A new kind of wearable health device would deliver real-time medical data to those with eye or mouth diseases, according to Huanyu 'Larry' Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM). Cheng recently published a paper in Microsystems & Nanoengineering on new micro- and nano-device technology that could revolutionize how certain health conditions are monitored and treated. "We sought to create a device that collects both small and large substances of biofluids such as tears and saliva, which can be analyzed for certain conditions on a rapid, continuous basis, rather than waiting on test results from samples in a lab," he said. The sensors would be placed near the tear duct or mouth to collect samples, ...

Winter survival of honey bee colonies is strongly influenced by summer temperatures and precipitation in the prior year, according to Penn State researchers, who said their findings suggest that honey bees have a "goldilocks" preferred range of summer conditions outside of which their probability of surviving the winter falls. The results of this study, which used several years of survey data provided by the Pennsylvania State Beekeeper's Association and its members, enabled the development of a tool for forecasting honey bee winter survival to support beekeepers' management decisions, the researchers said. Honey bees contribute more than $20 billion in pollination services to agriculture in the United States and generate another ...

Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems are now known to negatively control plasmid replication, according to Thomas Wood, Biotechnology Endowed Chair and professor of chemical engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering. Plasmids, or extra-chromosomal bits of DNA, allow bacteria to evade antibiotics, making the antibiotics ineffective in halting a bacterial infection. The presence or absence of plasmids impacts a bacterium's resistance to antibiotics and its ability to cause infection -- important points related to fighting bacterial infections, according to Wood. "Each year, there are at least 700,000 deaths worldwide because of bacterial infections, a growing number that is projected to increase to 10 million by 2050," Wood said. "And of course, the effectiveness ...

February 1, 2021 - Extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) is a potentially lifesaving treatment for patients in cardiac arrest when the circulation can't be restored by conventional CPR. New guidelines for ECPR in adults and children, developed by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO), are presented by the ASAIO Journal, official journal of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. A specialized application of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), ECPR is increasingly being used to provide a chance ...

Imagine a rubber band that was capable of snapping itself many times over, or a small robot that could jump up a set of stairs propelled by nothing more than its own energy. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. The discovery may prove useful for various industries that want to source movement sustainably, from toys to robotics, and is expected to further inform our understanding of how the natural world fuels some types of movement. Al Crosby, a professor of polymer science and engineering in the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst, ...

A key thread that holds together the delicate balance of a complex biological system is the transmembrane ion channel. These are supramolecular, or multi-molecule, ion and molecule exchange routes embedded within cell membranes to ensure essential chemical transport to and from the cell and facilitate cell signaling. In recent years, synthetic biomolecules that mimic the structures and functions of natural ion channels have garnered much interest among molecular biology researchers as models for studying the fundamentals of these channels and perhaps, even creating drug alternatives or developing advanced biosensors. However, although ...

Social media is increasingly used to spread fake news. The same problem can be found on the capital market - criminals spread fake news about companies in order to manipulate share prices. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Frankfurt and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana have developed an approach that can recognise such fake news, even when the news contents are repeatedly adapted. The results of the study were published in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems. In order to detect false information - often fictitious data that presents a company in a positive light - the scientists used machine learning methods and ...

The adoption of recommended changes in concussion management led to a reduction in the length of symptoms among 11- to 18-year-old athletes with first-time, sports-related concussions, according to new research in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. These outcomes support the widespread adoption of the updated concussion guidelines. Researchers conducted a retrospective review of the medical records of athletes who sustained a concussion between 2016 and 2018 and were treated by a physician who used the revised approach to concussion management. They then compared the data with a previously published data set from athletes who sustained a concussion between 2011 and 2013 and whose physicians followed older guidelines for concussion ...

ITHACA, NY - When it comes to saving endangered species of a certain size, conservationists often have to think outside the box. This was reinforced by a recent study published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases, led by faculty in the College of Veterinary Medicine, which analyzed the effects of hanging tranquilized black rhinoceroses upside down by their feet. "We found that suspending rhinos by their feet is safer than we thought," said Dr. Robin Radcliffe, senior lecturer in wildlife and conservation medicine and first author of the study. While ...

The virtual conferencing that has replaced large, in-person gatherings in the age of COVID-19 represents a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, but those online meetings still come with their own environmental costs, new research from the University of Michigan shows. The research offers a framework for analyzing and tallying the carbon emissions of an online conference based on factors that include everything from energy used by servers and monitors to the resources used to manufacture and distribute the computers involved. It also includes a case study showing that a May 2020 virtual conference held by the AirMiners carbon removal networking community produced 66 times less greenhouse gas emissions that an in-person gathering in San Francisco would have. And it highlights ...

How to study the stages children go through as they play together has been highlighted in new research by a Swansea University academic. Play is a crucial part of a child's development. It is how children develop cognitive skills and learn new information as well as social skills and it is an important topic of research by social scientists. Dr Pete King, who specialises in play and childhood studies, devised a method of studying the process of children's play - the Play Cycle Observation Method (PCOM) - and has now published research which demonstrates how effective it is as an observational tool. Working with collaborators Professor LaDonna Atkins and Dr Brandon Burr, his latest ...

Oncotarget recently published "Neuroendocrine carcinoma of uterine cervix findings shown by MRI for staging and survival analysis – Japan multicenter study" which reported that to investigate neuroendocrine carcinoma of the uterine cervix cases for MRI features and staging, as well as pathological correlations and survival. In 50 patients who underwent a radical hysterectomy and lymphadenectomy without neoadjuvant chemotherapy, intrapelvic T staging by MRI overall accuracy was 88.0% with reference to pathology staging, while patient-based sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy for metastatic ...

Oncotarget recently published "Simvastatin is a potential candidate drug in ovarian clear cell carcinomas" which reported that based on previous studies, the authors assessed the anti-proliferative effect of simvastatin, a Rho GTPase interfering drug, in three OCCC cell lines: JHOC-5, OVMANA and TOV-21G, and one high-grade serous ovarian cancer cell line, Caov3. The authors used the Rho GTPase interfering drug CID-1067700 as a control. All OCCC cell lines were more sensitive to single-agent simvastatin than the HGSOC cells, while all cell lines were less sensitive to CID-1067700 than to simvastatin. Most treatments inhibited migration, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new deep-learning model that can predict how human genes and medicines will interact has identified at least 10 compounds that may hold promise as treatments for COVID-19. All but two of the drugs are still considered investigational and are being tested for effectiveness against hepatitis C, fungal disease, cancer and heart disease. The list also includes the approved drugs cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant that prevents transplant organ rejection, and anidulafungin, an antifungal agent. The discovery was made by computer scientists, meaning much more work needs to be done before any of these medications would be confirmed as safe and effective treatments ...

Michelle O'Malley(link is external) has long been inspired by gut microbes. Since she began studying the herbivore digestive tract, the UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor has guided several students to their doctoral degrees, won early and mid-career awards (including a recognition from President Obama), attained tenure and advanced to the position of full professor. She even had three children along the way. A constant through it all: goat poop. "This has been the longest single effort in my lab," said O'Malley, who with her research team way back in 2015 first embarked on an ambitious project to characterize gut microbes in large herbivores. The purpose? To understand how these animals manage, via their microbiomes, ...

Over the past century, a wide variety of models have emerged to explain the complex behaviours which unfold within atomic nuclei at low energies. However, these theories bring up deep philosophical questions regarding their scientific value. Indeed, traditional epistemological tools have been rather elaborated to account for a unified and stabilised theory rather than to apprehend a plurality of models. Ideally, a theory is meant to be reductionist, unifying and fundamentalist. In view of the intrinsic limited precision of their prediction and of the difficulty in assessing a priori their range of applicability, as well as of their specific and disconnected character, traditional ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Army-funded researchers discovered how to make materials capable of self-propulsion, allowing materials to move without motors or hands. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. This research, published in Nature Materials and funded by the U.S. Army, could enable future military robots to move from their own energy. "This work is part of a larger multi-disciplinary effort that seeks to understand biological and engineered impulsive systems that will lay the foundations for scalable methods for generating forces for mechanical action and energy storing structures and materials," said Dr. Ralph ...

WASHINGTON -- In a new study, investigators report an optimized approach to using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for analyzing hydrogen isotopes. Their new findings could enable improved rapid identification and measurement of hydrogen and other light isotopes that are important in nuclear reactor materials and other applications. LIBS is promising for measuring hydrogen isotopes because it requires no sample preparation and data can be rapidly acquired with a relatively simple experimental setup. However, quantifying the concentration of hydrogen ...

Oncotarget published "The pro-apoptotic actions of 2-methoxyestradiol against ovarian cancer involve catalytic activation of PKCδ signaling" which reported that the authors have previously shown that a flaxseed-supplemented diet decreases both the incidence and severity of ovarian cancer in laying hens, also induces CYP1A1 expression in liver. Recently, they have shown that as a biologically derived active component of flax diet, 2MeOE2 induces apoptosis in ovarian cancer cells which is partially dependent on p38 MAPK. The objective of this Oncotarget study was to elucidate the molecular mechanism of actions of 2MeOE2, a known microtubule disrupting agent, in inducing apoptosis in ovarian tumors. The objective of this ...

Each year, billions of tons of goods are transported globally using cargo containers. Currently, there are concerns that this immense volume of traffic could be exploited to transport illicit nuclear materials, with little chance of detection. One promising approach to combating this issue is to measure how goods interact with charged particles named muons - which form naturally as cosmic rays interact with Earth's atmosphere. Studies worldwide have now explored how this technique, named 'muon tomography,' can be achieved through a variety of detection technologies and reconstruction algorithms. In this article of EPJ Plus, a team headed by Francesco Riggi at the University of Catania, Italy, build on these results to develop a full-scale muon tomograph ...

As the numbers of those infected with COVID-19 has continued to climb, the desperate need for a vaccine was apparent. Even now with the invention and administration of several COVID-19 vaccinations, the question remains: How effective are these vaccines? HMNTL students Congnyu Che, Weijing Wang, and Nantao Li, also members of the ECE Nanosensors Group, along with Postdoctoral Researcher Bin Zhao and Professor Brian Cunningham have recently been published in Talanta journal for the development of a cost efficient COVID-19 antibody test. "Compared with other detection methods, our method is a simple, 15-minute sample-to-answer test," says Zhao, a postdoctoral research associate and IGB Fellow. "It costs less ...

People who are unable to make their rent or mortgage payments sleep less than than their peers who don't have such problems, and those who are forced to move because of financial problems sleep even less, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The study, which followed 1,046 people receiving welfare in California over several years, is the first to analyze the relationship between housing insecurity and sleep outcomes after controlling for sleep duration and sleep quality measured prior to experiences with housing insecurity. The study found that people who were unable to make a rent or mortgage payment slept on average 22 fewer minutes a night than their peers who were able to make their rent or mortgage payments. People who were ...

Richard Feynman, one of the most respected physicists of the twentieth century, said "What I cannot create, I do not understand". Not surprisingly, many physicists and mathematicians have observed fundamental biological processes with the aim of precisely identifying the minimum ingredients that could generate them. One such example are the patterns of nature observed by Alan Turing. The brilliant English mathematician demonstrated in 1952 that it was possible to explain how a completely homogeneous tissue could be used to create a complex embryo, and he did so using one of the simplest, most elegant mathematical models ever written. One of the results of such models is that the symmetry shown by a cell or a tissue can "break" under a set of conditions. However, ...

Theoretical physicists of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz are working on a theory that goes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics and can answer questions where the Standard Model has to pass - for example, with respect to the hierarchies of the masses of elementary particles or the existence of dark matter. The central element of the theory is an extra dimension in spacetime. Until now, scientists have faced the problem that the predictions of their theory could not be tested experimentally. They have now overcome this problem in a publication in the current issue of the European Physical Journal C. Already in the 1920s, in an attempt to unify the forces of gravity and electromagnetism, Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein speculated ...

PHILADELPHIA--Scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered the molecular causes of a congenital form of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), an often-fatal heart disorder. This inherited form of DCM -- which affects at least several thousand people in the United States at any one time and often causes sudden death or progressive heart failure -- is one of multiple congenital disorders known to be caused by inherited mutations in a gene called LMNA. The LMNA gene is active in most cell types, and researchers have ...