Like a stern bodyguard for the central nervous sytem, the blood-brain barrier keeps out anything that could lead to disease and dangerous inflammation--at least when all is functioning normally. That may not be the case in people with schizophrenia and other mental disorders, suggest new findings from a team led by researchers from the School of Veterinary Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine, and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). In these individuals, a more permissive barrier appears to allow the immune system to get improperly involved in the central nervous system, the researchers showed. The inflammation that arises likely contributes to the clinical manifestations of neuropsychiatric conditions. "Our hypothesis was that, if the immune function of the blood-brain ...

WASHINGTON -- Researchers have developed new x-ray optics that can be used to harness extremely fast pulses in a package that is significantly smaller and lighter than conventional devices used to modulate x-rays. The new optics are based on microscopic chip-based devices known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). "Our new ultrafast optics-on-a-chip is poised to enable x-ray research and applications that could have a broad impact on understanding fast-evolving chemical, material and biological processes," said research team leader Jin Wang from the U.S Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. "This could aid in the development of more efficient solar cells and batteries, advanced computer storage materials and devices, ...

Engineered, autonomous machines combined with artificial intelligence have long been a staple of science fiction, and often in the role of villain like the Cylons in the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, creatures composed of biological and engineered materials. But what if these autonomous soft machines were ... helpful? This is the vision of a team of Penn State and U.S. Air Force researchers, outlined in a recent paper in Nature Communications. These researchers produced a soft, mechanical metamaterial that can "think" about how forces are applied to it and respond via programmed reactions. ...

People who regularly use psychoactive substances report experiencing a variety of negative impacts since the COVID-19 pandemic began, including increased usage and fear of relapse or overdose, highlighting the need for improved supports and services, including better access to safe supply programs, according to a new CAMH survey published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. "People who use drugs have been negatively impacted by the pandemic in ways that put them at greater risk for experiencing substance and health-related harms, including overdoses and a decreased ability to mitigate risk behaviours," ...

Leesburg, VA, April 20, 2021--An award-winning Scientific Electronic Exhibit to be presented at the ARRS 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting found non-contrast pituitary MRI for central precocious puberty (CPP), growth hormone deficiency (GHD), and short stature (SS) has similar diagnostic yield compared to the standard contrast-enhanced protocol. "Microadenomas, a common justification for contrast administration, may not influence management in this patient population," wrote first author Jennifer Huang of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, adding "minimal inconvenience would be added for the few patients who would need to return for contrast-enhanced MRI for definitive diagnosis." Huang and colleagues performed a retrospective review of pediatric pituitary MRI studies from 2010-2019 ...

Leesburg, VA, April 20, 2021--An award-winning Scientific Electronic Exhibit to be presented at the ARRS 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting found no statistically significant threshold for increased renal transplant biopsy risk based on systolic (SBP), diastolic (DBP), or mean arterial (MAP) blood pressure alone. "When these metrics are combined," first author Winston Wang of the Mayo Clinic Arizona cautioned, "the risk of complication is significantly higher when the SBP is >= 180 mm Hg, DBP is >= 95 mm Hg, and MAP is >= 116 mm Hg." Wang and team's review of consecutive ...

Researchers have found a causal link between caesarean section birth, low intestinal microbiota and peanut sensitivity in infants, and they report the effect is more pronounced in children of Asian descent than others, in a recently published paper in the journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "It's important to know what predicts or increases risk of food sensitivities because they predict which infants will go on to develop asthma and other types of allergies," said Anita Kozyrskyj, pediatrics professor in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry ...

Professor Bin He's team at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, has discovered that fast oscillations in scalp-recorded electroencephalography can pinpoint brain tissues responsible for epileptic seizures. The collaborative research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), leverages noninvasive EEG technology along with the development of a novel machine learning algorithm to automatically identify and delineate concurrent high-frequency oscillations and epileptiform spikes, a key link related to epilepsy. In the near future, these findings may be harnessed to rethink imaging and treatment options for epilepsy patients. More than ...

An expansive project led by Michigan State University's Lars Brudvig is examining the benefits, and limits, of environmental restoration on developed land after humans are done with it. Experts estimate there are up to 17 million square miles of land worldwide that have been altered by humans -- through cultivation say -- and then abandoned. That's more than four times the size of the continental United States. Once humans change a landscape, their impacts linger long after they've moved on. However, humans can heal some of that damage by working to restore the land to its natural state. ...

The familiar murkiness of waters in the Gulf of Mexico can be off-putting for beachgoers visiting Galveston Island. Runoff from the Mississippi River makes its way to local beaches and causes downstream water to turn opaque and brown. Mud is one factor, and river runoff is another. However, concern tends to ratchet up a notch when pollution enters the river runoff discussion on a national scale, specifically when smaller, navigable intrastate bodies of water push pollution into larger interstate waters often involved in commerce (i.e. the Mississippi River, Great Lakes, Ohio River). A recently published research analysis in the journal Science, co-authored by Victor Flatt, Dwight Olds Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law ...

Published in the Advanced Functional Materials, University of Minnesota researcher Hongbo Pang led a cross-institutional study on improving the efficacy of nucleotide-based drugs against prostate cancer and bone metastasis. In this study, Pang and his research team looked at whether liposomes, when integrated with the iRGD peptide, will help concentrate antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) into primary prostate tumors and its bone metastases. Liposomes are used as a drug carrier system, and ASOs are a type of nucleotide drug. More importantly, they investigated whether this system helps more drugs across the vessel wall and deeply into the tumor tissue. This is critical because, although nucleotide drugs offer unique advantages ...

Mass extinctions are known as times of global upheaval, causing rapid losses in biodiversity that wipe out entire animal groups. Some of the doomed groups linger on before going extinct, and a team of scientists found these "dead clades walking" (DCW) are more common and long-lasting than expected. "Dead clades walking are a pattern in the fossil record where some animal groups make it past the extinction event, but they also can't succeed in the aftermath," said Benjamin Barnes, a doctoral student in geosciences at Penn State. "It paints the pictures of a group consigned to an eventual extinction." The scientists found 70 of the 134 orders of ancient sea-dwelling invertebrates they examined could ...

The observation that most of the viruses that cause human disease come from other animals has led some researchers to attempt "zoonotic risk prediction" to second-guess the next virus to hit us. However, in an Essay publishing April 20th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr Michelle Wille at the University of Sydney, Australia with co-authors Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, it is proposed that these zoonotic risk predictions are of limited value and will not tell us which virus will cause the next pandemic. Instead, we should target the human-animal interface for intensive viral surveillance. So-called zoonotic viruses ...

In many species, including humans and mice, the fluctuating levels of the hormones progesterone and estrogen determine whether the female is fertile or not. And in the case of mice, whether she's sexually receptive or not. The change in receptivity is striking. Female mice shift from accepting sexual partners to aggressively rejecting them across a cycle of six short days. How can the female reproductive hormones bring about such a radical behavioural change? When searching for an explanation, the team of Susana Lima, a principal investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, came across an intriguing discovery. "Our experiments revealed that a brain area important for female receptivity, called the VMH (ventromedial ...

A chemist from Purdue University has found a way to synthesize a compound to fight a previously "undruggable" cancer protein with benefits across a myriad of cancer types. Inspired by a rare compound found in a shrub native to North America, Mingji Dai, professor of chemistry and a scientist at the Purdue University Center for Cancer Research, studied the compound and discovered a cost-effective and efficient way to synthesize it in the lab. The compound -- curcusone D -- has the potential to help combat a protein found in many cancers, including some forms of breast, brain, colorectal, prostate, lung and liver cancers, among others. The protein, dubbed BRAT1, had previously been deemed "undruggable" for its chemical properties. In collaboration with Alexander Adibekian's ...

Astronauts who spend extended time in space face stressors such as isolation, confinement, lack of privacy, altered light-dark cycles, monotony and separation from family. Interestingly, so do people who work at international research stations in Antarctica, where the extreme environment is characterized by numerous stressors that mirror those present during long-duration space exploration. To better understand the psychological hurdles faced by astronauts, University of Houston professor of psychology Candice Alfano and her team developed the Mental Health Checklist (MHCL), a self-reporting instrument for detecting ...

A Texas A&M researcher is discovering the demographic characteristics that can produce or lessen stress for racial and ethnic minority students in school settings. The study, recently published in the journal Ethnicity and Disease, collected mental health survey assessments among 389 sixth-graders from 14 Texas public schools in urban areas. Melissa DuPont-Reyes, assistant professor at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health, led the investigation of self-reported depressive-anxious symptoms over a two-year period. This issue of the journal highlighted research by early stage investigators, especially scholars of color, to advance new knowledge ...

A mollusk and shrimp are two unlikely marine animals that are playing a very important role in engineering. The bodies of both animals illustrate how natural features, like the structures of their bones and shells, can be borrowed to enhance the performance of engineered structures and materials, like bridges and airplanes. This phenomenon, known as biomimetics, is helping advance structural topology research, where the microscale features found in natural systems are being mimicked. In a recent paper published by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de ...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 -- Fiber optic technology is the holy grail of high-speed, long-distance telecommunications. Still, with the continuing exponential growth of internet traffic, researchers are warning of a capacity crunch. In AVS Quantum Science, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland show how quantum-enhanced receivers could play a critical role in addressing this challenge. The scientists developed a method to enhance receivers based on quantum physics properties to dramatically increase network ...

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany and the Institute of Molecular Biology of Barcelona in Spain have discovered how the blood plasma protein fetuin-B binds to the enzyme meprin β and used a computer model to visualize their findings. These results could lead to the development of new drugs to treat serious diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer. Meprin β releases proteins from cell membranes, thus controlling important physiological functions in the human body. However, a dysregulation of this process can trigger the development of Alzheimer's and ...

Earthquake early warnings can be delivered successfully using a small network of off-the-shelf smartphones attached to building baseboards, according to a study conducted in Costa Rica last year. In his presentation at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Ben Brooks of the U.S. Geological Survey said the ASTUTI (Alerta Sismica Temprana Utilizando Teléfonos Inteligentes) network of more than 80 stations performed comparably to scientific-grade warning systems. During six months' of ASTUTI operation, there were 13 earthquakes that caused noticeable ...

The famous 1700 Cascadia earthquake that altered the coastline of western North America and sent a tsunami across the Pacific Ocean to Japan may have been one of a sequence of earthquakes, according to new research presented at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting. Evidence from coastlines, tree rings and historical documents confirm that there was a massive earthquake in the U.S. Cascadia Subduction Zone on 26 January 1700. The prevailing hypothesis is that one megathrust earthquake, estimated at magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 and involving the entire tectonic plate boundary in the region, was responsible ...

When hydraulic fracturing operations ground to a halt last spring in the Kiskatinaw area of British Columbia, researchers expected seismic quiescence in the region. Instead, hundreds of small earthquakes occurred for months after operations shut down, according to a new study. In her presentation at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Rebecca Salvage of the University of Calgary said about 65% of these events could not be attributed to either natural seismicity or active fluid injection from hydraulic fracturing operations. Salvage and her colleagues instead suggest the latent earthquakes may be the result of aseismic slip, driven by fluid from previous hydraulic fracture injections keeping rock pore pressures elevated. "Because there are lots of faults ...

BOSTON - New research from Boston Medical Center identifies elevated mortality risk for women with back pain when compared to women without back pain. Back pain was not associated with mortality among men indicating long-term consequences of back pain may differ by sex. The overall findings suggest that mild back pain (pain that does not keep a person from exercising or doing daily activities) is unlikely to impact the length of one's life, but risk of mortality was increased among adults with more severe back pain. Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, this new study raises ...

The lack of accountability, poor communication and insufficient planning plaguing the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic -- especially in its early months -- have roots in how the nation responded to 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 swine flu, a new study involving the University of Washington found. Focusing on the way government agencies assemble and allocate resources - the procurement system - researchers said the successes and shortcomings of responses to other large-scale crises show that a more centralized approach can achieve goals faster and more effectively. "In the moment of disasters, we prioritize saving ...