BOSTON - At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, very little was known about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Over the past year, more evidence has become available on how the virus is transmitted, who is at the greatest risk and best practices to prevent exposure. Yet questions still remain about how the virus impacts the health of pregnant women and newborns. In a new study published in JAMA Network Open, physician-researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital reveal that, while ...

(Boston)-- Being a parent of a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) infant does not come with its own playbook of instructions. Preparing to care for a medically needy infant requires the mastery of technical skills, knowledge, emotional comfort and confidence. After confirming that an infant is medically ready for discharge, the quality of NICU discharge training/teaching is the strongest predictor of discharge readiness. A new study reinforces the importance of discharge preparation and transition to home planning. NICU discharge readiness is defined as the "masterful attainment of technical skills and knowledge, emotional ...

Evolution is unfolding in real time within many natural animal populations and researchers are now observing how this influences biodiversity in the field. In a newly published study in Molecular Ecology a team of Drexel University scientists examined the biological variations in pea aphids, insects that reproduce frequently enough to evolve before our eyes, by tracing the prevalence of their protective endosymbiont, Hamiltonella defensa, which the insects use to ward off parasitoid wasps. "We know that certain organisms have many generations in a season, and we know sometimes it just takes a handful of generations for evolution to unfold; and aphids are one of those types of organisms," explained END ...

DES PLAINES, IL - The diagnostic value of the Head-Impulse, Nystagmus, Test of Skew (HINTS) exam in the emergency department setting is limited. This is the result of a study titled END ...

It's been hailed as a wonder drug and it's certainly creating wonder profits. By some estimates, the Cannabidiol (or CBD) market could be worth $20 billion dollars by 2024. While users tout its effectiveness in pain relief, up until now there's been limited experimental human research on the actual effectiveness of the drug. However, a new study led by researchers at Syracuse University sheds light on the ability of CBD to reduce pain along with the impact that the so-called placebo effect may have on pain outcomes. "For science and the public at large the question remained, is the pain relief that CBD users claim to experience due to pharmacological effects or placebo effects," asked Martin De Vita, a researcher in the psychology department at Syracuse University's ...

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have discovered that some skeletal defects associated with a lack of movement in the womb during early development may still be ameliorated after such periods of immobility if movement resumes. The researchers' discovery was made using chicken embryos, which develop similarly to their human equivalents and which can be easily viewed as development takes place - raising hopes that the finding may also apply to humans and thus have important implications for therapeutic interventions. The research has just been published in leading international journal, Disease Models and Mechanisms. Why babies need to move in the womb Foetal movement in the uterus is a normal part of a healthy ...

The new alloys created by NUST MISIS scientists in cooperation with LG Electronics will help reduce the weight of radiators and heat removal systems in electric vehicles and consumer electronics by one third. The research results are published in the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys. According to experts, with the development of electronics the problem of efficient heat removal is becoming more and more acute -- with an increase in the productivity of equipment, heat generation also grows. Reducing the temperature directly affects the prolongation of the devices' life cycle. This is especially important for household appliances, electric vehicles, LED panels. Scientists from NUST MISIS, in collaboration with LG Electronics, ...

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." It's a silly rhyme, but one that highlights a simple fact: Humans have long relied on wells -- such as the one on the hill visited by Jack and Jill -- for their primary drinking water supply. Although the number of people who draw their water by pail is declining as pumps become ever more widespread, groundwater wells still supply drinking water to more than half of the world's population and sustain over 40% of irrigated agriculture. But this vital resource underfoot often gets overlooked. UC Santa Barbara assistant professors Debra Perrone and Scott Jasechko have compiled the most comprehensive assay of groundwater wells to date, spanning 40 countries that collectively account for half of all global groundwater ...

A team of researchers from the Africa Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) led a global team of 21 climate risk scholars to better understand and inform decision making around climate change risks in Africa and globally by examining how the drivers of risk interact. Their work extends on existing risk frameworks with the hope that this research could help decision makers, managers and researchers understand the inherent complexity of climate change. "Understanding the interactions among risks holds potential to change the way we respond to the risks. This is important because policy makers may worry about the risk of implementing a response as much, or more so, than the risk ...

A Southern California high school junior has built a low-cost seismometer device that delivers earthquake early warnings for homes and businesses. Costing less than $100 for her to make today, the seismometer could someday be a regular household safety device akin to a smart smoke detector, says its inventor Vivien He. About the size of a Rubik's cube and encased in clear acrylic, the seismometer has a sleek, consumer-ready look. The device's geophone detects incoming ground motion, while onboard hardware and software translate the geophone's electrical signals into a digital waveform. The device has detected all earthquakes over magnitude 3.0 around Los Angeles since September 2020. When ...

At the Seismological Society of America's 2021 Annual Meeting, researchers shared how they are using fiber optic cable to detect the small earthquakes that occur in ice in Antarctica. The results could be used to better understand the movement and deformation of the ice under changing climate conditions, as well as improve future monitoring of carbon capture and storage projects, said Anna Stork, a geophysicist at Silixa Ltd. Stork discussed how she and her colleagues are refining their methods of distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS, for microseismicity--earthquakes too small to be felt. DAS works by using the tiny internal flaws within an optical fiber as thousands of seismic ...

A deep spatiotemporal neural network trained on more than 36,000 earthquakes offers a new way of quickly predicting ground shaking intensity once an earthquake is underway, researchers report at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting. DeepShake analyzes seismic signals in real time and issues advanced warning of strong shaking based on the characteristics of the earliest detected waves from an earthquake. DeepShake was developed by Daniel J. Wu, Avoy Datta, Weiqiang Zhu and William Ellsworth at Stanford University. The earthquake data used to train ...

The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far. At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zürich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that detects marsquakes and curates the planet's seismicity catalog. Marsquakes differ from earthquakes in a number of ways, Ceylan explained. To begin with, they ...

How can I prepare myself for something I do not yet know? Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin and from the Technical University of Munich have addressed this almost philosophical question in the context of machine learning. Learning is no more than drawing on prior experience. In order to deal with a new situation, one needs to have dealt with roughly similar situations before. In machine learning, this correspondingly means that a learning algorithm needs to have been exposed to roughly similar data. But what can we do if there is a nearly infinite amount of possibilities so that it is simply impossible to generate data ...

Cardiovascular disease, the most common cause of death, is the result of oxygen deprivation as blood perfusion to affected tissue is prevented. To halt the development of the disease and to promote healing, re-establishment of blood flow is crucial. Researchers at Uppsala University have now discovered that one of the most common immune cells in the human body, macrophages, play an important role in re-establishing and controlling blood flow, something that can be used to develop new drugs. The classic function of immune cells is to defend the body against attacks from microorganisms and tumour cells. Macrophages are immune cells specialised in killing and consuming microorganisms but they have ...

How primates get from A to B gives vital information about their cognitive evolution, say researchers in a new study looking at the travel paths of animals in the wild. Using data from 164 wild primate populations, the global survey examines the mental abilities that primates, including ourselves, use to know where and when to travel in the most efficient way. A birds eye view Co-author Miguel de Guinea, expert in Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University commented: "Imagine looking down on a huge outdoor market from high in the sky, perhaps from a drone hovering quietly above. The people below move in different ways. Some wander haphazardly among the stalls: they are learning what's available but are clearly not busy. Others take bee-line routes ...

In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launching of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the renowned observatory at a brilliant "celebrity star," one of the brightest stars seen in our galaxy, surrounded by a glowing halo of gas and dust. The price for the monster star's opulence is "living on the edge." The star, called AG Carinae, is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The expanding shell of gas and dust that surrounds the star is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri. The huge ...

Now that teens and young adults across the country account for an increasing share of COVID-19 cases, and many have become eligible for vaccination, several recently published studies based on polls of this age group provide insights into the kinds of messaging that might work best for both preventing transmission and vaccine uptake. Using data from text-message polls of people between the ages of 14 and 24 taken at several points in 2020, researchers from the University of Michigan find a clear theme: that most young people are taking COVID-19 seriously and trying to follow public health guidance, and that many of them they are motivated by the desire to protect ...

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Army and Arizona State University researchers identified a set of approaches to help scientists assess how well autonomous systems and humans communicate. These approaches build on transformational scientific research efforts led by the Army's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, which evolved the state of robots from tools to teammates and laid the foundation for much of the service's existing research into how humans and robots can work together effectively. As ideas for autonomous systems evolve, and the possibilities ...

Researchers from the Faraday Institution's SOLBAT project have made a significant step in understanding how and why solid-state batteries (SSBs) fail. A paper, published in Nature Materials on 22 April, provides answers to one important piece of the scientific puzzle. To make step changes in electric vehicle (EV) battery range and safety at a lower cost, new battery chemistries that are "beyond lithium ion" must be developed. SSBs are one such promising technology, but mass market adoption has been held back by several key technical challenges that cause the battery to fail when charged and discharged. SSBs can short circuit after repeating charging and discharging. One well-recognised cause of battery failure is the growth of dendrites, branching networks of lithium that ...

An evolutionary biologist from the University of Bonn brought a new octopus species to light from depths of more than 4,000 meters in the North Pacific Ocean. The sensational discovery made waves in the media a few years ago. Researchers in Bonn have now published the species description and named the animal "Emperor dumbo" (Grimpoteuthis imperator). Just as unusual as the organism is the researchers' approach: in order to describe the new species, they did not dissect the rare creature, but instead used non-destructive imaging techniques. The results have now been published in the prestigious journal BMC Biology. In the summer of 2016, Dr. Alexander ...

A continental-scale network of conservation sites is likely to remain effective under future climate change scenarios, despite a predicted shift in key species distributions. New research, led by Durham University and published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, investigates the impacts of potential climate change scenarios on the network of Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) across the Caribbean, and Central and South America. The research was carried out in collaboration with Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, BirdLife International and the National Audubon Society. IBAs are sites identified as being internationally important for the conservation of bird populations, with over 13,000 ...

There are many different types of cancer, but they all have one thing in common: errors in the signals that control normal cell behaviour can cause uncontrolled cell growth and cell division, leading to a tumour. An enzyme called SHP2 plays a key role in this regard. SHP2 is a signalling molecule that in its activated state stimulates cell proliferation. In a normal healthy body, the rates of cell proliferation and cell death are balanced and tumours do not develop. However, if SHP2 becomes too active, the number of cells being created outweighs the number that die, which can lead to the formation of dangerous tumours. Enhanced SHP2 activity resulting from genetic ...

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati say a regulatory protein found in skeletal muscle fiber may play an important role in the body's fight or flight response when encountering stressful situations. The protein, fast skeletal myosin binding protein-C (fMyBP-C), plays a foundational role in the proper regulation of contractile structure and function in the body's fast twitch muscles -- these muscles produce sudden bursts of power to sprint into action, jump or lift heavy objects. Fast skeletal myosin binding protein-C modulates the speed and force of fast skeletal muscle contraction. "This response ...

People with type 2 diabetes tend to have poorer muscle function than others. Now a research team at Lund University in Sweden has discovered that in type 2 diabetes, a specific gene is of great importance for the ability of muscle stem cells to create new mature muscle cells. The findings are published in Nature Communications. "In people with type 2 diabetes, the VPS39 gene is significantly less active in the muscle cells than it is in other people, and the stem cells with less activity of the gene do not form new muscle cells to the same degree. The gene is important when muscle cells absorb sugar from blood and build new muscle. Our study is the first ever to link this gene to type 2 diabetes", says Charlotte Ling, professor of epigenetics at Lund University who led ...