The protein, known as NusG, pauses the transcription machinery at specific DNA sequences to facilitate what is called "intrinsic termination" and prevent unwanted transcription that could disrupt cellular function. A new study, led by Penn State researchers, shows that NusG and the related protein, NusA, together facilitate termination at about 88% of the intrinsic terminators in the bacteria Bacillus subtilis. Understanding this process expands our basic knowledge of this key cellular function and could eventually aid in the development of antibiotics that target and disrupt gene regulation ...

Boston, Mass. – Sleep disorders are associated with significantly higher rates of health care utilization, conservatively placing an additional $94.9 billion in costs each year to the United States health care system, according to a new study from researchers at Mass Eye and Ear, a member hospital of Mass General Brigham. In their new analysis, published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, the researchers found the number of medical visits and prescriptions filled were nearly doubled in people with sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia, compared to similar people without. Affected patients were also more likely to visit the emergency department and have more comorbid medical ...

(Toronto, Friday, May 7, 2021) -- Probing the unique biology of human pancreatic cancer cells in a laboratory has yielded unexpected insights of a weakness that can be used against the cells to kill them. Led by Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PM) Scientist Dr. Marianne Koritzinsky, researchers showed that about half of patient-derived pancreatic cancer cell lines are highly dependent or "addicted" to the protein peroxiredoxin 4 (PRDX4), as a result of the altered metabolic state of the cancer cell. This addiction is vital for the cancer cell's survival, thereby also making it a precise, potential target against the cancer. Pancreatic cancer is a deadly disease with an overall five-year survival of only eight per cent. Moreover, 36% to 46% of patients who undergo surgery with ...

Induced bank filtration is a key and well-established approach to provide drinking water supply to populated areas located along rivers or lakes and with limited access to groundwater resources. It is employed in several countries worldwide, with notable examples in Europe, the United States, and parts of Africa. Contamination of surface waters poses a serious threat to attaining drinking water standards. In this context, human pathogenic microorganisms such as some viruses and bacteria, originating from the discharge of wastewater treatment plants, form a major contaminant group. A detailed study at an induced bank filtration site along the Rhine river in Germany has now linked transport of bacteria to seasonal dynamics. Key results of the study show that floods should be ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Peer reviewed by medical experts that included three U.S. government senior scientists and published in the American Journal of Therapeutics, the research is the most comprehensive review of the available data taken from clinical, in vitro, animal, and real-world studies. Led by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a group of medical and scientific experts reviewed published peer-reviewed studies, manuscripts, expert meta-analyses, and epidemiological analyses of regions with ivermectin distribution efforts all showing that ...

The two meters of -stretched- DNA contained in human cells are continuously twisting and untwisting to give access to genetic information: when a gene is expressed to generate a protein, the two strands of DNA are separated to give access to all the machinery necessary for this expression, resulting in an excessive accumulation of coiling that needs to be resolved later. The paper that has now been published by the team led by Felipe Cortés, head of the DNA Topology and Breaks Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), in collaboration with Silvia Jimeno González, professor at the University of Seville ...

Neonatal hypothermia -- which occurs when an infant's core body temperature falls below the normal range needed to maintain health -- contributes to approximately one million deaths each year, and countless cases of stunted growth, almost exclusively in low- and middle-income countries. To address this common but preventable condition, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital, engineers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and colleagues in Rwanda developed the Dream Warmer, a low cost, reusable non-electric infant warmer to prevent and treat hypothermia. A new study from the team shows that infants who received treatment with the warmer had only an 11 percent rate of ...

A new experiment shows that the more energy consumed by a clock, the more accurate its timekeeping. Clocks pervade every aspect of life, from the atomic clocks that underlie satellite navigation to the cellular clocks inside our bodies. All of them consume energy and release heat. A kitchen clock, for example, does this by using up its battery. Generally the most accurate clocks require the most energy, which hints at a fundamental connection between energy consumption and accuracy. This is what an international team of scientists from Lancaster, Oxford, and Vienna set out to test. To do this, they built a particularly simple clock, consisting of a vibrating ultra-thin membrane, tens of nanometers ...

A research team from the Skoltech Center for Design, Manufacturing and Materials (CDMM) studied the effects of processing additives - aluminum hydroxide and zinc stearate - on the polymerization kinetics of thermosets used in pultrusion. The research was published in the Journal of Composite Materials. Fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP) structural elements that have obvious advantages over conventional materials, such as steel, wood, and concrete, are widely used in civil, marine and road construction. FRP structures are manufactured using the pultrusion process, in which polymerization is achieved by continuously pulling ...

A new University of Iowa study challenges the idea that gray matter (the neurons that form the cerebral cortex) is more important than white matter (the myelin covered axons that physically connect neuronal regions) when it comes to cognitive health and function. The findings may help neurologists better predict the long-term effects of strokes and other forms of traumatic brain injury. "The most unexpected aspect of our findings was that damage to gray matter hubs of the brain that are really interconnected with other regions didn't really tell us much about how poorly people would do on cognitive tests after brain damage. On the other hand, people with damage to the densest white matter connections did much worse on those tests," explains Justin Reber, PhD, ...

Training the artificial intelligence models that underpin web search engines, power smart assistants and enable driverless cars, consumes megawatts of energy and generates worrying carbon dioxide emissions. But new ways of training these models are proven to be greener. Artificial intelligence models are used increasingly widely in today's world. Many carry out natural language processing tasks - such as language translation, predictive text and email spam filters. They are also used to empower smart assistants such as Siri and Alexa to 'talk' to us, and to operate driverless cars. But to function ...

To observe the swift neuronal signals in a fish brain, scientists have started to use a technique called light-field microscopy, which makes it possible to image such fast biological processes in 3D. But the images are often lacking in quality, and it takes hours or days for massive amounts of data to be converted into 3D volumes and movies. Now, EMBL scientists have combined artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms with two cutting-edge microscopy techniques - an advance that shortens the time for image processing from days to mere seconds, while ensuring that the resulting images are crisp and accurate. The findings are published in Nature Methods. "Ultimately, we were able to take 'the best of both worlds' in this approach," says Nils Wagner, one of the paper's two lead ...

PHILADELPHIA-- A gene called GAS2 plays a key role in normal hearing, and its absence causes severe hearing loss, according to a study led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers, whose findings are published online today in Developmental Cell, discovered that the protein encoded by GAS2 is crucial for maintaining the structural stiffness of support cells in the inner ear that normally help amplify incoming sound waves. They showed that inner ear support cells lacking functional GAS2 lose their amplifier abilities, causing severe hearing ...

Depressive symptoms are more common in teenage girls than in their male peers. However, boys' mental health appears to be affected more if they suffer from obesity. Irrespective of gender, bullying is a considerably greater risk factor than overweight for developing depressive symptoms. These conclusions are drawn by researchers at Uppsala University who monitored adolescents for six years in a questionnaire study, now published in the Journal of Public Health. Peer-review/Observational study/People "The purpose of our study was to investigate the connection ...

Nearly four-fifths of 16- and 17-year-olds have encountered pornographic content on the Internet Pornography is a multibillion-dollar business. Pornographic content is virtually ubiquitous on the Internet, and surveys suggest that 25% of all searches lead to explicit content. Given the size of the market, it's not surprising that young people are drawn to such sites, which are only a couple of clicks away. Professor Neil Thurman of the Department of Media and Communication (IfKW) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, in collaboration with statistician Fabian Obster (Universität der Bundeswehr München), has carried out a study on the use of pornographic sites by young people. Based on a survey involving a sample ...

Great reed warblers normally migrate by night during its month-long migration from northern Europe to Sub-Saharan Africa. However, researchers have now discovered that during the few occasions when it continues to fly during daytime, it flies at extremely high altitudes (up to 6300 meters). One possible explanation for this unexpected and consistent behaviour could be that the birds want to avoid overheating. The study is published in Science. Most of the many millions of songbirds that migrate every year between Europe and Africa fly by night and spend the daytime hours resting and eating. Some species, which normally only fly by night, occasionally fly for over 24 consecutive ...

If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually. Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand. A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently completed the first in-depth study of browser tabs in more than a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload, an underlying reason being that while tabs serve a variety of functions, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - An 18.5 million-year-old fossil found in Panama provides evidence of a new species and is the oldest reliable example of a climbing woody vine known as a liana from the soapberry family. The discovery sheds light on the evolution of climbing plants. The new species, named Ampelorhiza heteroxylon, belongs to a diverse group of tropical lianas called Paullinieae, within the soapberry family (Sapindaceae). More than 475 species of Paullinieae live in the tropics today. Researchers identified the species from fossilized roots that revealed features known to be unique to the wood of modern climbing vines, adaptations that allow them to twist, grow and climb. The study, "Climbing ...

The functions of water-dominated ecosystems can be considerably influenced and changed by hydrological fluctuation. The varying states of redox-active substances are of crucial importance here. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have discovered this, in cooperation with partners from the Universities of Tübingen and Bristol and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Halle-Leipzig. They present their discovery in the journal Nature Geoscience. The new study enables a more precise understanding of the biogeochemical processes that contribute to the degradation of pollutants and the reduction of greenhouse gas ...

More than ever, patients are using telehealth to ask doctors and nurses about worrying blood-pressure readings, nauseating migraines and stubborn foot ulcers. But for patients with chronic conditions, how frequent should telehealth appointments be? Can that frequency change? Under what conditions? West Virginia University researcher Jennifer Mallow is trying to answer these questions. In a new project, she and her colleagues completed a systematic review of studies that dealt with telehealth and chronic conditions. They found that--in general--telehealth services benefitted patients more if they ...

A comprehensive review into what we know about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called "long-COVID", struggling with significant health issues months after infection. There is growing evidence that the virus infects both the upper and lower respiratory tracts - unlike "low pathogenic" human coronavirus sub-species, which typically settle in the upper respiratory tract and cause cold-like symptoms, or "high pathogenic" viruses such as those that cause SARS and ARDS, which typically settle in the lower respiratory tract. Additionally, more frequent multi-organ impacts, and blood clots, and ...

Which wound cuts deeper: the loss of an only child or loss of a spouse? A new study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and Fudan University suggests that Chinese parents find the loss of an only child to be approximately 1.3 times as psychologically distressing than the loss of a spouse. The findings are published in the journal Aging & Mental Health. Older adults in China rely heavily on family support, particularly from their adult children. Filial piety--the Confucian idea describing a respect for one's parents and responsibility for adult children to care for ...

Observing how cells stick to surfaces and their motility is vitally important in the study of tissue maintenance, wound healing and even understanding how cancers progress. A new paper published in EPJ Plus, by Raj Kumar Sadhu, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, takes a step towards a deeper understanding of these processes. "Cell adhesion is the ability of a cell to stick to another cell or an extracellular matrix. This process is important in order to understand how cells interact and coordinate their behaviour in multicellular organisms," says sadhu. "We theoretically model the adhesion of a cell-like vesicle by describing the cell as a three-dimensional vesicle adhering on a flat substrate with a constant adhesion interaction." Alongside ...

Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer, most commonly affecting children aged between 2 -3 and can be fatal. Since the tumour cells resemble certain cells in the adrenal glands, a joint research group from MedUni Vienna's Center for Brain Research and the Swedish Karolinska Institute investigated the cellular origin of these cells and sympathetic neurons during the embryonic development of human adrenal glands. During the course of their investigations, they discovered a previously unknown cell type that might potentially be the origin of the tumour cells. Treatments for this disease are extremely aggressive and challenging ...

The applied nitrogen in crop production is easily lost through ammonia emission and nitrogen leaching. Therefore, many attempts have been made on the development of novel slow-release fertilizers to reduce nitrogen loss and improve crop production. A research team led by Prof. WU Yuejin from the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science developed a novel matrix-based slow-release urea (MSU) recently to improve nitrogen use efficiency in rice production, and they assessed the performances of it. "MSU is a promising fertilizer for rice production," said WU, "as less nitrogen loss and greater soil nitrogen ...