The ability to predict and interpret modifications of ribonucleic acid (RNA) has been a welcome advance in biochemistry research. However, existing predictive approaches have a key drawback--they can only predict a single type of RNA modification without supporting multiple types or providing insightful interpretation of their prediction results. Researchers from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, led by Dr Jia Meng, have addressed this issue by developing a model that supports 12 RNA modification types, greatly expanding RNA research prediction and interpretation. "To the best of our knowledge, ...

While tropical forests remain threatened and their future is uncertain, the importance of understanding how well individual protected areas avoid deforestation increases. Researchers from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki, Finland, have investigated this question in a newly published study that focuses on the State of Acre in Brazilian Amazonia. Tropical forests are unique environments that have huge species diversity and also act as important reservoirs of organic carbon, thereby counteracting climate change. However, their area is diminishing due to deforestation, ...

Tsukuba, Japan - A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Haruka Ozaki of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research at the University of Tsukuba in collaboration with Dr. Koichi Takahashi from RIKEN used mathematical algorithms to optimize the schedule of automated biology laboratory robots. By analyzing the needs of time-sensitive samples that require investigation using multiple instruments, the researchers were able to maximize the number of experiments that can be performed within time and laboratory resource constraints. This work may help in the design of future automated biology labs and other workspaces. Biology laboratories have seen increasing automation because many tasks, like pipetting solutions or moving cells from one ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Most of the tests that doctors use to diagnose cancer -- such as mammography, colonoscopy, and CT scans -- are based on imaging. More recently, researchers have also developed molecular diagnostics that can detect specific cancer-associated molecules that circulate in bodily fluids like blood or urine. MIT engineers have now created a new diagnostic nanoparticle that combines both of these features: It can reveal the presence of cancerous proteins through a urine test, and it functions as an imaging agent, pinpointing the tumor location. In principle, this diagnostic could be used to detect cancer anywhere in the body, including tumors that have metastasized from their original locations. "This is a really broad sensor intended to respond to both primary tumors and their ...

Reno, Nev. (July 15, 2021) - Wildfire smoke may greatly increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to new research from the Center for Genomic Medicine at the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Washoe County Health District (WCHD), and Renown Health (Renown) in Reno, Nev. In a study published earlier this week in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, the DRI-led research team set out to examine whether smoke from 2020 wildfires in the Western U.S. was associated with an increase in SARS-CoV-2 infections in Reno. To ...

A new study by Vanderbilt University Medical Center researchers of more the 400,000 Medicare patients taking medications for insomnia found that the risk of death is increased when either benzodiazepines or "z-drugs" are taken with opioids. The study, published July 15 in PLOS Medicine and led by Wayne Ray, PhD, professor of Health Policy at VUMC, compared patients taking these drugs with opioids to comparable patients taking trazodone, another commonly prescribed sleep medication for older patients. The researchers found that those using benzodiazepines had a 221% increase in the risk of death from ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - July 16, 2021 - An international research group, led by Jamey Marth, Ph.D., a professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys, has shown that the Neuraminidase 3 (Neu3) enzyme is responsible for the onset and progression of colitis--a chronic digestive disease caused by inflammation of the colon. The study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was performed in a model of recurrent human food poisoning previously linked with the condition. The findings represent a scientific advance toward a targeted therapy to help the millions of people worldwide affected by the disorder. "Our new research demonstrates how increased activity of ...

Increases in maternal opioid use have led to an almost doubling in the number of babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) in the U.S. in the past 10 years. This statistic led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and American Academy of Pediatrics to call for stepped-up efforts to reduce opioid use during pregnancy, such as ensuring access to contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies among women who use opioids. More than 75% of women with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) report having had an unintended pregnancy, but they are less likely to use effective ...

A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colourful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), show different components of the galaxies in distinct colours, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of young stars and the gas they warm up around them. By combining these new observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, the team is helping shed new light on what triggers gas to form stars. Astronomers know that stars are born in clouds of gas, but what sets off star formation, and how galaxies as a whole play into it, remains a mystery. To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Although some people may yearn for sports to be free of political or racial divisiveness, a new study shows how impossible that dream may be. Researchers found that Americans' views on two hot-button issues in sports were sharply divided by racial, ethnic and political identities. In addition, their opinions on topics unrelated to sports, like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, also were linked to their beliefs about the two sports issues. The study analyzed opinions on whether college athletes should be paid and whether it is acceptable for pro athletes to protest ...

University of Utah paleontologists David Peterman and Kathleen Ritterbush know that it's one thing to use math and physics to understand how ancient marine creatures moved through the water. It's another thing to actually put replicas of those creatures into the water and see for themselves. They're among the scientists who are, through a range of methods including digital models and 3-D printed replicas, "de-fossilizing" animals of the past to learn how they lived. Peterman, Ritterbush and their colleagues took 3-D printed reconstructions of fossil cephalopods to actual water tanks (including a University of Utah swimming pool) to see how their shell structure may have been tied to their movement and lifestyle. Their research is published in PeerJ ...

Bottom Line: The investigational therapeutic ficlatuzumab in combination with chemotherapy showed signs of clinical efficacy in patients with relapsed/refractory acute myeloid leukemia. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research Author: Senior author Charalambos Andreadis, MD, professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and first author Victoria Wang, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of hematology and oncology at UCSF Background: "Only about half of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) will achieve long-term disease control," said ...

Byron Bay (16/7/2021) - A new study from WCS and WWF reveals that nearly 20 percent of tropical Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) overlap with concessions for extractive industries such as mining, oil and gas. The total area of overlap is 376,449 square miles (975,000 square kilometers), about the size of Egypt. Mining concessions overlap most with tropical IFLs, at 11.33 percent of the total area, while oil and gas concessions overlap with 7.85 percent of the total area. IFLs are globally important for conserving biodiversity and fighting climate change. ...

Oncotarget published "Occurence of RAS reversion in metastatic colorectal cancer patients treated with bevacizumab" which reported that a disappearance of RAS mutations in the plasma of about 50% of mCRCs treated with bevacizumab-based chemotherapy has been reported. Using next-generation sequencing and real-time PCR approaches, these authors characterized the primary tumor and paired liver metastases in 28 RAS mutant mCRCs. RAS mutant alleles are at the same percentage in PT and liver metastases in the control group, while a significant reduction of the level ...

Hiroshi Tanimoto, Director of the Earth System Division at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Japan, and Astrid Müller together with their international research team, have developed a new method to evaluate satellite observations of XCO2 over open ocean areas, which are currently inaccessible through established validation network sites. In the new approach, a reference CO2 dataset is formulated by combining cargo ship and passenger aircraft observations which were conducted in cooperation with operators of the private sector. (Background) After the Paris Agreement entered into force, commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are being expedited. CO2 is the most important anthropogenically produced greenhouse ...

Researchers from National University of Singapore and Stanford University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that investigates how rural consumers in India shift their expenditures towards branded consumption when they migrate to urban areas. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "The Economic and Social Impacts of Migration on Brand Expenditure: Evidence from Rural India" and is authored by Vishal Narayan and Shreya Kankanhalli. With Covid-19 disrupting work patterns and increased investment in rural employment, many of India's 450 million internal migrants are returning to their villages. Consumer goods companies view this as an opportunity to grow their presence in rural markets, with migrants serving as unofficial brand ambassadors ...

A team of researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), the University of Liège and the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy have developed a microswimmer that appears to defy the laws of fluid dynamics: their model, consisting of two beads that are connected by a linear spring, is propelled by completely symmetrical oscillations. The Scallop theorem states that this cannot be achieved in fluid microsystems. The findings have now been published in the academic journal Physical Review Letters. Scallops can swim in water by quickly clapping their shells together. They are large enough to still be able to move forwards through the moment of inertia while the scallop ...

The UK government's latest pandemic plan involves recklessly exposing millions of people to the acute and long-term effects of mass infection, warn experts in The BMJ today. A strategy that chooses mass infection in the young now over vaccination in order to achieve greater population immunity to protect the vulnerable in winter, is "unethical and unscientific" say Dr Deepti Gurdasani and colleagues. Instead of allowing infections to rise, they urge the government to take urgent actions to inform and protect the public and prepare for autumn. These include outlining a long-term strategy for pandemic control, keeping basic measures ...

A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Leuven in Belgium has further elucidated an intriguing process that could be an important step toward a methanol fuel economy with abundant methane as the feedstock, an advance that could fundamentally change how the world uses natural gas. Methanol - the simplest alcohol - is used to make various products, like paints and plastics, and as an additive to gasoline. Rich in hydrogen, methanol can drive new-age fuel cells that could yield significant environmental benefits. If natural gas, of which methane ...

In a new study from University of California San Diego School of Medicine, researchers have confirmed that patients taking statin medications had a 41 percent lower risk of in-hospital death from COVID-19. The findings were published July 15, 2021 in PLOS ONE and expand upon prior research conducted at UC San Diego Health in 2020. Statins are commonly used to reduce blood cholesterol levels by blocking liver enzymes responsible for making cholesterol. They are widely prescribed: The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 93 percent of patients who use a cholesterol-lowering drug use a statin. "When faced with this virus at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of speculation ...

Undeniably the shark movie to end all shark movies, the 1975 blockbuster, Jaws, not only smashed box office expectations, but forever changed the way we felt about going into the water - and how we think about sharks. Now, more than 40 years (and 100+ shark movies) on, people's fear of sharks persists, with researchers at the University of South Australia concerned about the negative impact that shark movies are having on conservation efforts of this often-endangered animal. In a world-first study, conservation psychology researchers, UniSA's Dr Briana Le Busque and Associate Professor Carla Litchfield have evaluated how sharks are portrayed in movies, finding that ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study shows that it is possible to use mechanical force to deliberately alter chemical reactions and increase chemical selectivity - a grand challenge of the field. The study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Jeffrey Moore and Stanford University chemist Todd Martinezz demonstrates how external mechanical forces alter atomic motions to manipulate reaction outcomes. The study findings are published in the journal Science. "We think of chemical reactions as molecules moving on a surface of potential energy in the way hikers follow the contour map of mountains and valleys along a trail," said lead author Yun ...

Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they've found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland's (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe2 for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor--a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices. "Nature can be wicked," says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. "There could be other reasons we're seeing all this wacky stuff, but ...

A new national study published in Public Health Nutrition on July 15 found that Americans experiencing food insufficiency were three times as likely to lack mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic than those not experiencing food insufficiency. The most extreme form of food insecurity, food insufficiency occurs when families do not have enough eat. Among a nationally representative sample of 68,611 adults who participated in the US Census Household Pulse Survey in October 2020, 11% reported food insufficiency. Of those, 24% also reported an unmet mental health need compared to 9% of food-sufficient adults. "Hunger, exhaustion, and stress related to not getting enough food to eat may lead ...

A national study published in the Journal of Pediatrics found that Emergency Department (ED) visits by youth for self-harm were nearly 40 percent higher in rural areas compared to urban settings. Strikingly, ED visits by youth for self-inflicted firearm injuries were three times more common in rural areas. Youth from rural areas presenting to the ED for suicidal ideation or self-harm also were more likely to need to be transferred to another hospital for care, which underscores the insufficient mental health resources in rural hospitals. "Our study used pre-pandemic data, and we know that increased attention to youth mental health is even more pressing now everywhere, ...