Using a widely known field of mathematics designed mainly to study how digital and other forms of information are measured, stored and shared, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center say they have uncovered a likely key genetic culprit in the development of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). ALL is the most common form of childhood leukemia, striking an estimated 3,000 children and teens each year in the United States alone. Specifically, the Johns Hopkins team used "information theory," applying an analysis that relies on strings of zeros and ones -- the binary system of symbols common to computer languages and codes -- to identify variables or outcomes of a particular process. In the case of human ...

BOSTON - Recent research links certain cells that line the human airway with different infant diseases. The work, which is published in Cell Reports and was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), could lead to new prevention and treatment strategies for these conditions. The human airway--from the windpipe to the lungs--is lined with epithelial cells, including a type called pulmonary neuroendocrine cells (PNECs) that communicate with the nervous system and secrete different factors and hormones. Increased numbers and clusters of PNECs have been observed in various breathing-related illnesses, but the cells' roles in health ...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 -- Forensic science includes the analysis of blood backspatter involved in gunshot wounds, but scientific questions about the detailed role of fluids in these situations remained unresolved. To search for answers about how blood droplets from a gunshot wound can reverse direction while in flight, University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University researchers explored the influence of propellant gases on blood backspatter. In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, the researchers report using numeric modeling to capture the behavior of gun muzzle gases and predict the reversal of blood droplet flight, which was captured experimentally. Their experiments also show the breakup of blood droplets, ...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 -- In 2009, music producer Phil Spector was convicted for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson, who was shot in the face from a very short distance. He was dressed in white clothes, but no bloodstains were found on his clothing -- even though significant backward blood spatter occurred. How could his clothing remain clean if he was the shooter? This real-life forensic puzzle inspired University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University researchers to explore the fluid physics involved. In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, the researchers present theoretical results revealing an interaction of the incoming vortex ring of propellant muzzle gases with backward blood spatter. A detailed analytical theory of ...

Dietary sugars and gut microbes play a key role in promoting malaria parasite infection in mosquitoes. Researchers in China have uncovered evidence that mosquitoes fed a sugar diet show an increased abundance of the bacterial species Asaia bogorensis, which enhances parasite infection by raising the gut pH level. The study appears April 20 in the journal Cell Reports. "Our work opens a new path for investigations into the role of mosquito-microbiota metabolic interactions concerning their disease-transmitting potential," says co-senior study author Jingwen Wang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China. "The results may also provide useful insights for the development of preventive strategies for vector ...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 -- Skipping stones on a body of water is an age-old game, but developing a better understanding of the physics involved is crucial for more serious matters, such as water landings upon reentry of spaceflight vehicles or aircrafts. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, scientists from several universities in China reveal several key factors that influence the number of bounces a skipping stone or landing aircraft will undergo when hitting the water. The study involved theoretical modeling and a simple experimental setup using a model stone to gather data in real time. The investigators used an aluminum disk as a stand-in for the stone and designed a launching mechanism that utilized a puff of air from a compressor ...

What The Study Did: Researchers investigated the association of burnout at an academic medical center with clinician type, sex, work culture and use of electronic health records. Authors: Eugenia McPeek-Hinz, M.D., M.S., of the Duke University Health System in Durham, North Carolina, 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.2021.5686) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

The worldwide adoption of biotechnologies to improve crop production has stalled, putting global food security at risk, according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham. The group, which includes economists, plant breeders and plant scientists, is calling on governments worldwide to put in place policies and regulations that will drive progress in this area. In an article published in the 25th anniversary edition of Trends in Plant Science, the group, which includes researchers from Australia, Canada and India, also argues that societal acceptance of technologies such as gene editing is a big barrier to adoption. They urge the scientific community to work harder to convince the public and governments of the value of adopting ...

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2021 -- As artificial intelligence has attracted broad interest, researchers are focused on understanding how the brain accomplishes cognition so they can construct artificial systems with general intelligence comparable to humans' intelligence. Many have approached this challenge by using conventional silicon microelectronics in conjunction with light. However, the fabrication of silicon chips with electronic and photonic circuit elements is difficult for many physical and practical reasons related to the materials used for the components. In Applied Physics Letters, by AIP Publishing, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology propose an approach to large-scale artificial intelligence that ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Patients who suffer from traumatic brain injuries (TBI) often need a great deal of healthcare services after the injury, but the extent of care utilization is unknown. A new study from research scientists affiliated with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Regenstrief Institute and IUPUI is one of the first to analyze how much care TBI patients use and identify areas of unmet need. "There is not a lot of information about traumatic brain injury care utilization available," said primary study author Johanne Eliacin, PhD, a Regenstrief research scientist and core investigator at the VA Health Services Research and Development Center for Health Information at Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical ...

A recent study suggests that preserving physical and mental health helps older adults experiencing cognitive impairment stave off declines in cognitive engagement. "We found that declines in physical and mental health were associated with more pronounced cognitive disengagement," says Shevaun Neupert, corresponding author of the study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. "The impact of declines in physical health was particularly pronounced for study participants who had more advanced cognitive impairment to begin with." There's ...

With roughly 80% of jobs being sedentary, often requiring several hours of sitting stooped in front of a computer screen, neck pain is a growing occupational hazard. Smartphones and other devices have also caused people to bend their necks for prolonged periods. But is bad posture solely to blame? In a recent study, researchers at Texas A&M University have found that while poor neck and head postures are indeed the primary determinants of neck pain, body mass index, age and the time of the day also influence the neck's ability to perform sustained or repeated movements. "Neck pain is one of the leading and fastest-growing ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Have you recently turned to your mobile device or computer to find out if your cough, sniffle or fever could be caused by COVID-19? The online symptom checker you used may have advised you to stay home and call your medical provider if symptoms worsen, or perhaps told you that you may be eligible for COVID-19 testing. But why did it make the recommendation it did? And how should you know if you can trust it? Those are questions that researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology recently explored through a project in which they augmented online symptom checkers by offering explanations of how the system generated its probable diagnoses and suggestions ...

From sample preparation to image acquisition, electron microscopy (EM) requires precise and time-consuming steps to produce the clarity and detail needed to visualize small cell structures with high resolution. Moreover, once EM images are created, extracting the biological information out of them through analysis can be an even more laborious and time intensive task. Especially because current EM analysis software often requires the skilled eye of a scientist to manually review hundreds of images. With a bit of ingenuity and the application of cutting-edge neural networks, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI) have created a new ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - People living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and without known cardiovascular disease have two to three times the noncalcified coronary plaque burden of non-HIV healthy volunteers, according to a study from Canada published in Radiology. Researchers said the results underscore the importance of a heart-healthy lifestyle in people living with HIV. HIV/AIDS emerged as a major public health crisis in the 1980s. Disease-related mortality peaked in the mid-1990s and has been dropping since, thanks in large part to antiretroviral therapy, which does not cure the disease but helps control it. Today, people ...

Researchers at Beam Therapeutics have developed a redesigned base editor that shows considerable promise in directly repairing the single-base mutation that causes sickle-cell disease (SCD). Many strategies are being pursued to harness genome editing approaches including CRISPR to treat patients with SCD and related hemoglobinopathies. The most advanced method in the clinic involves targeting an upstream regulatory pathway to switch on expression of the fetal hemoglobin gene but does not target the SCD mutation directly. Writing in the April issue of The CRISPR Journal, a team at Beam Therapeutics, led by Ian Slaymaker and Giuseppe Ciaramella, describe the successful ...

In a study conducted at the University of Helsinki, researchers found a cause for severe epilepsy resulting in death in Parson Russell Terrier puppies at a few months of age. A change in the PITRM1 gene can lead to a dysfunction of mitochondria, the cellular energy pumps. Concurrently, amyloid-β accumulation and widespread neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer's disease were identified in the puppies' brains. Changes to the PITRM1 gene in humans also cause a severe but slowly progressing brain disease. Some Parson Russell Terrier puppies were seen to suddenly develop epileptic seizures at 6 to 12 weeks of age. The disease progressed very rapidly, in a matter of hours in the worst cases, to a situation where the seizures were continuous and unresponsive to medication. "All ...

Exposure to certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals could elevate the risk of breast cancer, according to a new comprehensive systematic review of epidemiological research. However, for many chemicals, evidence is inconsistent or still limited. The review was carried out by researchers at the universities of Hong Kong and Eastern Finland and published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) can interfere with the body's hormonal system, also called the endocrine system, and are widely present in the environment. They originate from a variety of ...

If the CO2 content of the atmosphere is not to increase any further, carbon dioxide must be converted into something else. However, as CO2 is a very stable molecule, this can only be done with the help of special catalysts. The main problem with such catalysts has so far been their lack of stability: after a certain time, many materials lose their catalytic properties. At TU Wien, research is being conducted on a special class of minerals - the perovskites, which have so far been used for solar cells, as anode materials or electronic components rather than for their catalytic properties. Now scientists at TU Wien have succeeded in producing a special perovskite that is excellently suited as ...

As we accumulate more and more gene-sequencing information, cell-type databases are growing in both size and complexity. There is a need to understand where different types of cells are located in the body, and to map their gene expression patterns into specific locations in tissues and organs. For example, a gene can be actively expressed in one cell while suppressed in another. One way of mapping genes into tissues is a technique called in situ hybridization. Simply put, a target gene is tagged ("hybridized") with a fluorescent marker within the sections of the tissue it is located in (the "in situ" part). The sections are then visualized under a specialized microscope to see where the gene "lights up". Consecutive photographs of each section are then put together to generate a ...

Lafora disease is an inherited neurodegenerative condition that initially develops with seizures in adolescence and evolves with progressive degeneration of the nervous system to death, about ten years after its onset. It is characterised by the accumulation of abnormal glycogen aggregates called Lafora bodies in the brain. There is currently no treatment for this condition, although some therapies are being tested in clinical trials. Led by Dr. Joan Guinovart, emeritus professor of the University of Barcelona (UB) and also group leader of CIBERDEM, the Metabolic Engineering lab at IRB Barcelona has discovered that Lafora bodies that accumulate in glial cells, which are essential for the proper ...

You can lubricate a bicycle chain with oil, but what do you do with a Mars rover or a red-hot conveyor belt in the steel industry? Very special nanomaterials have now been studied by the TU Wien together with research groups from Saarbrücken (Germany), Purdue University in the USA and the Universidad de Chile (Santiago, Chile). The material class of MXenes (pronounced "maxene") has caused quite a stir in recent years in connection with novel battery technologies. But it now turns out that they are also an excellent solid lubricant that is extremely durable and performs its task even under the most difficult conditions. These remarkable properties of MXenes have now been published in the renowned journal ACS Nano. Like a stack of sheets of paper Just ...

A new type of COVID-19 testing strategy could help streamline the process of identifying cases, tracking variants and detecting co-infecting viruses. At present, separate assays and complex workflows are involved in each of these three diagnostic procedures, with analyses typically performed in highly specialized facilities. KAUST researchers have now combined all three kinds of tests into a single procedure that should allow for point-of-care tracking of COVID-19 and the many emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2. "Our all-in-one test provides a promising integrated solution for rapid field-deployable detection and mutational surveillance of pandemic viruses," says stem cell biologist Mo Li, who led the study. The test involves a portable ...

Scrobiculariaplana is a type of wedge clam widely found along the coasts and estuariesof northern Europe, the Mediterranean and West Africa. Like other mollusks, it is used as a bioindicator to study pollution in these types of ecosystems, for its ability to accumulate heavy metals and organic pollutants. A new study has managed to identify the transcriptome and the associated proteome of this bivalve, a finding that could represent an important leap forward in the early detection of pollutants in coastal areas. While the genome is the DNA content comprising the genetic information essential for life, the transcriptome includes only the information on genes that are expressed, while the proteome is the totality of proteins expressed at a given time and under specific conditions. Therefore, ...

Frequent use of social media may not amount to the same as addiction, according to research at the University of Strathclyde. The study invited 100 participants to locate specific social media apps on a simulated smartphone screen as quickly and accurately as possible, while ignoring other apps. The participants were varied in the extent and type of their social media use and engagement. The exercise aimed to assess whether social media users who reported the greatest level of use were more likely to have their attention drawn to the apps through a process known as 'attentional bias,' ...