increased 48.8% in 2021 versus 2019. The rate of suspected suicide attempts by poisoning among females ages 10-19 increased 36.8% in 2021 compared with 2019. The findings ...

A collaborative multi-site randomized controlled trial at the University of Houston and the Medical University of South Carolina is set to prove the effectiveness of treating alcohol use disorder (AUD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) together.  It’s a one-two punch whose time has come. No integrative treatment combining Cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for PTSD and relapse prevention (RP) for AUD currently exists.  “A substantial proportion of individuals with AUD also meet criteria for PTSD. The co-occurrence of AUD/PTSD is characterized by more severe symptomatology, greater functional impairment, ...

INDIANAPOLIS—While trying to understand what initiates breast cells to become cancerous, researchers at the Vera Bradley Foundation Center for Breast Cancer Research at Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a new target for breast cancer treatment. “When comparing healthy breast tissue and cancerous cells, we wanted to find out what is the earliest genomic change that happens to initiate the cancer,” said Harikrishna Nakshatri, PhD, the Marian J. Morrison professor of breast cancer research ...

Biologists at the University of Cincinnati discovered that underfed jumping spiders lose light-sensitive cells that are key to their vision. UC College of Arts and Sciences Professor Elke Buschbeck and her co-authors studied photoreceptors in the eyes of bold jumping spiders, tiny eight-legged predators found across North America. The little hunters rely on their keen vision to stalk prey. But researchers found that underfed spiders begin to lose photoreceptors that give them such good eyesight. Their findings could improve our understanding of ...

Researchers at Cleveland Clinic have taken an important step in predicting which treatment will work for individual cancer patients. Using a gene signature developed from cell lines and human tissue, the research team demonstrated the ability to predict a patient’s response to the chemotherapy agent cisplatin, without relying on changes in the mutational status of a patient’s cancer. The study was recently published in NPJ Precision Oncology. In recent years, effective new cancer treatments have ...

Search and rescue efforts following disasters like the massive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria are a race against time. Emergency response teams need to quickly identify voids or spaces in building rubble where survivors might be trapped, and before natural gas leaks, water main flooding or shifting concrete slabs take their toll. Advanced technology plays a vital role in these recovery operations. Thermal imaging equipment and sensitive listening devices are deployed to seek out signs of life. Small aerial ...

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory announced today that its life sciences preprint server bioRxiv has partnered with PaperPlayer, a service for converting manuscripts into high-quality audio, to provide audio versions of preprint abstracts in the bioRxiv Neuroscience category. This new feature increases content accessibility and offers a way of obtaining information from preprints that’s an alternative to a screen. It is being piloted in the Neuroscience category to assess its value for preprint users. "This ...

MIT researchers are using artificial intelligence to design new proteins that go beyond those found in nature. They developed machine-learning algorithms that can generate proteins with specific structural features, which could be used to make materials that have certain mechanical properties, like stiffness or elasticity. Such biologically inspired materials could potentially replace materials made from petroleum or ceramics, but with a much smaller carbon footprint. The researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Tufts University employed a generative model, which is the same type of machine-learning model architecture ...

A single species invades an ecosystem causing its collapse. A cyberattack on the power system causes a major breakdown. These type of events are always on our mind, yet they rarely result in such significant consequences. So how is it that these systems are so stable and resilient that they can withstand such external  disruptions? Indeed, these systems lack a central design or blueprint, and still, they exhibit exceptionally reliable functionality. In the early 70s the field of ecology was split on the question of whether biodiversity is a good or a bad thing for an ecosystem. In 1972 Sir Robert May showed, mathematically, that an increase in biodiversity causes less ecological ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 55,000 adult and pediatric patients hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Canada suggest that COVID-19 vaccination is important to reduce the burden on the Canadian health care system as well as severe outcomes associated with COVID-19.  Authors: Robyn Mitchell, M.H.Sc., of the Public Health Agency of Canada in Ottawa, 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.2023.9050) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this study of 171 participants who received primary surgery and postoperative radiation for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, lower levels of written health literacy were significantly associated with postoperative radiation delays when controlling for demographic and clinical factors. The addition of health literacy and the community-level area deprivation index improved the model’s prediction of postoperative radiation delay risk.  Authors: Tuleen Sawaf, B.S., of the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, 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/jamaoto.2023.0308) Editor’s ...

Chitin (kai’tin) and healthy fats from insects appear to contribute to healthy gut microbiota and are strong sources of protein and nutrients, according to a paper co-authored by a Colorado State University researcher and published in Nature Food. Tiffany Weir, an associate professor in CSU’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, co-authored the paper with the University of Wisconsin’s Valerie Stull. They pioneered human research on cricket consumption’s effect on gut microbiota. Weir said that her and Stull’s earlier research helped spawn Weir’s latest study of how cricket-derived chitin in designer chocolate patties may increase ...

Bones, although composing the hardest tissue in the human body, are not stagnant structures. According to recent studies, bones maintain a lively metabolism and closely interact via nerves with the brain. But whether endocrine hormones also play an important role in brain-bone talk has been unclear. Researchers from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences now have an answer to this question. They have revealed that the subfornical organ (SFO), a brain nucleus above the third ventricle ...

Cedars-Sinai investigators are developing a novel way to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and retinitis pigmentosa using engineered stem cells that may eventually lead to personalized treatments.  The new approach uses cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that are renewable and scalable, and also can delay the progression of these neurodegenerative diseases in rodents. This research, published in the journal Stem Cell Reports, marks an important first step toward achieving more personalized therapies for people with these debilitating conditions that currently have ...

New York, NY (April 20, 2023)—Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have demonstrated in a preclinical study a potential new therapeutic approach to treating the most common form of lung cancer. The strategy involves inhibiting the immune-system molecule TREM2 while enhancing natural killer cells (the so-called protectors of the immune system). It was described in the April 20 online issue of Nature Immunology [DOI: 10.1038/s41590-023-01475-4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-023-01475-4. “Our study reveals that macrophages expressing the molecule TREM2 drive the depletion and dysfunction of effector ...

HOUSTON ― Vijay Goradia, a Houston-based businessman, philanthropist, and cancer survivor, has donated $10 million to The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to speed translational research and clinical trials. An initial allocation of $3.5 million will fund the institution’s clinical trial of a CD70-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cell therapy for patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), developed by Katy Rezvani, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapy.  “We are focused on supporting the innovation ...

ANN ARBOR—The "spooky action at a distance" that once unnerved Einstein may be on its way to being as pedestrian as the gyroscopes that currently measure acceleration in smartphones. Quantum entanglement significantly improves the precision of sensors that can be used to navigate without GPS, according to a new study in Nature Photonics. "By exploiting entanglement, we improve both measurement sensitivity and how quickly we can make the measurement," said Zheshen Zhang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University ...

The paper is an important speech made by Min Wang, Vice Minister of the former Ministry of Land and Resources of the PRC, at the seminar “Groundwater and Healthy & Green Development”, which indicated the problems of geological and hydrogeological work over the past decades,  and what should we do next. Although significant progress in geological work has been made in China, there are still many challenges need to be done, “going one step further” is very important. It is necessary to promote the transformation of geological work, ...

Freshwater is essential for human life and the scarcity of freshwater is a critical issue in parts of the world today. In recent years, scientists have put great efforts into developing desalination technologies so that clean water can be produced from seawater. Interfacial solar evaporation (ISE) is a technology that holds promise for helping to relieve worldwide freshwater shortages. A team of researchers has undertaken a review study of the strategies available for constructing efficient ISE systems.   Their ...

Sleep disturbances can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. Many people eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s start experiencing difficulty falling and staying asleep years before cognitive problems such as memory loss and confusion emerge. It’s a vicious cycle: Alzheimer’s disease involves changes to the brain that disrupt sleep, and poor sleep accelerates harmful changes to the brain. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a possible way to help break that cycle. A small, two-night study has shown that people who took a sleeping pill before bed experienced a drop in the levels of key Alzheimer’s ...

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are considered a promising candidate for next-generation photovoltaic technology with high efficiency and low production cost, potentially revolutionizing the renewable energy industry. However, the existing layer-by-layer manufacturing process presents challenges that have hindered the commercialisation of this technology. Recently, researchers from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the US jointly developed an innovative one-step solution-coating ...

Imagine lying on a bed, you just have to move your fingers to guide a mobile robot to bring you a cup of water, open the door to fetch some deliveries, or even do some laundry. If you are interested, you may want to learn more about a new remotely operated robotic system based on two mobile manipulators. This system was developed by roboticists from Osaka University. They published a research paper describing this robotic system on Feb. 10 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.   Back in the year of 2013, Fukushima nuclear power plant witnessed a catastrophic radioactive leakage and contamination, which makes the surrounding area extremely dangerous for ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A meta-analysis of studies involving 33,541 cancer patients evaluates the relationship between advance care planning and aggressive vs. comfort-focused end-of-life care. The study, led by Kristin Levoy, PhD, MSN, RN, of the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Nursing, found a general trend toward less aggressive and more comfort-focused end-of-life care among cancer patients who had engaged in advance care planning, compared to those who did not do so. Advance care planning is a dynamic process to help prepare people for future decision-making with the goal of ensuring that individuals receive care at the end-of-life that is consistent ...

Imagine by only attaching a number of electromyography (EMG) sensors to your legs, your motion in the future several seconds can be predicted. Such a way of predicting motion via muscle states is an alternative to the mainstream visual cue-based motion prediction, which heavily relies on multi-view cameras to construct time-series posture. However, there is still a gap between muscle states and future movements.   Muscles act upon the ground, which induces ground reaction force. Together with muscle states and ground reaction force, body movements are produced. Therefore, estimating ...