Scientists have got up close and personal with human sewage to determine how best to measure hidden and potentially dangerous plastics. As the way microplastics are measured and counted varies from place to place, there is no agreed understanding of the weight of the problem. Until scientists can agree on one way of measuring them, life on land and sea will continue to ingest who knows how much plastic, affecting health for generations. A new study, published today in Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, by the University of Portsmouth has examined one method, using a chemical solution called 'Fenton reagent' to ...

WHAT: The immune system's attempt to eliminate Salmonella bacteria from the gastrointestinal (GI) tract instead facilitates colonization of the intestinal tract and fecal shedding, according to National Institutes of Health scientists. The study, published in Cell Host & Microbe, was conducted by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) scientists at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. Salmonella Typhimurium bacteria (hereafter Salmonella) live in the gut and often cause gastroenteritis in people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates Salmonella bacteria cause about ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen scientists perform incredible feats in a short amount of time, from developing tests to new types of vaccines. Despite these victories, experts are still working to develop an effective antiviral drug to kill the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A cover story in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, details the challenges of and progress toward creating a drug that would help the world conquer COVID-19. Creating a new antiviral drug is a tricky business. Viruses mutate and replicate quickly, and their structures differ greatly even within the same class, ...

American writer and humorist Mark Twain, a master of language and noted lecturer, once offered, "The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause." Electric fish and today's TED talk speakers take a page from Twain's playbook. They pause before sharing something particularly meaningful. Pauses also prime the sensory systems to receive new and important information, according to research from Washington University in St. Louis. "There is an increased response in listeners to words -- or in this case, electrical pulses ...

It's well known that reptiles depend on temperature cues while in the egg to determine a hatchling's sex. Now, researchers writing in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution on May 26 say that embryos of many different animal species also rely on acoustic signals in important ways. They call this phenomenon "acoustic developmental programming." "Acoustic developmental programming occurs when a sound informs embryos about the environment they'll encounter postnatally and changes their development to better suit this environment," said Mylene Mariette (@MyleneMariette) of Deakin University in Australia. Because this is a newly discovered phenomenon, the evidence is just beginning to accumulate. And, yet, it seems to ...

Skokie, IL - The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), today released updated guidelines for stem cell research and its translation to medicine. The update reflects emerging advances including, stem cell-based embryo models, human embryo research, chimeras, organoids, and genome editing. "The 2021 update presents practical advice for oversight of research posing unique scientific and ethical issues for researchers and the public," said Robin Lovell-Badge, PhD, FRS, Chair, ISSCR Guidelines task force and Senior Group Leader and Head of the Division of Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at The Francis Crick Institute, UK. "They provide confidence to researchers, clinicians, and the public ...

The multifunctional porous solids with diverse functionalized linkers have been utilized as promising materials for various applications in energy, environmental and biomedical areas. Although their emerging properties are ascribed to varying pore types resulting from combinations of functional groups, the chemical environment of the pores remains an open question. A new synthetic platform where the population of pores can be identified and further controlled is of great interest in materials science. A research team, led by Professor Wonyoung Choe and Professor Tae-Hyuk Kwon in Department of Chemistry ...

Communities benefit from sharing knowledge and experience among their members. Following a similar principle - called "swarm learning" - an international research team has trained artificial intelligence algorithms to detect blood cancer, lung diseases and COVID-19 in data stored in a decentralized fashion. This approach has advantage over conventional methods since it inherently provides privacy preservation technologies, which facilitates cross-site analysis of scientific data. Swarm learning could thus significantly promote and accelerate collaboration and information exchange in research, especially in the field of medicine. Experts from the DZNE, the University of Bonn, the information technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and other research institutions report on ...

New research published in Nature provides a powerful yet surprisingly simple way to determine the number of visitors to any location in a city. Scientists* from the Santa Fe Institute, MIT, and ETH Zürich have discovered and developed a scaling law that governs the number of visitors to any location based on how far they are traveling and how often they are visiting. The visitation law opens up unprecedented possibilities for accurately predicting flows between locations, which could ultimately have applications in everything from city planning to preventing the spread of the next major pandemic. "Imagine you are standing on a busy plaza, say in Boston, and you see people coming and going. This ...

What The Study Did: This study included data from more than 11,000 emergency medical services (EMS) agencies in 49 states to describe racial/ethnic, social and geographic changes in EMS-observed overdose-associated cardiac arrests during the COVID-19 pandemic through 2020 in the United States. Authors: Joseph Friedman, M.P.H., of the University of California, Los Angeles, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0967) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: Researchers conducted a review of studies examining the frequency and variety of persistent symptoms after COVID-19 infection. Authors: Steven N. Goodman, M.D., M.H.S., Ph.D., of Stanford University in Stanford, California, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.11417) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media ...

What explains how often people travel to a particular place? Your intuition might suggest that distance is a key factor, but empirical evidence can help urban studies researchers answer the question more definitively. A new paper by an MIT team, drawing on global data, finds that people visit places more frequently when they have to travel shorter distances to get there. "What we have found is that there is a very clear inverse relationship between how far you go and how frequently you go there," says Paolo Santi, a research scientist at the Senseable City Lab at MIT and a co-author of the new paper. "You only seldom go to faraway places, and usually you tend to visit places close to you more often. It tells us how we organize our lives." By examining cellphone data ...

What The Study Did: Researchers analyzed each state's department of health website for accessibility and usability challenges. Findings suggest state health department COVID-19 vaccine website accessibility and usability challenges create frustration, may promote health disparities and contribute to overall ineffective and inequitable distribution. Authors: Raj M. Ratwani, Ph.D., of the Medstar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington, D.C., is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.14861) Editor's ...

Seeing, hearing, thinking, daydreaming -- doing anything at all, in fact -- activates neurons in the brain. But for people predisposed to developing brain tumors, the ordinary buzzing of their brains could be a problem. A study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Stanford University School of Medicine shows that the normal day-to-day activity of neurons can drive the formation and growth of brain tumors. The researchers studied mice genetically prone to developing tumors of their optic nerves, the bundle of neurons that carries ...

What The Study Did: Researchers quantified the added burden of fatal opioid overdoses occurring in Ontario, Canada, during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors: Tara Gomes, Ph.D., of the Keenan Research Centre of the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.12865) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding support disclosures. ...

What The Study Did: Researchers compared reporting practices for race, sex and socioeconomic status in randomized clinical trials published in general medical journals in 2015 with those published in 2019. Authors: Asad Siddiqui, M.D., of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.11516) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full study is linked to this news ...

Flowering plants (angiosperms) dominate most terrestrial ecosystems, providing the bulk of human food. However, their origin has been a mystery since the earliest days of evolutionary thought. Angiosperm flowers are hugely diverse. The key to clarifying the origin of flowers and how angiosperms might be related to other kinds of plants is understanding the evolution of the parts of the flower, especially angiosperm seeds and the fruits in which the seeds develop. Fossil seed-bearing structures preserved in a newly discovered Early Cretaceous silicified peat in Inner Mongolia, China, provide a partial answer to the origin of flowering plants, according to a study led by Prof. SHI Gongle from the Nanjing ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (May 26, 2021) - Using novel imaging methods for studying brain metabolism, University of Kentucky researchers have identified the reservoir for a necessary sugar in the brain. Glycogen serves as a storage depot for the sugar glucose. The laboratories of Ramon Sun, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience, Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, and Matthew Gentry, Ph.D., professor of molecular and cellular biochemistry and director of the Lafora Epilepsy Cure Initiative at the University of Kentucky College ...

Berkeley -- The lifestyle of the horned passalus beetle, commonly known as the bessbug or betsy beetle, might seem downright disgusting to the average human: Not only does this shiny black beetle eat its own poop, known as frass, but it uses its feces to line the walls of its living space and to help build protective chambers around its developing young. Gross as it may seem, a new study suggests that this beetle's frass habits are actually part of a clever strategy for protecting the insect's health -- and could help inform human medicine, too. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered that the frass of the horned passalus beetle is teeming with antibiotic and antifungal chemicals similar to the ones that humans use to ward off bacterial and ...

In a new study published online in spring 2021 and in the July issue of the journal Contraception, University of Chicago Medicine investigators and colleagues interviewed primary care providers in Illinois about their interest in providing medication abortion care and found that lifting FDA restrictions on mifepristone to allow pharmacy dispensing could normalize medication abortion, facilitate its use in primary care facilities, and address disparities in reproductive health access. "Mifepristone is used in combination with misoprostol to end early pregnancies, during the first trimester," ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Thermoelectric power generators that make electrical power from waste heat would be a useful tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if it weren't for a most vexing problem: the need to make electrical contacts to their hot side, which is often just too hot for materials that can generate a current. The heat causes devices to fail over time. Devices known as transverse thermoelectrics avoid this problem by producing a current that runs perpendicular to the conducting device, requiring contacts only on the cold end of the generator. Though considered a promising ...

DURHAM, N.H.--Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have conducted two of the first studies in New England to collectively show that toxic man-made chemicals called PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances), found in everything from rugs to product packaging, end up in the environment differently after being processed through wastewater treatment facilities--making it more challenging to set acceptable screening levels. "PFAS are persistent substances that are not easily broken down and have been linked to adverse health effects," said Paula Mouser, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "They are found in a wide variety of industrial, commercial and medicinal products and can end up in the body, human waste and the environment. If not managed correctly, they ...

In a new study, scientists at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have revealed that most T cell epitopes known to be targeted upon natural infection are seemingly unaffected by current SARS-CoV-2 variants. In their latest research, the team compiled and analysed data from 18 immunological studies of T cell responses involving over 850 recovered COVID-19 patients from across four continents who are well-distributed in age, gender, disease severity and blood collection time. They demonstrated that T cells in these patients targeted fragments (epitopes) of almost all of ...

Rough night of sleep? Relying on caffeine to get you through the day isn't always the answer, says a new study from Michigan State University. Researchers from MSU's Sleep and Learning Lab, led by psychology associate professor Kimberly Fenn, assessed how effective caffeine was in counteracting the negative effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. As it turns out, caffeine can only get you so far. The study -- published in the most recent edition of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition -- assessed the impact of caffeine after a night of sleep deprivation. More than 275 participants were asked to complete a ...

Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has been the gold standard for diagnosis during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the PCR portion of the test requires bulky, expensive machines and takes about an hour to complete, making it difficult to quickly diagnose someone at a testing site. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a plasmofluidic chip that can perform PCR in only about 8 minutes, which could speed diagnosis during current and future pandemics. Rapid diagnosis of COVID-19 and other highly contagious viral diseases is important for timely medical care, quarantining ...