New research from the Florida State University College of Medicine has found that the personality trait neuroticism is consistently associated with a higher risk of developing the brain disorder Parkinson's disease. The research by Professor of Geriatrics Antonio Terracciano and team, published in Movement Disorders, found that adults in the study who scored in the top quartile of neuroticism had more than 80% greater risk of Parkinson's, compared to those who scored lower on neuroticism. "Some clinicians think that the anxiety and depression is just the result of Parkinson's," Terracciano said. "However, our findings suggest that some emotional vulnerability is present early in life, ...

AMHERST, Mass. - Last month saw the average concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) climb to almost 418 parts-per-million, a level not seen on Earth for millions of years. In order to get a sense of what our future may hold, scientists have been looking to the deep past. Now, new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which combines climate, ice sheet and vegetation model simulations with a suite of different climatic and geologic scenarios, opens the clearest window yet into the deep history of the Antarctic ice sheet and what our planetary future might hold. The Antarctic ice sheet has attracted the particular interest of the scientific community because it is "a lynchpin in the earth's climate system, affecting everything from ...

Financial stress can have an immediate impact on well-being, but can it lead to physical pain nearly 30 years later? The answer is yes, according to new research from University of Georgia scientists. The study, published in Stress & Health, reveals that family financial stress in midlife is associated with a depleted sense of control, which is related to increased physical pain in later years. "Physical pain is considered an illness on its own with three major components: biological, psychological and social," said Kandauda A.S. Wickrama, first author and professor in the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "In older adults, it co-occurs with other health problems like limited physical functioning, loneliness and cardiovascular ...

Florida State University researchers have discovered a novel way to improve the performance of electrical wires used as high-temperature superconductors (HTS), findings that have the potential to power a new generation of particle accelerators. An image of Bi-2212, bismuth-based superconducting wires. (Mark Wallheiser/FAMU-FSU College of Engineering) Researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy to understand how processing methods influence grains in bismuth-based superconducting wires (known as Bi-2212). Those grains form the underlying ...

Amyloid fibrils are deposits of proteins in the body that join together to form microscopic fibres. Their formation has been linked to many serious human diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes. Until today, scientists have been unable to reliably measure the speed of fibril growth, as there have been no tools that could directly measure growth rate in solution. However, researchers from the UK's University of Bath and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source have now invented a technique that does just that. Results from their study are published in RSC Chemical Biology. "This is an important breakthrough, ...

In a newly released study, researchers found that remote and virtual care models can negatively impact small physician offices. Three researchers from END ...

To better understand the psychological and physical impact caused by the profound consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic - and also inform priorities for interventions and policy changes to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic -- researchers from the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute developed and deployed the CoRonavIruS health and Impact Survey (CRISIS). This questionnaire covered key topics relating to mental distress and resilience during the pandemic. According to a newly-published manuscript of the findings, perceived risk of COVID-19, prior mental health status, and lifestyle changes were key predictors of mental health during the pandemic in adults and children surveyed in the U.S. and U.K. In the study, supported by the Morgan Stanley ...

URBANA, Ill. - Agricultural producers deal firsthand with changing weather conditions, and extreme events such as drought or flooding can impact their productivity and profit. Climate change models project such events will occur more often in the future. But studies of the economic consequences of weather and climate on agriculture typically focus on local impacts only. A new study from the University of Illinois looks at how changes in weather - including extreme events - may decrease crop profit in one state while increasing profits in other states. The secret ingredient: U.S. interstate trade. It is expected to mitigate ...

The field of ancient DNA has revealed important aspects of our evolutionary past, including our relationships with our distant cousins, Denisovans and Neandertals. These studies have relied on DNA from bones and teeth, which store DNA and protect it from the environment. But such skeletal remains are exceedingly rare, leaving large parts of human history inaccessible to genetic analysis. To fill these gaps, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed new methods for enriching and analyzing human nuclear DNA from sediments, which are abundant at almost every archaeological site. Until now, only ...

The widespread proliferation of the internet and information and communication technologies (ICT) has drawn people into urban centres, according to new research. Despite being able to access data at the drop of a hat or speak face-to-face to people on the other side of the world, the evolution of technological capabilities hasn't led to an exodus from cities. In fact experts at the University of Bristol have found quite the opposite; that the increased adoption of ICT has resulted in national urban systems - cities within a country - that are characterised by higher population concentrations. ...

A new generation of miniature recording probes can track the same neurons inside tiny mouse brains over weeks -- and even months. The new tools build on the success of the original Neuropixels probes released in 2017 and currently used in more than 400 labs. Neuropixels 2.0 are much smaller -- about a third the size of their predecessors. They're designed to record the electrical activity from more individual neurons and have the unique ability to track this activity over extended time periods. That makes them especially useful for studying long-term phenomena like learning and memory in small animals such as mice, says Tim Harris, a senior fellow at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus who led the project. Harris and his colleagues describe the advance in a paper published online ...

Irvine, Calif., -- By analyzing gains and losses in the genes of phytoplankton samples collected in all major ocean regions, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have created the most nuanced and high-resolution map yet to show where these photosynthetic organisms either thrive or are forced to adapt to limited quantities of key nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron. As part of the new Bio-GO-SHIP initiative, the UCI scientists made eight deployments on six different research vessels, spending 228 days at sea in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. They generated nearly 1,000 ocean metagenomes from 930 locations around the globe, with an average distance between collection points at 26.5 kilometers (about 16.5 miles). ...

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold. Desalination -- the removal of salt -- is only one step in the process of producing drinkable water, or water for agriculture or industry, from ocean or waste water. Either before or after the removal of salt, the water often has to be treated to remove boron, which is toxic to plants, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, which are toxic to humans. Often, the process leaves ...

Being constantly hungry, no matter how much you eat - that's the daily struggle of people with genetic defects in the brain's appetite controls, and it often ends in severe obesity. In a study published in Science on April 15, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, together with colleagues from the Queen Mary University of London and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, have revealed the mechanism of action of the master switch for hunger in the brain: the melanocortin receptor 4, or MC4 receptor for short. They have also clarified how this switch is activated by setmelanotide (Imcivree), ...

Hafnium-based thin films, with a thickness of only a few nanometres, show an unconventional form of ferroelectricity. This allows the construction of nanometre-sized memories or logic devices. However, it was not clear how ferroelectricity could occur at this scale. A study that was led by scientists from the University of Groningen showed how atoms move in a hafnium-based capacitor: migrating oxygen atoms (or vacancies) are responsible for the observed switching and storage of charge. The results, which were published online by the journal Science on 15 April, point the way to new ferroelectric materials. Ferroelectric ...

Researchers from King's College London have created 3D replicas of full-sized healthy adult hearts from Computed Tomography (CT) images and analyzed how cardiac shape relates to function. Published today in PLOS Computational Biology, the study also includes 1000 new synthetic hearts that have been made open access allowing researchers to download and use them to test new algorithms, test in-silico therapies, run more statistical analyses or generate specific shapes from the average models. Statistical shape analysis is a technique that allows the rigorous study of the anatomical changes of the heart across different subjects. Using this technique, from a cohort of 20 healthy adult hearts the researchers created an average heart and ...

PHILADELPHIA--People who have recovered from COVID-19 had a robust antibody response after the first mRNA vaccine dose, but little immune benefit after the second dose, according to new research from the Penn Institute of Immunology. The findings, published today in Science Immunology, suggest only a single vaccine dose may be needed to produce a sufficient antibody response. The team found that those who did not have COVID-19--called COVID naïve--did not have a full immune response until after receiving their second vaccine dose, reinforcing the importance of completing the two recommended doses for achieving strong levels of immunity. The study provides more insight on the underlying immunobiology of mRNA vaccines, ...

Even the mention of parasites can be enough to make some people's skin crawl. But to recent UC Santa Barbara doctoral graduate Dana Morton these creepy critters occupy important ecological niches, fulfilling roles that, in her opinion, have too often been overlooked. That's why Morton has just released the most extensive ecological food web that includes parasites. Eight years in the making, the dataset includes over 21,000 interactions between 942 species, all thoroughly annotated. The detailed description, published in the journal Scientific Data, is a boon for basic research, conservation efforts and resource management. Understanding ...

The abundant biological and mineral diversity of the Rio Grande Rise, a seamount in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean about 1,500 km from the coast of Brazil, is probably due to a great extent to little-known microscopic creatures.  Researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo's Oceanographic Institute (IO-USP), collaborating with colleagues at the UK's National Oceanography Center, investigated the microorganisms inhabiting the seamount's ferromanganese crusts and concluded that bacteria and archaea are probably responsible for maintaining the abundant local life, ...

A new analysis of antibody and B cell responses in 44 people who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines shows that only one dose may be needed for previously infected patients who have since recovered. The study also supported that two doses is optimal to induce strong antibody and B cell responses in patients who are immunologically naïve for SARS-CoV-2, and antibodies induced by the vaccination could protect against the more infectious and deadly South African variant. The results build on an increasing body of research suggesting that people ...

Cancer is an insidious disease that, despite being around for centuries, is still very difficult to diagnose and treat. Thus, cancer has been the focus much research in the biomedical fields. Today, with research methods advancing rapidly and the base pool of researchers growing constantly, our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of cancer formation and proliferation have increased, and new more promising treatment avenues have opened up. In a END ...

A new study from North Carolina State University found that, on average, voters and local leaders showed greater concern about plastic and other garbage in the ocean after watching kids' presentations. The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Political Science, built on previous research that found educating kids about climate change was linked to an increase in concern in parents. The new findings indicate kids can have a broader impact outside of their families. "Our lab has already established that kids can have an impact across the dinner table, and it's cool to see that they can also have an impact within ...

A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun's mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas - called an accretion disk - that surrounds each one. Viewed from near the orbital plane, each accretion disk takes on a characteristic double-humped look. But as one passes in front of the other, the gravity of the foreground black hole transforms its partner into a rapidly changing sequence of arcs. These distortions play out as light from both disks navigates the tangled fabric of space and time near the black holes. "We're seeing two supermassive black holes, a larger ...

From cancer treatment to sunlight, radiation and toxins can severely damage DNA in both harmful and healthy cells. While the body has evolved to efficiently treat and restore damaged cells, the mechanisms that allow this natural repair remain misunderstood. In a new study, Northwestern University researchers have used cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to visualize this process by illuminating the mysterious cycle of DNA breakage sensing and repair. The researchers believe this new information could potentially form the basis for understanding how cells respond to chemotherapy and radiation and potentially ...

The complex patterns of genetic ancestry uncovered from genomic data in health care systems can provide valuable insights into both genetic and environmental factors underlying many common and rare diseases--insights that are far more targeted and specific than those derived from traditional ethnic or racial labels like Hispanic or Black, according to a team of Mount Sinai researchers. In a study in the journal Cell, the team reported that this information could be used to better understand and predict which populations are more susceptible to certain disorders--including cancers, asthma, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease--and to potentially develop early interventions. "This is the first time researchers have shown how ...