(Boston)--Pregnancy complications affect up to one in three pregnancies and are increasingly linked to future chronic disease. For example, preeclampsia is associated with a doubled risk of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S., and gestational diabetes is associated with a seven-fold increased risk of type 2 diabetes. While guidelines recommend preventive care starting within the first postpartum year to address such pregnancy-related health risks, the connections between pregnancy health and future health are often neglected. In ...

An international team of researchers led by a University of Virginia School of Medicine professor is warning that scientists must better prepare for the next pandemic - and has developed a plan to do just that. Noting the "avalanche" of scientific data generated in response to COVID-19, UVA's Wladek Minor, PhD, and colleagues are calling for the creation of an "advanced information system" (AIS) to help scientists integrate, monitor and evaluate the vast amounts of data that will be produced as researchers reveal the molecular architecture of the next pathogen ...

URBANA, Ill. - Ever thought about buying or building a bat box to help bats? Think carefully about the design and where you put it, University of Illinois researchers say. Here's why: Bats and their pups can overheat and die in poorly designed or placed bat boxes, and in a warming climate, it could happen more often. Illinois bat ecologists Joy O'Keefe and Reed Crawford recently synthesized the available data on bat boxes, also known as bat houses or artificial roosts, to raise awareness of the issue and motivate change in bat box design, marketing, and consumer education. Their recommendations are published in Conservation Science and Practice. "Conservation ...

A pilot human clinical trial conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reveals that supplementation with GlyNAC - a combination of glycine and N-acetylcysteine as precursors of the natural antioxidant glutathione - could improve many age-associated defects in older humans to improve muscle strength and cognition, and promote healthy aging. Published in the journal Clinical and Translational Medicine, the results of this study show that older humans taking GlyNAC for 24 weeks saw improvements in many characteristic defects of aging, including ...

In the Arctic, climate change and pollution are the biggest threats to top predators like narwals. Studying the animals' tusks reveals that diet and exposure to pollution have shifted over the past half century in response to sea-ice decline. Human emissions have also led to a sharp rise in the presence of mercury in recent years, according to an international team of researchers. "Our research shows that climate change is having substantial impacts on Arctic ecosystems, with consequences for exposure to toxic pollutants like mercury," says co-author Jean-Pierre Desforges, a Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University under the supervision ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- Asymptomatic carriage of SARS-CoV-2 is a potentially significant source of transmission, yet remains relatively poorly understood. The study "SARS-CoV-2 Positivity in Asymptomatic-screened Dental Patients" published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated SARS-CoV-2 infection in asymptomatic dental patients to inform community surveillance and improve understanding of risks in the dental setting. Thirty-one dental care centers across Scotland invited asymptomatic screened patients over the age of five to participate. During the patient visit, trained ...

Laser treatment is now commonplace across various fields of medicine including dermatology, where it is commonly used to remove scars, wrinkles, and freckles. The technology, however, has a major downside: despite continued improvements, medical accidents related to laser treatment has been on the rise, with studies revealing excessively high laser energy as the major cause of such accidents. Assistant Professor Takahiro Kono from Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT), Japan, whose research is focused on the mechanism of heat transfer involved in the interaction of laser light with biological tissue explains, "The difficulty lies in adjusting the laser conditions for each patient ...

A team of researchers led by UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) has found that metformin - a drug commonly used to treat Type 2 diabetes - can successfully reduce symptoms associated with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), including reduction in the frequency of seizures and the size of brain tumours. The study, which also included teams from Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH) and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, recruited 51 patients with TSC who were randomly assigned a placebo or metformin for one year on a dose similar to that given for Type 2 diabetes. TSC is a genetic disorder characterised ...

In order to develop more effective drugs against a range of cancers, researchers have been investigating the molecular structure of many diseased-linked enzymes in the body. An intriguing case in point is Taspase 1, a type of enzyme known as a protease. The primary duty of proteases is to break down proteins into smaller peptide snippets or single amino acids. Taspase 1 appears to play a vital role in a range of physiological processes, including cell metabolism, proliferation, migration and termination. The normal functioning of Taspase 1 can go awry however, leading to a range of diseases, including leukemia, colon and breast cancers, as well as glioblastoma, a particularly lethal and incurable malignancy in the brain. Because Taspase 1 dysregulation is increasingly ...

Use of vouchers and coupons offered by pharmaceutical companies to defray patients' out-of-pocket drug costs is concentrated among a small number of drugs. While these offsets significantly reduce patient costs, they are not targeted to patients who most need the price reduction, according to a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers, in what is thought to be the largest study of its kind to date, analyzed tens of millions of pharmacy transactions by more than 600,000 people in the U.S. during 2017-19, in order to get a better sense of how vouchers and other point-of-sale copayment "offsets" are used. These coupons and vouchers come in many forms--some are offered online directly to customers, others by pharmacy ...

When you bump into someone in the workplace or at your local coffee shop, you might call that an "encounter." That's the scientific term for it, too. As part of urgent efforts to fight COVID-19, a science is rapidly developing for measuring the number of encounters and the different levels of interaction in a group. At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), researchers are applying that science to a concept they have created called "encounter metrics." They have developed an encrypted method that can be applied to a device such as your phone to help with the ultimate goal of slowing down or preventing future pandemics. The method is also applicable to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research ...

A drop of food coloring slowly spreading in a glass of water is driven by a process known as diffusion. While the mathematics of diffusion have been known for many years, how this process works in living organisms is not as well understood. Now, a study published in Nature Communications provides new insights on the process of diffusion in complex systems. The result of a collaboration between physicists at Penn, the University of Chile, and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, this new theoretical framework has broad implications for active surfaces, such as ones found in biofilms, active coatings, and even mechanisms for pathogen clearance. Diffusion is described ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Bullying at boarding schools has a negative impact on students' emotional health, but for male students, having a school staff member to rely on for support may mute the harmful effects of bullying, according to a new University at Buffalo study. Support networks did not have the same effect for female students, the researchers say. The study, recently published in School Psychology Review, is one of few to examine the impact of bullying at boarding schools, which provide a unique environment where most students live on school grounds, away from their families. It is also one of the first studies to observe the effects ...

Climate labels informing us of a meat product's carbon footprint cause many people to opt for climate-friendlier alternatives. This applies to people who are curious about a product's carbon footprint, as well as to those who actively avoid wanting to know more. The finding is published in a new study from, among others, the University of Copenhagen. As such, climate labeling food products can be a good way of reducing our climate footprint. But according to the researcher behind the study, labels must be obligatory for them to be effective. Certain situations exist where we humans strategically avoid greater knowledge and more information - a phenomenon known as "active information avoidance". ...

The unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii has already given research a massive boost: One of its light sensors, channelrhodopsin-2, founded the success of optogenetics about 20 years ago. In this technology, the alga's light sensor is incorporated into cells or small living organisms such as threadworms. Afterwards, certain physiological processes can be triggered or stopped by light. This has already led to several new scientific findings, for example on the function of nerve cells. Now the green alga Chlamydomonas is once again setting an accent. Once again, it is its light sensors, ...

High-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) is an imaging technique that can be used for visualizing biological processes, for example the activity of proteins. Nowadays, typical HS-AFM frame rates are as high as 12 frames per second. In order to improve the capabilities of the method, so that it can be applied to an ever expanding range of biological samples, better video rates are needed, though. Moreover, faster recording times imply less interaction between the sample and the probe -- a tip scanning the sample's surface -- making the imaging ...

A team of researchers, led by the Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio (Incipit-CSIC) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the team from the Arqueological Zone of Caral (Perú) led by Dr. Ruth Shady Solís, has established the relation between the position of the monuments of the Supe Culture (Perú), their orientations, and some astronomical and topographic features, which opens the way to the analysis of the way the inhabitants of this valley conceived space and time 5000 years ago. The results of the study have just been published in the journal Latin American Antiquity. The valley of the river Supe in Perú contains the first evidence for city building in the Americas. In recent decades in this valley and ...

Next-gen electronics is envisioned to be non-rigid, component-free, flexible, bendable, and easily integrable with different objects. Direct-write printing techniques provide unique opportunity to enable this vision through use of nanomaterial so-called functional inks, that can be tailored to add desired functionalities on various flexible substrates, such as textiles or plastic. The technology, known as Printed Electronics (PE), has been known for decades, but has recently gained considerable attention due to innovation in material inks, process technology and design revolution. To keep the research community abreast with the latest technological advancements in the area of droplet-based PE techniques for next-gen devices, researchers from Aarhus University have now ...

Kanazawa, Japan - Solar cells are excellent renewable energy tools that use sunlight to drive an electrical current for power. They've been used to power homes since the 1980s, and their performance and production cost have improved dramatically since then. The most common solar cells, based on silicon, work well for a long time. They retain more than 80% of their functionality even after 25 years. However, the efficiency--i.e., how much of the incoming sunlight is converted to electrical power--of commercial-scale silicon solar cells is currently only around 20%. Maximizing solar cells' energy conversion efficiency will improve their competitiveness compared to fossil fuels and help optimize them as a sustainable ...

The B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants of SARS-CoV-2 were first detected in the UK and South Africa respectively, and have since spread to many other countries. Scientists from the Institut Pasteur joined forces with Orléans Regional Hospital, Tours University Hospital, Créteil Intercommunal Hospital, Strasbourg University Hospital and Georges Pompidou European Hospital to study the sensitivity of these two variants to neutralizing antibodies present in the serum samples of people who have been vaccinated or previously infected with SARS-CoV-2. They compared this sensitivity with that of the reference ...

Whether for microscopy, data storage or sensor technology, many advanced technological applications that require specific functions rely on the structure of the electromagnetic field near the surfaces of materials. In nanosystems, so-called surface phonons, i.e. temporal distortions of the atomic lattice, contribute decisively to the physical and thermodynamic properties. If surface phonons could be specifically manipulated, it would be possible to achieve better thermal conduction or heat transfer between two components with nanosurfaces. This could be used, for example, in detectors, sensors or in highly efficient passive cooling systems. In addition, surface phonons concentrate electromagnetic energy ...

A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for the "Editors' Suggestion" of the journal Physical Review D. Their paper was published on March 24, 2021. In a quantum theory of point particles, a fundamental quantity is the correlation function, which measures the probability for a particle to propagate from one point to another. The correlation function develops singularities when the two points are connected by light-like trajectories. In a flat spacetime, there is such a unique trajectory, but when spacetime is curved, there ...

The recommendations are clear: physical activity is good for mental health. But it also depends on how varied it is. That's what a new study by researchers at the University of Basel shows, pointing to one of the reasons why well-being suffers during the pandemic. A walk in the morning, a jog in the evening or even just going out to buy groceries: activity helps the psyche. Many are trying to stay active during the pandemic despite mandatory home office and limited leisure activities. Others find that they are moving significantly less than before the pandemic because previous everyday activities are off-limits due to measures taken against the spread of Covid-19. Against this backdrop, a study led by Professor Andrew ...

A new type of universal computer memory - ULTRARAM™ - has taken a step closer towards development with a successful experiment by Lancaster physicists. Professor Manus Hayne, who is leading the research, commented: "These new results confirm the astonishing properties of ULTRARAM™, allowing us to demonstrate its potential as a fast and efficient non-volatile memory with high-endurance." Currently, the two main types of memory, dynamic RAM (DRAM) and flash, have complementary characteristics and roles:- DRAM is fast, so used for active (working) memory but it is volatile, meaning that information is lost when power is removed. Indeed, DRAM continually ...

"I've been studying how plants regulate their water balance for over 35 years. To find a completely new and unexpected way for saving water has certainly been one of the most surprising discoveries in my life." So says Professor Rainer Hedrich, plant scientist and biophysicist from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. Hedrich's group discovered this new strategy together with researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia. The results have been published in the journal Nature Communications. GABA quantity as stress memory The publication shows: plants use the signalling molecule GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) to remember the dryness of a day. The drier it is, the ...