Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the Public Health Agency of Sweden have studied newborn babies whose mothers tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during pregnancy or childbirth. The results show that although babies born of test-positive mothers are more likely to be born early, extremely few were infected with COVID-19. The study, which is published in the esteemed journal JAMA, supports the Swedish recommendation not to separate mother and baby after delivery. The population-based study comprised 92 per cent of all neonates - almost 90,000 births - in Sweden during the first year of the pandemic (11 March 2020 to 31 January 2021), making it one of the largest datasets in the field to date. The results show a slightly higher level of morbidity ...

During the first wave of the corona pandemic, 36 per cent fewer men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden than in previous years. On the other hand, the number of patients receiving curative treatment for prostate cancer was unaffected. This is shown by a new register study led by Uppsala University researchers, whose results are published in the Scandinavian Journal of Urology. "We think the number of cases diagnosed fell because, early on, the Public Health Agency of Sweden urged older people to minimise their social contacts and, by the same token, refrain from non-urgent ...

Microalgae of the dinoflagellate group are known for their ability to survive in other animal cells. These tiny single-cell organisms have engaged in mutually beneficial relationships with corals since primeval times. By passing on critical nutrients to their hosts, dinoflagellates allow corals to thrive even in barren areas. A research team from the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) of Heidelberg University recently discovered that such symbioses within the cell essentially depend on the ability of the algae to suppress the immune system of their host cell and thereby avoid being "spit ...

Nearly half of adults in the United States have hypertension, a condition that raises the risk for heart disease and stroke, which are leading causes of death in the U. S. At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. David J. Durgan and his colleagues are dedicated to better understand hypertension, in particular the emerging evidence suggesting that disruption of the gut microbiota, known as gut dysbiosis, can have adverse effects on blood pressure. "Previous studies from our lab have shown that the composition of the gut microbiota in animal models of hypertension, such as the SHRSP (spontaneously hypertensive stroke-prone ...

The outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed the widespread effects a pandemic can have on all spheres of life from health, to social life, to the economy. The main thrust of efforts to control the spread has been to decrease the reproduction rate to flatten the curve of the total number of infected individuals per day in order to reduce overload on the health system. The most widely implemented response to the exponential growth of the infection has been widespread quarantine and lockdown. While isolation is an effective tool to decelerate the spread, repeatedly imposing complete ...

Small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) face many obstacles and difficulties (economic, technical, cultural, etc.) when it comes to implementing Industry 4.0. "These are transition processes that are economically costly, and in which SMEs often come up against technical and cultural problems, as they are not cognizant of how to make this transition, or of the benefits their companies stand to gain by implementing Industry 4.0," explained the UPV/EHU pre-doctoral researcher Víctor Ramírez-Durán. While several pieces of work address the incorporating ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2021) - In a new resource for the scientific community, published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers in the lab of Neville Sanjana, PhD, at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) developed CRISPR-sciATAC, a novel integrative genetic screening platform that jointly captures CRISPR gene perturbations and single-cell chromatin accessibility genome-wide. With this technology, they profile changes in genome organization and create a large-scale atlas of how loss of individual chromatin-altering enzymes impacts the human genome. The new method harnesses the programmability of the gene editing system CRISPR to knock-out ...

Exploring extreme environments can put significant operational challenges on the engineering systems we depend upon to safely explore and at times operate within. Within high-value and safety-critical applications, such as space exploration or sub-surface drilling, the extreme and at times dynamic operating conditions within the environment, can make it challenging to understand the life expectancy of critical components and sub-systems. Hence, it's a highly complex and at times impossible situation to accurate understand therefore predict. To have safe, resilient and economically viable operations within these challenge environments, it is vital ...

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have discovered one way in which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, hijacks human cell machinery to blunt the immune response, allowing it to establish infection, replicate and cause disease. In short, the virus' genome gets tagged with a special marker by a human enzyme that tells the immune system to stand down, while at the same time ramping up production of the surface proteins that SARS-CoV-2 uses as a "doorknob" to enter cells. The study, published April ...

The burden of student loans in the U.S. continues to grow unabatedly, currently accounting for a total of $1.7 trillion in household debt among nearly 45 million borrowers. "The introduction of income-based repayment over the past decade has made student loans rather complicated products," Paolo Guasoni of Dublin City University said. As borrowers navigate this complex process, they face long-term consequences; people with student debt are less likely to own homes or become entrepreneurs, and generally postpone their enrollment in graduate or professional studies. Though legislative reform is necessary to combat this problem on a grand scale, individual borrowers can take steps to ...

Hydrogen as a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels is part of a sustainable-energy future, and very much already here. However, lingering concerns about flammability have limited widespread use of hydrogen as a power source for electric vehicles. Previous advances have minimized the risk, but new research from the University of Georgia now puts that risk in the rearview mirror. Hydrogen vehicles can refuel much more quickly and go farther without refueling than today's electric vehicles, which use battery power. But one of the final hurdles to hydrogen power is securing a safe method for detecting hydrogen leaks. A new study published in Nature Communications documents an inexpensive, spark-free, optical-based hydrogen sensor that is more sensitive ...

Study Take-Aways Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease. o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies. o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects ...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the abnormal accumulation and spread of the tau protein in the brain. An international study can now show how tau spreads according to four distinct patterns that lead to different symptoms with different prognoses of the affected individuals. The study was published in Nature Medicine. "In contrast to how we have so far interpreted the spread of tau in the brain, these findings indicate that tau pathology in the brain varies according to at least four distinct patterns. This would suggest that Alzheimer's is an even more heterogeneous disease than previously thought. We now have reason to reevaluate the concept of typical Alzheimer's, and in the long ...

As state and local policymakers and politicians made the decision to enact stay-at-home orders last March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a recent study found that more stringent public health measures put in place directly correlated with lower virus case numbers during the first two months of the pandemic. The study, "More Stringent Measures Against Covid-19 Are Associated With Lower Cases and Deaths in Florida and Miami-Dade," was recently published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Utilizing The New York Times' GitHub repository of cases and deaths and the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index developed by Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government for the ...

The image of rows of chairs and desks facing a teacher at a blackboard has been a reality for decades. However, research reveals that this way of organizing the classroom furniture in schools is not the best way for favouring the learning process. Especially if the needs of 21st-century students are taken into account, who, according to the OECD, require a social environment that fosters autonomy, flexibility, decision-making capacity and the connection of knowledge by individual students or through teamwork. It is also the opinion of 6 out of every 10 teachers that changing the ...

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults. The findings by researchers from Sansum Diabetes Research Institute (SDRI) and Rice University are available online this week in EClinicalMedicine, an open-access clinical journal published by The Lancet. "The fresh look at the glucose data sheds new light on disease progression, which could have a direct impact on better management," said Rice study co-author Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor and department chair in electrical and ...

Researchers from Osaka University, Japan and the University of Adelaide, Australia have worked together to produce the new multiplexer made from pure silicon for terahertz-range communications in the 300-GHz band. "In order to control the great spectral bandwidth of terahertz waves, a multiplexer, which is used to split and join signals, is critical for dividing the information into manageable chunks that can be more easily processed and so can be transmitted faster from one device to another," said Associate Professor Withawat Withayachumnankul from the University of Adelaide's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. "Up ...

A third of children and adolescents develop a mental health problem after a concussion, which could persist for several years post-injury, according to a new literature review. The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found mental health should be evaluated as part of standard pediatric concussion assessment and management. MCRI researcher and Monash University PhD candidate Alice Gornall said despite many post-concussion and mental health symptoms overlapping, the relationship between delayed recovery and mental health had remained poorly understood until this literature review. The review of 69 articles published between 1980 to June 2020, involved ...

Amsterdam, April 29, 2021 - The clinical presentation and underlying biology of Parkinson's disease (PD) varies significantly, but attempts to cluster cases into a limited number of subtypes have questionable applicability and relevance, reports the international Task Force for PD Subtypes in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. Their systematic review of studies reporting a subtyping system for the first time concludes that new approaches are needed that acknowledge the individual nature of the disease and are more aligned with personalized medicine. In 2018, the International Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Society (MDS) convened the Task Force for PD Subtypes to critically appraise ...

Obesity and a high-salt diet are both bad for our hearts but they are bigger, seemingly synergistic risks for females, scientists report. "We see younger and younger women having cardiovascular disease and the question is: What is the cause?" says Dr. Eric Belin de Chantemele, physiologist in the Vascular Biology Center and Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. "We think the fact that females are more salt sensitive and more sensitive to obesity are among the reasons they have lost the natural protection youth and estrogen are thought to provide." His message to women based on the sex differences they are finding: "First reduce your consumption of salt, a message the American ...

A study by the Hydrology and Agricultural Hydraulics group at the University of Cordoba analyses the potential of rock in dehesas as a source of water for vegetation Soil is an essential reservoir of the water cycle, not so much because of the volume it represents, but rather due to its continuous renewal and because of humanity's ability to take advantage of it. Although the evolution of the climate in the medium and long term may modify current conditions, thevariability of precipitation can cause notable changes in the natural systems of arid and semi-arid areas, accelerating their degradation, especially ...

Many meteorological satellite networks are constantly scanning Earth, providing vital research data and real-time life-saving weather information. Since China began its initial development in 1970, the Fengyun (FY) series of meteorological satellites have advanced considerably throughout more than 50 years. While FY satellites primarily focus on the atmosphere, they are capable of observing complex variables within the Earth-atmosphere system. Since the initial FY dispatch, China has successfully launched 17 FY satellites, seven of which are currently operating in orbit. The Fengyun Meteorological Satellite Ground Application System generates more than 90 Earth observation products every day, producing more than ...

Claiming that something has a defect normally suggests an undesirable feature. That's not the case in solid-state systems, such as the semiconductors at the heart of modern classical electronic devices. They work because of defects introduced into the rigidly ordered arrangement of atoms in crystalline materials like silicon. Surprisingly, in the quantum world, defects also play an important role. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and scientific institutes and universities in Japan, Korea and Hungary have established guidelines that will be an invaluable resource for the discovery of new defect-based ...

A compound in avocados may ultimately offer a route to better leukemia treatment, says a new University of Guelph study. The compound targets an enzyme that scientists have identified for the first time as being critical to cancer cell growth, said Dr. Paul Spagnuolo, Department of Food Science. Published recently in the journal Blood, the study focused on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which is the most devastating form of leukemia. Most cases occur in people over age 65, and fewer than 10 per cent of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Leukemia cells have higher amounts of an enzyme called VLCAD involved in their metabolism, said Spagnuolo. "The cell relies on that pathway to ...

Coral reefs provide shelter, sustenance and stability to a range of organisms, but these vital ecosystems would not exist if not for the skeletal structure created by stony corals. Now, KAUST scientists together with an international team have revealed the underlying genetic story of how corals evolved from soft-bodied organisms to build the myriad calcified structures we see today. "While the processes involved in coral calcification are well understood, it is less clear how corals' ability to grow calcium carbonate skeletons actually evolved," says Xin Wang, a former KAUST Ph.D. student who worked on the project under the supervision of Manual Aranda. "How did a squishy anemone-like organism begin to build reefs?" ...