The Tibet ASγ experiment, a China-Japan joint research project on cosmic-ray observation, has discovered ultra-high-energy diffuse gamma rays from the Milky Way galaxy. The highest energy detected is estimated to be unprecedentedly high, nearly 1 Peta electronvolts (PeV, or one million billion eV). Surprisingly, these gamma rays do not point back to known high-energy gamma-ray sources, but are spread out across the Milky Way (see Fig.1). Scientists believe these gamma rays are produced by the nuclear interaction between cosmic rays escaping from the most powerful galactic sources ...

A dangerous toxin has been witnessed - for the first time - releasing into the air from pond scum, research published in the peer-reviewed journal Lake and Reservoir Management today shows. Not only is pond scum - otherwise known as algal bloom - an unsightly formation which can occur on still water across the world, it can also prove dangerous to wildlife and humans. For the first time, scientists have now detected the presence of the algal toxin anatoxin-a (ATX)which is also known as 'Very Fast Death Factor', in the air near a Massachusetts pond with large algal blooms. ATX can cause a range of symptoms at acute doses, including loss of coordination, muscular twitching and respiratory paralysis, and has been linked to the deaths of livestock, waterfowl and dogs from ...

Researchers from University of Queensland, University of Melbourne, and Universidad Finis Terrae published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that studies consumer resistance to a nationwide plastic bag ban implemented in Chile in 2019. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "How Do I Carry All This Now?': Understanding Consumer Resistance to Sustainability Interventions" and is authored by Claudia Gonzalez-Arcos, Alison M. Joubert, Daiane Scaraboto, and Jörgen Sandberg. As environmental crisis challenges accelerate, governments are searching for solutions to reduce the negative impacts of economic activity. One popular measure has been to ban disposable plastic ...

A palliative care doctor has suggested that studying Shakespeare's plays could help medical students connect more closely with their patients. Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Dr David Jeffrey, of the Department of Palliative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, investigates how the playwright's empathic approach - the ability to understand and share the feelings of another - can enhance the patient-doctor relationship. Dr Jeffrey writes that the idea that emotions are disruptive and need to be controlled is deeply ingrained in medical education and practice, contributing to doctors distancing from patients. The coronavirus pandemic, with ...

Fewer than half of inmates in jails and prisons surveyed in a study by the CDC and University of Washington said they would accept a COVID-19 vaccine, while the majority either said they wanted to wait before getting the vaccine or would refuse one. "This is a population already at risk for COVID-19, and outbreaks among incarcerated people can worsen inequities in COVID-19 outcomes as well as contribute to spread in the surrounding community," said lead author Dr. Marc Stern, affiliate assistant professor of health services in the UW School of Public Health. "So culturally and health-literacy informed interventions are needed to help them feel more confident about getting vaccinated." The study conducted by CDC researchers ...

As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, researchers have found associations between certain lifestyle factors and a person's risk of getting infected. While it has already been established that those with Type II diabetes and a high body mass index (BMI) are at greater risk of experiencing hospitalizations and other severe complications related to COVID-19, they are also at greater risk of getting symptomatic infection in the first place. That is the finding of a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine that was published today in the journal PLoS ONE. Using data from the UK Biobank of 500,000 British volunteers over age 40, the researchers examined ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- All too often, patients with high levels of antibodies face major challenges getting a transplant. These highly sensitized patients have a much higher risk of death while waiting for suitable organs they are less likely to reject. But there is new hope for highly sensitized patients in need of a combined heart and liver transplant, thanks to an innovative surgical approach at Mayo Clinic. Traditionally, surgeons transplant the heart first, followed by the liver. But Mayo Clinic heart transplant team decided to reverse the order for highly sensitized patients in the hopes that the liver would absorb some of the patient's antibodies, removing them from circulation and lowering ...

Researchers have confirmed for the first time that Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica could cross tipping points, leading to a rapid and irreversible retreat which would have significant consequences for global sea level. Pine Island Glacier is a region of fast-flowing ice draining an area of West Antarctica approximately two thirds the size of the UK. The glacier is a particular cause for concern as it is losing more ice than any other glacier in Antarctica. Currently, Pine Island Glacier together with its neighbouring Thwaites glacier are responsible for about 10% of the ongoing increase in global sea level. Scientists have argued for some time that this region of Antarctica could reach a tipping point and undergo an irreversible ...

Kidney development is a balancing act between the self-renewal of stem and progenitor cells to maintain and expand their numbers, and the differentiation of these cells into more specialized cell types. In a new study in the journal eLife from Andy McMahon's laboratory in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, former graduate student Alex Quiyu Guo and a team of scientists demonstrate the importance of a molecule called β-catenin in striking this balance. β-catenin is a key driver at the end of a complex signaling cascade known as the Wnt pathway. Wnt signaling plays critical roles in the embryonic development of multiple organs including the kidneys. By partnering with ...

Key Takeaways: Discounting or couponing is not the most effective way to tap the power of retargeting in online marketing. Customized seller recommendations may be more powerful than discounting. Seller auctions that allow marketers to self-select in the retargeting process improve cost efficiency. CATONSVILLE, MD, April 1, 2021 - Online marketers have seen the pattern: 95%-98% of online visitors search for something, but the search never converts into a purchase and they leave the site without buying. For marketers, this results in speculation and assumptions that can lead to wasted time and investments in ineffective marketing programs. One of the more common ways online marketers attempt to solve this problem is to "retarget," which tracks those consumers and reconnects ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: GSA's dynamic online journal, Geosphere, posts articles online regularly. Locations studied this month include the western Himalaya, the boundary between the southern Coast Ranges and western Transverse Ranges in California, the northern Sierra Nevada, and northwest Nepal. Marine sedimentary records of chemical weathering evolution in the western Himalaya since 17 Ma Peng Zhou; Thomas Ireland; Richard W. Murray; Peter D. Clift Abstract: The Indus Fan derives sediment from the western Himalaya and Karakoram. Sediment from International Ocean Discovery Program drill sites in the eastern part of the fan coupled with data from an industrial ...

Below please find a summary of a new article that is published in Annals of Internal Medicine today. The summary is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. Physicians must advocate for common sense gun laws for good of public health #thisisourlane FREE content: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-1505 A pointed editorial by Douglas DeLong, MD, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown, NY, suggests that it's time for physicians to move past talking and start taking ...

The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state's inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout. A larger power grid has perks, but also has perils that researchers at Northwestern University are hoping to address to expedite integration and improvements to the system. An obvious challenge in larger grids is that failures can propagate further -- in the case of Texas, across state lines. Another is that all power generators ...

Telehealth has become a critical way for doctors to still provide health care while minimizing in-person contact during COVID-19. But with phone or Zoom appointments, it's harder for doctors to get important vital signs from a patient, such as their pulse or respiration rate, in real time. A University of Washington-led team has developed a method that uses the camera on a person's smartphone or computer to take their pulse and respiration signal from a real-time video of their face. The researchers presented this state-of-the-art system in December at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Now the team is proposing a better system to measure these physiological signals. This system is less likely to be tripped up by different ...

SEATTLE (April 1, 2021) - An international consortium of geneticists, biologists, clinicians, mathematicians, and other scientists is determined to take the study of the human genome to the next level - creating a comprehensive atlas of genetic variants to advance the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. "This Herculean undertaking is unprecedented," said Dr. Matthew Hurles, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England. "Indeed, the scientific community has an increasingly comprehensive catalog of functional DNA elements in the human genome, but that catalog remains incomplete. We have collectively characterized the functional impact of less than 1% of genetic variation in the 1 to 2 percent of our DNA." Hurles and Dr. Doug Fowler, a member of the ...

Exposure to antibiotics in utero and infancy can lead to an irreversible loss of regulatory T-cells in the colon-a valuable component of the immune system's response toward allergens in later life - after only six months, a Rutgers researcher found. The study was published in the journal mBio. It is already known that the use of antibiotics early in life disrupts the intestinal microbiota - the trillions of beneficial microorganisms that live in and on our bodies - that play a crucial role in the healthy maturation of the immune system and the prevention of ...

Video games offer students obvious respite from the stresses of studies and, now, a study from a University of Ottawa medical student has found they could benefit surgical skills training. Arnav Gupta carries a heavy course load as a third-year student in the Faculty of Medicine, so winding down with a game of Legend of Zelda always provides relief from the rigorous of study. But Zelda may be helping improve his surgical education, too, as Gupta and a team of researchers from the University of Toronto found in a paper they recently published in the medical journal ...

East Hanover, NJ. April 1, 2021. A team of New Jersey researchers has shown that changes in perceptual certainty and response bias, two central metrics of signal detection theory (SDT), correlate with changes in cognitive fatigue. They also show that SDT measures change as a function of changes in brain activation. This finding was reported in Frontiers in Psychology on January 15, 2021, in the open access article "Using Signal Detection Theory to Better Understand Cognitive Fatigue" (doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.579188). The authors are Glenn Wylie, DPhil, Brian Yao, PhD, and John DeLuca, PhD, of Kessler Foundation, and Joshua Sandry, PhD, of Montclair State ...

Researchers have developed a new mechanical model that simulates how whiskers bend within a follicle in response to an external force, paving the way toward better understanding of how whiskers contribute to mammals' sense of touch. Yifu Luo and Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. With the exception of some primates, most mammals use whiskers to explore their environment through the sense of touch. Whiskers have no sensors along their length, but when an external force bends ...

A new, detailed model of the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reveals previously unknown vulnerabilities that could inform development of vaccines. Mateusz Sikora of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. A key feature of SARS-CoV-2 is its spike protein, which extends from its surface and enables it to target and infect human cells. Extensive research has resulted in detailed static models of the spike protein, but these models do not capture the flexibility of the spike protein itself nor the movements of protective glycans--chains ...

Six genetic variants add up to determine the risk of several blood cancers in pre-disposed dog breeds, according to a study by Benoît Hédan at the University of Rennes and colleagues, publishing April 8th in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics. The results confirm a known tumour-suppressor gene as a risk factor for histiocytic sarcoma -- a rare and aggressive blood cancer that affects both dogs and humans -- as well as identifying four new genetic loci associated with the disease. The researchers sequenced genomic DNA extracted from blood samples from Bernese mountain dogs, Rottweilers, flat-coated retrievers, and golden retrievers, including ...

Memory loss is common after general anesthesia, particularly for events occurring immediately before surgery--a phenomenon called retrograde amnesia. But a new study publishing on April 1st 2021 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Simon Wiegert at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, shows that changes in the hippocampus--the part of the brain used to make new memories--differ depending on which general anesthetic is used. Consequently, their effects on memory formation also differ. Understanding how different anesthetics affect the brain, particularly the hippocampus, is therefore important for both clinicians with human patients and experimental scientists who work with animals. Wiegert and his team recorded brain activity from the hippocampus ...

Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, published a column in the journal Science about how medical devices can be fundamentally biased -- not just in dataset representation as has been widely reported, but from a deeper root: the laws of physics. Kadambi described how the inherent physics behind medical devices could vary across race and gender. He cited several examples of potential physics-based bias. For example, recent research has shown that a pulse oximeter -- a medical device typically placed on a fingertip that uses infrared and light beams to measure oxygen saturation of the blood and the pulse rate -- is more likely to miss low levels in people with darker skin. What motivated Kadambi to write this piece stemmed from ...

A group of scientists from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, has shown that for plants and insects the applied pesticide toxicity in agriculture has substantially increased between 2004 and 2016. In a paper published in the current issue of Science, the authors show that this pattern is even relevant in genetically modified (GM) crops that were originally designed to reduce pesticide impacts on the environment. "We have taken a large body of pesticide use data from the US and have expressed changes of amounts applied in agriculture over time as changes in total applied pesticide toxicity," says lead author Ralf Schulz, professor for environmental sciences in Landau. "This provides a new view on the potential ...

We know your cat's whiskers are handsome -- but you can't even see the cool part. The base of the whisker, which is responsible for sending touch signals to the brain, is hidden inside the follicle, a deep pocket that embeds the whisker within the skin. Because this section of the whisker is obscured, understanding precisely how whiskers communicate touch to the brain has been a longstanding mystery. In a new study, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Northwestern University has developed the first mechanical simulation of the whisker inside the follicle. By combining their new model with new anatomical observations, the researchers discovered that when whiskers touch an object, they ...