Blood transfusions are a common procedure in medical practice in which donated blood is used to replace blood lost to injury or surgery or to treat serious medical conditions. The procedure is not performed as routinely in the treatment of pet cats - but, as in people, can be lifesaving. The availability of donors has been a limitation in primary care veterinary practice, but with the growth of blood banks providing greater access to feline blood, the procedure is likely to become more commonplace. To address the need for authoritative guidance, not only on best practice but also some important considerations beyond the clinical procedure itself, the International Society of Feline Medicine (ISFM) has today published consensus guidelines in the Journal ...

From Cat's-Whisker detectors in the early 1900s to electronic circuit chips in modern-day mobile phones, electronic devices have been modified in myriad creative ways to adapt to the needs of humankind. Apart from increasing the efficiency of conventionally used semiconductors such as silicon, recent research has focused on exploring more cost effective semiconductor materials. In tune with these requirements, a new publication in Nature Materials has successfully tweaked low cost semiconducting materials, quite similar to the composition of plastic, into conducting electricity more efficiently than before. Solar cells have the property to convert ...

A study by a University of Illinois Chicago pediatric dentist has shown a novel way to track potential COVID-19 cases -- testing children who visit the dentist. The study also showed an over 2% positivity rate for the asymptomatic children tested. Dr. Flavia Lamberghini, UIC clinical assistant professor in the department of pediatric dentistry, has co-authored the article, "Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infection in asymptomatic pediatric dental patients," in the April 2021 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association. Co-authors are Dr. Fernando Testai, UIC professor ...

Brain changes in people with Alzheimer's disease and in those with mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) have significant similarities, a new USC study shows, suggesting new ways to identify patients at high risk for Alzheimer's. The findings appear this week in GeroScience. TBIs, which affect over 1.7 million Americans every year, are often followed by changes in brain structure and function and by cognitive problems such as memory deficits, impaired social function and difficulty with decision-making. Although mild TBI -- also known as concussion -- is a known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, ...

Amsterdam, April 26, 2021 - Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) face a wide range of symptoms and challenges. A team from Parkinson's UK, including several Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) contributors, surveyed patients to find out which PD symptoms troubled them most and how priorities may change with condition duration. Their goal was to identify where improved treatments and strategies are most needed to help maintain independence and quality of life. They report their findings in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. "While PD has some common features such as tremor, rigidity, and bradykinesia, the disease is highly varied, with each individual experiencing their own unique blend of symptoms ...

Violent continental collisions and volcanic eruptions are not things normally associated with comfortable conditions for life. However, a new study, involving University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Associate Professor of Microbiology Karen Lloyd, unveils a large microbial ecosystem living deep within the earth that is fueled by chemicals produced during these tectonic cataclysms. When oceanic and continental plates collide, one plate is pushed down, or subducted, into the mantle and the other plate is pushed up and studded with volcanoes. This is the main process by which chemical elements are moved between Earth's surface and interior and eventually recycled back to ...

A Lancaster University professor has introduced a new concept for rapidly analysing for the presence of a virus from colds to coronaviruses. Based on analysing chemical elements the methodology, which has been adapted from an analytical technique used to identify metallic nanoparticles, is able to detect the presence of viruses within just 20 seconds. Although the tests would need to be performed in a lab, it could be used to quickly identify whether people admitted to hospitals have been infected by a virus - enabling clinicians to decide treatments and also whether to admit patients into isolation wards. The ...

DETROIT (April 26, 2021) - A new study by Henry Ford Health System published in Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery may signal a first step toward eliminating the use of opioids to relieve pain after knee surgery. A novel multimodal pain management protocol developed at Henry Ford can bring about immediate pain relief for knee injury patients without using powerful opioids like morphine, codeine, and oxycodone. "Orthopedic surgeons can now perform meniscal knee surgery without the need for prescribing opioids whatsoever," said Toufic Jildeh, M.D., chief resident at Henry Ford's Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and the study's lead researcher. "We believe this non-opioid approach can be replicated for other types of orthopedic ...

Philadelphia, April 26, 2021 - Fast turnaround of COVID-19 test results for healthcare workers is critical. Investigators have now developed a COVID-19 testing strategy that maximizes the proportion of negative results after a single round of testing, allowing prompt notification of results. The method also reduces the need for increasingly limited test reagents, as fewer additional tests are required. Their strategy is described in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier. There is an urgent need to reduce the spread of COVID-19 transmission in hospitals and care facilities and to maintain adequate levels of staffing. Group testing strategies with pooled samples have been proposed to increase capacity; however, the currently used strategies ...

Buyer beware: single-family homes in floodplains - almost 4 million U.S. homes - are overvalued by nearly $44 billion collectively or $11,526 per house on average, according to a new Stanford University-led study. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, suggests that unaware buyers and inadequate disclosure laws drive up financial risks that could destabilize the real estate market. The threat is likely to grow as climate change drives more frequent extreme weather. (WATCH VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n18s5kcE0So) "The overvaluation we find is really concerning, ...

Results of a study co-authored by MGH Institute of Health Professions researcher Teresa Kimberley, PhD, PT, have the potential to be one of the most impressive advances in decades to help improve the lives of patients who have had a stroke with resulting arm weakness. In an article published April 22 in The Lancet, "Vagus Nerve Stimulation Paired with Rehabilitation for Upper Limb Motor Function After Ischaemic Stroke (VNS-REHAB): A Randomised, Blinded, Pivotal, Device Trial," the study reports that patients who incorporated vagus nerve stimulation during physical or occupational therapy showed 2 to 3 times the improvement in arm and hand function compared to those who received intense rehabilitation with sham stimulation. "How ...

With climate change looming, what must people hear to convince them to change their ways to stop harming the environment? A new Johns Hopkins University study finds stories to be significantly more motivating than scientific facts-- at least for some people. After hearing a compelling pollution-related story in which a man died, the average person paid more for green products than after having heard scientific facts about water pollution. But the average person in the study was a Democrat. Republicans paid less after hearing the story rather than the simple facts. The findings, published this week in the journal ...

Humans have been breeding plants for their economic value for thousands of years. Traditionally, plant breeding techniques included cumbersome and time-consuming techniques like grafting and hybridization to enhance traits of economic value like disease resistance and high nutrition content. Now, with the ability to edit plant DNA using revolutionary gene-editing tools, particularly the CRISPR-Cas9 system, it is possible to enhance traits of economic value in plants easily and more efficiently than by using traditional techniques. But for that, it is necessary to sequence whole ...

Osaka - Gallium nitride (GaN) is a semiconductor material whose wide band gap may one day lead to it superseding silicon in electronics applications. It is therefore important to have GaN characterization techniques that are able to support the development of GaN devices. Researchers at Osaka University have reported a nondestructive method for characterizing the crystalline quality of GaN. Their findings were published in Applied Physics Express. GaN power switching devices offer numerous advantages including high-speed switching, high-power operation, low on-resistance, and high breakdown voltage. To take advantage of these properties, the defect density of GaN crystals must be low. Threading dislocations ...

The various methods that Netflix employs when premiering its content favour the international success of original local productions and, at the same time, act as a safety net for these films in an audiovisual industry in constant evolution. A study conducted by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) researchers Antoni Roig, Judith Clares and Jordi Sánchez, published in the open access journal Communication & Society, has analysed the various systems and schedules implemented by the American entertainment platform in recent years in relation to its original feature films, which have allowed it to become the leader in the distribution of on-demand audiovisual content. According to the authors, the approaches adopted by Netflix form part of a global expansion plan to consolidate ...

A new study has found Australia's government-owned airports could produce enough electricity to power 136,000 homes, if they had large-scale rooftop solar systems installed. Researchers at RMIT University compared electricity generated by residential solar panels in a regional Australian city to the potential green energy production of 21 leased federal airports. They found if large-scale solar panels were installed at the airports, they would generate 10 times more electricity than the city's 17,000 residential panels, while offsetting 151.6 kilotons of greenhouse gasses annually. Researcher Dr Chayn Sun said the analysis showed the value ...

As a result of the work of five years of research, they have created the first trifocal corneal inlay that is also fully transparent. Such an inlay would allow good eyesight to presbyopic people of objects located at several distances: far, intermediate (computer, mobile devices) and near. Their work has been published in Nature group's Scientific Reports journal. "This inlay could be an alternative for those suffering from presbyopia who would rather not use glasses or contact lenses. Furthermore, it would be fully compatible with laser refractive surgery in myopic and hyperopic patients, as well as possible subsequent cataract interventions. We are suggesting something totally new that is also not ...

Researchers from Kumamoto University, Japan have found that DNP peptide, a small intestine-permeable cyclic peptide originally used as an insulin additive to improve absorption into the small intestinal, lowers blood glucose levels in mice. They also found that insulin can be administered orally by simply adding D-form DNP peptide (D-DNP) peptide to injectable insulin used in clinical practice. This study is expected to provide a basis for the development of oral insulin using DNP peptides. Insulin therapy by self-injected insulin is currently the best way to control ...

Narcolepsy with cataplexy, or narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), is a rare and chronic neurological disease whose prevalence increased in children and adolescents after the administration of Pandemrix swine flu vaccine in 2009-2010. It is an autoimmune disease to which a specific inherited tissue type (HLA-DQB1*0602) predisposes people. The disease mechanism of NT1 was investigated in a collaborative study carried out by PhD student Arja Vuorela and university researcher Dr. Tobias Freitag, working in the research groups of Prof. Outi Vaarala and Prof. Seppo Meri. The study analyzed the cell-mediated immune response targeting ...

The colonization of the seafloor is one of the most important events in evolutionary history, leading to an explosive radiation and large-scale morphological diversification of marine phyla. Flatfishes are one of the most successful groups of seafloor colonizers and have evolved the most specialized body plan (i.e., flat and asymmetrical) among the teleosts. However, the origin and formation mechanism of the peculiar morphology of flatfishes had long been unclear. Now, researchers from the Kunming Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this mini review article the authors Meiyu Qiu and Pei Li from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea summarize CRISPR/Cas-based Diagnostics and Gene Therapy. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology, an easy, rapid, cost-effective, and precise gene-editing technique, has revolutionized diagnostics and gene therapy. Fast and accurate diagnosis of diseases is essential for point-of-care-testing (POCT) and specialized medical institutes. The CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins system shed light on the new diagnostics methods at point-of-care (POC) owning to its advantages. In addition, CRISPR/Cas-based gene-editing ...

People's ability to perceive speech sounds has been deeply studied, specially during someone's first year of life, but what happens during the first hours after birth? Are babies born with innate abilities to perceive speech sounds, or do neural encoding processes need to age for some time? Researchers from the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona (UBNeuro) and the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute (IRSJD) have created a new methodology to try to answer this basic question on human development. The results, published in the Nature's open-access journal Scientific Reports, ...

Not all stars shine brightly all the time. Some have a brightness that changes rhythmically due to cyclical phenomena like passing planets or the tug of other stars. Others show a slow change in this periodicity over time that can be difficult to discern or capture mathematically. KAUST's Soumya Das and Marc Genton have now developed a method to bring this evolving periodicity within the framework of mathematically "cyclostationary" processes. "It can be difficult to explain the variations of the brightness of variable stars unless they follow a regular pattern over time," says Das. "In this study we created methods that can explain the evolution of the brightness of a variable star, even if it ...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in ski wax have been receiving a lot of attention recently, but waxes constitute only a limited part of the problem of the PFAS group of toxicants. PFAS are a large group of man-made fluorocarbon toxicants, and you are most likely full of them. The toxic substances don't break down and instead accumulate, both in nature and in your body. "Due to their extensive use, humans and animals all over the world are continuously exposed to PFAS," says Håkon Austad Langberg, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) who has studied several of them in the last few years. PFAS are used in many different products beyond the fluorinated ski wax that ends up in the ground on ski slopes and on trails, ...

The corona pandemic has made us all focus on new ways of organizing our work. More and more companies and organizations around the world are considering how to meet their employees' demand for flexibility while at the same time reducing their office space and expensive rents. There are advantages and disadvantages to working from home, and many factors that affect the peoples' experience of it, such as their job function, age and seniority, whether they have children, whether they are a manager or employee, etc. Researchers from DTU Management have identified six main areas that company managers should focus on when developing strategies for remote work in future. Associate Professor at DTU Management Christine ...