The longest nerve in the human body starts in the brain and meanders its way down the neck and into the chest, where it splits into separate branches, winding its twisting tendrils to touch each internal organ. Known as the “information superhighway” and aptly named from the Latin word meaning “wanders,” the vagus nerve is a bundle of fibers responsible for the parasympathetic nervous system: digestion, heart rate, breathing.  Sending electrical impulses down this tenth cranial nerve has proven effective in treating conditions like depression and epilepsy, ...

The formation of the country’s first emergency department for the over 80s led to a significant decrease in time spent in A&E – according to research from the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital (NNUH) and University of East Anglia (UEA). The first Older People’s Emergency Department in England was opened at NNUH in December 2017 to bring specialists in older people’s medicine to the front doors of the hospital and provide earlier assessment and treatment for patients. A new study evaluates the outcomes for patients who received treatment in the main emergency department at NNUH and a similar ...

Have you ever wondered why some people never became sick from COVID-19? A study published today in Nature shows that common genetic variation among people is responsible for mediating SARS-CoV-2 asymptomatic infection. The results indicate that individuals having this variant never feel sick once infected. This exciting discovery was a result of a U.S.-Australia collaborative work led by Danillo Augusto, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Jill Hollenbach, Ph.D., professor ...

Nearly a century ago, physicists Max Born and J. Robert Oppenheimer developed an assumption regarding how quantum mechanics plays out in molecules, which are comprised of intricate systems of nuclei and electrons. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation assumes that the motion of nuclei and electrons in a molecule are independent of each other and can be treated separately. This model works the vast majority of the time, but scientists are testing its limits. Recently, a team of scientists demonstrated the breakdown ...

Women with Lyme disease take longer to get diagnosed, have more severe symptoms and experience higher rates of disability when compared to men. They may also be more likely to develop persistent Lyme disease. Those are among the findings of a recent study that analyzed information from the MyLymeData patient registry. The results have been published in the International Journal of General Medicine. The present study, which was conducted by LymeDisease.org, a research and advocacy organization, assessed sex-based differences in Lyme disease patients who remained ill for six months or more after antibiotic treatment. In ...

Ranches across the Show-Me State manage approximately two million cattle — a significant number of which are Angus, a top-tier breed that has unrivaled success in the commercial beef market. In a new study, University of Missouri researcher Jared Decker and Thompson Research Farm tested a group of commercial Angus cows using a commercial genomic prediction tool called Zoetis GeneMax Advantage to investigate the ability of the test to predict their calves’ performance and profitability. This project demonstrates ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Immune system changes in the pregnant body that protect the fetus appear to extend to the brain, where a decrease in immune cells late in gestation may factor into the onset of maternal behavior, new research in rats suggests. In adult female rats that had never given birth – which typically don’t like being around babies – depletion of these cells sped up their care for rat newborns that were placed in their cage. The loss of these cells, called microglia, and the related uptick in motherly attentiveness were also associated with changes to neuron activity in several regions of the rat brain, suggesting ...

Early in pregnancy, something strange happens in the uterus: Cells from the fetal side of the developing placenta invade the uterine endometrium and work with the mother’s immune system to remodel the arteries.   “When I first read about it, I thought, ‘This is so bizarre,’” said Stanford Medicine pathologist Michael Angelo, MD, PhD.   Humans’ immune systems usually attack unfamiliar cells, which would theoretically pose a problem for a developing pregnancy. But on the mother’s side of the growing placenta, the arteries incorporate cells that genetically match the embryo, just one of ...

When you think about your ideal neighborhood, perhaps you think of tree-lined streets or a close-knit community of people who help each other. You probably don’t think about your digestive system. But maybe you should. According to a team of scientists led by researchers at Stanford Medicine, there are indeed “neighborhoods” of different cell types cooperating to digest your food and protect you from infection, among other things — and a new, ultra-high-resolution map of these neighborhoods proves your intestine is both functionally impressive and visually striking. Just like human neighborhoods, ...

The incidences of teen suicidality including self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts increased nationally between 2016 and 2021; were at seasonal high peaks in April and October; and were at their lowest when schools were shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to research at UTHealth Houston.  The study was published this month in JAMA Network Open. It was authored by Youngran Kim, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Management, Policy, and Community Health at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health; Scott D. Lane, PhD, professor and vice chair for research in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral ...

NASA has awarded funding for three science teams to conduct citizen science investigations as a total solar eclipse sweeps across North America on April 8, 2024. In these experiments, volunteers will help study the Sun and its ethereal outer atmosphere, called the corona, which is revealed when the Moon completely covers the Sun’s bright disk. “During next year’s total eclipse, hundreds of volunteers will capture images of the Sun and its corona to help answer real science question about our star and how it affects us,” said program scientist and eclipse lead at NASA Headquarters, ...

About The Study: This study found that major U.S. cities with higher populations of Black individuals are more likely to be affected by mass shooting events, suggesting that structural racism may have a role in their incidence. Public health initiatives aiming to prevent mass shooting events should target factors associated with structural racism to address gun violence. Authors: Michael Ghio, M.D., of Tulane University in New Orleans, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2023.2846) Editor’s ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 73,000 emergency department visits and hospitalizations for suicidality indicated the presence of seasonal patterns and an observed unexpected decrease in suicidality among children and adolescents after COVID-19–related school closures in March 2020, which suggest a potential association between suicidality and the school calendar.  Authors: Scott D. Lane, Ph.D., of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit ...

In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium.   “The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other,” says Ilaria Caiazzo, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who leads a new study on the findings in the journal Nature. “When I show the observations to people, they are blown away.”    White dwarfs are the scalding remains of stars that were once like our sun. As the ...

FROM: James Urton University of Washington 206-543-2580 jurton@uw.edu  (Note: researcher contact information at the end)   Embargoed by Nature For public release at 11 a.m. Eastern Time (8 a.m. Pacific Time; 4 p.m. British Summer Time) on Wednesday, July 19, 2023   Researchers put a new twist on graphite   For decades, scientists have been probing the potential of two-dimensional materials to transform our world. 2D materials are only a single layer of atoms thick. Within them, subatomic particles like electrons can only move in two dimensions. This simple restriction can trigger unusual electron behavior, ...

In our modern era of larger, more destructive, and longer-lasting fires—called the Pyrocene—plants and animals are evolving quickly to survive. By synthesizing the wide body of research about rapid animal evolution in response to fire in a review publishing in Trends in Ecology & Evolution on July 19, a multidisciplinary team of ecology experts hopes to leverage what we already know to help foster evolution-informed conservation plans. In this way, they suggest, we can try to harness the ways in which fire impacts animals to protect vulnerable species—working with evolution instead of against it. In response to climate change and changes in land use, ...

An international team led by astronomers from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) has discovered a new type of stellar object that challenges our understanding of the physics of neutron stars. The object could be an ultra-long period magnetar, a rare type of star with extremely strong magnetic fields that can produce powerful bursts of energy. Until recently, all known magnetars released energy at intervals ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. The newly discovered object emits radio waves every 22 minutes, making it the longest period magnetar ever detected. The research was published ...

Left-tail risk (LT) stocks are those whose returns fall into the extreme end on the left side of the return distribution. In the hopes of mean-reverting to the normal price, investors usually hold on to these stocks. However, contrary to mean-reverting expectations, these stocks that have experienced extreme losses and high tail risks in the past tend to continue declining in the future, resulting in financial losses. This phenomenon, referred to as left-tail momentum (LTM), appears to challenge the traditional notion of a positive relationship between risk and return. To investigate this market anomaly, a team of researchers, led by Prof. Eom from the School of Business at Pusan National ...

A team of scientists, led by the researcher at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) Sebastién Comerón, has found that the galaxy NGC 1277 does not contain dark matter.This is the first time that a massive galaxy (it has a mass several times that of the Milky Way) does not show evidence for this invisible component of the universe. “This result does not fit in with the currently accepted cosmological models, which include dark matter” explains Comerón. In the current standard model cosmology massive galaxies contain substantial quantities of dark matter, a type of matter which does not interact in the same ...

Finding sustainable and clean fuels is crucial in today’s global energy and climate crisis. One promising candidate that is increasingly gaining relevance is hydrogen. However, today’s industrial hydrogen production still has a considerable CO2 footprint, especially considering processes like steam reforming or non-sustainable electrolysis. A team led by Prof. Dominik Eder from the Institute of Materials Chemistry (TU Wien) is therefore focusing on the development of environmentally friendly processes for obtaining hydrogen, for example by photocatalysis. This process enables the conversion of ...

Biomass, mainly composed of lignocellulose and vegetable oil, has been acclaimed as one of the most promising sustainable sources of raw carbon material for the synthesis of transport fuels and value-added chemicals. The catalytic conversion of lignocellulose/vegetable oil and their related derivatives has attracted great attention in biomass valorization. Many elegant methods including hydrolysis, dehydration, hydrogenation, hydrogenolysis, oxidation, etherification, esterification, amination, aldol condensation, ...

When raindrops fall from the sky, they can produce a small amount of energy that can be harvested and turned into electricity. It is a small-scale version of hydropower, which uses the kinetic energy of moving water to produce electricity. Researchers have proposed that the energy collected from raindrops could be a potential source of clean, renewable power. However, this technology has been difficult to develop on a large scale, which has limited its practical application.   To collect raindrop energy, a device called a triboelectric ...

Homologous recombination (HR) is an important process that plays multiple crucial roles during meiosis, a type of cell cycle dedicated to sexual reproduction. During HR, homologous DNA molecules exchange their genetic material. During the meiotic prophase, DNA are clipped throughout the genome, forming numerous DNA double-strand breaks. Such DNA breaks attract homologous recombination enzymes, which promote pairing of homologous chromosomes. Dmc1 is one such meiosis-specific recombinase in eukaryotes (organisms that have a clearly defined nucleus), ...

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are versatile materials composed of interconnected organic molecules held together by covalent bonds. These frameworks can be constructed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional (3D) forms which possess a unique combination of low density, high surface area, and easily tunable properties. Among the various types of COFs, imine-linked COFs have garnered considerable attention owing to their exceptional thermal and chemical stability as well as their broad scope of monomeric starting materials. However, traditional bulk synthetic methods for COFs often yield powders that are insoluble ...

As necessary as cooling technologies are, we’re still operating on an outdated technology that can be considered a significant contributor to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, vapor compression cycle-based cooling (VCC) is the standard for reliable cooling of air conditioning and refrigeration, but by switching to electrocaloric cooling (EC) researchers are hoping to create a more environmentally friendly, scalable and compressor-free method of cooling to benefit businesses, families and the environment.   The researchers published their work in iEnergy on ...