Simple systems can reproduce faster than complex ones. So, how can the complexity of life have arisen from simple chemical beginnings? Starting with a simple system of self-replicating fibres, chemists at the University of Groningen have discovered that upon introducing a molecule that attacks the replicators, the more complex structures have an advantage. This system shows the way forward in elucidating how life can originate from lifeless matter. The results were published on 10 March in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The road to answering the question of how life originated is guarded by Spiegelman's monster, named after the American molecular biologist Sol Spiegelman, who some 55 years ago ...

Many people who embrace social welfare programs vote against their own interests, according to new UC Riverside research. The mitigating factor is education: The more education one has, the more likely one is to stick to one's policy preferences. "It means candidates who employ tactics such as fear and attaching patriotism to certain concepts can persuade people to vote for candidates who are in opposition to their social beliefs," Diogo Ferrari, a professor of political science at UC Riverside, wrote in his recently published paper, "Education, Belief Structures, Support for Welfare Polices, and Vote," published in the journal Education & Society. For the study, Ferrari looked at public opinion ...

Brazilian researchers have published a systematic review of the scientific literature showing that some warm-up strategies such as dynamic stretching can effectively prepare soccer players to maintain kicking accuracy, whereas intense physical exercises have a negative effect on the velocity of the ball when kicked, and consumption of carbohydrate beverages during a match can enable players to maintain adequate kicking performance in the concluding moments of prolonged physical exercise such as a sudden-death playoff. The review, published in the journal Sports Medicine in December 2020, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Electricity may slow - and in some cases, stop - the speed at which breast cancer cells spread through the body, a new study indicates. The research also found that electromagnetic fields might hinder the amount of breast cancer cells that spread. The findings, published recently in the journal Bioelectricity, suggest that electromagnetic fields might be a useful tool in fighting cancers that are highly metastatic, which means they are likely to spread to other parts of the body, the authors said. "We think we can hinder metastasis by applying these fields, but we also think it may be possible to even destroy tumors using this approach," said Vish Subramaniam, senior author of the paper and former professor of mechanical ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 17, 2021) - Stroke remains a leading cause of death worldwide and one of the most common reasons for disability. While a wide variety of factors influence stroke outcomes, data show that avoiding readmissions and long lengths of stay among ischemic stroke patients has benefits for patients and health care systems alike. Although reduced readmission rates among various medical patients have been associated with better nurse work environments, it is unknown how the work environment might influence readmissions and length of stay for ischemic stroke patients. In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing's (Penn Nursing) Center for Health Outcomes ...

The NASA-funded Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) performed well in seismic experiments conducted in snowy summer Greenland, according to a new study by the SIIOS team led by the University of Arizona published this week in Seismological Research Letters. SIIOS could be a part of proposed NASA spacecraft missions to the surface of Europa or Enceladus. These moons of Jupiter and Saturn are encrusted by an icy shell over subsurface liquid oceans, and seismic data could be used to better define the thickness and depth of these layers. Other seismic points of interest on these worlds could include ice volcanoes, drainage events below the ice shell and possibly even ...

East Hanover, NJ. March 17, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers have identified several practical and technical barriers to the widespread use of surface electromyography (sEMG) in clinical neurorehabilitation. Based on their holistic analysis of these factors, the researchers suggest a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and unified approach to enable rehabilitation professionals to routinely use sEMG. The article, "Use of Surface EMG in Clinical Rehabilitation of Individuals With SCI: Barriers and Future Considerations" (doi: 10.3389/fneur.2020.578559), was published December 18, 2020, in Frontiers in Neurology. It is available open access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7780850/ The authors are Rakesh ...

Autoimmune diseases are typically caused when the immune system, whose purpose is to deal with foreign threats to the body, incorrectly recognizes the body's own proteins and cells as threats and activates immune cells to attack them. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis, a well-known autoimmune disease, immune cells erroneously attack the body's own joint components and proteins, causing painful inflammation and even the destruction of bone! Scientists from Japan have now taken a massive step toward understanding and, potentially, treating rheumatoid arthritis better, with their discovery in a brand-new study. Read on to understand how! The development of autoimmune diseases is an incredibly complex process, involving several key players ...

A sustainable, powerful micro-supercapacitor may be on the horizon, thanks to an international collaboration of researchers from Penn State and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Until now, the high-capacity, fast-charging energy storage devices have been limited by the composition of their electrodes -- the connections responsible for managing the flow of electrons during charging and dispensing energy. Now, researchers have developed a better material to improve connectivity while maintaining recyclability and low cost. They published their results on Feb. 8 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A. "The supercapacitor is a very powerful, energy-dense device with a fast-charging rate, in contrast to the typical battery ...

An international collaboration between Great Ormond Street Hospital, the UCL GOS Institute for Child Health and Harvard Medical School has shown that the beneficial effects of gene therapy can be seen decades after the transplanted blood stem cells has been cleared by the body. The research team monitored five patients who were successfully cured of SCID-X1 using gene therapy at GOSH. For 3-18 years patients' blood was regularly analysed to detect which cell types and biomarker chemicals were present in their blood. The results showed that even though the stem cells transplanted as part of gene therapy had been cleared by the patients, the all-important corrected immune cells, called T-cells, were still forming. Gene therapy works by first removing ...

In researching the causes and potential treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, neuroscientists frequently struggle to accurately identify cells needed to understand brain activity that gives rise to behavior changes such as declining memory or impaired balance and tremors. A multidisciplinary team of Georgia Institute of Technology neuroscience researchers, borrowing from existing tools such as graphical models, have uncovered a better way to identify cells and understand the mechanisms of the diseases, potentially leading to better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment. Their research findings were reported Feb. 24 in the journal eLife. The research was supported by the National Institutes of ...

Hydrogen is a pollution-free energy source when it's extracted from water using sunlight instead of fossil fuels. But current strategies for "splitting" or breaking apart water molecules with catalysts and light require the introduction of chemical additives to expedite the process. Now, researchers reporting in ACS ES&T Engineering have developed a catalyst that destroys medications and other compounds already present in wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, getting rid of a contaminant while producing something useful. Harnessing the sun's energy to split water to make hydrogen fuel is a promising renewable resource, but it is a slow process even when catalysts are used to speed it along. In some cases, alcohols or sugars are added to boost the rate of hydrogen production, ...

NEW YORK (March 17, 2021) -- High speed air dryers not only leave more contamination on poorly washed hands compared to paper towels, but during hand drying, they can also spread germs onto clothing, ultimately transferring more bacteria to other surfaces, according to a study published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. Past research has shown recommended handwashing practices for healthcare workers are often not followed with average adherence of 40%. To better understand the impact of hand drying in hand hygiene, researchers conducted an experiment to learn the role of different hand drying methods in spreading germs from poorly washed hands beyond the restroom. For ...

Scientists in Japan have observed, and interfered with, the ultrafast motion of electron movement inside of a Xenon atom using the coherent pairs of short light waves in synchrotron radiation. Xenon, consisting of a nucleus surrounded by five nested shells containing a total of 54 electrons, is used in flash lamps, and it burns bright and fast. The luminescent electrons move there on a time scale of one billionth of a second. The fast electron movement is however six orders of magnitude slower than that the scientists observed. Using the synchrotron facility at Institute for Molecular Science, they tracked the electron movement in relaxation to shed energy by dropping from an outer shell to an inner shell. The process happens at a timescale of femtoseconds, ...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have designed a new bioink which allows small human-sized airways to be 3D-bioprinted with the help of patient cells for the first time. The 3D-printed constructs are biocompatible and support new blood vessel growth into the transplanted material. This is an important first step towards 3D-printing organs. The new study has been published in Advanced Materials. Chronic lung diseases are the third leading cause of death worldwide with an EU cost of more than €380 billion annually. For many chronic diseases ...

The promotion of psychosocial health among individuals, groups, and society is an increasingly important subject in the field of public health. Psychosocial health is a complex interaction between the psyche of an individual and the social environment in which that individual lives. Promoting psychosocial health is often challenging and complex for health care professionals. Therefore, an important question of public health significance is: "how can we address and improve the psychosocial health of individuals, groups, as well as society in general?" An interdisciplinary team of specialists ...

The use of artificial light at night around the world has increased enormously in recent years, causing adverse effects on the survival and reproduction of nocturnal organisms. Artificial light at night interferes with vital ecological processes such as the nighttime pollination of plants by nocturnal insects, which could have consequences for agricultural crop yields and reproduction of wild plants. Scientists from the University of Zurich and Agroscope have now demonstrated for the first time that artificial light at night also adversely affects insects' pollination behavior during the daytime. In an experiment, they used commercial ...

Silicon solar cells are now so cheap and efficient that they can generate electricity at prices of less than 2 cent/kWh. The most efficient silicon solar cells today are made with less than 10 nanometres thin selective amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) contact layers, which are responsible for separating the light-generated charges . Efficiencies of over 24% are achieved at HZB with such silicon heterojunction solar cells and are also part of a tandem solar cell that lead to a recently reported efficiency record of 29.15 % (A. Al-Ashouri, et al. Science 370, (2020)). The current world record from Japan for a ...

Tropical Cyclone (TC) is an intense atmospheric vortex with a warm core and low pressure structure, and generates over the tropical or subtropical warm ocean. The problem of TC genesis has been paid great attention by scientists since the 1950s, but due to the lack of the observation data over sea, this problem has become the most difficult and challenging topic in the researches of TC. Cumulus convections are considered to be the most basic element in the TC generation process. The formation of TC in the Northwest Pacific is often associated with the mesoscale convective system (MCS) or mesoscale convective complex (MCC). Meanwhile, in the stratiform ...

Not least because of the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories are more topical than ever. They are reported and discussed in almost all media and communication channels. But what influence do they have on our behavior? Scientists led by behavioral economist Loukas Balafoutas investigated this question in a recently published study. The result: We don't need to believe in conspiracy theories for them to have an impact on us. Merely being confronted with them suffices. Previous studies have shown that beliefs in conspiracy theories have an influence on the behavior of their adherents. For example, they lead to lower voter turnout or a lower willingness to get vaccinated. For years now, conspiracy theories have been ...

One of the most vital functions performed by the cells in our body is DNA repair, a task so crucial to our well-being that failing to execute it can lead to consequences as dreadful as cancer. The process of DNA repair involves a complex interplay between several gene pathways and proteins. One such pathway is the "Fanconi anemia (FA) pathway," whose genes participate in DNA repair. FANCM, a component of this pathway, is tasked with the elimination of harmful DNA "inter-strand cross-links," and interacts with another component called MHF in order to function. The importance of the FANCM-MHF complex is well-documented: its loss can result in chromosomal ...

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infections are among the major global health problems. Particularly problematic is the high number of chronic courses of the disease, causing the deaths of more than 800.000 people globally every year. So far, there is no therapy to cure the condition. "With the discovery of a new hepatitis B virus in donkeys and zebras capable of causing prolonged infections, we now have the opportunity for a better understanding of the chronic course of the disease and thus also for mitigation or prevention of severe clinical consequences," explains Prof. Dr. Jan Felix Drexler, DZIF ...

A new study uncovers which cell types can be infected by SARS-CoV-2 due to their viral entry factors. The study also suggests that increased gene expression of these viral entry factors in some individuals partially explains the differences of COVID-19 severity reported in relation to age, gender and smoking status. The study evolved from the Human Cell Atlas Lung Biological Network with main contributions from Helmholtz Zentrum München, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University Medical Center Groningen. COVID-19 does not affect everyone in the same way. While the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 primarily ...

The health of women aged 65 and over appears to be related, in addition to their own socioeconomic characteristics, with that of their partners, as a result of traditional gender norms. This is one of the main conclusions of research led by Jordi Gumà, a researcher at the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences, conducted in conjunction with Jeroen Spijker, a Ramon y Cajal I3 researcher at the Centre for Demographic Studies of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (CED-UAB), focusing on the case of Spain. The study, published in Gaceta Sanitaria, analyses the health differences among the Spanish ...

An international team of scientists from the University of Turku, Finland and PennState University, USA have solved a long-standing mystery of how living organisms distinguish RNA and DNA building blocks during gene expression paving the way for the design of new antiviral drugs. The new insights were published in the journal Nature Communications. All cellular organisms use two types of nucleic acids, RNA and DNA to store, propagate and utilize their genetic information. The synthesis of DNA is carried out by enzymes called DNA polymerases and is needed to accurately transfer the genetic information from generation to generation. ...