Participants at the 6th Joint Science Conference of the Western Balkans Process have developed a "10 Point Plan" to control the coronavirus pandemic in the Western Balkans. Participants at the virtual two-day meeting also discussed priorities for the time after the pandemic in the Western Balkans and South East Europe. These include a decent healthcare system, climate neutrality, reduction of air and water pollution, and the digitalization of education, public administration, industry and healthcare. The conference was jointly organized by the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Polish Academy of Sciences as part of the Western Balkans ...

Although hypomorph mammals (or equids) are currently represented by only one genus ('Equus') and just a handful of species of horses, donkeys and zebras, they were more diverse during the Eocene epoch (between 56 and 33.9 million years ago). One of the most widespread groups in Europe, which was an archipelago at that time, were the palaeotheriidae, named after the genus 'Palaeotherium', described in 1804 from fossils originating in the quarries of Montmartre (Paris) by the famous French naturalist George Cuvier. The international Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has recently published a paper on a study led by Leire Perales-Gogenola describing two new species of palaeotheriidae mammals that inhabited the subtropical landscape of Zambrana (Álava) ...

Big hydropower plants are an important source of clean and cheap electricity for many countries in Southeast Asia. However, dams harm the environment and have dire consequences on local communities. Building more dams would therefore pose major trade-offs between electricity supply and environmental protection. A team of scientists based in Singapore showed that these two challenges can be decoupled. Their study, titled "Solar energy and regional coordination as a feasible alternative to large hydropower in Southeast Asia", recently published in Nature Communications, showed that there are more sustainable pathways to a clean energy future (refer to figure below). Building on high resolution mathematical models of the Thai, Laotian, and Cambodian ...

Researchers from Skoltech and the Mental Health Research Center have found 22 lipids in the blood plasma of people with schizophrenia that were associated with lower symptom improvement over time during treatment. These can help track resistance to medication that affects over a third of patients. The paper was published in the journal Biomolecules. Studies suggest that up to 34% of people living with schizophrenia can be resistant to two or more antipsychotic medications used to treat the disorder. Individual responses vary greatly, and there are no satisfactory biomarkers of treatment response yet, which can often turn finding the right medication into a painful ...

TAMPA, Fla. (July 6, 2021) - All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate. A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine looked at the consequences of sleeping fewer than six hours for eight consecutive nights - the minimum duration of sleep that experts say is necessary to support optimal health in average adults. Lead author Soomi Lee, assistant professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, found the biggest jump in symptoms appeared after just one night of sleep loss. The number of mental and physical problems steadily got worse, peaking on day three. At that point, research shows the human body got relatively used to repeated sleep loss. But that all ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Daowei Lin, Zhixiao Han, Yanni Fu, Xiaoqiu Zhu, Jin Li, Hui Xu, Jing Wen, Fei Wang and Mingyan Guo from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, China, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA discuss how interscalene brachial plexus block combined with general anesthesia attenuates stress and inflammatory response in arthroscopic shoulder surgery. In arthroscopic shoulder surgery, general ...

Singapore, 7 July 2021 - In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with the iconic 'Eleanor Rigby', a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at number one on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. "We found that lonely older adults can expect to live a shorter life than their peers who don't perceive themselves as ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Xiao'en Shi, Xu Zhang, Xinlu Zhang, Haizhen Guo and Sheng Wang from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China discuss the integration of reactive oxygen species generation and prodrug activation for cancer therapy. The combination of chemotherapeutic drugs and reactive oxygen species (ROS) can improve cancer treatment outcome. Many ROS-generation strategies can specifically consume tumor-inherent oxygen and generate ROS, resulting in amplified ROS level and aggravated hypoxia. Therefore, the ROS generation strategy can integrate with prodrug activation strategy to realize synergetic therapy. In recent years, stimuli-responsive nanomedicines have ...

Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Using sophisticated simulations of the whole of the Local Group of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their respective satellite ...

By analyzing the genomes of 99 species of vinegar flies and evaluating their chemical odor profiles and sexual behaviors, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology show that sex pheromones and the corresponding olfactory channels in the insect brain evolve rapidly and independently. Female flies are able to recognize conspecific males through their specific odor profiles. Interestingly, closely related species show distinct differences in odor profiles, which helps to prevent mating between different species. Males, in turn, chemically mark females during mating so that they become less attractive to other males. The ...

July 6, 2021 - Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has a major impact on the lives of affected patients and families. But it doesn't necessarily lead to an increased risk of marital instability, as two-thirds of patients with TBI are still married to the same partner 10 years after their injury, reports a study in the July/August issue of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation (JHTR). The official journal of the Brain Injury Association of America, JHTR is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. For marriages that do end, divorce most often occurs within the first year after TBI, according to the new research by Flora M. Hammond, MD, of Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, and colleagues. "Our data dispel ...

The onset of the Indian summer monsoon has been predicted three months ahead for the last 40 years with the highest precision up until today. The result indicates longer seasonal forecasts based on machine learning may be a way to mitigate the consequences of an erratic monsoon system under future global warming. Dr. Takahito Mitsui and Dr. Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK Potsdam), Germany, published the results in Environmental Research Letters. The work is part of the European TiPES project, Coordinated from The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and PIK Potsdam. Millions of people as well as natural habitats depend on the ...

BOSTON - A novel therapy recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for patients with Alzheimer's disease amid considerable controversy should not be prescribed by physicians off-label for cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), a similar cerebrovascular condition, according to Steven Greenberg, MD, PhD, director of the Hemorrhagic Stroke Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and president of the International Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy Association (ICAAA). In a letter published in The Lancet Neurology, Greenberg and eight other officers of the association wrote that there is no clinical evidence that the monoclonal antibody aducanumab is beneficial to patients with CAA, a condition in which proteins known ...

Chromosomal instability is a feature of solid tumours such as carcinoma. Likewise, cellular senescence is a process that is highly related to cellular ageing and its link to cancer is becoming increasingly clear. Scientists led by ICREA researcher Dr. Marco Milán at IRB Barcelona have revealed the link between chromosomal instability and cellular senescence. "Chromosomal instability and senescence are two characteristics common to most tumours, and yet it was not known how one related to the other. Our studies indicate that senescence may be one of the intermediate links between chromosomal alterations and cancer," says Dr. Milan, head of the Development and Growth Control laboratory at IRB Barcelona. "The behaviour we saw in cells with chromosomal instability ...

(Boston)--During neuropsychological assessments, participants complete tasks designed to study memory and thinking. Based on their performance, the participants receive a score that researchers use to evaluate how well specific domains of their cognition are functioning. Consider, though, two participants who achieve the same score on one of these paper-and-pencil neuropsychological tests. One took 60 seconds to complete the task and was writing the entire time; the other spent three minutes, and alternated between writing answers and staring off into space. If researchers ...

BOSTON -- As we age, our brains typically undergo a slow process of atrophy, causing less robust communication between various brain regions, which leads to declining memory and other cognitive functions. But a rare group of older individuals called "superagers" have been shown to learn and recall novel information as well as a 25-year-old. Investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have now identified the brain activity that underlies superagers' superior memory. "This is the first time we have images of the function of superagers' brains as they actively learn and remember new information," says Alexandra Touroutoglou, PhD, director of Imaging ...

Scientists at the University of Leeds have developed an approach that could help in the design of a new generation of synthetic biomaterials made from proteins. The biomaterials could eventually have applications in joint repair or wound healing as well as other fields of healthcare and food production.   But one of the fundamental challenges is to control and fine tune the way protein building blocks assemble into complex protein networks that form the basis of biomaterials.   Scientists at Leeds are investigating how changes to the structure and mechanics of individual protein building blocks - changes at the nanoscale - can alter the structure and mechanics of the biomaterial ...

Two model studies document the probability of climate tipping in Earth subsystems. The findings support the urgency of restricting CO2 emissions as abrupt climate changes might be less predictable and more widespread in the climate system than anticipated. The work is part of the European TiPES project, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark but was conducted by Professor Michael Ghil, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and coauthours from The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium and Parthenope University of Naples, Italy. Tipping could be imminent It is often assumed climate change will proceed gradually as we increase the amounts of CO2 in ...

Streptococcus pneumoniae is a major human pathogen and a leading cause of several infectious diseases including pneumonia, the third-leading cause of death in Portugal. In Europe, S. pneumoniae is the most common cause of community-acquired bacterial pneumonia in adults. Still, very little is known about its colonization within this age group. A team of researchers from ITQB NOVA has now taken a crucial step to clarify the dynamics of carriage of this bacterium in adults. This bacterium, also known as pneumococcus, can asymptomatically colonize the human upper respiratory tract. Colonization not only precedes diseases but is also essential for transmission. Even ...

In 2011, scientists confirmed a suspicion: There was a split in the local cosmos. Samples of the solar wind brought back to Earth by the Genesis mission definitively determined oxygen isotopes in the sun differ from those found on Earth, the moon and the other planets and satellites in the solar system. Early in the solar system's history, material that would later coalesce into planets had been hit with a hefty dose of ultraviolet light, which can explain this difference. Where did it come from? Two theories emerged: Either the ultraviolet light came from our then-young sun, or it came from a large nearby star in the sun's stellar nursery. Now, researchers from the lab of Ryan Ogliore, assistant professor of physics in Arts ...

The neocortex is a layered structure of the brain in which neurons are arranged parallel to each other. This organization is critical for healthy brain function. A team of researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin have uncovered two key processes that direct this organization. Reporting in Science Advances*, the researchers identify one crucial factor which ensures the timely movement of neurons into their destined layer and, subsequently, their final parallel orientation within this space. The neocortex is the outer region of the brain. It is responsible for cognitive functions such as language, decision-making, and ...

A research team, led by Professor Guntae Kim in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST has introduced an innovative way to quantify proton kinetic properties of triple (H+/O2?/e?) conducting oxides (TCOs) being a significant indicator for characterizing the electrochemical behavior of proton and the mechanism of electrode reactions. Layered perovskites have recently received much attention as they have been regarded as promising cathode materials for protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) that use proton conducting oxide (PCO) as an electrolyte. Therefore, quantitative characterization of the proton kinetics in TCO can be an important indicator providing a scientific ...

Psychologists from UNSW Sydney have developed a new face identification ability test that will help find facial recognition experts for a variety of police and government agencies, including contract tracing. The Glasgow Face Matching Test 2 [GFMT2] targets high-performing facial recognition individuals known as super-recognisers, who have an extraordinary ability to memorise and recall faces. The type of professional roles that involve face identification and that could benefit from the test include visa processors, passport issuers, border control officers, ...

Cells play a precise game of telephone, sending messages to each other that trigger actions further on. With clear signaling, the cells achieve their goals. In disease, however, the signals break up and result in confused messaging and unintended consequences. To help parse out these signals and how they function in health -- and go awry in disease -- scientists tag proteins with labels they can follow as the proteins interact with the molecular world around them. The challenge is figuring out which proteins to label in the first place. Now, a team led by researchers from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) has developed a new approach to identifying and tagging the specific proteins. They published their results on June 1 in Angewandte ...

AUSTIN, Texas -- A diagnostic tool called the MasSpec Pen has been tested for the first time in pancreatic cancer patients during surgery. The device is shown to accurately identify tissues and surgical margins directly in patients and differentiate healthy and cancerous tissue from banked pancreas samples. At about 15 seconds per analysis, the method is more than 100 times as fast as the current gold standard diagnostic, Frozen Section Analysis. The ability to accurately identify margins between healthy and cancerous tissue in pancreatic cancer surgeries can give patients the greatest chance of survival. The results, by a team from ...