A small drug molecule that appears to protect normal tissue from the damaging effects of radiation, may simultaneously be able to boost the cancer-killing effect of radiation therapy, according to a new study led by scientists at University of Iowa, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Galera Therapeutics, Inc. The study, published online May 12 in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that the drug's dual effect is based on a fundamental difference between the ability of cancer cells and healthy cells to withstand the damaging effects of a highly reactive molecule called hydrogen peroxide, which is produced during the dismutation of superoxide. The drug, known as Avasopasem manganese, is made by Galera Therapeutics. ...

The stock market is a staple of business news, but it is unclear how meaningful stock prices are to the larger economy. Do changes in stock prices directly affect shorter-term consumption, or are they just leading indicators for subsequent economic activity? The U.S. Federal Reserve, for its part, usually seems to act as if stock-based wealth does help drive spending and employment. But is this correct? A new study co-authored by an MIT economist brings data to the discussion and finds that increased stock market wealth has moderate but clear economic effects. After looking at the U.S. on a county-by-county basis, the study finds that after large market ...

Sydney, Australia; New York City, USA (May 13, 2021)--In a collaborative report published today in Cell, scientists from Sydney and New York describe the critical worldwide need to improve the diversity of cells used in medical research. Currently, 95% of all human cell lines used in research are of European descent. The authors provide actionable steps that researchers and the biomedical community can take to promote more inclusivity in preclinical and basic science research. The commentary, "Ancestry Matters: Building inclusivity into preclinical study design," is co-authored by Sophie Zaaijer, PhD, who co-founded FIND Genomics (findgen.bio), a company that aims to improve reproducible ...

The once-abundant California condor briefly went extinct in the wild, with only 22 individuals living in captivity by 1982. Today, 300 condors live freely in the wild and another 200 are in captivity. But, despite the condor's struggles, a new study of the California condor genome reported in the journal Current Biology on May 13 has found a surprising amount of genetic diversity. The study is the first to begin quantifying diversity across the entire California condor genome, which offers researchers needed baseline information to inform future research and conservation of this iconic species, ...

New York, NY (May 13, 2021)-- Artificial food colorants can cause disease when the immune system has become dysregulated, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers report. The study, published in Cell Metabolism in May, was the first to show this phenomenon. The study, conducted in mice, found that the mice developed colitis when they consumed food with the artificial food colorants FD&C Red 40 and Yellow 6 when a specific component of their immune system, known as cytokine IL-23, was dysregulated. While it remains unclear whether food colorants have similar effects in humans, researchers plan to investigate exactly how cytokine IL-23 promotes the development of colitis after food colorant exposure. Colitis is a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and cytokine ...

Fossilised footprint tracks, recently discovered within the Hanna Formation in Wyoming, USA, which have been dated to 58 million years ago, may represent the earliest evidence of mammals gathering by the sea, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. The findings suggest that mammals may have first used marine habitats at least 9.4 million years earlier than previously thought, in the late Paleocene (66-56 million years ago), rather than the Eocene (56-33.9 million years ago). Drs. Anton Wroblewski and Bonnie Gulas-Wroblewski examined and photographed over 1,000 metres of fossilised footprints in an area dated back to 58 million years ago by plant and pollen fossils. The authors identified various different tracks. One set showed relatively large, five-toed ...

Climate change may be accelerating the degradation of ancient rock paintings in Indonesia, including the oldest known hand stencil in the world which dates back to 39,900 years ago, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Rock paintings made using red and mulberry-coloured pigments in the limestone caves and rock shelters of Maros-Pangkep, Indonesia have been dated to between 20,000 and 45,000 years old. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the paintings have been deteriorating at an accelerated rate in recent decades, but the reasons for this have been unclear. Jillian Huntley and colleagues investigated the potential causes of accelerated rock art degradation at 11 cave art sites in Maros-Pangkep, by analysing ...

Radical changes to the food system are needed to safeguard our food supply and combat malnutrition in the face of climate change, environmental degradation and epidemics, says new report. Researchers at the University of Cambridge say our future global food supply cannot be safeguarded by traditional approaches to improving food production. They suggest state-of-the-art, controlled-environment systems, producing novel foods, should be integrated into the food system to reduce vulnerability to environmental changes, pests and diseases. Their report is published today in the journal Nature Food. The researchers say that global malnutrition could be eradicated by farming foods including spirulina, chlorella, larvae of insects such as the house fly, mycoprotein (protein derived ...

A new study with zebrafish shows that a deadly form of skin cancer -- melanoma -- alters the metabolism of healthy tissues elsewhere in the body. The research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that these other tissues could potentially be targeted to help treat cancer. "Tumors rely on a constant supply of nutrients to grow. Instead of competing with tumors for nutrients, other tissues can reprogram their metabolism to be complementary. In some instances, this may even allow healthy tissues to feed the tumor," said Gary Patti, the Michael and Tana Powell Professor of Chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and a professor of chemistry and medicine at the School of Medicine. Patti is the corresponding author of the study published May 13 in Cell Metabolism. Cancer ...

Scientists exploring the drivers of Antarctic climate change have discovered a new and more efficient pathway for the creation of natural aerosols and clouds which contribute significantly to temperature increases. The Antarctic Peninsula has shown some of the largest global increases in near-surface air temperature over the last 50 years, but experts have struggled to predict temperatures because little was known about how natural aerosols and clouds affect the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth and energy radiated back into space. Studying data from seas around the Peninsula, experts have discovered that most new particles are formed in air masses arriving from the partially ice-covered Weddell Sea - a significant source ...

Today, the rocks of the Hanna Formation in south-central Wyoming are hundreds of miles away from the nearest ocean. But around 58 million years ago, Wyoming was oceanfront property, with large hippo-like mammals traipsing through nearshore lagoons. In a study published in Scientific Reports, geologist Anton Wroblewski, an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and applied biodiversity scientist Bonnie Gulas-Wroblewski of the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute, report the discovery of several sets of ...

What The Viewpoint Says: Questions regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccination for patients with cancer are explored in this article. Authors: Dimitrios P. Kontoyiannis, M.D., Sc.D.,Ph.D., of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, 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/jamaoncol.2021.1218) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, ...

What The Study Did: This survey study examined differences between male and female physicians in the use of social media and reported career and professional benefits. Authors: Shikha Jain, M.D., of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 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.2021.9834) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, ...

What The Study Did: Advertisements on videos on made-for-kids channels on YouTube, as well as the frequency of age-inappropriate ads, were analyzed in this study. Authors: Jenny S. Radesky, M.D., of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, 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.2021.9890) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

Among other things, dams serve as reservoirs for drinking water, agricultural irrigation, or the operation of hydropower plants. Until now, it had been assumed that dams act as net carbon stores. Researchers from the Helmholtz Centre of Environmental Research (UFZ) together with Spanish scientists from the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA) in Girona and the University of Barcelona showed that dams release twice as much carbon as they store. The study has been published in Nature Geosciences. Whether leaves, branches, or algae - streams transport large amounts of carbon-containing material. If the water is dammed, the material gradually settles and accumulates at the bottom ...

Cooperation as a successful strategy has evolved in both nature and human society, but understanding its emergence can be a difficult task. Researchers have to abstract interactions between individuals into mathematical formulas to be able to create a model that can be used for predictions and simulations. In the field of evolutionary game theory, they often investigate strategies of players in a simple game of giving and receiving benefits. Such strategies tell players how to behave in a given interaction. The scientists' findings counter the narrative that only the strongest and most selfish flourish and survive. Instead, they show how cooperation can be a successful and stable strategy. Researchers, spearheaded by Laura Schmid ...

The majority of children infected with SARS-CoV-2 may not show typical symptoms such as fever, cough or shortness of breath, according to a study published in Scientific Reports, which examined data on 12,306 children with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 across the United States. Pakaj Arora and colleagues found that 18.8% of the children included in the study were recorded as having symptoms such as fever, malaise, muscle or joint pain, and disturbances of smell or taste. . 16.5% of children had respiratory symptoms including cough and shortness of breath, 13.9% had gastrointestinal symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, 8.1% had dermatological symptoms (rash), and 4.8% had headaches. 5.5% (672) of children included in the study were hospitalized. Of those, 118 (17.6%) and ...

CHICAGO --- For men physicians, the professional perks of networking on social media, like being asked to give a talk, are abundant, a new Northwestern Medicine study reports. For women physicians, the benefits are far less plentiful, the study found. What's more, women physicians are more than twice as likely to be sexually harassed on social media than men physicians, according to an earlier study, published in January, of this same group of study participants. The findings mirror the struggles women physicians face in person when trying to advance their careers, ...

New research led by the University of Kent has found that adolescents and older adults pay less attention to social cues in real-world interactions than young adults. The findings published by Nature Human Behaviour show that social attention undergoes age-related change, which has potential implications for how successfully we can interpret social interactions in daily life and throughout the lifespan. Interpreting the facial expression, tone of voice and gestures of others is a vital element of social interaction that allow us to make rapid inferences about others' mental states, such as their intentions, emotions, desires and beliefs. Successful social interaction prompts perspective-taking and empathy along with other essential ...

Multiple studies have shown that African American women with breast cancer have lower survival rates than white women with the disease. But the association between race or ethnicity and treatment outcomes in triple-negative breast cancer -- an aggressive type of tumor that does not respond to hormonal or other targeted therapies -- has not been well defined. Now, new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that non-Hispanic African American women with triple-negative breast cancer also do not fare as well as non-Hispanic white women with this type of breast cancer. The study demonstrates the need for additional research to address disparities in cancer care and understand whether tumor biology or nonbiological reasons such as systemic racism -- ...

University of Massachusetts Amherst neuroscientists examining genetically identified neurons in a songbird's forebrain discovered a remarkable landscape of physiology, auditory coding and network roles that mirrored those in the brains of mammals. The research, published May 13 in Current Biology, advances insight into the fundamental operation of complex brain circuits. It suggests that ancient cell types in the pallium - the outer regions of the brain that include cortex - most likely retained features over millions of years that are the building blocks for advanced cognition in birds and mammals. "We as neuroscientists are catching on that birds can do sophisticated things and they have sophisticated circuits to do those things," ...

The Antarctic ice sheet was even more unstable in the past than previously thought, and at times possibly came close to collapse, new research suggests. The findings raise concerns that, in a warmer climate, exposing the land underneath the ice sheet as it retreats will increase rainfall on Antarctica, and this could trigger processes that accelerate further ice loss. The research is based on climate modelling and data comparisons for the Middle Miocene (13-17 million years ago) when atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures reached levels similar to those expected by the end of this century. The study was carried out by ...

A new discovery led by Princeton University could upend our understanding of how electrons behave under extreme conditions in quantum materials. The finding provides experimental evidence that this familiar building block of matter behaves as if it is made of two particles: one particle that gives the electron its negative charge and another that supplies its magnet-like property, known as spin. "We think this is the first hard evidence of spin-charge separation," said Nai Phuan Ong, Princeton's Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and senior author on the paper published this week in the journal Nature Physics. The experimental results fulfill a prediction made decades ago to explain one of the most mind-bending states ...

The chemical compound glyphosate, the world's most widely used herbicide, can weaken the immune systems of insects, suggests a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Round Up™, a popular U.S. brand of weed killer products. The researchers investigated the effects of glyphosate on two evolutionarily distant insects, Galleria mellonella, the greater wax moth, and Anopheles gambiae, a mosquito that is an important transmitter of malaria to humans in Africa. They found that ...

People who work nontraditional work hours, such as 11 p.m.-7 p.m., or the "graveyard" shift, are more likely than people with traditional daytime work schedules to develop a chronic medical condition -- shift work sleep disorder -- that disrupts their sleep. According to researchers at the University of Missouri, people who develop this condition are also three times more likely to be involved in a vehicle accident. "This discovery has many major implications, including the need to identify engineering counter-measures to help prevent these crashes from happening," said Praveen Edara, department chair and professor of civil and environmental ...