A new study out of the University of Chicago has found that during the initial wave of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 cases of the virus was symptomatic. The research team found that non-symptomatic cases substantially contribute to community transmission, making up at least 50% of the driving force of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The results were published on Feb. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When the COVID-19 epidemic arrived in the U.S., the investigators noticed that it was very difficult to estimate what proportion of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 would go on to develop symptoms, partially due to the initial challenges with testing capacity. "Without ...

As the number of pregnant women using opioid drugs continues to rise, questions have been raised about the long-term health effects on children exposed to these drugs in the womb. Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine now have preliminary but striking evidence that suggests that such exposure can cause long-lasting impairment in the brain's ability to process sensory information. These impairments may give rise to autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and substance use disorders during adolescence. The landmark study, recently published in Journal ...

It was once thought that Ebola and related filoviruses were more or less contained to Central Africa. After a West African outbreak and the discovery of Reston ebolavirus in the Philippines, cuevavirus in Spain and various bat filoviruses in China, researchers now understand that this viral family--causing hemorrhagic fevers with up to 90% case fatality rates--has been widespread around the world for millions of years. Our defenses against it are more embryonic, and though we have a vaccine against one species of Ebola and some therapeutic antibodies on the horizon, both have production or distribution issues. What doctors ...

At a glance: New study suggests monetary reparations for Black descendants of people enslaved in the United States could have cut SARS-CoV-2 transmission and COVID-19 rates both among Black individuals and the population at large. Researchers modeled the impact of structural racism on viral transmission and disease impact in the state of Louisiana. The higher burden of SARS-CoV-2 infection among Black people also amplified the virus's spread in the wider population. Reparations could have reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the overall population by as much as 68 percent. Compared with white people, Black individuals in the United States are more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, more likely ...

In a recent article in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine, authors gathered previously published research to summarize current thinking on the feasibility and efficacy of using scent detection dogs to screen for the COVID-19 virus. The researchers report that sensitivity, specificity, and overall success rates reported by the canine scent detection studies are comparable or better than the standard RT-PCR and antigen testing procedures. These findings indicate scent detection dogs can likely be used to effectively screen and identify individuals infected with the COVID-19 virus in hospitals, senior care facilities, schools, universities, ...

EUGENE, Ore. -- Feb. 11, 2021 -- Researchers have mined and combined information from two databases to link pollen and key plant traits to generate confidence in the ability to reconstruct past ecosystem services. The approach provides a new tool to that can be used to understand how plants performed different benefits useful for humans over the past 21,000 years, and how these services responded to human and climate disturbances, including droughts and fires, said Thomas Brussel, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Oregon's Department of Geography. The approach is detailed in a paper published online ...

Palo Alto, CA-- Understanding how plants respond to stressful environmental conditions is crucial to developing effective strategies for protecting important agricultural crops from a changing climate. New research led by Carnegie's Zhiyong Wang, Shouling, Xu, and Yang Bi reveals an important process by which plants switch between amplified and dampened stress responses. Their work is published by Nature Communications. To survive in a changing environment, plants must choose between different response strategies, which are based on both external environmental factors and internal nutritional and energy demands. For example, a plant might either delay or accelerate its lifecycle, depending on the availability of the stored ...

A negative experience with food usually leaves us unable to stomach the thought of eating that particular dish again. Using sugar-loving snails as models, researchers at the University of Sussex believe these bad experiences could be causing a switch in our brains, which impacts our future eating habits. Like many other animals, snails like sugar and usually start feeding on it as soon as it is presented to them. But through aversive training which involved tapping the snails gently on the head when sugar appeared, the snails' behaviour was altered and they refused to feed on the sugar, even when hungry. When the team ...

FRANKFURT. More than two thirds of the earth is covered by clouds. Depending on whether they float high or low, how large their water and ice content is, how thick they are or over which region of the Earth they form, it gets warmer or cooler underneath them. Due to human influence, there are most likely more cooling effects from clouds today than in pre-industrial times, but how clouds contribute to climate change is not yet well understood. Researchers currently believe that low clouds over the Arctic and Antarctic, for example, contribute to the warming of these regions by blocking the direct radiation of long-wave heat from the Earth's surface. All ...

Low-income middle-aged African-American women with high blood pressure very commonly suffer from depression and should be better screened for this serious mental health condition, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The researchers found that in a sample of over 300 low-income, African-American women, aged 40-75, with uncontrolled hypertension, nearly 60 percent screened positively for a diagnosis of depression based on a standard clinical questionnaire about depressive symptoms. The results appeared February 10 in JAMA Psychiatry. "Our findings suggest that low-income, middle-aged African-American women with hypertension really should be screened for depression symptoms," ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- People who participated in a health education program that included both mental health and physical health information significantly reduced their risks of cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases by the end of the 12-month intervention - and sustained most of those improvements six months later, researchers found. People who participated in the integrated mental and physical health program maintained significant improvements on seven of nine health measures six months after the program's conclusion. These included, on average, a 21% ...

New research shows that biodiversity is important not just at the traditional scale of short-term plot experiments--in which ecologists monitor the health of a single meadow, forest grove, or pond after manipulating its species counts--but when measured over decades and across regional landscapes as well. The findings can help guide conservation planning and enhance efforts to make human communities more sustainable. Published in a recent issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the multi-institutional study was led by Dr. Christopher Patrick ...

STEMOs (Stroke-Einsatz-Mobile) have been serving Berlin for ten years. The specialized stroke emergency response vehicles allow physicians to start treating stroke patients before they reach hospital. For the first time, a team of researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin has been able to show that the dispatch of mobile stroke units is linked to improved clinical outcomes. The researchers' findings, which show that patients for whom STEMOs were dispatched were more likely to survive without long-term disability, have been published in JAMA*. The phrase 'time is brain' emphasizes a fundamental principle from emergency medicine, namely that after stroke, every minute counts. Without ...

With the help of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, and other ground-based telescopes, astronomers have confirmed that a faint object discovered in 2018 and nicknamed "Farfarout" is indeed the most distant object yet found in our Solar System. The object has just received its designation from the International Astronomical Union. Farfarout was first spotted in January 2018 by the Subaru Telescope, located on Maunakea in Hawai'i. Its discoverers could tell it was very far away, but they weren't sure exactly how far. They needed more observations. "At that time we did not know the object's orbit as we only had the Subaru discovery observations over 24 hours, but it takes years of ...

A report summary released today by a team at Lehigh University led by Thomas McAndrew , a computational scientist and assistant professor in Lehigh's College of Health, shares the consensus results of experts in the modeling of infectious disease when asked to rank the top 5 most effective interventions to mitigate the spread and impact of COVID-19 in the U.S. The report is part of an ongoing meta forecasting project aimed at translating forecasting and real world experience into actions. McAndrew and his colleagues wanted to answer "Here is where ...

Wilmington, DE, Feb. 11, 2020 -Scientists have developed an affordable, downloadable app that scans for potential unintended mistakes when CRISPR is used to repair mutations that cause disease. The app reveals potentially risky DNA alterations that could impede efforts to safely use CRISPR to correct mutations in conditions like sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis. The development of the new tool, called DECODR (which stands for Deconvolution of Complex DNA Repair), was reported today in The CRISPR Journal by researchers from ChristianaCare's Gene Editing Institute.  "Our research has shown that when CRISPR is used to repair a gene, it also can introduce a variety of subtle changes to DNA near the site of the repair," said Eric ...

Amsterdam, February 11, 2021 - Recent genetic data from patients with Huntington's disease (HD) show that DNA repair is an important factor that determines how early or late the disease occurs in individuals who carry the expanded CAG repeat in the HTT gene that causes HD. The processes of DNA repair further expand the CAG repeats in HTT in the brain implicated in pathogenesis and disease progression. This special issue of the Journal of Huntington's Disease (JHD) is a compendium of new reviews on topics ranging from the discovery of somatic CAG repeat expansion in HD, to our current understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved ...

In the last 25 years, scientists have discovered over 4000 planets beyond the borders of our solar system. From relatively small rock and water worlds to blisteringly hot gas giants, the planets display a remarkable variety. This variety is not unexpected. The sophisticated computer models, with which scientists study the formation of planets, also spawn very different planets. What the models have more difficulty to explain is the observed mass distribution of the planets discovered around other stars. The majority have fallen into the intermediate mass category - planets with masses of several Earth masses to around that of Neptune. Even in ...

LAWRENCE -- Nearly every fall, as football teams return to the field, tragic stories of players falling ill and even dying of heat trauma make the headlines. What many don't consider is that marching band members -- who don heavy uniforms and perform in the same sweltering temperatures -- may also be at risk. A study led by the University of Kansas has measured core temperatures, hydration and sweat levels of marching band members and found that they are very much at risk and deserve access to athletic trainers for their safety -- just as players do. The study used high tech methods to gauge band members' body core ...

A study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine reveals a novel role of the steroid receptor coactivator 3 (SRC-3/NCOA3), a protein crucial for steroid hormone function and a prognostic marker for aggressive human breast and other cancers. The team discovered that SRC-3 also regulates human immune T regulatory cells (Tregs), which contribute to the regulation of the body's immunological activity by suppressing the function of other immune cells, including those involved in fighting cancer. The study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, shows that Tregs whose SRC-3 function was eliminated failed to suppress the activity of other immune cells in the lab. The authors anticipate that their findings ...

The golden-mantled ground squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis) is a popular sight among tourists in the Rocky Mountains--the small rodent is a photogenic creature with a striped back and pudgy cheeks that store seeds and other food. But there's a reality that Instagram photos don't capture, said Christy McCain, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a new study spanning nearly 13 years, she and her colleagues discovered that the ground squirrel has joined many other small mammals in Colorado's Rocky Mountains that are making an ominous trek: They're climbing uphill to avoid warming temperatures in the state brought on by climate change. "It's frightening," ...

Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, in which stars are packed closely together. They are also typically very old -- the globular cluster that is the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the Universe itself. It resides 7800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. Because of its very dense nucleus, it is known as a core-collapsed cluster. When Eduardo Vitral and Gary A. Mamon of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris set out to study the core of NGC 6397, they expected to find evidence for an "intermediate-mass" black hole (IMBH). These are smaller than the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, but larger than stellar-mass black holes ...

Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) develops as a long term complication of childhood streptococcal angina. Latent RHD can be detected with echocardiography years before it becomes symptomatic. RHD is curable when treated early with medication. RHD is responsible for over 300 000 deaths worldwide each year, accounting for just over two-thirds of all deaths from valvular heart diseases. RHD is disproportionally prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Pacific Islands and largely a phenomenon of marginalized communities in developing and emerging countries whereas ...

Millions of tonnes of plastic waste find their way into the ocean every year. A team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam has investigated the role of regional ocean governance in the fight against marine plastic pollution, highlighting why regional marine governance should be further strengthened as negotiations for a new global agreement continue. In recent years, images of whales and sea turtles starving to death after ingesting plastic waste or becoming entangled in so-called ghost nets have led to a growing ...

Domestic cats are a major threat to wild species, including birds and small mammals. But researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on February 11 now have evidence that some simple strategies can help to reduce cats' environmental impact without restricting their freedom. Their studies show that domestic cats hunt less when owners feed them a diet including plenty of meat proteins. Equally, it helps to play with them each day in ways that allow cats to mimic hunting. "While keeping cats indoors is the only sure-fire way to prevent hunting, some owners ...