The burden of student loans in the U.S. continues to grow unabatedly, currently accounting for a total of $1.7 trillion in household debt among nearly 45 million borrowers. "The introduction of income-based repayment over the past decade has made student loans rather complicated products," Paolo Guasoni of Dublin City University said. As borrowers navigate this complex process, they face long-term consequences; people with student debt are less likely to own homes or become entrepreneurs, and generally postpone their enrollment in graduate or professional studies. Though legislative reform is necessary to combat this problem on a grand scale, individual borrowers can take steps to ...

Hydrogen as a clean, renewable alternative to fossil fuels is part of a sustainable-energy future, and very much already here. However, lingering concerns about flammability have limited widespread use of hydrogen as a power source for electric vehicles. Previous advances have minimized the risk, but new research from the University of Georgia now puts that risk in the rearview mirror. Hydrogen vehicles can refuel much more quickly and go farther without refueling than today's electric vehicles, which use battery power. But one of the final hurdles to hydrogen power is securing a safe method for detecting hydrogen leaks. A new study published in Nature Communications documents an inexpensive, spark-free, optical-based hydrogen sensor that is more sensitive ...

Study Take-Aways Unprecedented novel discoveries have implications for characterizing biodiversity for all life, conservation, and human health and disease. o This finding provides novel avenues of research to increase immune defenses, particularly relevant for emerging infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The flagship paper presented whole genome sequence analyses of 16 vertebrate species to illustrate high quality, near error free, near complete, low cost reference genome assemblies. o Though near 400 species have been sequenced at some level, the quality today reflects ...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the abnormal accumulation and spread of the tau protein in the brain. An international study can now show how tau spreads according to four distinct patterns that lead to different symptoms with different prognoses of the affected individuals. The study was published in Nature Medicine. "In contrast to how we have so far interpreted the spread of tau in the brain, these findings indicate that tau pathology in the brain varies according to at least four distinct patterns. This would suggest that Alzheimer's is an even more heterogeneous disease than previously thought. We now have reason to reevaluate the concept of typical Alzheimer's, and in the long ...

As state and local policymakers and politicians made the decision to enact stay-at-home orders last March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a recent study found that more stringent public health measures put in place directly correlated with lower virus case numbers during the first two months of the pandemic. The study, "More Stringent Measures Against Covid-19 Are Associated With Lower Cases and Deaths in Florida and Miami-Dade," was recently published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine. Utilizing The New York Times' GitHub repository of cases and deaths and the COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index developed by Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government for the ...

The image of rows of chairs and desks facing a teacher at a blackboard has been a reality for decades. However, research reveals that this way of organizing the classroom furniture in schools is not the best way for favouring the learning process. Especially if the needs of 21st-century students are taken into account, who, according to the OECD, require a social environment that fosters autonomy, flexibility, decision-making capacity and the connection of knowledge by individual students or through teamwork. It is also the opinion of 6 out of every 10 teachers that changing the ...

HOUSTON - (April 29, 2021) - In one of the first studies of its kind, medical and engineering researchers have shown wearable devices that continuously monitor blood sugar provide new insights into the progression of Type 2 diabetes among at-risk Hispanic/Latino adults. The findings by researchers from Sansum Diabetes Research Institute (SDRI) and Rice University are available online this week in EClinicalMedicine, an open-access clinical journal published by The Lancet. "The fresh look at the glucose data sheds new light on disease progression, which could have a direct impact on better management," said Rice study co-author Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor and department chair in electrical and ...

Researchers from Osaka University, Japan and the University of Adelaide, Australia have worked together to produce the new multiplexer made from pure silicon for terahertz-range communications in the 300-GHz band. "In order to control the great spectral bandwidth of terahertz waves, a multiplexer, which is used to split and join signals, is critical for dividing the information into manageable chunks that can be more easily processed and so can be transmitted faster from one device to another," said Associate Professor Withawat Withayachumnankul from the University of Adelaide's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. "Up ...

A third of children and adolescents develop a mental health problem after a concussion, which could persist for several years post-injury, according to a new literature review. The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found mental health should be evaluated as part of standard pediatric concussion assessment and management. MCRI researcher and Monash University PhD candidate Alice Gornall said despite many post-concussion and mental health symptoms overlapping, the relationship between delayed recovery and mental health had remained poorly understood until this literature review. The review of 69 articles published between 1980 to June 2020, involved ...

Amsterdam, April 29, 2021 - The clinical presentation and underlying biology of Parkinson's disease (PD) varies significantly, but attempts to cluster cases into a limited number of subtypes have questionable applicability and relevance, reports the international Task Force for PD Subtypes in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease. Their systematic review of studies reporting a subtyping system for the first time concludes that new approaches are needed that acknowledge the individual nature of the disease and are more aligned with personalized medicine. In 2018, the International Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Society (MDS) convened the Task Force for PD Subtypes to critically appraise ...

Obesity and a high-salt diet are both bad for our hearts but they are bigger, seemingly synergistic risks for females, scientists report. "We see younger and younger women having cardiovascular disease and the question is: What is the cause?" says Dr. Eric Belin de Chantemele, physiologist in the Vascular Biology Center and Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. "We think the fact that females are more salt sensitive and more sensitive to obesity are among the reasons they have lost the natural protection youth and estrogen are thought to provide." His message to women based on the sex differences they are finding: "First reduce your consumption of salt, a message the American ...

A study by the Hydrology and Agricultural Hydraulics group at the University of Cordoba analyses the potential of rock in dehesas as a source of water for vegetation Soil is an essential reservoir of the water cycle, not so much because of the volume it represents, but rather due to its continuous renewal and because of humanity's ability to take advantage of it. Although the evolution of the climate in the medium and long term may modify current conditions, thevariability of precipitation can cause notable changes in the natural systems of arid and semi-arid areas, accelerating their degradation, especially ...

Many meteorological satellite networks are constantly scanning Earth, providing vital research data and real-time life-saving weather information. Since China began its initial development in 1970, the Fengyun (FY) series of meteorological satellites have advanced considerably throughout more than 50 years. While FY satellites primarily focus on the atmosphere, they are capable of observing complex variables within the Earth-atmosphere system. Since the initial FY dispatch, China has successfully launched 17 FY satellites, seven of which are currently operating in orbit. The Fengyun Meteorological Satellite Ground Application System generates more than 90 Earth observation products every day, producing more than ...

Claiming that something has a defect normally suggests an undesirable feature. That's not the case in solid-state systems, such as the semiconductors at the heart of modern classical electronic devices. They work because of defects introduced into the rigidly ordered arrangement of atoms in crystalline materials like silicon. Surprisingly, in the quantum world, defects also play an important role. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and scientific institutes and universities in Japan, Korea and Hungary have established guidelines that will be an invaluable resource for the discovery of new defect-based ...

A compound in avocados may ultimately offer a route to better leukemia treatment, says a new University of Guelph study. The compound targets an enzyme that scientists have identified for the first time as being critical to cancer cell growth, said Dr. Paul Spagnuolo, Department of Food Science. Published recently in the journal Blood, the study focused on acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which is the most devastating form of leukemia. Most cases occur in people over age 65, and fewer than 10 per cent of patients survive five years after diagnosis. Leukemia cells have higher amounts of an enzyme called VLCAD involved in their metabolism, said Spagnuolo. "The cell relies on that pathway to ...

Coral reefs provide shelter, sustenance and stability to a range of organisms, but these vital ecosystems would not exist if not for the skeletal structure created by stony corals. Now, KAUST scientists together with an international team have revealed the underlying genetic story of how corals evolved from soft-bodied organisms to build the myriad calcified structures we see today. "While the processes involved in coral calcification are well understood, it is less clear how corals' ability to grow calcium carbonate skeletons actually evolved," says Xin Wang, a former KAUST Ph.D. student who worked on the project under the supervision of Manual Aranda. "How did a squishy anemone-like organism begin to build reefs?" ...

CLEVELAND - In a Correspondence article published in the April 29, 2021 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from University Hospitals (UH) Cleveland Medical Center, and New York Presbyterian Hospital - Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, found a substantial reduction in the use of minimally invasive surgery for cervical cancer after publication of the results a major study called the Laparoscopic Approach to Cervical Cancer (LACC) in November 2018. The earlier study, which compared minimally invasive surgery with open abdominal radical hysterectomy in patients with early-stage cervical cancer, found that minimally invasive surgery was associated with worse disease-free and overall ...

LAWRENCE -- Researchers commonly work with the criminal justice system to implement reforms, bringing with them the latest science and data pointing to why a certain practice will help improve outcomes. New research from the University of Kansas shows if community corrections agencies are to sustain evidence-based reforms, they need to view them as legitimate. Researchers worked with eight federal community corrections agencies to implement Contingency Management, an evidence-based practice used to help people convicted of drug offenses set and achieve goals to end addiction, avoid repeat offenses and increase pro-social behavior. Such evidence-based practices and reforms are frequently put in place across the criminal justice system. Shannon Portillo"We've ...

Nanopore technology shows promise for making it possible to develop small, portable, inexpensive devices that can sequence DNA in real time. One of the challenges, however, has been to make the technology more accurate. Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have moved closer toward this goal by developing a nanopore sequencing platform that, for the first time, can detect the presence of nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA and RNA. The study was published online Feb. 11 and is featured on the back cover of the April print edition of the ...

A study by University of Guam researchers has found that shade can mitigate the effects of heat stress on corals. The study, which was funded by the university's National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, was published in February in the peer-reviewed Marine Biology Research journal. "We wanted to see what role light has in coral bleaching," said UOG Assistant Professor Bastian Bentlage, the supervisor and co-author of the study. "Usually, people talk about temperature as a cause for bleaching, but we show that both light and temperature work together." Previous UOG research led by Laurie J. Raymundo found that more than one-third of all coral reefs in Guam were killed from 2013 to 2017 over the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Hispanic Americans have died of COVID-19 at a disproportionately high rate compared to whites because of workplace exposure to the virus, a new study suggests. It's widely documented that Hispanics are overrepresented among workers in essential industries and occupations ranging from warehousing and grocery stores to health care and construction, much of which kept operating when most of the country shut down last spring. The analysis of federal data showed that, considering their representation in the U.S. population, far higher percentages of Hispanics of working ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at Yale and Princeton say the scientific community sorely needs a new way to compare the cascading effects of ecosystem loss due to human-induced environmental change to major crises of the past. For too long, scientists have relied upon metrics that compare current rates of species loss with those characterizing mass extinctions in the distant past, according to Pincelli Hull, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and Christopher Spalding, an astrophysicist at Princeton. The result has been projections of extinction rates in the next few decades that are on the order ...

DALLAS - April 28, 2021 - Depression screening among cancer patients improved by 40 percent to cover more than 90 percent of patients under a quality improvement program launched by a multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern Medical Center and Southwestern Health Resources. Cancer patients with depression are at an increased risk of mortality and suicide compared with those without depression. Although rates vary based on cancer type and stage, depression is estimated to affect 10 to 30 percent of patients with cancer compared with 7 to 8 percent of adults without a diagnosis or history of cancer, and impact both men and women equally. Due to the higher risk, medical ...

LAWRENCE -- For thousands of years during the last ice age, generations of maritime migrants paddled skin boats eastward across shallow ocean waters from Asia to present-day Alaska. They voyaged from island to island and ultimately to shore, surviving on bountiful seaweeds, fish, shellfish, birds and game harvested from coastal and nearshore biomes. Their island-rich route was possible due to a shifting archipelago that stretched almost 900 miles from one continent to the other. A new study from the University of Kansas in partnership with universities in Bologna and Urbino, Italy, documents the newly named Bering Transitory Archipelago and then points to how, when and where the first Americans ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 29, 2021)--A new study is drawing the most detailed picture yet of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the lung, revealing mechanisms that result in lethal COVID-19, and may explain long-term complications and show how COVID-19 differs from other infectious diseases. Led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, the study found that in patients who died of the infection, COVID-19 unleashed a detrimental trifecta of runaway inflammation, direct destruction and impaired regeneration of lung cells involved in gas exchange, and accelerated lung scarring. Though the study looked at lungs from patients who had died of the disease, ...