Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a genetically inherited group of red blood cell disorders. END ...

DURHAM, N.C. - A group of researchers have discovered the detailed inner workings of the molecular motor that packages genetic material into double-stranded DNA viruses. The advance provides insight into a critical step in the reproduction cycle of viruses such as pox- herpes- and adeno-viruses. It could also give inspiration to researchers creating microscopic machines based on naturally occurring biomotors. The research was conducted by scientists from Duke University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). The results appear online in a trilogy of papers published in Science Advances, ...

WHO: JoAnn Manson, MD, DrPH, Physician and Epidemiologist, Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital; co-author of a new Perspective piece published in The New England Journal of Medicine (pdf attached) WHAT: Less than 50 years ago, a U.S. Supreme Court decision paved the way for women's use of contraception irrespective of marital status, and a year later, in 1973, the Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women have a right to legalized abortion. In recent decades, clinical researchers and policymakers alike have made important strides ...

You would not be surprised to see an elephant in the savanna or a plate in your kitchen. Based on your prior experiences and knowledge, you know that is where elephants and plates are often to be found. If you saw a mysterious object in your kitchen, how would you figure out what it was? You would rely on your expectations or prior knowledge. Should a computer approach the problem in the same way? The answer may surprise you. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Partha Mitra described how he views problems like these in a "Perspective" in Nature Machine Intelligence. He hopes his insights will help researchers teach computers how to analyze complex systems more effectively. Mitra thinks it helps to understand the nature of knowledge. Mathematically speaking, many data scientists ...

The surface of the sun churns with energy and frequently ejects masses of highly-magnetized plasma towards Earth. Sometimes these ejections are strong enough to crash through the magnetosphere -- the natural magnetic shield that protects the Earth -- damaging satellites or electrical grids. Such space weather events can be catastrophic. Astronomers have studied the sun's activity for centuries with greater and greater understanding. Today, computers are central to the quest to understand the sun's behavior and its role in space weather events. The ...

MADISON, Wis. -- For birds and other wildlife, winter is a time of resource scarcity. Extreme winter weather events such as a polar vortex can push some species to the edge of survival. Yet winter tends to get short shrift in climate change research, according to UW-Madison forest and wildlife ecology Professor Ben Zuckerberg. "When we think about the impact of climate change, winter tends to be overlooked as a time of year that could have significant ecological and biological implications," says Zuckerberg. "It makes me, and my colleagues, think quite deeply about the impacts of these extreme events during this time when species are particularly vulnerable." Zuckerberg, ...

Using a piece of magnet, researchers have designed a simple system that can control the movement of a small puddle of water, even when it's upside down. The new liquid manipulation strategy, described in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science on June 3, can have a wide range of applications including cleaning hard-to-reach environments or delivering small objects. Previous attempts to control the movement of fluids often relied on special platforms. For example, on a surface that has one section more hydrophobic than another, water will spontaneously ...

Anyone that's ever interacted with a dog knows that they often have an amazing capacity to interact with people. Now researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on June 3 have found that this ability is present in dogs from a very young age and doesn't require much, if any, prior experience or training. But, some of them start off better at it than others based on their genetics. "We show that puppies will reciprocate human social gaze and successfully use information given by a human in a social context from a very young age and prior to extensive experience with humans," said Emily E. Bray of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "For example, even before puppies have left their littermates to live ...

Whales are largely protected from direct catch, but many populations' numbers still remain far below what they once were. A study published in the journal Current Biology on June 3 suggests that, in addition to smaller population sizes, those whales that survive are struggling. As evidence, they find that right whales living in the North Atlantic today are significantly shorter than those born 30 to 40 years ago. "On average, a whale born today is expected to reach a total length about a meter shorter than a whale born in 1980," said Joshua Stewart of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in La Jolla, CA. That represents an average decline in length of about 7%. "But that's just the average--there are also some extreme cases where young whales are several ...

Patients who, perhaps unbeknownst to their health care providers, are in need of genetic testing for rare undiagnosed diseases can be identified en masse based on routine information in electronic health records (EHRs), a research team reported today in the journal Nature Medicine. Findings from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center study suggest that, among the patients of any sizeable health care system, there are hundreds or thousands with undiagnosed rare diseases of the sort where a genetic test could lead to a diagnosis. "Patients with rare genetic diseases often face ...

What The Study Did: Changes in pregnancy and birth rates before and after COVID-19 lockdown measures were estimated using electronic medical records. Authors: Molly J. Stout, M.D., of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, 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/jamanetworkopen.2021.11621) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full study is linked to this news release. Embed this link to provide your readers free access ...

Quantum computers with their promises of creating new materials and solving intractable mathematical problems are a dream of many physicists. Now, they are slowly approaching viable realizations in many laboratories all over the world. But there are still enormous challenges to master. A central one is the construction of stable quantum bits - the fundamental unit of quantum computation called qubit for short - that can be networked together. In a study published in Nature Materials and led by Daniel Jirovec from the Katsaros group at IST Austria in close collaboration with researchers from the L-NESS Inter-university Centre in Como, Italy, scientists now have created a new and promising candidate system for reliable qubits. Spinning Absence The researchers created the qubit using the ...

Dogs may have earned the title "man's best friend" because of how good they are at interacting with people. Those social skills may be present shortly after birth rather than learned, a new study by University of Arizona researchers suggests. Published today in the journal Current Biology, the study also finds that genetics may help explain why some dogs perform better than others on social tasks such as following pointing gestures. "There was evidence that these sorts of social skills were present in adulthood, but here we find evidence that puppies - sort of like humans - are biologically prepared to interact in these social ways," said lead study author Emily Bray, a postdoctoral research associate in the UArizona School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral ...

(Toronto, June 3, 2021) -- The impact of deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) for radiation cancer therapy in a real-world clinical setting has been tested by Princess Margaret researchers in a unique study involving physicians and their patients. A team of researchers directly compared physician evaluations of radiation treatments generated by an AI machine learning (ML) algorithm to conventional radiation treatments generated by humans. They found that in the majority of the 100 patients studied, treatments generated using ML were deemed to be clinically acceptable for patient treatments by physicians. Overall, 89% of ML-generated treatments were considered clinically acceptable for treatments, ...

For reasons unknown, Earth's solid-iron inner core is growing faster on one side than the other, and it has been ever since it started to freeze out from molten iron more than half a billion years ago, according to a new study by seismologists at the University of California, Berkeley. The faster growth under Indonesia's Banda Sea hasn't left the core lopsided. Gravity evenly distributes the new growth -- iron crystals that form as the molten iron cools -- to maintain a spherical inner core that grows in radius by an average of 1 millimeter per year. But the enhanced growth on one side suggests that something in Earth's outer core or mantle under Indonesia is removing heat from the inner core at a faster rate than on the opposite side, under Brazil. Quicker cooling on one side would ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC), working in partnership with researchers at the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) in Canada, have identified Meis transcription factors as essential biomolecules for the formation and antero-posterior patterning of the limbs during embryonic development. In the study, published in Nature Communications, the research team carried out an in-depth characterization of the Meis family of transcription factors. Genetic deletion of all four family members showed that these proteins are essential for the formation of the limbs during embryonic development. "An embryo that develops in the absence of Meis does not ...

Regular strength and impact-type training may decrease or even prevent age-related bone deterioration in men, new research at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, shows. The tibial bone properties of middle-aged and older male sprint athletes were followed over 10 years. The study presents novel findings on maintaining the adaptability of the aging skeleton and on the importance of regular intensive training for maintaining bone health. "Part of the age-related bone loss is probably explained by reduced levels of physical activity. Especially intensive, bone-loading exercise ...

Affecting more than one in a hundred children, autism spectrum disorder is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders. It has a particular impact on social interaction, including difficulties in understanding other people's perspectives, beliefs, desires and emotions, known as 'theory of mind'. Bilingual families with an autistic child often tend - and are sometimes encouraged - to forego the use of one of the home languages, so as not to further complicate the development of their child's communicative skills. A researcher from the University of Geneva (UNIGE, Switzerland), in collaboration with the Universities ...

So-called quantum dots are a new class of materials with many applications. Quantum dots are realized by tiny semiconductor crystals with dimensions in the nanometre range. The optical and electrical properties can be controlled through the size of these crystals. As QLEDs, they are already on the market in the latest generations of TV flat screens, where they ensure particularly brilliant and high-resolution colour reproduction. However, quantum dots are not only used as "dyes", they are also used in solar cells or as semiconductor devices, right up to computational building blocks, the qubits, of a quantum computer. Now, a team led by Dr. Annika Bande at HZB has extended the understanding of the interaction between several quantum dots with an ...

A biomarker in the blood of patients with bowel cancer may provide valuable insight into the risk of cancer relapse after surgery and the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Research published in PLOS found circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) measured before and after surgery provided a reliable marker for predicting whether the cancer would recur following chemotherapy treatment. The ctDNA also provided a real-time measure of the effectiveness of chemotherapy, highlighting the potential for this test to provide an early indication of the success of chemotherapy in eradicating microscopic cancer. At a glance By measuring levels of ctDNA present in the blood of bowel cancer patients after surgery, researchers were able to predict the likelihood ...

If insomnia keeps you awake at night, Flinders University researchers recommend a trip to the doctor - not for a sleeping pill prescription but for a short course of intensive behavioural therapy. Researchers have developed new clinical guidelines for Australian doctors to give family GPs insights into the most effective treatment for insomnia - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia (or 'CBTi'). CBTi improves insomnia, mental health and quality of life, and can be more successful than sleeping pills, say Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health (AISH) sleep experts from Flinders University in a new paper in the Australian Journal of General Practice. Most patients with insomnia managed in general practice are prescribed potentially addictive ...

Paleo researcher Charlotte Prud'homme, who until recently worked at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and is now a researcher at the Université Lausanne, explains: "The 80-meter-thick sedimentary sequence we found at Charyn Canyon in southeast Kazakhstan provides us with a virtually continuous record of five million years of climate change. This is a very rare occurrence on land!" The alternating dust and soil layers provide the first reliable evidence, in one place, of long-term interactions between major climate systems on the Eurasian continent. "Over the past five million years, the land surfaces of Eurasia appear to ...

The so-called 'bullshit jobs theory' - which argues that a large and rapidly increasing number of workers are undertaking jobs that they themselves recognise as being useless and of no social value - contains several major flaws, argue researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham. Even so, writing in Work, Employment and Society, the academics applaud its proponent, American anthropologist David Graeber, who died in September 2020, for highlighting the link between a sense of purpose in one's job and psychological wellbeing. Graeber initially put forward the concept of 'bullshit jobs' - jobs that even those who do them view as worthless - in his 2013 essay ...

Researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, showed that the antibody treatment reactivates the immune defense in patients with advanced-stage cancer. The treatment alters the function of the body's phagocytes and facilitates extensive activation of the immune system. The immune defense is the body's own defense system equipped to combat cancer. However, cancer learns to hide from immune attacks and harnesses this system to promote its own growth. Therefore, it would be beneficial to be able to return the immune defense back to restricting the advancement of cancer. Macrophages, a type of white blood cell, are central in the fight against cancer. Cancer educates ...

RUDN University mathematician and his colleagues from France and Hungary developed an algorithm for parallel computing, which allows solving applied problems, such as electrodynamics or hydrodynamics. The gain in time is up to 50%. The results are published in the Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics. Parallel computing methods are often used to process practical problems in physics, engineering, biology, and other fields. It involves several processors joined in a net to simultaneously solve a single problem -- each has its own small part. The way to distribute the work between the processors and make them "communicate" with each other is a choice based on the specifics of a particular problem. ...