LAWRENCE -- New research from the University of Kansas END ...

Meat and fish fraud are global problems, costing consumers billions of dollars every year. On top of that, mislabeling products can cause problems for people with allergies, religious or cultural restrictions. Current methods to detect this fraud, while accurate, are slower than inspectors would like. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have optimized their handheld MasSpec Pen to identify common types of meat and fish within 15 seconds. News stories of food fraud, such as beef being replaced with horse ...

SAN ANTONIO (March 31, 2021) -- Insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea have increased dramatically among active-duty military members over a 14-year period, 2005 through 2019. Insomnia increased 45-fold and sleep apnea went up more than 30-fold, according to a study led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio). The study found that the most likely military member to be diagnosed with either sleep disorder was married, male, white, a higher-ranking enlisted Army service member and age 40 or older. The researchers compared medical codes that represent diagnosis of sleep apnea or insomnia in active-duty Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force personnel. No medical ...

Risks of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection for long-stay nursing home residents were mainly dependent on factors in their nursing homes and surrounding communities, according to a large study led by a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. By contrast, the study found that the risks of being hospitalized with, and of dying from, COVID-19, depended more on patient-specific characteristics such as age and body mass index--although the mix of factors linked to hospitalization was distinct from the mix of factors linked to mortality. The study, which appears online March 31 in JAMA Network Open, detailed COVID-19 risk factors among more than 480,000 long-stay nursing home residents in the ...

Roughly five years ago, Institute Head Prof. Dr. William (Bill) Martin and his team introduced the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms and named it "LUCA". It lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago in hot deep sea hydrothermal vents. Now the evolutionary biologists in Duesseldorf have described a further ancient cell named "LBCA" ("Last Bacterial Common Ancestor"). It is the ancestor of today's largest domain of all living organisms: Bacteria. In Communications Biology, they report on their new research approaches which led to the successful prediction ...

Every day, people are exposed to microplastics from food, water, beverages and air. But it's unclear just how many of these particles accumulate in the human body, and whether they pose health risks. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have developed a lifetime microplastic exposure model that accounts for variable levels from different sources and in different populations. The new model indicates a lower average mass of microplastic accumulation than previous estimates. Microplastics, which are tiny pieces of plastic ranging in size from 1 μm to 5 mm (about the ...

In Brazil, researchers are puzzling over socioeconomic and environmental indicators that do not add up. They are concerned with what they call the São Paulo Macrometropolitan Area, a mega-region comprising five metropolitan areas in the state of São Paulo with a total of 180 municipalities, some of which provide ecosystem services while others receive them. The problem is that the former, which provide the others with water, food and power generation inputs, suffer from steep inequities in terms of defective human development and lack of social inclusion. "Urban centers have always been ...

Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists. Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, which has led to myriad advances in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, geology, nanoscience, drug discovery and more. But because amorphous solids aren't assembled in rigid, repetitive atomic structures like crystals are, they have defied researchers' ability to determine their atomic structure with the same level of precision. Until now, that is. ...

Sugar practically screams from the shelves of your grocery store, especially those products marketed to kids. Children are the highest consumers of added sugar, even as high-sugar diets have been linked to health effects like obesity and heart disease and even impaired memory function. However, less is known about how high sugar consumption during childhood affects the development of the brain, specifically a region known to be critically important for learning and memory called the hippocampus. New research led by a University of Georgia faculty member in collaboration with a University ...

LAWRENCE, KANSAS -- The phrase "to see red" means to become angry. But for investors, seeing red takes on a whole different meaning. William BazleyThat's the premise behind a new article by William Bazley, assistant professor of finance at the University of Kansas. "Visual Finance: The Pervasive Effects of Red on Investor Behavior" reveals that using the color red to represent financial data influences individuals' risk preferences, expectations of future stock returns and trading decisions. The effects are not present in people who are colorblind, and they're muted in China, where red represents prosperity. Other colors do not generate the same outcomes. The ...

As demand for low-carbon electricity rises around the world, nuclear power offers a promising solution. But how many countries are good candidates for nuclear energy development? A new study in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that countries representing more than 80 percent of potential growth in low-carbon electricity demand--in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa--may lack the economic or institutional quality to deploy nuclear power to meet their energy needs. The authors suggest that if nuclear power is to safely expand its role in mitigating climate change, countries need to radically improve their ability to manage the technology. "Efforts to enhance institutional quality in these countries must be redoubled and could well be one of the ...

Taking progestogens - steroid hormones - during pregnancy could reduce the risk of preterm birth in high-risk single baby pregnancies, research has shown. Although these compounds have been in use for some time, results of individual clinical trials investigating their effectiveness in preventing preterm birth have been conflicting, and so further evaluation of the research evidence was needed. University of York researchers led the Evaluating Progestogens for Prevention of Preterm Birth International Collaborative (EPPPIC) project, a systematic review which brought together and re-analysed datasets from 31 clinical trials of progestogens, including more than 11,000 women and 16,000 babies ...

Microbial life already had the necessary conditions to exist on our planet 3.5 billion years ago. This was the conclusion reached by a research team after studying microscopic fluid inclusions in barium sulfate (barite) from the Dresser Mine in Marble Bar, Australia. In their publication "Ingredients for microbial life preserved in 3.5-billion-year-old fluid inclusions," the researchers suggest that organic carbon compounds which could serve as nutrients for microbial life already existed at this time. The study by first author Helge Mißbach (University of Göttingen, Germany) was published in the journal ...

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS), teamed up with scientists from Aix Marseille University, discovered that hematopoietic progenitors possessed the differentiation potential to type 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILC1s) in adult liver, and dissected the regulation mechanisms of such cell differentiation, revealing the pathways that lead to the development of tissue-resident lymphocytes. This study was published in Science. Hematopoiesis occurs at different sites following the development of human body. After birth, the bone marrow (BM) has long been known to be the main hematopoietic organ ...

ST segment-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) is a particularly severe type of heart attack associated with a high risk of mortality or long-term disability. Clinicians can reduce a patient's chances of unfavorable outcomes by performing a procedure known as percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), which combines coronary angioplasty--in which a balloon is inserted into a blocked artery of the heart to clear it--with stenting--inserting a tiny tube into a blocked artery to keep the line open. But studies in China have found that many patients with STEMI choose not to undergo PCI and that women with STEMI, in particular, have a reduced likelihood of undergoing guideline-based ...

By harvesting energy from their surrounding environments, particles named 'artificial micromotors' can propel themselves in specific directions when placed in aqueous solutions. In current research, a popular choice of micromotor is the spherical 'Janus particle' - featuring two distinct sides with different physical properties. Until now, however, few studies have explored how these particles interact with other objects in their surrounding microenvironments. In an experiment detailed in EPJ E, researchers in Germany and The Netherlands, led by Larysa Baraban at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, show for the first time how the velocities of Janus particles relate to the physical properties of nearby barriers. The team's discoveries could help researchers to engineer micromotors which ...

Children with a common but regularly undiagnosed disorder affecting their language and communication are likely to be finding the transition back to school post-lockdown harder than most, according to a team of psychologists. Two children in every class of 30 are estimated to have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (around 8%), yet public awareness, diagnosis and referral to speech and language therapists all remain low in the UK. DLD is a condition where children have problems acquiring their own language for no obvious reasons. Unlike temporary language delay (which reflects the natural variation of age at which children learn to speak and communicate), DLD is a lifelong condition with significant impacts for individuals in childhood and in later life, in particular their ...

Lakes store huge amounts of methane. In a new study, environmental scientists at the University of Basel offer suggestions for how it can be extracted and used as an energy source in the form of methanol. Discussion about the current climate crisis usually focuses on carbon dioxide (CO2). The greenhouse gas methane is less well known, but although it is much rarer in the atmosphere, its global warming potential is 80 to 100 times greater per unit. More than half the methane caused by human activities comes from oil production and agricultural fertilizers. But the gas is also created by the natural decomposition of biomass by ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin believe they have pinpointed our most distant animal relative in the tree of life and, in doing so, have resolved an ongoing debate. Their work finds strong evidence that sponges - not more complex comb jellies - were our most distant relatives. Sponges are structurally simple, lacking complex traits such as a nervous system, muscles, and a though-gut. Logically, you would expect these complex traits to have emerged only once during animal evolution - after our lineage diverged from that of sponges - and then be retained in newly evolved creatures thereafter. However, a debate has been raging ever since phylogenomic studies found evidence that our most distant ...

Superalloys that withstand extremely high temperatures could soon be tuned even more finely for specific properties such as mechanical strength, as a result of new findings published today. A phenomenon related to the invar effect - which enables magnetic materials such as nickel-iron (Ni-Fe) alloys to keep from expanding with increasing temperature - was reported to have been discovered in paramagnetic, or weakly magnetized, high-temperature alloys. Levente Vitos, Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says the breakthrough research, which includes a general theory explaining the new invar effect, promises to advance the design of high-temperature alloys with exceptional mechanical stability. The article was published in the Proceedings ...

The higher the number of plant and bird species in a region, the healthier the people who live there. This was found by a new study published in Landscape and Urban Planning and led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F) and the Christian Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel. The researchers found that, in particular, mental health and higher species diversity are positively related, whereas a similar relationship between plant or bird species and physical health could not be proven. The study led by researchers from iDiv, SBiK-F and CAU provides ...

University of Rochester researchers who demonstrated superconducting materials at room temperatures last fall, now report a new technique in the quest to also create the materials at lower pressures. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the lab of Ranga Dias, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics and astronomy, describes separating hydrogen atoms from yttrium with a thin film of palladium. "This is a completely new technique that nobody has used before for high pressure superhydride synthesis," Dias says. Hydrogen rich materials are critical in the ...

As with any complex machine, sometimes a simple crossed wire or short circuit can cause problems with how it functions. The same goes for our brains, and even when the short circuit is uncovered, sometimes experts don't have a quick fix. A new study reveals that an evidence-based treatment may "fix" this human short circuit and, with the help of brain imaging, might predict treatment outcomes for adolescents with anxiety disorders. University of Cincinnati researchers say this could determine medication effectiveness more quickly to help patients. Study results showed that brain imaging was able to predict -- after just two weeks of treatment ...

A targeted opioid that only treats diseased tissues and spares healthy tissues relieves pain from inflammatory bowel disease without causing side effects, according to new research published in the journal Gut. The study, led by researchers at New York University College of Dentistry and Queen's University in Ontario, was conducted in mice with colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease marked by inflammation of the large intestine. Opioids, which are used to treat chronic pain in people with inflammatory bowel disease, relieve pain by targeting opioid receptors, including the mu opioid receptor. When opioids activate the mu opioid receptor in healthy ...

A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the CIBER Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN) has designed and tested, at a preclinical level, a new biomaterial for the treatment and recovery of muscle injuries. It is a boron-loaded alginate hydrogel, which would be administered with a subcutaneous injection. According to the tests carried out so far -in animal models-, it is capable of regenerating damaged muscle very rapidly -specifically, in half the time it takes for it to regenerate naturally. The scientific advance could also be applied to the prevention and treatment of muscle atrophy associated with aging. The results of the work of these Spanish researchers have been published in the journal Materials Science & Engineering C. The ...