Ancient alchemists dreamed of transforming base materials like lead into gold and other valuable commodities. While such efforts generally came to naught, researchers today are having some success in extracting a variety of useful products like aviation fuels, lubricants, solvents, food additives and plastics from organic waste. The trick is accomplished with the aid of specialized bacteria, whose metabolic activities can convert simpler chemicals into useful products through a microbial growth process knows as chain elongation. Anca Delgado, a researcher in the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University, has been exploring the phenomenon. In a new study, she describes ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Feb. 18, 2021 -- An abnormal suppression of the immune system linked to the onset of numerous diseases has been associated with poor functional regeneration of traumatic bone injuries. Levels of immune cells and proteins circulating in the blood following traumatic injury combined with advanced data analytics could predict whether patients are likely to respond to treatment, said Robert Guldberg, executive director of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. The project -- detailed in a paper published online ahead of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- identified ...

WASHINGTON--A potentially dangerous side effect of testosterone therapy for transgender men is an increase in red blood cells that can raise the risk of blood clots, heart attack or stroke, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Gender diverse people make up an estimated 0.6% of the U.S. population and are defined as having gender identity that is not aligned with their sex recorded at birth. Transgender men often undergo testosterone therapy as part of their gender-affirming treatment. Erythrocytosis, a condition where your body makes too many red blood cells, is a common side effect of testosterone therapy that can increase the risk of blood clots, heart attack or stroke. "Erythrocytosis is common ...

Despite being one of the world's most charismatic species, tigers face uncertain futures primarily due to habitat fragmentation, human-wildlife conflict and poaching. As global tiger populations decline, so does their genetic diversity. But until now it's been unclear how the animals' dwindling numbers are affecting them at the genetic level. To find out, researchers at Stanford University, the National Centre for Biological Sciences, India, and various zoological parks and NGOs sequenced 65 genomes from four of the surviving tiger subspecies. Their findings confirmed that strong genetic differences exist between different tiger subspecies but showed, surprisingly, that these differences emerged relatively recently, ...

Transit-oriented development--which concentrates high-density housing, commercial activities and public spaces around a rapid transit station--can both be a boon and a bane for communities, suggests a new UBC study. "Transit-oriented development (TOD) can reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, encourage active mobility, and revitalize a neighbourhood," explains study author Craig E. Jones, a PhD candidate in geography and the research coordinator for the Housing Research Collaborative at UBC's faculty of applied science. "However, it can also cause gentrification through the demolition of affordable rental housing. It can tailor the area towards condo ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. and DUARTE, Calif. -- Feb. 17, 2021 -- Urinalysis has long been a staple of physical exams to detect and manage a number of diseases and disorders, but not cancer. What if it were that easy, though, and cancer was detected in its very earliest stages when the disease responds more favorably to treatment and improved outcomes are more likely? That was the question posed by scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, who have found a way of zeroing in on early-stage cancer by analyzing short strands of cell-free DNA in urine. Their study's findings were published today in the scientific journal Science ...

Severe forms of malaria such as Plasmodium falciparum may be deadly even after treatment with current parasite-killing drugs. This is due to persistent cyto-adhesion of infected erythrocytes even though existing parasites within the red blood cells are dead. As vaccines for malaria have proved less than moderately effective, and to treat these severe cases of P. falciparum malaria, new avenues are urgently needed. Latest estimates indicate that more than 500 million cases of malaria and more than 400,000 deaths are reported worldwide each year. Anti-adhesion drugs may hold the key to significantly improving survival rates. Using venom from the Conus nux, a species of sea snail, a first-of-its-kind study ...

Extending the symptoms that trigger a PCR test for COVID-19 could help detect around a third more cases of the disease. New research led by researchers at King's College London and published in the Journal of Infection suggests that restricting testing to the 'classic triad' of cough, fever and loss of smell which is required for eligibility for a PCR test through the NHS may have missed cases. Extending the list to include fatigue, sore throat, headache and diarrhoea would have detected 96% of symptomatic cases. A team of researchers at King's College London and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) analysed data from more than 122,000 UK adult users of the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app. These users reported experiencing ...

A research team from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has improved the protective effect of a molecule against ischemic stroke, which is caused by an interruption of blood flow to the brain. The results of the study, conducted in collaboration with a Spanish team, were published in the Communications Biology of Nature Research journal. Every year in Quebec, about 20,000 people have a stroke. Also known as a "cerebral infarction", this sudden neurological deficit can lead to psychological and physical after-effects. These effects result from an increase in glutamate in the brain, which destroys neurons. "Glutamate is an essential neurotransmitter for neuronal communication, learning and memory ...

BURNABY, BC - (February 18, 2021) -- D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today published a milestone study in collaboration with scientists at Google, demonstrating a computational performance advantage, increasing with both simulation size and problem hardness, to over 3 million times that of corresponding classical methods. Notably, this work was achieved on a practical application with real-world implications, simulating the topological phenomena behind the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics. This performance advantage, exhibited in a complex quantum simulation of materials, is a meaningful step in the journey toward applications advantage in quantum computing. The work by scientists at D-Wave ...

Ice is a very versatile material. In snowflakes or ice cubes, the oxygen atoms are arranged hexagonally. This ice form is called ice one (ice I). "Strictly speaking, however, these are not actually perfect crystals, but disordered systems in which the water molecules are randomly oriented in different spatial directions," explains Thomas Loerting from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Including ice I, 18 crystalline forms of ice were known so far, which differ in the arrangement of their atoms. The different types of ice, known as polymorphs, form depending on pressure and temperature and have very different properties. For example, their melting points differ by several ...

DALLAS - Feb. 18, 2021 - Inhalation of depleted uranium from exploding munitions did not lead to Gulf War illness (GWI) in veterans deployed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a new study co-authored by a leading researcher of the disease at UT Southwestern suggests. The findings, published today in Scientific Reports, help eliminate a long-suspected cause of GWI that has attracted international concern for three decades. Using high-precision multicollector mass spectrometry for the first time in such a study, END ...

[Vienna, Feb 18, 2021] Communities worldwide are trying to address inequality. One promising approach could be to look at the design of a city, according to research with real-world data in the journal Nature Communications. An international team of scientists, including members of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH), show that urban planning directly influences the formation of social networks in a city and subsequently the socio-economic equality or inequality of its citizens. "We know how important social networks are for our social and economic outcomes," explains CSH researcher Johannes Wachs, one of the authors of the paper. Social relations provide individuals with essential access to resources, information, economic opportunities and other forms ...

An irregular sleep schedule can increase a person's risk of depression over the long term as much as getting fewer hours of sleep overall, or staying up late most nights, a new study suggests. Even when it comes to just their mood the next day, people whose waking time varies from day to day may find themselves in as much of a foul mood as those who stayed up extra late the night before, or got up extra early that morning, the study shows. The study, conducted by a team from Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan's academic medical center, uses data from direct measurements of the sleep and mood of more than 2,100 early-career ...

Researchers have published new insights into the causes of mortality in sepsis Loss of endothelial function is induced through two different pathophysiological processes and is a major driver of septic shock, a life-threatening drop in blood pressure The first pathway originates in the loss of the endothelial barrier triggering an increased production of the repair hormone bioactive Adrenomedullin (bio-ADM), which also has the undesired side effect of vasodilation The second threat acting on the endothelial function is the release of the protease DPP3 into the bloodstream which degrades angiotensin II, a process resulting in decreased vascular tone and cardiac output The different ...

The UK's first national lockdown from March 2020 and its immediate aftermath saw a massive shift in consumer habits that was initially mandated but then lingered as shops and restaurants opened but risks from the virus remained. A new study from the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle used data from the ONS to compare retail, hospitality and online sales in the UK between March and August 2020 with average figures for the same months for the years 2010-2019. Researchers took an approach normally used to estimate cumulative excess deaths to try and measure the impact of the COVID-19 shock on sales of UK retailers and restaurants. They say their economic models suggest that shops predominantly selling food, such as supermarkets, saw ...

Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) are releasing recommendations designed to address the under-representation of African Americans in clinical trials for multiple myeloma (MM), a blood cancer that is twice as deadly in this demographic as in whites. The initiative, publishing today in the AACR journal Blood Cancer Discovery, is a "road map" for designing myeloma clinical trials to eliminate racial bias by including more African American patients, as well as gathering "real-world" data from health records about the effects of drugs in African American patients. Through this joint workshop initiated by ...

Among strategies to curb hospital prices among the commercially insured population in the U.S., direct price regulations such as setting rates are likely to achieve greater savings than other approaches like increasing competition or improving price transparency, according to a new RAND Corporation study. But price regulations face the greatest political obstacles and historically have been strongly opposed by medical providers, according to the report. Setting prices for all commercial health care payers could reduce hospital spending by $61.9 billion to $236.6 billion annually if the rates were set as high as 150% to as low as 100% of the amounts paid by the federal Medicare program, ...

An analysis published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society indicates that while adults aged 75 years and older do not benefit from taking aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease, many do so on a regular basis. Also, although statins are known to help prevent heart problems in older adults who have experienced a cardiovascular event, many of these individuals do not take a statin. The analysis included data on 11,392 U.S. adults aged 50 years and older who were surveyed from 2011 to 2018. Investigators found that more than half of participants took aspirin or a statin. "Healthcare providers should inform their older patients about appropriate aspirin use so that they can avoid misuse of aspirin, which can be easily purchased over the counter. Ultimately, ...

African Americans have higher rates of prostate cancer and are more likely to die from the disease than other groups in the United States, likely due to socioeconomic factors, healthcare access problems, and tumor biology. A new review published in Cancer Reports focuses on the biological differences in the development of prostate cancer across ethnicities. The authors note that these differences could be leveraged to improve the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer in African American men, ultimately reducing incidence and mortality rates associated with the disease. "We provide a comprehensive review of the significant research in recent years that has examined the molecular and genomic reasons for unequal cancer burden in African American and Caucasian American ...

In an analysis of information on 448 patients with heart failure who were discharged from a hospital in Sweden, 20.3% of patients were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days, and 60.9% were readmitted within 1 year. The END ...

A study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry has found long-term impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the northern Gulf of Mexico on bottlenose dolphins' immune function. Bottlenose dolphins from an area that received prolonged and heavy oiling were temporarily captured, sampled, and released as part of health assessment programs. The animals were compared with dolphins from an area where no oil was observed. Investigators documented immunological alterations in bottlenose dolphins tested up to a decade following the oil spill that were similar in nature to those immediately following the spill. The effects were seen even in dolphins born after the spill. The nature of the immunological ...

A new study published in Economic Inquiry is the first to assess the willingness of consumers to adopt advisory services in the banking sector that are based on artificial intelligence (AI). Investigators examined whether the likelihood that consumers adopt AI in banking services depends on tastes for human interaction across different cultures. The study focused on robo-advisory services, which are automated investment platforms that provide investment advice without the intervention of a human advisor. When investigators analyzed an ING Bank dataset encompassing 11,000 respondents from 11 countries, they found ...

A new study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research has identified various factors that may indicate whether a person faces a higher likelihood of experiencing a bone fracture over the next two decades. The study included 30,446 middle-aged women and men who were followed from the early/mid 1990s to 2016. A total of 8,240 participants (27%) had at least one fracture during a median follow-up of 20.7 years. Older age, female sex, higher body mass index, a previous fracture, a family history of fracture after the age of 50 years, low leisure-time physical activity, heavy work, living alone, smoking, and no or high alcohol consumption were factors independently associated with ...

Among patients with cancer, having additional physical comorbidities was linked with a higher risk of experiencing psychological distress. The finding comes from a Psycho-Oncology analysis of 2017 data from the National Health Survey of Spain. The analysis included 484 patients who reported a cancer diagnosis and 484 matched controls without a history of cancer. Compared with controls, patients with cancer reported more physical comorbidities, including chronic back pain, asthma, chronic bronchitis, urinary incontinence, prostate problems, and kidney problems. ...