Epidemiological studies have found that transportation noise increases the risk of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, with high-quality evidence for ischaemic heart disease. According to the WHO, ?1.6 million healthy life-years are lost annually from traffic-related noise in Western Europe. Traffic noise at night causes fragmentation and shortening of sleep, elevation of stress hormone levels, and increased oxidative stress in the vasculature and the brain. These factors can promote vascular dysfunction, inflammation and hypertension, thereby elevating the risk of cardiovascular ...

Humans have altered the ocean soundscape by drowning out natural noises relied upon by many marine animals, from shrimp to sharks. Sound travels fast and far in water, and sea creatures use sound to communicate, navigate, hunt, hide and mate. Since the industrial revolution, humans have introduced their own underwater cacophony from shipping vessels, seismic surveys searching for oil and gas, sonar mapping of the ocean floor, coastal construction and wind farms. Global warming could further alter the ocean soundscape as the melting Arctic opens up more ...

The world's first ground-based observations of the bare nucleus of a comet nearing the end of its active life revealed that the nucleus has a diameter of 800 meters and is covered with large grains of phyllosilicate; on Earth large grains of phyllosilicate are commonly available as talcum powder. This discovery provides clues to piece together the history of how this comet evolved into its current burnt-out state. Comet nuclei are difficult to observe because when they enter the inner Solar System, where they are easy to observe from Earth, they heat up and release gas and dust which ...

April 06, 2020-- A new commentary published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society provides an exhaustive examination of published research that discusses whether air pollution may be linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes. The studies that the authors examined look at several potential disease mechanisms, and also at the relationship between pollution, respiratory viruses and health disparities. In "COVID-19 Pandemic: A Wake-Up Call for Clean Air," Stephen Andrew Mein, MD, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, and colleagues ...

A University of Guam review of published research on the critically endangered Serianthes nelsonii tree has revealed a reason why the population of the trees continues to be endangered despite a long history of funded conservation projects and a national recovery plan implemented 26 years ago. The review article, co-authored by biologists of the Plant Physiology Laboratory of UOG's Western Pacific Tropical Research Center, was published on March 2 in Horticulturae journal (doi:10.3390/horticulturae7030043). "A main message of our paper is that decision-makers from funding agencies limit conservation success when practitioners ...

A revolutionary technology developed within the END ...

WASHINGTON, April 6, 2021 -- Home brewing enthusiasts and major manufacturers alike experience the same result of the beer-making process: mounds of leftover grain. Once all the flavor has been extracted from barley and other grains, what's left is a protein- and fiber-rich powder that is typically used in cattle feed or put in landfills. Today, scientists report a new way to extract the protein and fiber from brewer's spent grain and use it to create new types of protein sources, biofuels and more. The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2021 is being held online April 5-30. Live sessions will be hosted April 5-16, ...

By 2050 global warming could reduce crop yields by one-third. UC Riverside researchers have identified a gene that could put the genie back in the bottle. Warmer temperatures signal to plants that summer is coming. Anticipating less water, they flower early then lack the energy to produce more seeds, so crop yields are lower. This is problematic as the world's population is expected to balloon to 10 billion, with much less food to eat. "We need plants that can endure warmer temperatures, have a longer time to flower and a longer growth period," said UCR botany and plant sciences professor ...

DALLAS, April 6, 2021 -- A tsunami of chronic health conditions as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, especially cardiometabolic disease, may produce an enormous wave of death and disability that demands immediate, comprehensive strategies. In addition, COVID-19 has disrupted cardiovascular science and medicine, yet it presents opportunities to transform and create novel approaches that can yield new successes. These are the opinions of two esteemed leaders in cardiovascular disease care, research and strategy, detailed in two new Frame of Reference articles published today in the American Heart Association's flagship journal Circulation. While COVID-19 has severely impacted everyone's daily lives, its societal ...

The inequality is enormous: Mothers in select African countries are more than 100 times more likely to have had a child die than mothers in high-income countries. This is what Diego Alburez-Gutierrez (Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany), Emily Smith-Greenaway (Researcher at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles and Guest Researcher at MPIDR), and co-authors found in their recent paper published in BMJ Global Health. "We offer the first global estimates of the cumulative number of child deaths experienced by mothers ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (APRIL 6, 2021). New research by a team from the Cleveland Clinic and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has determined that surgeries performed late in the workweek, and those culminating in discharge to a specialty care facility, are associated with higher costs and unnecessarily longer stays in the hospital following a common elective spine surgery. Sebastian Salas-Vega, PhD, and colleagues retrospectively reviewed the data for all adult patients who underwent elective lumbar laminectomy over a nearly three-year period at any Ohio hospital included within ...

Newer is not always better; a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) led by researchers at the University of Warwick shows that simple fetal heartbeat monitoring is still the best method for determining whether a baby is in distress during delivery and whether cesarean delivery is needed http://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.202538. Cesarean delivery is the most common surgical procedure worldwide, performed to expedite birth and avoid neonatal complications. Listening to the fetal heart rate using a stethoscope -- intermittent auscultation -- has been used for years to assess the fetal state and whether the baby is experiencing distress that might require a cesarean delivery. Other monitoring techniques have become ...

Legalization of recreational cannabis may be associated with an increase in fatal motor vehicle collisions based on data from the United States, and authors discuss the implications for Canada in an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). "Analyses of data suggest that legalization of recreational cannabis in United States jurisdictions may be associated with a small but significant increase in fatal motor vehicle collisions and fatalities, which, if extrapolated to the Canadian context, could result in as many as 308 additional driving fatalities annually," says Ms. Sarah Windle, Lady Davis Institute/McGill ...

Hamilton, ON (April 6, 2021) - If you are one of the millions of people worldwide suffering from allergies, you may take an antihistamine pill to ward off hives, sneezing and watery eyes. But you may be taking your medications incorrectly, says Derek Chu, a McMaster University allergy expert and clinical scholar. "People need to rethink what they stock in their home cabinets as allergy medicines, what hospitals keep on formulary, and what policymakers recommend. The message needs to get out. This publication is on time for the spring allergy season and as COVID vaccines roll out, for which rashes are common and antihistamines can be helpful," said Chu. Co-author Gordon ...

The idea of implantable sensors that continuously transmit information on vital values and concentrations of substances or drugs in the body has fascinated physicians and scientists for a long time. Such sensors enable the constant monitoring of disease progression and therapeutic success. However, until now implantable sensors have not been suitable to remain in the body permanently but had to be replaced after a few days or weeks. On the one hand, there is the problem of implant rejection because the body recognizes the sensor as a foreign object. On the other hand, the sensor's color which indicates concentration changes has been unstable so far and faded over time. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a novel type of implantable sensor which can ...

In 2001, the famous herpetologist Joseph B. Slowinski died from snakebite by an immature black-and-white banded krait, while leading an expedition team in northern Myanmar. The very krait that caused his death is now confirmed to belong to the same species identified as a new to science venomous snake, following an examination of samples collected between 2016 and 2019 from Yingjiang County, Yunnan Province, China. The new krait species, found in Southwestern China and Northern Myanmar, is described by Dr Zening Chen of END ...

A new study analyzing bean production and food security across 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, found COVID-19 pandemic-related restrictions to significantly impact bean production. Border controls and high transport costs have led to drops in production of the key food security crop, threatening to reverse gains made in achieving Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2, towards no poverty and zero hunger, respectively. Even before the pandemic, 55% of the world's hungry people and 70% of the world's poorest people lived in Africa, the researchers said. In addition, food systems across Africa were already affected by the adverse impacts of climate change, disease and pests, such as the worst desert locust outbreak in 70 years impacting food security in Kenya, Somalia, ...

3-D printing has the potential to revolutionize product design and manufacturing in a vast range of fields--from custom components for consumer products, to 3-D printed dental products and bone and medical implants that could save lives. However, the process also creates a large amount of expensive and unsustainable waste and takes a long time, making it difficult for 3-D printing to be implemented on a wide scale. Each time a 3-D printer produces custom objects, especially unusually-shaped products, it also needs to print supports­-printed stands that balance the object as the printer creates layer by layer, ...

Likely the first extinction event of the 2000s in Europe, the sad history of the Pyrenean Ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) is a powerful example of the ever-increasing species loss worldwide due to causes related to human activity. It can, however, give us valuable information on what should be done (or avoided) to halt this extinction vortex. The distribution of this subspecies of Iberian Ibex was limited to the French and Spanish Pyrenees. Its first mention in an official written document, dating back to 1767, already refers to it as extremely rare. Like many other mountain goats, it was almost hunted to extinction before its killing became prohibited in 1913. Neither the institution ...

Insomnia is a common problem in patients with schizophrenia, and a new study reinforces a close association between insomnia, more suicidal thoughts and actions and increased problems like anxiety and depression in these patients. It also provides more evidence that keeping tabs on how patients are sleeping -- and intervening when needed -- is important to their overall care. "We are now aware that significant insomnia is putting our patients at even higher risk for suicide, so if they are having changes in sleep patterns, if they are having significant insomnia, then we really need to hone in on those questions even more related to suicidal thinking and do what we can to help," says Dr. ...

A new paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine published by the GenderSci Lab at Harvard University shows that Black women are dying at significantly higher rates than white men, and that disparities in mortality rates among women of all races are greater than those between white women and white men. The study is the first to quantify the inequities in COVID-19 mortality looking at both race and sex group. "This analysis complicates the simple narrative that men are dying at greater rates of COVID-19 than women," said lead author Tamara Rushovich, Harvard Ph.D. candidate in population health sciences and lab member ...

The adult human body produces hundreds of billions of blood cells every day. This essential process unavoidably leads to the appearance of mutations in the DNA of the progenitor cells. These are known as somatic mutations because they are acquired, not inherited. While most of these mutations are innocuous, occasionally a mutation gives affected cells a competitive advantage that allows them to expand progressively, generating clonal populations of blood cells. This phenomenon is known as clonal hematopoiesis. Now, a team of scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and the Hospital Universitario Virgen de Arrixaca in Murcia has discovered that the presence of these acquired mutations in blood cells increases ...

Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent. 1. ACP Best Practice Advice: Shorter course of antibiotics may be appropriate for some common infections HD video soundbites of ACP's president discussing the paper are available to download at http://www.dssimon.com/MM/ACP-antibiotics-paper. Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-7355 Free ...

Researchers at the Human Genome and Stem Cell Research Center (HUG-CELL), hosted by the University of São Paulo's Institute of Biosciences (IB-USP) in Brazil, have developed a technique to reconstruct and produce livers in the laboratory. The proof-of-concept study was conducted with rat livers. In the next stage of their research, the scientists will adapt the technique for the production of human livers in order in future to increase the supply of these organs for transplantation. The study was supported by FAPESP and is reported in an article published in Materials Science and Engineering: ...

PITTSBURGH, April 5, 2021 - "Near-poor" Americans--people just above the federal poverty level but still well below the average U.S. income--who rely on Medicare for health insurance face high medical bills and may forgo essential health care, according to new research led by health policy scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. This is due to a coverage "cliff" in Medicaid, which supplements Medicare for people with incomes below poverty but excludes individuals above the federal poverty threshold, including the near-poor. In a report published today in the April issue of the journal Health Affairs, the authors describe the effects of this cliff and propose solutions to fix it, with the aim of lessening barriers to care among near-poor people ...