Volcanic basalt rocks in the Black Rock Desert, Utah. If you drive south through central Utah on Interstate 15 and look west somewhere around Fillmore, you'll see smooth hills and fields of black rock. The area is, aptly, named the Black Rock Desert. It may not look like much, but you're looking at some of Utah's volcanoes. A pair of earthquake sequences, in September 2018 and April 2019, focused scientists' attention on the Black Rock Desert. The sequences, which included the main quakes and their aftershocks, were very different from the Magna earthquake that shook the Wasatch Front in 2020 and other Utah earthquakes. The Black Rock sequences were captured ...

Since early in the pandemic, COVID-19 has been associated with heart problems, including reduced ability to pump blood and abnormal heart rhythms. But it's been an open question whether these problems are caused by the virus infecting the heart, or an inflammatory response to viral infection elsewhere in the body. Such details have implications for understanding how best to treat coronavirus infections that affect the heart. A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis provides evidence that COVID-19 patients' heart damage ...

Positive psychological effects associated with taking small doses of psychedelic drugs are likely the result of users' expectations, suggests a study published today in eLife. The study - the largest placebo-controlled trial on psychedelics to date - used an innovative 'self-blinding citizen science' approach, where members of the public who were already microdosing implemented their own placebo control following online instructions. The results from the trial may influence future studies in real-world settings. There has been renewed interest in studying whether psychedelic drugs may be a useful treatment for depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorders and other conditions. Few small studies have previously suggested that microdoses ...

A new paper from associate professor Jiandi Wan's group in the UC Davis Department of Chemical Engineering, published in Science Advances, proposes a potential solution to dendrite growth in rechargeable lithium metal batteries. In the paper, Wan's team prove that flowing ions near the cathode can potentially expand the safety and lifespans of these next-generation rechargeable batteries. Lithium metal batteries use lithium metal as the anode. These batteries have a high charge density and potentially double the energy of conventional lithium ion batteries, but safety is a big concern. When they charge, some ions are reduced to lithium ...

In a new study from Shiley Eye Institute at UC San Diego Health, researchers have identified a potential new marker that shows cardiovascular disease may be present in a patient using an optical coherence tomography (OCT) scan -- a non-invasive diagnostic tool commonly used in ophthalmology and optometry clinics to create images of the retina. The finding suggests it may be possible to detect heart disease during an eye examination. In the paper published March 2, 2021 in EClinical Medicine by The Lancet, the research team examined lesions of the retina, the inner-most, light-sensitive layer of the eye, to determine if a cardiovascular disorder may be present. "The eyes are a window into our health, and many diseases can manifest in the eye; cardiovascular ...

NEW YORK, NY--March 2, 2021--In March and April 2020, mental health claim lines for individuals aged 13-18, as a percentage of all medical claim lines, approximately doubled over the same months in the previous year. At the height of the spring wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, this rise in mental health claim lines amounted to 97.0 percent in March and 103.5 percent in April. These are among the many findings in FAIR Health's new white paper, the seventh in its COVID-19 studies, The Impact of COVID-19 on Pediatric Mental Health: A Study of Private Healthcare Claims. In those same months of March and April 2020, all medical claim lines (including mental health claim lines) decreased by approximately ...

When it comes to the evolution of the mammal spine -- think of animals whose backbone allows them to gallop, hop, swim, run, or walk upright -- a key part of the tale is quite simple. Because nonmammalian synapsids, the extinct forerunners to mammals, had similar traits to living reptiles (like having their limbs splayed out to the side instead of tucked into their body like today's mammals), the strongheld belief was that they must have also moved in similar ways. Primarily, their backbones must have moved side-to-side, bending like those of modern lizards, instead of the up-and-down bending motion mammal spines are known for. It's believed over time, and in response to selective pressures, the mammal spine evolved from that lizard like side-to-side bending ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- By modeling wolves in Yellowstone National Park, researchers have discovered that how a population is organized into social groups affects the spread of infectious diseases within the population. The findings may be applicable to any social species and could be useful in the protection of endangered species that suffer from disease invasion. Like other social carnivores, wolves tend to form territorial social groups that are often aggressive toward each other and may lead to fatalities. During these encounters, infectious diseases -- like mange and canine distemper -- can spread between groups, which can further reduce the number of individuals in a group. "Previous social group-disease models have assumed that groups do not change ...

WESTMINSTER, Colorado - March 02, 2021 - Herbicide-resistant weeds have fueled a growing demand for effective, nonchemical weed controls. Among the techniques used are chaff carts, impact mills and other harvest-time practices that remove or destroy weed seeds instead of leaving them on the field to sprout. A recent article in the journal Weed Science explores whether such harvest-time controls would be effective against downy brome, Italian ryegrass, feral rye and rattail fescue - weeds that compete with winter wheat in the Pacific Northwest. Researchers set out to determine whether ...

New research has found that shrimp like creatures on the South Coast of England have 70 per cent less sperm than less polluted locations elsewhere in the world. The research also discovered that individuals living in the survey area are six times less numerous per square metre than those living in cleaner waters. This discovery, published today in Aquatic Toxicology, mirrors similar findings in other creatures, including humans. The scientist leading research at the University of Portsmouth believes pollutants might be to blame, further highlighted by this ...

Resveratrol is a plant compound found primarily in red grapes and Japanese knotweed. Its synthetic variant has been approved as a food ingredient in the EU since 2016. At least in cell-based test systems, the substance has anti-inflammatory properties. A recent collaborative study by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich and the Institute of Physiological Chemistry at the University of Vienna has now shown that the bitter receptor TAS2R50 is involved in this effect. The team of scientists led by Veronika Somoza ...

CHICAGO, March 2, 2021 -- More than 70 percent of dentists surveyed by the American Dental Association (ADA) Health Policy Institute are seeing an increase of patients experiencing teeth grinding and clenching, conditions often associated with stress. This is an increase from ADA data released in the fall that showed just under 60 percent of dentists had seen an increase among their patients. "Our polling has served as a barometer for pandemic stress affecting patients and communities seen through the eyes of dentists," said Marko Vujicic, Ph.D., chief economist and vice president of the ADA Health Policy Institute. "The increase over time suggests stress-related conditions have become substantially more prevalent since the onset of COVID-19." The ...

BOSTON - Lymph nodes in the armpit area can become swollen after a COVID-19 vaccination, and this is a normal reaction that typically goes away with time. Radiologists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) who recently published an approach to managing this situation in women who receive mammograms for breast cancer screening in the American Journal of Roentgenology have now expanded their recommendations to include care for patients who undergo other imaging tests for diverse medical reasons. Their guidance is published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology. "Our ...

A new study published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters used NASA's ice-measuring laser satellite to identify atmospheric river storms as a key driver of increased snowfall in West Antarctica during the 2019 austral winter. These findings from scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and colleagues will help improve overall understanding of the processes driving change in Antarctica, and lead to better predictions of sea-level rise. The study was funded by NASA, with additional support from the Rhodium Group's Climate Impact Lab, a consortium ...

CLEVELAND - Researchers from Cleveland Clinic's Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health have developed a promising new COVID-19 vaccine candidate that utilizes nanotechnology and has shown strong efficacy in preclinical disease models. According to new findings published in mBio, the vaccine produced potent neutralizing antibodies among preclinical models and also prevented infection and disease symptoms in the face of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). An additional reason for the vaccine candidate's early appeal is that it may be thermostable, which would make it easier to transport and store than currently authorized COVID-19 ...

There's more to taste than flavor. Let ice cream melt, and the next time you take it out of the freezer you'll find its texture icy instead of the smooth, creamy confection you're used to. Though its flavor hasn't changed, most people would agree the dessert is less appetizing. UC Santa Barbara Professor Craig Montell and postdoctoral fellow Qiaoran Li have published a study in Current Biology providing the first description of how certain animals sense the texture of their food based on grittiness versus smoothness. They found that, in fruit flies, a mechanosensory channel relays this information about a food's texture. The channel, called TMEM63, is part of ...

UPTON, NY--Physically confined spaces can make for more efficient chemical reactions, according to recent studies led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. They found that partially covering metal surfaces acting as catalysts, or materials that speed up reactions, with thin films of silica can impact the energies and rates of these reactions. The thin silica forms a two-dimensional (2-D) array of hexagonal-prism-shaped "cages" containing silicon and oxygen atoms. "These porous silica frameworks are the thickness of only three atoms," explained Samuel Tenney, a chemist in the Interface Science and ...

AMES, Iowa - Vaccines are an important tool in fighting porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), but the fast-mutating virus that causes the disease sometimes requires the production of autogenous vaccines tailored to particular variants. The production of autogenous vaccines depends on the ability of scientists to isolate the virus, but sometimes that's a tricky process. A new study from an Iowa State University researcher shows that a new cell line may offer a better alternative to the cell line most commonly used to isolate the PRRS virus. That could lead to more reliable processes for creating autogenous vaccines, but most autogenous vaccine producers would have to make dramatic changes to their processes ...

For nearly a century, improvement in human healthcare has depended heavily on the efficiency with which we can treat bacterial diseases. But today, antibiotic resistance--the ability of certain mutant super-bacteria to block out antibiotics--poses a major threat to healthcare, food security, and overall social development worldwide, threatening to upend much of the progress our civilization has achieved. Scientists are now urgently attempting to tackle this problem from various angles. Professor Yunho Lee at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea, whose contribution is published in the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science and Technology, is looking at it from the point of view of his field of research--wastewater ...

If you're looking for an indoor space with a low level of particulate air pollution, a commercial airliner flying at cruising altitude may be your best option. A newly reported study of air quality in indoor spaces such as stores, restaurants, offices, public transportation -- and commercial jets -- shows aircraft cabins with the lowest levels of tiny aerosol particles. Conducted in July 2020, the study included monitoring both the number of particles and their total mass across a broad range of indoor locations, including 19 commercial flights in which measurements took place throughout ...

Finding innovative and sustainable solutions to our material needs is one of the core objectives of green chemistry. The myriad plastics that envelop our daily life - from mattresses to food and cars - are mostly made from oil-based monomers which are the building blocks of polymers. Therefore, finding bio-based monomers for polymer synthesis is attractive to achieve more sustainable solutions in materials development. In a paper published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, researchers from the Kleij group present a new route to prepare biobased polyesters with tuneable properties. The researchers ...

Insects can reprogram plant growth, transforming ordinary plant parts into intricately patterned shelters that are safe havens for feeding and reproduction. These structures, called galls, have fascinated biologists for centuries. They're crafted by a variety of insects, including some species of aphids, mites, and wasps. And they take on innumerable forms, each specific in shape and size to the insect species that's created it - from knobs to cone-shaped protrusions to long, thin spikes. Some even resemble flowers. Insects create galls by manipulating the development of plants, but figuring out exactly how they perform this feat "feels like ...

The backbone is the Swiss Army Knife of mammal locomotion. It can function in all sorts of ways that allows living mammals to have remarkable diversity in their movements. They can run, swim, climb and fly all due, in part, to the extensive reorganization of their vertebral column, which occurred over roughly 320 million years of evolution. Open any anatomy textbook and you'll find the long-standing hypothesis that the evolution of the mammal backbone, which is uniquely capable of sagittal (up and down) movements, evolved from a backbone that functioned ...

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2021 -- Tons of plastic debris get released into the ocean every day, and most of it accumulates within the middle of garbage patches, which tend to float on the oceans' surface in the center of each of their regions. The most infamous one, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is in the North Pacific Ocean. Researchers in the U.S. and Germany decided to explore which pathways transport debris from the coasts to the middle of the oceans, as well as the relative strengths of different subtropical gyres in the oceans and how they influence long-term accumulation of debris. In Chaos, from AIP Publishing, Philippe Miron, Francisco Beron-Vera, Luzie Helfmann, and Peter Koltai report creating a Markov chain ...

What The Study Did: This study investigates emergency department visits for violence-related injuries occurring at home and outside the home in Cardiff, Wales, before and after COVID-19 lockdown measures were instituted in March 2020. Authors: Jonathan P. Shepherd, Ph.D., Crime and Security Research Institute at Cardiff University in Wales, 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/jama.2020.25511) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...