The functions of water-dominated ecosystems can be considerably influenced and changed by hydrological fluctuation. The varying states of redox-active substances are of crucial importance here. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have discovered this, in cooperation with partners from the Universities of Tübingen and Bristol and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Halle-Leipzig. They present their discovery in the journal Nature Geoscience. The new study enables a more precise understanding of the biogeochemical processes that contribute to the degradation of pollutants and the reduction of greenhouse gas ...

More than ever, patients are using telehealth to ask doctors and nurses about worrying blood-pressure readings, nauseating migraines and stubborn foot ulcers. But for patients with chronic conditions, how frequent should telehealth appointments be? Can that frequency change? Under what conditions? West Virginia University researcher Jennifer Mallow is trying to answer these questions. In a new project, she and her colleagues completed a systematic review of studies that dealt with telehealth and chronic conditions. They found that--in general--telehealth services benefitted patients more if they ...

A comprehensive review into what we know about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called "long-COVID", struggling with significant health issues months after infection. There is growing evidence that the virus infects both the upper and lower respiratory tracts - unlike "low pathogenic" human coronavirus sub-species, which typically settle in the upper respiratory tract and cause cold-like symptoms, or "high pathogenic" viruses such as those that cause SARS and ARDS, which typically settle in the lower respiratory tract. Additionally, more frequent multi-organ impacts, and blood clots, and ...

Which wound cuts deeper: the loss of an only child or loss of a spouse? A new study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and Fudan University suggests that Chinese parents find the loss of an only child to be approximately 1.3 times as psychologically distressing than the loss of a spouse. The findings are published in the journal Aging & Mental Health. Older adults in China rely heavily on family support, particularly from their adult children. Filial piety--the Confucian idea describing a respect for one's parents and responsibility for adult children to care for ...

Observing how cells stick to surfaces and their motility is vitally important in the study of tissue maintenance, wound healing and even understanding how cancers progress. A new paper published in EPJ Plus, by Raj Kumar Sadhu, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, takes a step towards a deeper understanding of these processes. "Cell adhesion is the ability of a cell to stick to another cell or an extracellular matrix. This process is important in order to understand how cells interact and coordinate their behaviour in multicellular organisms," says sadhu. "We theoretically model the adhesion of a cell-like vesicle by describing the cell as a three-dimensional vesicle adhering on a flat substrate with a constant adhesion interaction." Alongside ...

Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer, most commonly affecting children aged between 2 -3 and can be fatal. Since the tumour cells resemble certain cells in the adrenal glands, a joint research group from MedUni Vienna's Center for Brain Research and the Swedish Karolinska Institute investigated the cellular origin of these cells and sympathetic neurons during the embryonic development of human adrenal glands. During the course of their investigations, they discovered a previously unknown cell type that might potentially be the origin of the tumour cells. Treatments for this disease are extremely aggressive and challenging ...

The applied nitrogen in crop production is easily lost through ammonia emission and nitrogen leaching. Therefore, many attempts have been made on the development of novel slow-release fertilizers to reduce nitrogen loss and improve crop production. A research team led by Prof. WU Yuejin from the Institute of Intelligent Machines of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science developed a novel matrix-based slow-release urea (MSU) recently to improve nitrogen use efficiency in rice production, and they assessed the performances of it. "MSU is a promising fertilizer for rice production," said WU, "as less nitrogen loss and greater soil nitrogen ...

Physicists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have for the first time been able to prove a long-predicted but as yet unconfirmed fundamental effect. In Faraday chiral anisotropy, the propagation characteristics of light waves are changed simultaneously by the natural and magnetic-field induced material properties of the medium through which the light travels. The researchers obtained proof that this is the case by conducting experiments using nickel helices at the nanometre scale. Their findings have now been published in the academic journal 'Physical Review Letters'. Light is transmitted as sine waves consisting of crossed electric and magnetic fields and interacts with matter. This ...

Recently, Prof. XIE Can from the High Magnetic Field Laboratory of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), in a collaboration with Prof. YAN Xiyun's lab from the Institute of Biophysics, reported the structural basis of mAb AA98's inhibition on CD146-mediated endothelial cells (EC) activation and designed higher affinity monoclonal antibody HA98 for cancer treatment. CD146 is an adhesion molecule that plays important roles in angiogenesis, cancer metastasis, and immune response. Prof. YAN Xiyun's lab has been focused on the function of CD146 and the mechanism ...

Australia, the driest inhabited continent, is prone to natural disasters and wild swings in weather conditions - from floods to droughts, heatwaves and bushfires. Now two new Flinders University studies of long-term hydro-climatic patterns provide fresh insights into the causes of the island continent's strong climate variability which affect extreme wet or dry weather and other conditions vital to water supply, agriculture, the environment and the nation's future. For the first time, researchers from the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT) at Flinders have revealed a vegetation-mediated seesaw wetting-drying phenomenon between eastern and western Australia. ...

Ishikawa, Japan - As decarbonization progresses rapidly in the world, fuel cells offer potentially higher electrical efficiency than conventional power-generating systems. Anion exchange membrane fuel cells offer advantages of using non-precious metal catalysts than proton exchange membrane fuel cells. One of the challenges of this next-generation fuel cell is to clarify the hydroxide ion conductivity in the ion conductive polymer around the electrode catalyst. The difficulty of studying the hydroxide ion conductivity at the electrode interface is that the hydroxide ion, which is a carrier, easily reacts with carbon dioxide in the air. To solve this problem, all evaluation devices were improved so that the sample did not come into contacting with air. In a new study published ...

Cells talk to each other to coordinate nutrition, waste removal, energy use, and, in some cases, disease progression. The cells that line the surfaces of organs or specific tissues, called epithelial cells, appear to speak two different languages - one for either side of the cell, according to a new study by researchers based in Japan. The discovery, published on March 16 in EMBO Reports, could have implications for understanding how cancer spreads and, potentially, for advanced treatments, the team says. The team, led by Mitsunori Fukuda, professor in the Laboratory of Membrane Trafficking Mechanisms, Department of Integrative ...

Patients with lasting symptoms of COVID-19 who completed a six week, supervised rehabilitation programme demonstrated significant improvements in exercise capacity, respiratory symptoms, fatigue and cognition, according to researchers at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre - a partnership between Leicester's Hospitals, the University of Leicester and Loughborough University. The study, which is published in the journal Chronic Respiratory Disease today (Friday 7 May 2021), followed thirty patients who took part in face-to-face ...

Dispersal is an important process governing the persistence of wild animal populations. Upon reaching sexual maturity, individuals usually disperse from their natal home range to search for suitable habitat and mates for reproduction. As such, dispersal promotes gene flow among populations, allows rescuing small and isolated populations, and enables the colonization of unoccupied habitats. In human-dominated landscapes, however, dispersing animals find it increasingly difficult to cross densely populated areas that separate suitable habitats. For this reason, the identification and preservation of wildlife corridors has become of utmost importance for conservation authorities worldwide. In southern Africa, the governments ...

Inclusion of soybean and linseed oils in the diet of dairy cows made the fatty acid content of their milk even healthier for human nutrition. It also increased the proportions of omega-6 and omega-3, which in the right balance play a key role in preventing cardiovascular diseases, for example, as well as chronic inflammation and some kinds of cancer. Cardiovascular diseases are one of the world’s main public health problems. In Brazil, they are among the foremost causes of death. Each year some 300,000 Brazilians have heart attacks, dying in 30% of cases, according to the Health Ministry. Research led by Arlindo Saran Netto, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s School of Animal Science and Food Engineering (FZEA-USP) in Pirassununga, São Paulo ...

People spend about 80-90% of their time indoors. Compared to outdoor air quality, the indoor air quality is more relevant to people's health. Therefore, understanding the levels, sources and evolution of particulate matter (PM) indoors is important for the accurate evaluation of people's health risks to aerosol exposure. A research team led by Prof. Yele Sun from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences deployed a time-of-flight aerosol chemical speciation monitor (ToF-ACSM) to measure time series and mass spectra of non-refractory species in a typical academic office in IAP. The study was published in Indoor Air. The researchers measured the concentration and chemical composition of indoor PM2.5 ...

To understand the world, we arrange individual objects, people, and events into different categories or concepts. Concepts such as 'the telephone' consist primarily of visible features, i.e. shape and color, and sounds, such as ringing. In addition, there are actions, i.e. how we use a telephone. However, the concept of telephone does not only arise in the brain when we have a telephone in front of us. It also appears when the term is merely mentioned. If we read the word "telephone", our brain also calls up the concept of telephone. The same regions in the brain are activated that would be activated ...

To infect its host plant maize, the fungal parasite Ustilago maydis uses a complex of seven proteins. Numerous findings reveal an essential role of the complex in causing disease and suggest a widespread occurence in fungal plant pathogens. Each year, fungal plant pathogens such as rusts, rice blast and mildews destroy huge amounts of cereal crops that could feed millions of people. Many of these fungi are biotrophic pathogens: Instead of killing their host plants, they manipulate host cells to assure that these sustain fungal growth. Among these pathogens, the corn smut fungus Ustilago maydis has emerged as a model for basic research on biotrophic fungi. During the infection, U. maydis releases an entire cocktail of so-called ...

7 May 2021/Kiel. Corals are the backbone of marine ecosystems in the tropics. They are threatened by rising water temperatures caused by global warming and they are among the first ecosystems worldwide that are on the verge of ecological collapse. Coral bleaching, which is becoming stronger and more frequent due to heat stress, has already wiped out corals at many locations globally. With the help of a microbiome-targeting strategy developed by an international team led by GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, it could become feasible to help protect corals from heat stress. The work has now been published in the international journal Microbiome. Corals are the backbone of marine ecosystems in the tropics. They are threatened by rising water temperatures caused by global warming ...

Narrow-gap semiconductors with the ability to use visible light have garnered significant interest thanks to their versatility. Now, scientists in Japan have developed and characterized a new semiconductor material for application in process components stimulated by light. The findings have, for the first time, suggested a new way to reduce the band gap in cheaper and non-toxic tin-based oxide semiconductors for efficient light-based applications. Semiconductors that can exploit the omnipresent visible spectrum of light for different technological applications would serve as a boon to the material world. However, such semiconductors often do not come cheap and can often be toxic. Now, a group of material scientists ...

May 7, 2021 - Among collegiate football players and other athletes, Black athletes recognize fewer concussion-related symptoms than their White counterparts, reports a study in the May/June 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. "Despite NCAA concussion education requirements for athletes, Black collegiate-athletes were found to have lower concussion symptom knowledge than White collegiate-athletes," according to the new research by Jessica Wallace, PhD, MPH, LAT, ATC, of University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and colleagues. The ...

RNA-based drugs have the potential to change the standard of care for many diseases, making personalized medicine a reality. This rapidly expanding class of therapeutics are cost-effective, fairly easy to manufacture, and able to go where no drug has gone before, reaching previously undruggable pathways. Mostly. So far, these promising drugs haven't been very useful in getting through to the well-protected brain to treat tumors or other maladies. Now a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by Costas Arvanitis at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, has figured out a way: using ultrasound and RNA-loaded nanoparticles to get through the protective blood-brain barrier and deliver potent medicine to brain tumors. "We're able to make this drug more available ...

Some meat eaters feel disgusted by meat, according to a new study. University of Exeter scientists showed food pictures to more than 700 people, including omnivores (who eat meat and other foods), flexitarians (who try to eat less meat) and vegetarians. About 7% of meat eaters (15% of flexitarians and 3% of omnivores) had a "fairly strong disgust response" to images of meat dishes commonly eaten in the UK, like roast chicken or bacon. As a group, omnivores rated meat images about twice as disgusting on average as pictures of carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, chips and rice. Based on the findings, the researchers say harnessing the "yuk factor" may ...

Ikoma, Japan - Many natural compounds have various anti-inflammatory and other beneficial properties that humans have been utilizing for medicinal purposes for hundreds of years. However, the specific molecular mechanisms behind these health-promoting effects are not always clear. One such compound is 1'-acetoxychavicol acetate, or ACA, which comes from the tropical ginger Alpinia plant. Now, researchers from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) have identified how ACA can help in the treatment of inflammatory diseases. In a report published in International Immunology, they found that ACA attenuates mitochondrial damage through decreasing mitochondrial reactive oxygen species (ROS), blocking ...

Scientists from Nanjing University and University of Macau have discovered nano-scaled apoptotic bodies (ABs) as a new brain-targeting drug carrier, bringing new promise for the Parkinson's Disease as well as other brain diseases. The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is the most restrictive barrier that keeps most biomolecules and drugs from the brain, setting "barriers" for the treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. With the increasingly serious ageing problem, the treatment of brain diseases now faces tough challenges, and therefore efficient brain drug delivery ...