Disposable plastics are everywhere: Food containers, coffee cups, plastic bags. Some of these plastics, called compostable plastics, can be engineered to biodegrade under controlled conditions. However, they often look identical to conventional plastics, get recycled incorrectly and, as a result, contaminate plastic waste streams and reduce recycling efficiency. Similarly, recyclable plastics are often mistaken for compostable ones, resulting in polluted compost. Researchers at University College London (UCL) have published a paper in Frontiers ...

Electroluminescence is the production of light with an electrical current, without relying on heat or chemical reactions. This makes electroluminescent lights reliable and highly efficient: they are used as backlights in digital watches and in the displays of Apollo space shuttle guidance computers. Like OLEDs, light-emitting electrochemical cells (LECs)—which emit light through electroluminescence—have undergone many technological advancements. Close examination of the processes that lead to luminescence is essential ...

HOUSTON – (March 13, 2023) – Synthetic biologists at Rice University are embarking on a three-year project to create “genetically encoded antibiotics,” strands of RNA that bacteria will readily copy and share that will selectively kill only disease-causing, pathogenic bacteria. “Most bacteria pose no danger to human health,” said James Chappell, an assistant professor of biosciences and bioengineering at Rice. “The question for us as synthetic biologists is, ‘Can we create genetic programs that move through microbial communities and precisely remove only the bad actors from those communities?’” Thanks ...

One of the key factors of success in a dental implant is the condition of the periodontium around the implant. A higher long-term success rate of dental implants requires sufficient and healthy alveolar bone. In those cases where lack of alveolar bone renders setting an implant difficult, the bone should be regenerated sufficiently to receive the implant, whether before or during the implant surgery. Development of osteogenic barrier coating material for implants by a Korean research team is expected to improve the success rate of alveolar bone grafting.   Three research teams led by Professor Hyung Joon Cha of the Chemical Engineering ...

Scientists have documented plant species for centuries to help us understand and protect the incredible diversity of flora in our world. But according to new research, many have never actually been photographed in their natural habitats – and that’s a problem. Researchers from UNSW Sydney and the Australian Institute of Botanical Science, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, surveyed 33 major online databases of plant photographs to examine the photographic record of Australian plant species. The findings, published in New Phytologist, reveal out of 21,077 native Australian vascular plant species, almost 20 per cent lack a verifiable photograph. Lead ...

Patients-turned-social-media-influencers routinely offer prescription drug advice to their followers and often have close ties with pharmaceutical companies, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research. But they also tend to have good intentions, the study found. The study, published this week in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, provides some of the first insights into the burgeoning, loosely regulated world of so-called “patient influencers,” sharing findings from 26 in-depth interviews about why and how they do it. “The bottom line here is that patient influencers act as a form ...

A video game featuring a mystical character named Rumble has helped Griffith University researchers investigate how school kids fared following lockdown disruption. Dr Jacqueline Allen from Griffith’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice headed up the team looking at self-reported wellbeing in a sample of primary school-aged children in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia. The team used an innovative video game called Rumble’s Quest, developed wholly within Griffith University, which measures the four key facets of wellbeing, as well as ...

Consumption of a traditional Mediterranean-type diet – rich in foods such as seafood, fruit, and nuts – is associated with a reduced risk of dementia, reports a study published in BMC Medicine. Individuals with a higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet had up to 23% lower risk for dementia compared with those who had lower adherence to a Mediterranean diet. Diet may be an important modifiable risk factor for dementia that could be targeted for disease prevention and risk reduction but previous studies exploring the impact of a Mediterranean diet have typically been limited to small sample ...

Great apes spinning behaviours could provide clues about the role of altered states for the origins of the human mind.  Online videos observed great apes spin themselves to deliberately make themselves dizzy.  Researchers say these new findings suggest that the behaviour could be used to understand when humans evolved the desire to seek altered mental states and actively manipulate their mood and perception of reality.  Great apes deliberately spin themselves in order make themselves dizzy, academics at the University ...

Eating a traditional Mediterranean-type diet – rich in foods such as seafood, fruit, and nuts – may help reduce the risk of dementia by almost a quarter, a new study has revealed.   Experts at Newcastle University found that individuals who ate a Mediterranean-like diet had up to 23% lower risk for dementia than those who did not.   This research, published today in BMC Medicine, is one of the biggest studies of its kind as previous studies have typically been limited to small sample sizes and low numbers ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. (March 14, 2023) – The vascular smooth muscle cells that normally give blood vessel walls strength and flexibility proliferate and become destructive in pulmonary hypertension, a typically rapidly progressing condition that makes it hard to get blood inside our lungs and oxygen to our bodies. Now scientists have found that inhibiting a gene essential to making DNA so the cells can take on this uncharacteristic growth, can significantly reduce the destructive cell proliferation and disease progression, they report in the European Heart Journal.  The findings point toward a ...

Endometriosis is a painful, complex condition affecting about 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, but it is poorly understood. A new clinical review published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.220637 provides an overview of the causes, diagnosis and management of endometriosis based on the latest evidence, to help clinicians and patients. The review is timely, as March is Endometriosis Awareness Month. Endometriosis, defined as the presence of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus, is one of the most common gynecologic conditions. It is estimated to affect approximately 1 million women ...

A new analysis by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside shows that even in Blue state California, political attacks on public schools are pervasive and growing, hindering learning and the role schools play in a diverse democracy. Political division and community-level conflict is negatively impacting student interactions, and many California students are experiencing hostility and intolerance in school. Troublingly, the research finds high levels of hostile comments toward LGBTQ students, and racist remarks targeting Latino, and in particular, African American ...

El Camino Health is the first health system in the world to adopt FloPatch, an innovative new technology that monitors blood flow in real time. Developed by Flosonics Medical, FloPatch is the world’s first wireless, wearable Doppler ultra-sound system that helps clinicians better manage intravenous (IV) fluid therapy earlier in the sepsis care pathway.  “Timing is crucial when caring for patients with sepsis. Our nurses have seen firsthand how effective FloPatch is in monitoring the effectiveness of treatment in deteriorating patients, especially those with sepsis and low blood pressure,” said Cheryl Reinking, chief nursing officer at El Camino Health. “We ...

Scientists reveal a potential new approach to treating liver cancer Results in cell and mouse studies may have implications for the development of a new class of anticancer drugs Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have uncovered a potential new approach against liver cancer that could lead to the development of a new class of anticancer drugs. In a series of experiments in cells and mice, researchers found that an enzyme produced in liver cancer ...

FINDINGS A new study published in Science Immunology points to a promising therapeutic approach for future cancer treatments based on natural killer cells (NK), which are immune cells that bind to tumor cells and destroy them. City of Hope scientists created a knockout mouse model for a protein called XBP1s to explore the molecule’s effect on NK cells and its role in fighting cancer. Earlier studies showed that XBPIs strengthened the survival of NK cells, but precisely how was unclear. The team identified a previously unknown mechanism in which interleukin-15 (IL-15) — a protein naturally ...

With a high-speed camera and the luck of being in the right place at the right time, physicist Marcelo Saba, a researcher at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE), and PhD candidate Diego Rhamon obtained a unique image of lightning strikes showing details of the connections to nearby buildings. The image is so special that it appeared on the cover of the 28 December 2022 issue of Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) – one of the most important scientific journals in the field –, which featured an article with Saba as first author. ...

Word lists are the basis of so much research in so many fields. Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub have now developed an algorithm that can be applied to different languages and can expand word lists significantly better than others.   Many projects start with the creation of a word list. Not only in companies when mind maps are created, but also in all areas of research. Imagine you want to find out on which days people are in a particularly good mood by analyzing Twitter postings. Just looking for the word "happy" wouldn't be enough.  Instead, you would have to use an algorithm that detects all tweets that indicate that someone is happy. "So ...

Yersinia bacteria cause a variety of human and animal diseases, the most notorious being the plague, caused by Yersinia pestis. A relative, Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, causes gastrointestinal illness and is less deadly but naturally infects both mice and humans, making it a useful model for studying its interactions with the immune system. These two pathogens, as well as a third close cousin, Y. enterocolitica, which affects swine and can cause food-borne illness if people consume infected meat, have many traits in common, particularly their knack for interfering with the immune system’s ability to respond to infection. The plague pathogen is blood-borne and transmitted by infected ...

Hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel could be limited by a chemical reaction in the lower atmosphere, according to research from Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. This is because hydrogen gas easily reacts in the atmosphere with the same molecule primarily responsible for breaking down methane, a potent greenhouse gas. If hydrogen emissions exceed a certain threshold, that shared reaction will likely lead to methane accumulating in the atmosphere — with decades-long climate consequences. “Hydrogen is theoretically the fuel of the future,” said Matteo Bertagni, a postdoctoral researcher at the High ...

BOSTON – A type of immune therapy called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy has revolutionized the treatment of multiple types of blood cancers but has shown limited efficacy against glioblastoma—the deadliest type of primary brain cancer—and other solid tumors. New research led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer March 10, 2023, suggests that drugs that correct abnormalities in a solid tumor’s blood vessels can improve the delivery and function of CAR-T cell therapy. With CAR-T cell therapy, immune cells are taken from a ...

DETROIT – A team of faculty from Wayne State University has discovered new technology that will quickly and easily detect active Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) infection antibodies. Their work, “Discovery of Novel Transketolase Epitopes and the Development of IgG-Based Tuberculosis Serodiagnostics,” was published in a recent edition of Microbiology Spectrum, a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology. The team is led by Lobelia Samavati, M.D., professor in the Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics in the School of Medicine. ...

AMHERST, Mass. – University of Massachusetts Amherst biologist Lynn Adler has won the Mahoney Life Sciences Prize for her research demonstrating that different kinds of wildflowers can have markedly different effects on the health and reproduction rate of bumblebees. “My lab studies the role that flowers play in pollinator health and disease transmission,” says Adler. “Flowers are of course a food source for pollinators, but, in some cases, nectar or pollen from specific plants can be medicinal. However, flowers are also high-traffic areas, and just like with humans, high-traffic areas can be hotspots for disease transmission. We’re tracing how different populations ...

New research from Washington University in St. Louis provides evidence that modern gender norms and biases in Europe have deep historical roots dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond, suggesting that DNA is not the only thing we inherit from our ancestors. The findings — published on March 13, 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) — highlight why gender norms have remained stubbornly persistent in many parts of the world despite significant strides made by the international ...

Populations of whooper swans grow 30 times faster inside nature reserves, new research shows. Whooper swans commonly spend their winters in the UK and summers in Iceland. In the new study, researchers examined 30 years of data on swans at 22 UK sites – three of which are nature reserves managed by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT). Survival rates were significantly higher at nature reserves, and population growth was so strong that many swans moved to non-protected sites. Based on these findings, the research team – led by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki – project that nature reserves could help double the number ...