Major changes in bereavement care have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, amid a flood of demand for help from bereaved people, according to new research from the University of Cambridge. The first major study of pandemic-related changes in bereavement care has found that the switch to remote working has helped some services to reach out, but many practitioners feel they do not have capacity to meet people's needs. It is estimated that for every death, nine people are affected by bereavement. The scale of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on those ...

MINNEAPOLIS - Obstructive sleep apnea is when breathing is repeatedly interrupted during sleep. Research has shown people with this sleep disorder have an increased risk of developing cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Yet, it is treatable. A preliminary study released today, February 28, 2021, has found that obstructive sleep apnea is common in people with cognitive impairment. The study will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 73rd Annual Meeting being held virtually April 17 to 22, 2021. Cognitive impairment includes memory and thinking problems that affect ...

Red supergiants are a class of star that end their lives in supernova explosions. Their lifecycles are not fully understood, partly due to difficulties in measuring their temperatures. For the first time, astronomers develop an accurate method to determine the surface temperatures of red supergiants. Stars come in a wide range of sizes, masses and compositions. Our sun is considered a relatively small specimen, especially when compared to something like Betelgeuse which is known as a red supergiant. Red supergiants are stars over nine times the mass of our sun, and all this mass means that when they die they do so with extreme ferocity in an enormous explosion known as a supernova, in particular what is known as a Type-II supernova. Type II supernovae seed the cosmos with elements ...

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have revealed how liquid foams collapse by observing individual collapse "events" with high-speed video microscopy. They found that cracks in films led to a receding liquid front which sweeps up the original film border, inverts its shape, and releases a droplet which hits and breaks other films. Their observations and physical model provide key insights into how to make foams more or less resistant to collapse. Understanding how foams collapse is serious business. Whether it's ensuring fire extinguishing foams stay long enough to put out flames, cleaning up toxic foams in seas and rivers, or simply getting the perfect rise on a cake, getting to grips with how foam materials collapse is vital to tailoring their properties, ...

Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI, President Suh Pann-ghill) announced that the research team led by Dr. Jae-Yeol Joo discovered new cryptic splice variants and SNVs in PLCg1 gene of AD-specific models for the first time using Splice-AI. This research outcome was published in PNAS, a world-renowned academic journal. * (Title) Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease-Specific phospholipase c gamma-1 SNV by Deep Learning-Based Approach for High-Throughput Screening Alternative splicing variant regulates gene expression and influences diverse phenotypes. Especially, genetic ...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) around O?ahu do not adequately protect populations of herbivorous reef fishes that eat algae on coral reefs. That is the primary conclusion of a study published in Coral Reefs by researchers from the University of Hawai?i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). There are over 20 species of herbivorous fishes and ten species of herbivorous urchins commonly observed on Hawaiian reefs. These species eat algae that grows on reefs, a process called herbivory, that contributes to the resilience of coral reefs by preventing algae dominance that can lead to overgrowth of corals. The team of researchers found that of the four marine protected areas around O?ahu they assessed in the study, ...

The ability to read is foundational to education, but prolonged school closures and distance learning due to the pandemic have imposed unique challenges on the teaching of many fundamental skills. When in-person classes resume, many students will likely need a period of catch-up learning, especially those who lag behind in basic reading skills. New research published in the journal Psychological Science shows that people who were taught to read by receiving explicit instructions on the relationship between sounds and spelling experienced a dramatic improvement compared to learners who discovered this relationship naturally through the reading process. These results contribute to an ongoing debate about how best to teach children to ...

New research from Baylor College of Medicine scientists shows that a combination of deep brain stimulation (DBS) and exercise has potential benefits for treating ataxia, a rare genetic neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive irreversible problems with movement. Working with a mouse model of the human condition, researchers at Baylor and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital discovered that combining DBS targeted to the cerebellum, a major motor center in the brain, and exercise rescued limb coordination and stepping and that the benefits persisted without further stimulation. In addition, the study reports that stimulating mice with early-stage ataxia showed the most dramatic improvements. These and other ...

BOSTON -- Billions of peripheral white blood cells are produced every day by the regular divisions of hematopoietic stem cells and their descendants in the bone marrow. Under normal circumstances, thousands of stem cells contribute progeny to the blood at any given time, making white blood cells a group with diverse ancestry. Clonal hematopoiesis is a common age-related condition in which the descendants of one of these hematopoietic stem cells begin to dominate substantial portions of the blood. Genome-wide analyses have determined that clonal ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - While physical activity is important for everyone, research has shown people with developmental disabilities do not exercise as often as their typically developed peers. In an effort to close this disparity, a researcher at the University of Missouri recently created fitness picture books that help youth with autism exercise more frequently while offering low-income families a simple resource for workout motivation when outdoor fitness equipment might not be accessible. "There is so much research geared toward helping individuals with autism improve their academic ...

Treatments for beating tumours are mainly based on CD8 T lymphocytes, which specialise in detecting and eliminating intracellular infections and in killing cancer cells. A large proportion of patients, however, do not respond to these treatments. This prompted a research team from the Swiss Cancer Centre Léman (SCCL, Switzerland) to bring together the universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL), the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), EPFL and CHUV to investigate CD4 T lymphocytes. While these play a supporting role with CD8 T cells, their ability to eliminate tumour cells directly has been a matter of controversy. Using innovative nanoimaging technologies designed at the EPFL laboratory, the scientists found that when the CD4 T lymphocytes ...

The ocean floor is vast and varied, making up more than 70% of the Earth's surface. Scientists have long used information from sediments at the bottom of the ocean -- layers of rock and microbial muck -- to reconstruct the conditions in oceans of the past. These reconstructions are important for understanding how and when oxygen became available in Earth's atmosphere and ultimately increased to the levels that support life as we know it today. Yet reconstructions that rely on signals from sedimentary rocks but ignore the impact of local sedimentary processes do so at their own peril, according to geoscientists including David Fike in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Their new study published Feb. ...

Cells rely on membranes to protect themselves from the outside world. But these membranes can't be fully closed because nutrients and other molecules have to be able to pass through. To achieve this, cell membranes have many types of channels and pores. Also, there are receptors, antennas if you like, imbedded in the membrane that continuously monitor the outside world and signal to the cell interior. Extensive collaboration between five VIB groups resulted in a better understanding of the machinery that plants use to regulate the protein composition of their outer membrane. This discovery, published in Science Advances, enhances our basic knowledge of how the plasma membrane composition can be adapted based on external stimuli, an essential ...

A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the period-ic table. Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) (irenaweb.org) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics - Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE) (jinaweb.org), the study is published in the lat-est issue of the journal Science (science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6532/945). Heavy elements we encounter in our everyday life, ...

HOUSTON - (Feb. 26, 2021) - Save your silver! It's better used for jewelry than as a catalyst for drugs. Rice University scientists have developed a greatly simplified method to make fluoroketones, precursors for drug design and manufacture that typically require a silver catalyst. Rice chemist Julian West and graduate students Yen-Chu Lu and Helen Jordan introduced a process for the rapid and scalable synthesis of fluoroketones that have until now been challenging and expensive to make. Their open-access work graces the cover of the Feb. 21 issue of the Royal Society of ...

Dropping out of high school, having schizophrenia, or being diagnosed with a co-occurring personality disorder increases the likelihood of someone becoming a "high utilizer" of inpatient psychiatric hospital services, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). A high utilizer is someone who has been admitted three or more times within one year. The research was published today in The Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. For their findings, researchers used machine learning to analyze deidentified electronic ...

MISSOULA - University of Montana researchers and their partners have discovered a slimy strategy used by bacteria to defeat antibiotics and other drugs used to combat infections afflicting people with cystic fibrosis. The research was published Feb. 23 in the journal Cell Reports. Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits a person's ability to breathe over time. A common strain of bacteria, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, often thrives in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis, as well as in wounds from burns or diabetic ulcers. Once a P. aeruginosa infection is established, ...

Robots that could take on basic healthcare tasks to support the work of doctors and nurses may be the way of the future. Who knows, maybe a medical robot can prescribe your medicine someday? That's the idea behind 3D structural-sensing robots being developed and tested at Simon Fraser University by Woo Soo Kim, associate professor in the School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering. "The recent pandemic demonstrates the need to minimize human-to-human interaction between healthcare workers and patients," says Kim, who authored two recent papers on the subject - a perspective on the technology and a demonstration of a robots' usefulness in healthcare. "There's an opportunity for sensing robots to measure ...

Parasitic flatworms known as agents of food-borne zoonoses were confirmed to use several species of thiarid snails, commonly found in freshwater and brackish environments in southeast Asia, as their first intermediate host. These parasites can cause severe ocular infections in humans who consume raw or improperly cooked fish that have fed on infected snails. The study, conducted in South Thailand by Thai and German researchers and led by Kitja Apiraksena, Silpakorn University, is published in the peer-reviewed open-access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution. "Trematode infections are major public health problems affecting humans in southeast Asia," explain the scientists. "Trematode infections depend not only on the habit of people, but also on the presence of first ...

BOSTON - Two novel calculators for predicting which patients admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 are at greatest risk of requiring mechanical ventilation or of in-hospital death have been developed and validated by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In a study published in The Lancet's EClinicalMedicine, researchers describe how these models could enable clinicians to better stratify risk in COVID-infected patients to optimize care and resource utilization in hospitals faced with ICU capacity constraints. "Information that can accurately predict severity of the clinical course at the time of hospital admission has been limited," says senior author Rajeev Malhotra, MD, a cardiologist at MGH and investigator in the MGH Cardiovascular Research Center. ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- When Patrick Rottinghaus began college, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his career. He started out as an "Open" major while he explored possibilities. Today, Rottinghaus, an associate professor in the University of Missouri College of Education, is helping young people eager to find their place in the world by identifying their strengths and connecting them with careers that match their skillset, interests and personality. As the father of three children, including a daughter soon to enter high school, he wants to ensure they are equipped ...

In recent years, engineers have found ways to modify the properties of some "two- dimensional" materials, which are just one or a few atoms thick, by stacking two layers together and rotating one slightly in relation to the other. This creates what are known as moiré patterns, where tiny shifts in the alignment of atoms between the two sheets create larger-scale patterns. It also changes the way electrons move through the material, in potentially useful ways. But for practical applications, such two-dimensional materials must at some point connect with the ordinary world of 3D materials. An international team led by MIT researchers has now come up with a way of imaging what goes on at these ...

Both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly favor politicians who support generous COVID-19 relief spending, yet remain deeply polarized over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results and former President Donald Trump's second impeachment. Meanwhile, political experts find that the former president's actions and those taken by congressional supporters in the aftermath of the election represent serious departures from American democratic norms. Those are among the most recent findings of Bright Line Watch, the political science research project cofounded by Gretchen Helmke, a professor of political science at the ...

A Swansea University scientist's research into the geometrical characteristics of a physical theories is highlighted in a new paper. Physicist Dr Farid Shahandeh said: "Imagine a physical theory whose explanation for the trajectory of an apple falling from a tree differs for Gala and Pink Lady. We know that the apple's variety has nothing to do with how it falls. A theory like this is overcomplicated. "Any seemingly unnecessary and nonsensical parameter like this adds context to a theory's description of a physical phenomenon. "Luckily, classical theories are not contextuality. But, we know that if we try to interpret quantum mechanics in classical terms, it becomes contextual, and consequently ...

HOUSTON - (Feb. 26, 2021) - In a twist befitting the strange nature of quantum mechanics, physicists have discovered the Hall effect -- a characteristic change in the way electricity is conducted in the presence of a magnetic field -- in a nonmagnetic quantum material to which no magnetic field was applied. The discovery by researchers from Rice University, Austria's Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute and Canada's McMaster University is detailed in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Of interest are both the origins of the effect, which is typically associated with magnetism, and its gigantic magnitude -- more than 1,000 times larger than one might observe in simple ...