As the driver of global atmospheric and ocean circulation, the tropics play a central role in understanding past and future climate change. Both global climate simulations and worldwide ocean temperature reconstructions indicate that the cooling in the tropics during the last cold period, which began about 115,000 years ago, was much weaker than in the temperate zone and the polar regions. The extent to which this general statement also applies to the tropical high mountains of Eastern Africa and elsewhere is, however, doubted on the basis of palaeoclimatic, geological and ecological studies at high elevations. A research team led by Alexander Groos, Heinz Veit (both from the Institute of Geography) and Naki Akçar (Institute of Geological Sciences) at the University ...

How much did SARS-CoV-2 need to change in order to adapt to its new human host? In a research article published in the open access journal PLOS Biology Oscar MacLean, Spyros Lytras at the University of Glasgow, and colleagues, show that since December 2019 and for the first 11 months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic there has been very little 'important' genetic change observed in the hundreds of thousands of sequenced virus genomes. The study is a collaboration between researchers in the UK, US and Belgium. The lead authors Prof David L Robertson (at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, Scotland) ...

Informing how COVID-19 response plans may incorporate digital contact tracing, a model of COVID-19 spread within a simulated French population found that if about 20% of the population adopted a contact tracing app on their smartphones, an outbreak could be reduced by about 35%. If more than 30% of the population adopted the app, the epidemic could be suppressed to manageable levels. Jesús Moreno López and colleagues note that the effectiveness of digital contact tracing would depend on a given population's level of immunity to the virus; the intervention alone would be unable to suppress a COVID-19 epidemic where transmission - and especially asymptomatic transmission - remains high. While many countries have implemented ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- If you binged on high-calorie snacks and then spent the winter crashed on the couch in a months-long food coma, you'd likely wake up worse for wear. Unless you happen to be a fat-tailed dwarf lemur. This squirrel-sized primate lives in the forests of Madagascar, where it spends up to seven months each year mostly motionless and chilling, using the minimum energy necessary to withstand the winter. While zonked, it lives off of fat stored in its tail. Animals that hibernate in the wild rarely do so in zoos and sanctuaries, with their climate controls and ...

Decades of feminist gains in the workforce have been undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has upended public education across the United States, a critical infrastructure of care that parents -- especially mothers -- depend on to work, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. The research, published in Gender & Society, draws on new data from the Elementary School Operating Status (ESOS) database to show that the gender gap between mothers and fathers in the labor force has grown significantly since the onset of the pandemic in states where schools primarily offered remote instruction. And if these circumstances continue, it could deliver ...

Sound sleep plays a critical role in healing traumatic brain injury, a new study of military veterans suggests. The study, published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, used a new technique involving magnetic resonance imaging developed at Oregon Health & Science University. Researchers used MRI to evaluate the enlargement of perivascular spaces that surround blood vessels in the brain. Enlargement of these spaces occurs in aging and is associated with the development of dementia. Among veterans in the study, those who slept poorly had more evidence of these enlarged spaces and more post-concussive symptoms. "This has huge implications for the armed forces as well as civilians," said lead author Juan Piantino, M.D., MCR, assistant professor of pediatrics (neurology) in the ...

Astronomers have painted their best picture yet of an RV Tauri variable, a rare type of stellar binary where two stars - one approaching the end of its life - orbit within a sprawling disk of dust. Their 130-year dataset spans the widest range of light yet collected for one of these systems, from radio to X-rays. "There are only about 300 known RV Tauri variables in the Milky Way galaxy," said Laura Vega, a recent doctoral recipient at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "We focused our study on the second brightest, named U Monocerotis, which is now the first of these systems from which X-rays have been detected." A paper describing the findings, led by Vega, was published in The Astrophysical Journal. The system, called U ...

Water is perhaps Earth's most critical natural resource. Given increasing demand and increasingly stretched water resources, scientists are pursuing more innovative ways to use and reuse existing water, as well as to design new materials to improve water purification methods. Synthetically created semi-permeable polymer membranes used for contaminant solute removal can provide a level of advanced treatment and improve the energy efficiency of treating water; however, existing knowledge gaps are limiting transformative advances in membrane technology. One basic problem is ...

BOSTON -- SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has mutated throughout the pandemic. New variants of the virus have arisen throughout the world, including variants that might possess increased ability to spread or evade the immune system. Such variants have been identified in California, Denmark, the U.K., South Africa and Brazil/Japan. Understanding how well the COVID-19 vaccines work against these variants is vital in the efforts to stop the global pandemic, and is the subject of new research from the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital. In a study recently published in Cell, Ragon Core Member Alejandro Balazs, PhD, found that the neutralizing antibodies induced by the ...

Orono, Maine -- The origins of ice age climate changes may lie in the Southern Hemisphere, where interactions among the westerly wind system, the Southern Ocean and the tropical Pacific can trigger rapid, global changes in atmospheric temperature, according to an international research team led by the University of Maine. The mechanism, dubbed the Zealandia Switch, relates to the general position of the Southern Hemisphere westerly wind belt -- the strongest wind system on Earth -- and the continental platforms of the southwest Pacific Ocean, and their control on ocean currents. Shifts in the latitude of the westerly winds affects the strength ...

March 12, 2021 - Financial strains like debt or unemployment are significant risk factors for becoming homeless, and even help to explain increased risk of homelessness associated with severe mental illness, reports a study in a supplement to the April issue of Medical Care. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. The findings "suggest that adding financial well-being as a focus of homelessness prevention efforts seems promising, both at the individual and community level," according to the new research, led by Eric Elbogen, PhD, of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center on Homelessness and Duke University School of Medicine. The study appears as part of a special issue on ...

Mantle cell lymphoma is a malignant disease in which intensive treatment can prolong life. In a new study, scientists from Uppsala University and other Swedish universities show that people with mantle cell lymphoma who were unmarried, and those who had low educational attainment, were less often treated with a stem-cell transplantation, which may result in poorer survival. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Blood Advances. Patients diagnosed with a mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) where the disease has spread receive intensive treatment with cytotoxic drugs and stem-cell transplantation. In a new study, researchers looked at which people are more likely to be offered transplants, and compared survival between those ...

WINSTON-SALEM, NC - March 12, 2021 - The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is investigating how cats with chronic kidney disease could someday help inform treatment for humans. In humans, treatment for chronic kidney disease -- a condition in which the kidneys are damaged and cannot filter blood as well as they should -- focuses on slowing the progression of the organ damage. The condition can progress to end-stage kidney failure, which is fatal without dialysis or a kidney transplant. An estimated 37 million people in the US suffer from chronic kidney disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there are about 58 million ...

If you were given "ultrasound" in a word association game, "sound wave" might easily come to mind. But in recent years, a new term has surfaced: bubbles. Those ephemeral, globular shapes are proving useful in improving medical imaging, disease detection and targeted drug delivery. There's just one glitch: bubbles fizzle out soon after injection into the bloodstream. Now, after 10 years' work, a multidisciplinary research team has built a better bubble. Their new formulations have resulted in nanoscale bubbles with customizable outer shells -- so small and durable that they can travel to and penetrate some of the ...

(BOSTON) -- There is a great need to generate various types of cells for use in new therapies to replace tissues that are lost due to disease or injuries, or for studies outside the human body to improve our understanding of how organs and tissues function in health and disease. Many of these efforts start with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that, in theory, have the capacity to differentiate into virtually any cell type in the right culture conditions. The 2012 Nobel Prize awarded to Shinya Yamanaka recognized his discovery of a strategy that can reprogram adult cells to become iPSCs ...

Arlington, Va. (March 12, 2021)--A new supplement offering guidance on severe COVID-19 management in resource-limited settings is now available on the American Journal of Tropical Medicine (AJTMH) website. Pragmatic Recommendations for the Management of Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients in Low- and Middle-Income Countries was coordinated by a COVID-LMIC Task Force headed by Alfred Papali, MD, of Atrium Health, Charlotte, NC, and Marcus Schultz, MD, PhD, of Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; University of Oxford, United Kingdom; and Amsterdam University Medical Centers, The Netherlands. ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - University at Buffalo computer scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes. The tool proved 94% effective in experiments described in a paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing to be held in June in Toronto, Canada. "The cornea is almost like a perfect semisphere and is very reflective," says the paper's lead author, Siwei Lyu, PhD, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "So, anything that is coming to the eye with a light emitting from those sources will have an image on ...

Reston, VA--Immuno-positron emission tomography (PET) imaging can provide early insight into a tumor's response to targeted therapy, allowing physicians to select the most effective treatment for patients who have cancer. The new research was published in the March issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The research showed that immuno-PET successfully visualizes changes in different cancer receptors (receptor tyrosine kinases, or RTKs) within tumors during targeted therapies. This gives physicians a tool that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment soon after its administration. "When healthy cells turn into cancer cells, there is a disruption in the RTK signaling. This makes RTKs a valuable therapeutic and ...

Leesburg, VA, March 12, 2021--According to an open-access article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), compared with multi-target stool-DNA (mt-sDNA) and fecal immunochemical test (FIT), CT colonography (CTC) with 10 mm threshold most effectively targets advanced neoplasia (AN)--preserving detection while decreasing unnecessary colonoscopies. "CTC performed with a polyp size threshold for colonoscopy referral set at 10 mm represents the most effective and efficient non-invasive screening test for colorectal cancer (CRC) prevention and detection," clarified first author Perry J. Pickhardt from the department of radiology ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Did you ever wonder how social networking applications like Facebook and LinkedIn make recommendations on the people you should friend or pages you should follow? Behind the scenes are machine learning models that classify nodes based on the data they contain about users -- for example, their level of education, location or political affiliation. The models then use these classifications to recommend people and pages to each user. But there is significant bias in the recommendations made by these models -- known as graph neural networks (GNNs) ...

A new study by UC Davis MIND Institute researchers suggests that executive control differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be the result of a unique approach, rather than an impairment. Executive control difficulties are common in individuals with autism and are associated with challenges completing tasks and managing time. The study, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, sought to tease out whether these difficulties represent a disruption in proactive executive control (engaged and maintained before a ...

Quantum dots are manmade nanoparticles of semiconducting material comprising only a few thousand atoms. Because of the small number of atoms, a quantum dot's properties lie between those of single atoms or molecules and bulk material with a huge number of atoms. By changing the nanoparticles' size and shape, it is possible to fine-tune their electronic and optical properties - how electrons bond and move through the material, and how light is absorbed and emitted by it. Thanks to increasingly refined control of the nanoparticles' size and shape, the number ...

A machine learning algorithm that predicts suicide attempt recently underwent a prospective trial at the institution where it was developed, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Over the 11 consecutive months concluding in April 2020, predictions ran silently in the background as adult patients were seen at VUMC. The algorithm, dubbed the Vanderbilt Suicide Attempt and Ideation Likelihood (VSAIL) model, uses routine information from electronic health records (EHRs) to calculate 30-day risk of return visits for suicide attempt, and, by extension, suicidal ideation. Suicide has been on the rise in the U.S. for a generation ...

What The Study Did: Researchers investigated whether acute COVID-19 symptoms are associated with the probability of subsequent depressive symptoms. Authors: Roy H. Perlis, M.D., M.Sc., of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, 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.2021.3223) Editor's Note: Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, ...

What The Study Did: National claims data were used to look at changes in well-child care visits with out-of-pocket costs before and after passage of the Affordable Care Act. Authors: Paul R. Shafer, Ph.D., of Boston University, 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.2021.1248) Editor's Note: Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding ...