CLEVELAND - In a Correspondence article published in the April 29, 2021 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from University Hospitals (UH) Cleveland Medical Center, and New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, found a substantial reduction in the use of minimally invasive surgery for cervical cancer after publication of the results a major study called the Laparoscopic Approach to Cervical Cancer (LACC) in November 2018. The earlier study, which compared minimally invasive surgery with open abdominal radical hysterectomy in patients with early-stage cervical cancer, found that minimally invasive surgery was associated with worse disease-free and overall ...

LAWRENCE -- Researchers commonly work with the criminal justice system to implement reforms, bringing with them the latest science and data pointing to why a certain practice will help improve outcomes. New research from the University of Kansas shows if community corrections agencies are to sustain evidence-based reforms, they need to view them as legitimate. Researchers worked with eight federal community corrections agencies to implement Contingency Management, an evidence-based practice used to help people convicted of drug offenses set and achieve goals to end addiction, avoid repeat offenses and increase pro-social behavior. Such evidence-based practices and reforms are frequently put in place across the criminal justice system. Shannon Portillo"We've ...

Nanopore technology shows promise for making it possible to develop small, portable, inexpensive devices that can sequence DNA in real time. One of the challenges, however, has been to make the technology more accurate. Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have moved closer toward this goal by developing a nanopore sequencing platform that, for the first time, can detect the presence of nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. The study was published online Feb. 11 and is featured on the back cover of the April print edition of the ...

A study by University of Guam researchers has found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. The study, which was funded by the university's National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, was published in February in the peer-reviewed Marine Biology Research journal. "We wanted to see what role light has in coral bleaching," said UOG Assistant Professor Bastian Bentlage, the supervisor and co-author of the study. "Usually, people talk about temperature as a cause for bleaching, but we show that both light and temperature work together." Previous UOG research led by Laurie J. Raymundo found that more than one-third of all coral reefs in Guam were killed from 2013 to 2017 over the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Hispanic Americans have died of COVID-19 at a disproportionately high rate compared to whites because of workplace exposure to the virus, a new study suggests. It's widely documented that Hispanics are overrepresented among workers in essential industries and occupations ranging from warehousing and grocery stores to health care and construction, much of which kept operating when most of the country shut down last spring. The analysis of federal data showed that, considering their representation in the U.S. population, far higher percentages of Hispanics of working ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at Yale and Princeton say the scientific community sorely needs a new way to compare the cascading effects of ecosystem loss due to human-induced environmental change to major crises of the past. For too long, scientists have relied upon metrics that compare current rates of species loss with those characterizing mass extinctions in the distant past, according to Pincelli Hull, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and Christopher Spalding, an astrophysicist at Princeton. The result has been projections of extinction rates in the next few decades that are on the order ...

DALLAS - April 28, 2021 - Depression screening among cancer patients improved by 40 percent to cover more than 90 percent of patients under a quality improvement program launched by a multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Southwestern Health Resources. Cancer patients with depression are at an increased risk of mortality and suicide compared with those without depression. Although rates vary based on cancer type and stage, depression is estimated to affect 10 to 30 percent of patients with cancer compared with 7 to 8 percent of adults without a diagnosis or history of cancer, and impact both men and women equally. Due to the higher risk, medical ...

LAWRENCE -- For thousands of years during the last ice age, generations of maritime migrants paddled skin boats eastward across shallow ocean waters from Asia to present-day Alaska. They voyaged from island to island and ultimately to shore, surviving on bountiful seaweeds, fish, shellfish, birds and game harvested from coastal and nearshore biomes. Their island-rich route was possible due to a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles from one continent to the other. A new study from the University of Kansas in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy, documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2021)--A new study is drawing the most detailed picture yet of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lung, revealing mechanisms that result in lethal COVID-19, and may explain long-term complications and show how COVID-19 differs from other infectious diseases. Led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, the study found that in patients who died of the infection, COVID-19 unleashed a detrimental trifecta of runaway inflammation, direct destruction and impaired regeneration of lung cells involved in gas exchange, and accelerated lung scarring. Though the study looked at lungs from patients who had died of the disease, ...

Primary care practitioners often over-estimate the likelihood of a patient having a medical condition based on reported symptoms and laboratory test results. Such overestimations can lead to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) published in JAMA Internal Medicine. "A large gap exists between practitioner estimates and scientific estimates of the probability of disease," said study leader Daniel Morgan, MD, a Professor of Epidemiology & Public Health at UMSOM. "Practitioners who overestimate ...

The discovery of ancient kumara pits just north of Dunedin dating back to the 15th century have shone a light on how scientific evidence can complement mātauranga Maori around how and where the taonga were stored hundreds of years ago. A new study published in the science journal PLOS ONE reports that early Polynesians once stored kumara - American sweet potato - in pits dug into sand dunes at Purākaunui, eastern Otago, less than 30km north of Dunedin. The pits were first discovered in 2001 and are found over 200km south of the currently accepted South Island limit of cooler-climate Māori kumara storage. These Purākaunui features have the novel form of semi-subterranean, rectangular pits used for the cool seasonal storage ...

The brain possesses a complex architecture of functional networks as its information-processing machinery. Is the brain's network architecture itself a target of disease? If so, which networks are associated with which diseases? What can this tell us about the underlying causes of brain disorders? Building on the extraordinary progress in neuroscience made over the past 30 years, researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) published a study of 43 brain disorders - both psychiatric and neurologic - and strongly affirmed ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 29, 2021 -- An analysis of Twitter activity between March 1 and Aug. 1, 2020, found strong support by U.S. users for wearing face coverings and that a media focus on anti-mask opinions fueled the rhetoric of those opposed, report University of Oregon researchers. The study, published April 28 in the journal PLOS ONE, initially focused on linguistics, zeroing in on the language associated with hashtags during the study period, which began a month before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended mask-wearing to protect against COVID-19 infection. However, to better understand that semantics, which were found to be polarized, angry and emotionally ...

Adult mantis shrimp pack an explosive punch that can split water, but no crustacean emerges fully formed. Minute larvae can undergo six or seven transformations before emerging as fully developed adults and limbs and manoeuvres develop over time. So, when do mantis shrimp larvae acquire the ability to pulverise their dinner and how powerful are the punches that these mini crustaceans pack? 'We knew that larval mantis shrimp have these beautiful appendages; Megan Porter and Eve Robinson at the University of Hawaii had captured normal videos of a couple of strikes a few years ago', says Jacob Harrison from Duke University, USA. So, he packed up ...

Adult heterosexual women and men are often jealous about completely different threats to their relationship. These differences seem to establish themselves far sooner than people need them. The finding surprised researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who studied the topic. "You don't really need this jealousy until you need to protect yourself from being deceived," says Professor Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair at NTNU's Department of Psychology. Romantic jealousy can be experienced as horrible at its worst. But jealousy associated with a partner's infidelity has clearly been ...

More than a quarter of American infants in 2018 had not received common childhood vaccines that protect them from illnesses such as polio, tetanus, measles, mumps and chicken pox, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine reveals. Only 72.8% of infants aged 19-35 months had received the full series of the seven recommended vaccines, falling far short of the federal government's goal of 90%. Those less likely to complete the vaccine series include African-American infants, infants born to mothers with less than a high-school education and infants in families with incomes below the federal poverty line. The researchers warn that failure to complete the vaccine series leaves children at increased risk of infection, illness and death. It also reduces the herd ...

Human decision-making depends on the flexible processing of complex information, but how the brain may adapt processing to momentary task demands has remained unclear. In a new article published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have now outlined several crucial neural processes revealing that our brain networks may rapidly and flexibly shift from a rhythmic to a "noisy" state when the need to process information increases. Driving a car, deliberating over different financial options, or even pondering different life paths requires us to process an overwhelming amount of information. But not all decisions pose equal demands. In some situations, decisions are easier because we already know which ...

People with diabetes are at increased risk of developing a severe course of COVID-19 compared to people without diabetes. The question to be answered is whether all people with diabetes have an increased risk of severe COVID-19, or whether specific risk factors can also be identified within this group. A new study by DZD researchers has now focused precisely on this question and gained relevant insights. The COVID-19 pandemic poses unprecedented challenges to science and the health sector. While in some people with a SARS-CoV-2 infection the disease is hardly noticeable, in others ...

Exposure before birth to persistent organic pollutants (POPs)-- organochlorine pesticides, industrial chemicals, etc.--may increase the risk in adolescence of metabolic disorders, such as obesity and high blood pressure. This was the main conclusion of a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation. The study was based on data from nearly 400 children living in Menorca, who were followed from before birth until they reached 18 years of age. POPs are toxic, degradation-resistant ...

A top-level international research team including researchers from the University of Eastern Finland has developed a new algorithm for the diagnostics of dementia. The algorithm is based on blood and cerebrospinal fluid biomarker measurements. These biomarkers can be used to aid setting of an exact diagnosis already in the early phases of dementia. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Oulu in collaboration with an international team have created a new diagnostic biomarker-based algorithm for the diagnostics of dementia. The team is led by Professor Barbara Borroni from the University of Brescia, Italy. The article was published in the Diagnostics journal. The accurate diagnosis ...

The proliferation of electric cars, smartphones, and portable devices is leading to an estimated 25 percent increase globally in the manufacturing of rechargeable batteries each year. Many raw materials used in the batteries, such as cobalt, may soon be in short supply. The European Commission is preparing a new battery decree, which would require the recycling of 95 percent of the cobalt in batteries. Yet existing battery recycling methods are far from perfect. Researchers at Aalto University have now discovered that electrodes in lithium batteries containing cobalt can be reused as is after being newly saturated with lithium. In comparison to traditional recycling, which typically ...

Glaciers are a sensitive indicator of climate change - and one that can be easily observed. Regardless of altitude or latitude, glaciers have been melting at a high rate since the mid-?20th century. Until now, however, the full extent of ice loss has only been partially measured and understood. Now an international research team led by ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse has authored a comprehensive study on global glacier retreat, which was published online in Nature on 28 April. This is the first study to include all the world's glaciers - around 220,000 in total - excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The study's spatial and temporal resolution is unprecedented - and shows how rapidly glaciers have lost thickness and mass over the past two decades. Rising sea levels ...

Spreading of the seafloor in the Red Sea basin is found to have begun along its entire length around 13 million years ago, making its underlying oceanic crust twice as old as previously believed. The formation history and age of the Red Sea basin has long been contested, largely because the crust under the sea is widely overlain by thick layers of salt and sediment, making it difficult to observe directly. "Existing geological models of the Red Sea often contradict each other, largely due to limited high-resolution data and the influence of overlaying salt layers," says Froukje van der Zwan from KAUST, who worked on the project. "For example, ...

Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GG, or LGG, is the most studied probiotic bacterium in the world. However, its features are not perfect, as it is unable to utilise the milk carbohydrate lactose or break down the milk protein casein. This is why the bacterium grows poorly in milk and why it has to be separately added to probiotic dairy products. In fact, attempts have been made to make L. rhamnosus GG better adjust to milk through genetic engineering. However, strict restrictions have prevented the use of such modified bacteria in human food. Thanks to a recent breakthrough made at the University of Helsinki, Finland, with researchers from the National Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic ...

When heavy ions, accelerated to the speed of light, collide with each other in the depths of European or American accelerators, quark-gluon plasma is formed for fractions of a second, or even its "cocktail" seasoned with other particles. According to scientists from the IFJ PAN, experimental data show that there are underestimated actors on the scene: photons. Their collisions lead to the emission of seemingly excess particles, the presence of which could not be explained. Quark-gluon plasma is undoubtedly the most exotic state of matter thus far known to us. In the LHC at CERN near Geneva, it is formed during central collisions of two lead ions ...