Alzheimer’s is considered a disease of old age, with most people being diagnosed after 65. But the condition actually begins developing out of sight many years before any symptoms emerge. Tiny proteins, known as amyloid-beta peptides, clump together in the brain to form plaques. These plaques lead to inflammation and eventually cause neuronal cell death. Interplay of proteins in the brain reveals disease mechanism Exactly what triggers these pathological changes is still unclear. “We’re lacking good diagnostic markers that would allow us to reliably detect the disease at an early stage or make predictions about its course,” says Professor ...

UPTON, NY—Putting a suite of new materials synthesis and characterization methods to the test, a team of scientists from the University of Iowa and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has developed 14 organic-inorganic hybrid materials, seven of which are entirely new. These uranium-based materials, as well as the detailed report of their bonding mechanisms, will help advance clean energy solutions, including safe nuclear energy. The work, currently published online, was recognized as both a Very Important Paper and a Hot Topic: Crystal Engineering in ...

Research is shedding light on kidneys, their critical functions, and predictors of disease. The research co-led by Matthias Kretzler, M.D. describes the creation of a cellular atlas of the kidney describing nearly 100 cell types and states. It represents the most comprehensive study of cellular states, neighborhoods, and outcome-associated signatures in the kidney. Researchers from more than twenty institutions collaborated on this project. Kidneys monitor and maintain the internal balance in the body, filter out ...

Research conducted at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil shows that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can infect liver cells (hepatocytes), stimulating glucose production and leading to a condition similar to diabetes (hyperglycemia) in hospitalized patients, even if their blood sugar level was normal before they were admitted to hospital. An article on the study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings describe part of the mechanism used by the virus to infect liver cells and impair glucose metabolism, and point ...

Carbon-based materials have several qualities that make them attractive as catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions. They are low-cost, lightweight and their high surface area provides a good scaffold on which to anchor catalysts, keeping them stable and dispersed far apart, while providing molecules a lot of surface area to work. This makes carbons useful for energy storage and sensors. Over the last 10 years, carbons have been used in electrochemistry to catalyze reactions to make chemicals and fuel cells. However, ...

In a world increasingly concerned about the environmental and geopolitical implications of fossil fuel usage, nuclear energy has resurfaced as a subject of great interest. Its ability to generate electricity at scale without greenhouse gas emissions holds promise as a sustainable clean energy source that could bridge society’s transition away from fossil fuels to a net-zero future. However, nuclear power generation does produce radioactive waste. The safe management of nuclear waste remains a crucial challenge that must be addressed to gain public confidence in this transformative power solution. Now, a team of University of Houston researchers has come up with an innovative ...

  A widely-used tool that finds the exact references needed to pinpoint differences in our DNA just got a refresh. On 17 July, the Standards Steering Committee of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) voted to release refget v2.0. With better compatibility for a range of reference genome names, formats, and systems, the new version of refget makes it easier than ever to retrieve verified genomic reference sequences.   A vital infrastructure You may not even realise that you’re using refget already. “Almost ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – Higher levels of vitamin B-related amino acids may be linked to the risk of dementia associated with a certain type of air pollutants called particulate matter, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that pollution or amino acids cause dementia, but it suggests a possible link among them. Researchers ...

Philadelphia, July 19, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that cancer patients who continued to smoke after their diagnosis were significantly more likely to receive treatment for tobacco use when “nudges” to provide tobacco treatment were directed at clinicians through the electronic health record. The findings strengthen the case for using behavioral economics, or targeting predictable patterns in human decision-making to overcome ...

New Haven, Conn. — Decades after Purdue Pharma began to push physicians to prescribe addictive pain pills, the opioid crisis has been a slow-motion disaster, with overdoses destroying lives and families across the country. Now, it appears the consequences of those early marketing efforts are even more devastating. In a new study, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health show that infectious disease rates in the United States also climbed as a direct long-term result of the marketing of OxyContin. By ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – People who start taking medication soon after the first signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) may have a lower risk of disability later, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. MS is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. Symptoms of MS may include fatigue, numbness, ...

You’re a poker wizard. A friend knows all about French cuisine. Another friend is a Mozart expert. The three of you get together and share knowledge about your respective expertise. Each of you leaves learning something from the other two. People learn a lot by sharing and exchanging information. Can computers do the same with other computers—can robots, in effect, teach other robots how to learn by sharing knowledge? A team of researchers led by computer science Professor Laurent Itti and one of his Ph.D. students, Yunhao Ge, address this question in ...

As molecular biologists at Boston University and as husband and wife, Ruslan Afasizhev and Inna Afasizheva, have worked together for decades. Together, they have published dozens of papers on the mechanics of mitochondrial DNA and RNA in a single-celled, disease-causing parasite called Trypanosoma brucei. Now, years of breakthroughs have led to their latest paper published in Science, which provides a detailed look at a mystifying process called RNA editing and could potentially help treat a deadly disease. In ...

Researchers led by a team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created the first tool to map and visualize the areas where human settlements and nature meet on a global scale. The tool, which was part of a study recently published in Nature, could improve responses to environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of zoonotic diseases and loss of ecosystem biodiversity. These areas where people and wildlands meet are called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI for short. More technically, a WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) describes anywhere that has at least one house per 40 acres and is also 50% covered by wildland ...

Using an innovative method for measuring doctor turnover, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers determined that between 2010 and 2018, the annual rate at which physicians left their practices increased by 43 percent, from 5.3 percent to 7.6 percent a year.  The causes of this trend are not known, but warrant further investigation, according to the researchers. The study, published July 11 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also found that the first three quarters of 2020 (the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States) were not associated with higher turnover. However, more data are needed to fully understand turnover trends related to COVID-19. Whether doctors ...

New research from the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus has determined that enjoying a tasting at a winery goes well beyond the sip. Professor Annamma Joy, with UBCO’s Faculty of Management, conducts research in the area of consumer behaviour and branding with a special focus on luxury brands, fashion brand experiences, wineries and wine tourism. Dr. Joy, along with her collaborators and students, studied several Okanagan wineries over a three-year period to comprehensively document the experiences ...

Laura-Isobel McCall, Ph.D., and Zhibo Yang, Ph.D., co-principal investigators and associate professors of chemistry and biochemistry in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, have been awarded a prestigious R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health for their project, “Novel single-cell mass spectrometry to assess the role of intracellular drug concentration and metabolism in antimicrobial treatment failure.” “Our project builds upon Dr. ...

“This evidence strengthens the relevance of the findings by Pietrobono et al., shedding light on the potential application of SMO inhibitors in concert with BRD4 inhibitors.” BUFFALO, NY- July 19, 2023 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on May 26, 2023, entitled, “Combined targeting of HEDGEHOG signaling and BRD4 as a novel therapeutic option against melanoma.” The Hedgehog-GLI (HH/GLI) pathway is aberrantly activated in several types of cancer. Canonical HH/ GLI pathway is triggered by binding of HH ligands to the twelve-pass transmembrane receptor Patched 1 (PTCH1), which retrieves its inhibition ...

A study of data from about 500,000 people in the UK Biobank has uncovered small but statistically significant associations between signs of systemic inflammation and later risk of dementia. Dr. Krisztina Mekli of The University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 19, 2023. Millions of people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, and researchers are working to tease out the complex mechanisms behind these conditions. Prior research has suggested that inflammation—activation of the body’s innate immune system—may ...

Women working as STEM instructors are more likely than men in the same profession to disclose to their undergraduate students identities which could carry stigma, such as depression or growing up in a low-income household. In the new study, published July 19, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, Carly Busch of Arizona State University, USA, and colleagues suggest that these decisions to disclose may be in order to act as role models for students. Concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs) are identities that ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283134 Article Title: Gradient-mixing LEGO robots for purifying DNA origami nanostructures of multiple components by rate-zonal centrifugation Author Countries: USA Funding: The research in Hariadi lab was supported by the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (1DP2AI144247), National Science Foundation SemiSynBio II (2027215), and Arizona Biomedical Research Consortium (ADHS17-00007401). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287719 Article Title: A double-pointed wooden throwing stick from Schöningen, Germany: Results and new insights from a multianalytical study Author Countries: UK, Germany Funding: T.T. and this project are funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 447423357. https://www.dfg.de/. The project is further funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture, with funds from the Future Lower Saxony Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation – project ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285372 Article Title: Ear health and quality of life in pet rabbits of differing ear conformations: A UK survey of owner-reported signalment risk factors and effects on rabbit welfare and behaviour Author Countries: UK Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. M.R.D.K included some of this questionnaire in part-fulfilment of her Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine at Royal Veterinary College. ...

Philadelphia, July 19, 2023—Why do nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) exacerbate gastrointestinal infections by Clostridioides difficile, the leading cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea worldwide? In a new paperpublished in Science Advances, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have begun to answer that question, showing that NSAIDs disrupt the mitochondria of cells lining the colon, sensitizing them to damage by pathogenic toxins.  Clostridioides ...

A 300,000-year-old hunting weapon has shone a new light on early humans as woodworking masters, according to a new study. State-of-the-art analysis of a double-pointed wooden throwing stick, found in Schöningen in Germany three decades ago, shows it was scraped, seasoned and sanded before being used to kill animals. The research indicates early humans’ woodworking techniques were more developed and sophisticated than previously understood. The findings, published today (Wednesday, 19 July) in PLOS ONE, also suggest the ...