What is happening in your brain as you are scrolling through this page? In other words, which areas of your brain are active, which neurons are talking to which others, and what signals are they sending to your muscles? Mapping neural activity to corresponding behaviors is a major goal for neuroscientists developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs): devices that read and interpret brain activity and transmit instructions to a computer or machine. Though this may seem like science fiction, existing BMIs can, for example, connect a paralyzed person with a robotic ...

The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in nursing homes, causing many families to rethink whether to keep an aging parent at home instead. Now a new study by UC San Francisco has found that many elderly Americans lack the basic self-care equipment that could enable them to live at home longer, postponing the need to move into residential care facilities. In the study, researchers focused on three inexpensive, low-tech assistive devices: grab bars around the toilet and in the shower or tub area; a shower or tub seat; and a raised toilet or toilet seat. They identified approximately 2,600 seniors who were representative of Medicare recipients nationwide and were drawn from the National Health and Aging ...

Social deficits attract so much attention in the study of autism spectrum disorder, it's easy to forget there are motor learning deficits during early childhood as well. For autistic kids hoping to throw a ball around the schoolyard and connect with classmates, these physical skill differences can isolate a child further. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Medicine have closed in on the neurological underpinnings of the motor learning delay. Dr. Simon Chen's lab in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine used a mouse model of autism to demonstrate a shortage ...

Though 40 million concussions are recorded annually, no effective treatment exists for them or for many other brain-related illnesses. In collaboration with Dragan Maric of the National Institutes of Health, Badri Roysam, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his team are working to speed up drug development to treat brain diseases and injuries like concussion by developing new tools. "We are interested in mapping and profiling unhealthy and drug-treated brain tissue in unprecedented detail to reveal multiple biological processes at once - in context," said Roysam about his latest paper published ...

NEW YORK, NY (March 22, 2021)--The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the lives of millions of people around the world but has also left hundreds with lingering symptoms or completely new symptoms weeks after recovery. Much is unknown about what causes these symptoms and how long they last. But with nearly 740,000 cases of COVID reported in New York City since last March--and 28 million in the United States--physicians are increasingly seeing these "long-haulers" in their practices. "Over the course of the summer, we started getting a sense of what issues these people were having," ...

Organoids are tiny three-dimensional cellular assemblies that are grown in a laboratory from tissue-specific cells. They are particularly interesting to biologists because of their ability to mimic the characteristics of the original tissues. If scientists extract cells from a tumor, then they can grow cancer organoids that mimic the characteristics of the source tumor. This possibility for individual-level studies of tumor properties makes cancer organoids an exciting tool from the perspective of an emerging field called precision cancer medicine. Daniel Gil of the University of Wisconsin ...

CLEVELAND--A new technique for sampling and testing cells from Barrett's esophagus (BE) patients could result in earlier and easier identification of patients whose disease has progressed toward cancer or whose disease is at high risk of progressing toward cancer, according to a collaborative study by investigators at Case Western Reserve University and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center (JHKCC). Published in the journal Gastroenterology, the findings show the combination of esophageal "brushing" with a massively parallel sequencing method can provide an accurate assessment of the ...

For something we spend one-third of our lives doing, we still understand remarkably little about how sleep works -- for example, why can some people sleep deeply through any disturbance, while others regularly toss and turn for hours each night? And why do we all seem to need a different amount of sleep to feel rested? For decades, scientists have looked to the behavior of the brain's neurons to understand the nature of slumber. Now, though, researchers at UC San Francisco have confirmed that a different type of brain cell that has received far less study -- astrocytes, named for their star-like shape -- can influence how long and how deeply animals sleep. The findings could open new avenues for exploring sleep disorder therapies and help scientists better understand brain diseases linked ...

A large study of brain MRI scans from 11,679 nine- and ten-year-old children reviewed by UC San Francisco neuroradiologists identified potentially life-threatening conditions in 1 in 500 children, and more minor but possibly clinically significant brain abnormalities in 1 out of 25 children. The results provide the best estimates to date of the true incidence of various structural abnormalities in the developing brain, and raise the question of whether all MRI brain imaging obtained during research studies should be reviewed by board-certified radiologists, as was done in this study, in the hopes of saving lives and alerting participants to incidental findings that ought to be medically evaluated. One ...

How the amygdala responds to viewing negative and subsequent neutral stimuli may impact our daily mood, according to new research published in JNeurosci. The amygdala evaluates the environment to find potential threats. If a threat does appear, the amygdala can stay active and respond to new stimuli like they are threatening too. This is helpful when you are in a dangerous situation, but less so when spilling your coffee in the morning keeps you on edge for the rest of the day. In a recent study, Puccetti et al. examined data collected from the "Midlife ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (03/22/2021) -- New research from the University of Minnesota Medical School suggests that disease-driving B cells, a white blood cell, play a role in the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) - the most common chronic liver condition in the U.S. Their findings could lead to targeted therapies for NAFLD, which currently affects a quarter of the nation and has no FDA-approved treatments. After noticing that patients with the disease showed a large number of inflammatory B cells in their livers, Xavier Revelo, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and senior author, began studying B cells in NAFLD. "This disease is increasing in prevalence ...

Although Tuberculosis, or TB, killed nearly as many people as COVID-19 (approx. 1.8 million) in 2020, it did not receive as much media and public attention. The pandemic has proven that transmissible infection is indeed a global issue. TB remains a serious public health concern in Ireland, particularly with the presence of multi-drug resistant types and the numbers of complex cases here continuing to rise, with cases numbering over 300 annually. Science tells us that iron is crucial for daily human function, but it is also an essential element for the survival of ...

Batteries charge and recharge--apparently all thanks to a perfect interplay of electrode material and electrolyte. However, for ideal battery function, the solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) plays a crucial role. Materials scientists have now studied nucleation and growth of this layer in atomic detail. According to the study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the properties of anions and solvent molecules need to be well balanced. In lithium-ion batteries, the SEI forms at the beginning of the first charging process, when a potential is applied. Elements from the electrolyte deposit on the graphite electrode and form a coating that soon ...

Antibiotics have revolutionized the field of medicine by making it possible to treat most known microbial diseases today. However, their uncontrolled usage has led to the major global problem of antibiotic resistance. As we continue to exploit antibiotics, sometimes at doses much higher than needed, disease-causing bacteria are rapidly evolving defense strategies to evade them. These drug-resistant bacteria, also known as "superbugs," cause severe infections that are difficult to treat and can eventually be fatal. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a particularly vicious group of superbugs that have developed resistance to the antibiotic methicillin, is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. Accurate and timely diagnosis ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Beneath the cold, dark depths of the Arctic ocean sit vast reserves of methane. These stores rest in a delicate balance, stable as a solid called methane hydrates, at very specific pressures and temperatures. If that balance gets tipped, the methane can get released into the water above and eventually make its way to the atmosphere. In its gaseous form, methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, warming the Earth about 30 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Understanding possible sources of atmospheric methane is critical for accurately predicting future climate change. In the Arctic Ocean today, ice sheets exert pressure on the ground below them. That pressure diffuses ...

Screenings for breast cancer and colon cancer dropped dramatically during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, but use of the procedures returned to near-normal levels by the end of July 2020, according to a new study. Analyzing insurance claims from more than 6 million Americans with private health coverage, researchers found that mammography rates among women aged 45 to 64 declined by 96% during March and April 2020 as compared to January and February. Similarly, the weekly rate of colorectal cancer screenings among adults aged 45 to 64 and older declined by 95% during the period. By the end of July 2020, however, the rate of mammograms among women had rebounded and was slightly higher than it had been before the pandemic was declared. The rate of colonoscopies also rebounded, ...

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have been shedding light on the enigmatic "spiders from Mars", providing the first physical evidence that these unique features on the planet's surface can be formed by the sublimation of CO2 ice. Spiders, more formally referred to as araneiforms, are strange-looking negative topography radial systems of dendritic troughs; patterns that resemble branches of a tree or fork lightning. These features, which are not found on Earth, are believed to be carved into the Martian surface by dry ice changing directly from solid to gas (sublimating) in the spring. Unlike Earth, Mars' atmosphere comprises mainly of CO2 and as temperatures decrease in winter, this deposits onto the surface as CO2 ...

Optical resonators provide the foundation of modern photonics and optics. Thanks to its extreme energy confinement, the high-Q-factor optical resonator optimizes light-matter interaction and photonic device performance by enabling low-threshold laser and enhanced nonlinear harmonic generation. Two typical structures, the photonic crystal cavity and the whispering gallery cavity, are frequently used to obtain extremely high-Q factors. However, these structures may require dimensions that are comparable to--or several times larger than--the operating wavelength. Whether there is a general way to find out all high-Q modes in a dielectric ...

The tuberculosis (TB) burden in the WHO European Region as a whole is decreasing, and is down 19% overall for 2015-2019, according to the latest WHO/European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) report Tuberculosis surveillance and monitoring in Europe 2021 (2019 data). Regional TB mortality has gone down, declining by 9.4% between 2018 and 2019. This is notably higher than the average global decline in TB mortality (3.7%) and enough to have reached the End TB Strategy milestone of a 35% reduction by 2020 compared to 2015. However, TB is second only to COVID-19 as an infectious disease that kills, and drug resistance is a major concern. There are also worrying indications that the COVID-19 pandemic may stall progress or cause significant setbacks in the fight against TB. The ...

Developing a standardized drying protocol for goldenseal could lead to more predictable health applications and outcomes by preserving the alkaloids found in the plant, which is native to Appalachia, according to Penn State researchers, who conducted a new study of the medicinal forest herb. The roots and rhizomes of goldenseal -- Hydrastis canadensis -- have been used for hundreds of years as a source of antimicrobials and compounds to treat intestinal ailments, noted study co-author Eric Burkhart, associate teaching professor, ecosystem science ...

Antibody injections are a highly desirable treatment for people with chronic diseases such as cancer, psoriasis, Crohn's disease and arthritis. And recently, antibodies have been in the news as a promising treatment for severe cases of COVID-19. But the costly, time-consuming manufacturing process to produce antibodies prevents these treatments from being accessible to most patients. Andrew Zydney, Bayard D. Kunkle Chair and professor of chemical engineering at Penn State, has identified a new method to manufacture antibodies, which could drive down the production cost. His research results were recently published in Biotechnology Progress. "If you look at the top 10 best-selling medications, by annual sales, eight ...

A new type of rock created during large and exceptionally hot volcanic eruptions has been discovered beneath the Pacific Ocean. An international team of researchers including the University of Leeds unearthed the previously unknown form of basalt after drilling through the Pacific ocean floor. The discovery suggests that ocean floor eruptions sourced in the Earth's mantle were even hotter and more voluminous than previously thought. Report co-author is Dr Ivan Savov, of Leeds' Institute of Geophysics and Tectonics, in the university's School of Earth and Environment. He said: "In an era when we rightly admire discoveries made through space exploration, our findings show there are still many discoveries still to make on our ...

The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events like droughts and floods have taken a toll on the midwestern U.S. in recent years, putting a major strain on the region's farmers. From 2001 to 2010, the Federal Crop Insurance Program, a government program created to protect farmers from crop loss, covered $4.1 billion in damages; in 2011 alone, the program paid out $10.8 billion. With the largest U.S. crop -- corn -- conservatively estimated to drop in yield anywhere from 20 to 80 percent due to extreme weather exacerbated by climate change, insurance claims may skyrocket to levels that may not be sustainable. But researchers from the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) found that by considering soil properties when determining insurance premiums ...

Less than a decade after unveiling the "Map of Life," a global database that marks the distribution of known species across the planet, Yale researchers have launched an even more ambitious and perhaps important project -- creating a map of where life has yet to be discovered. For Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale who spearheaded the Map of Life project, the new effort is a moral imperative that can help support biodiversity discovery and preservation around the world. "At the current pace of global environmental change, there is no doubt that many species will go extinct before we have ever learned ...

Efficient conversion of CO2 is strategically significant for alleviating the energy crisis and achieving the goal of carbon neutrality. One promising conversion route is the hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol using a renewable energy-based "green hydrogen" source. Traditional metal oxide catalysts for this reaction typically require a high temperature (>300 oC), which tends to promote undesired reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) side reactions, thus producing a large amount of CO as the by-product. Introduction of transition metal components onto metal oxides can promote the activation of H2, thereby reducing the reaction temperature, but this also facilitates excessive hydrogenation of CO2 to CH4, leading to lowered methanol selectivity. Further improvement of the performance ...