Scientists have discovered that the way in which neurons are connected within regions of the brain, can be a better indicator of disease progression and treatment outcomes for people with brain disorders such as epilepsy. Many brain diseases lead to cell death and the removal of connections within the brain. In a new study, published in Human Brain Mapping, a group of scientists, led by Dr Marcus Kaiser from the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, looked at epilepsy patients undergoing surgery. They found that changes in the local network within brain regions can be a better predictor ...

More than 90 years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble observed the first hint of the rate at which the universe expands, called the Hubble constant. Almost immediately, astronomers began arguing about the actual value of this constant, and over time, realized that there was a discrepancy in this number between early universe observations and late universe observations. Early in the universe's existence, light moved through plasma--there were no stars yet--and from oscillations similar to sound waves created by this, scientists deduced that the Hubble constant was about 67. This means the universe expands about 67 kilometers per second faster every 3.26 million light-years. But this observation differs when scientists look at the universe's ...

BOSTON - Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers are presenting dozens of research studies at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). The studies will be presented during the virtual program on June 4-8, 2021. ASCO is the world's largest clinical cancer research meeting, attracting more than 30,000 oncology professionals from around the world. Toni K. Choueiri, MD, the director of the Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology at Dana-Farber, will present results from the randomized, double-blind, phase III KEYNOTE-564 trial evaluating pembrolizumab versus placebo after surgery in patients with renal cell carcinoma (abstract LBA5) during ASCO's Plenary Session on Sunday, June ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Solid-state batteries pack a lot of energy into a small space, but their electrodes are not good at keeping in touch with their electrolytes. Liquid electrolytes reach every nook and cranny of an electrode to spark energy, but liquids take up space without storing energy and fail over time. Researchers are now putting solid electrolytes in touch with electrodes made of strategically arranged materials - at the atomic level - and the results are helping drive better solid-state battery technologies. A new study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun, postdoctoral research associate Beniamin Zahiri, and Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. director of research and development ...

The University of Maryland (UMD) co-published a new review paper in the Annual Review of Resource Economics to examine pollinators from both an economic and ecological perspective, providing much needed insight into the complexities of valuing pollination. Pollinators are not only a critical component of a healthy ecosystem, but they are also necessary to produce certain foods and boost crop yields. While native and wild pollinators (whether they be certain bee species, other insects and animals, or just the wind) still play an important role, managed honey bee colonies are commercially trucked around the U.S. to meet the need for pollination services in agricultural products. Recent reports of ...

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - A diet that improves the biomarkers of metabolic health, and that could potentially slow the aging process, has moved a step closer to reality. "We've known for years that restricting the amino acid methionine in the diet produces immediate and lasting improvements in nearly every biomarker of metabolic health," said Thomas W. Gettys, PhD, Professor and Director, Nutrient Sensing and Adipocyte Signaling Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. "The problem is that methionine-restricted diets have been difficult to implement because they taste so bad." Until now. Restricting methionine normally involves diets formulated with elemental (e.g., individual) amino acids. Individual amino acids are the building blocks ...

May 20, 2021 - Women with a history of weight cycling - losing and regaining 10 pounds or more, even once - have increased rates of insomnia and other sleep problems, reports a study in The Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, official journal of the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "History of weight cycling was prospectively associated with several measures of poor sleep, including short sleep duration, worse sleep quality, greater insomnia, greater sleep disturbances, ...

Melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are among the dominant sources of sea-level rise, yet until now, the water beneath them has remained hidden from airborne ice-penetrating radar. With the detection of groundwater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland, researchers have opened the possibility that water can be identified under other glaciers from the air at a continental scale and help improve sea-level rise projections. The presence of water beneath ice sheets is a critical component currently missing from glacial melt scenarios that may greatly impact how quickly seas rise - for example, by enabling big chunks of ice to calve ...

New research led by the University of Kent's School of Psychology has found that some brain activity methods used to detect incriminating memories do not work accurately in older adults. Findings show that concealed information tests relying on electrical activity of the brain (electroencephalography [EEG]) are ineffective in older adults because of changes to recognition-related brain activity that occurs with aging. EEG-based forensic memory detection is based on the logic that guilty suspects will hold incriminating knowledge about crimes they have committed, and therefore their brains will elicit a recognition response ...

For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today's Romania 35,000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology. "She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5,000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought. We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last ...

DURHAM, N.C. - A newly identified group of antibodies that binds to a coating of sugars on the outer shell of HIV is effective in neutralizing the virus and points to a novel vaccine approach that could also potentially be used against SARS-CoV-2 and fungal pathogens, researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute report. In a study appearing online May 20 in the journal Cell, the researchers describe an immune cell found in both monkeys and humans that produces a unique type of anti-glycan antibody. This newly described antibody has the ability to attach ...

Juvenile salmon migrating to the sea in the Sacramento River face a gauntlet of hazards in an environment drastically modified by humans, especially with respect to historical patterns of stream flow. Many studies have shown that survival rates of juvenile salmon improve as the amount of water flowing downstream increases, but "more is better" is not a useful guideline for agencies managing competing demands for the available water. Now fisheries scientists have identified key thresholds in the relationship between stream flow and salmon survival that can serve as actionable targets for managing water resources in the Sacramento River. The new analysis, published May 19 in Ecosphere, revealed nonlinear ...

Today, proteins that can be controlled with light are a widely used tool in research to specifically switch certain functions on and off in living organisms. Channelrhodopsins are often used for the technique known as optogenetics: When exposed to light, these proteins open a pore in the cell membrane through which ions can flow in; this is how nerve cells can be activated. A team from the Centre for Protein Diagnostics (PRODI) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum has now used spectroscopy to discover a universal functional mechanism of channelrhodopsins that determines their efficiency as a channel and thus as an optogenetic tool. The researchers led by Professor Klaus ...

Microfluidic technologies have seen great advances over the past few decades in addressing applications such as biochemical analysis, pharmaceutical development, and point-of-care diagnostics. Miniaturization of biochemical operations performed on lab-on-a-chip microfluidic platforms benefit from reduced sample, reagent, and waste volumes, as well as increased parallelization and automation. This allows for more cost-effective operations along with higher throughput and sensitivity for faster and more efficient sample analysis and detection. Optoelectrowetting (OEW) is a digital optofluidic technology that is based on the principles of light-controlled electrowetting and enables ...

Since our ancestors infected themselves with retroviruses millions of years ago, we have carried elements of these viruses in our genes - known as human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs for short. These viral elements have lost their ability to replicate and infect during evolution, but are an integral part of our genetic makeup. In fact, humans possess five times more HERVs in non-coding parts than coding genes. So far, strong focus has been devoted to the correlation of HERVs and the onset or progression of diseases. This is why HERV expression has been studied in samples of pathological origin. Although important, these studies ...

Passing down a healthy genome is a critical part of creating viable offspring. But what happens when you have harmful modifications in your genome that you don't want to pass down? Baby plants have evolved a method to wipe the slate clean and reinstall only the modifications that they need to grow and develop. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor & HHMI Investigator Rob Martienssen and his collaborators, Jean-Sébastien Parent and Institut de Recherche pour le Développement Université de Montpellier scientist Daniel Grimanelli, discovered one of the genes responsible for reinstalling modifications in a baby plant's genome. A plant's genomic modifications--called epigenetic ...

The study sought to describe and explain gender pay differences in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services between 2010 and 2018. HHS comprises a quarter of the country's governmental public health workers, with over 80,000 employees. Understanding what may be driving wage gaps at HHS provides opportunities for employers and legislators to take action to support women in the health care field, said lead author Zhuo "Adam" Chen, an associate professor of health policy and management at UGA's College of Public Health. "A large percentage of the health care workforce are women," said Chen. "If you have underpaid women in the profession, I don't think it spells good things for the public health system." Chen ...

Maywood, Ill. - May 19, 2021 - A team of scientists from Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine have discovered a critical component for renewing the heart's molecular motor, which breaks down in heart failure. Approximately 6.2 million Americans have heart failure, an often fatal condition characterized by the heart's inability to pump enough blood and oxygen throughout the body. This discovery could represent a novel approach to repair the heart. Their findings, published in the May 19 issue of Nature Communications, show how a protein called BAG3 helps replace "worn-out" components of the cardiac sarcomere. The sarcomere is a microscopic ...

FINDINGS A new multi-institution study led by a team of researchers at the David Geffen School of Medicine demonstrated that blocking a protein called ABCB10 in liver cells protects against high blood sugar and fatty liver disease in obese mice. Furthermore, ABCB10 activity prompted insulin resistance in human liver cells. The findings are the first to show that ABCB10 transports biliverdin out of the mitochondria - the cell's "energy generating powerhouses." Biliverdin is the precursor of bilirubin, a substance with antioxidant properties. Consequently, ABCB10 transport ...

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary. Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars. The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with ...

Orangutans are closely related to humans. And yet, they are much less sociable than other species of great apes. Previous studies have showed that young orangutans mainly acquire their knowledge and skills from their mothers and other conspecifics. Social learning in orangutans occurs through peering, i.e. sustained observation of other members of the species at close range. An international team led by the University of Zurich (UZH) has now studied peering behavior in young orangutans at two research stations on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. The data was collected by researchers from the Department of Anthropology of UZH, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Constance, the Universitas Nasional in Jakarta and Leipzig University, ...

Do we have free choice or are our decisions predetermined? Is physical reality local, or does what we do here and now have an immediate influence on events elsewhere? The answers to these questions are sought by physicists in the Bell inequalities. It turns out that free choice and local realism can be skilfully measured and compared. The results obtained reveal surprising relationships of a fundamental and universal nature, going far beyond quantum mechanics itself. Causality, locality, and free choice are related by a few simple formulas known as Bell's inequalities. The sophisticated experiments in quantum optics over the past few decades have unquestionably proved that these inequalities are broken. Today, physicists are ...

The genome is tightly organised (packaged) within the cell nuclei. This three-dimensional (3D) genome organisation is fundamental, given that it regulates gene expression. A study led by scientists at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) now demonstrates using mice models that the 3D organisation of the genome is extremely dynamic during the formation of male germ cells (precursors of spermatozoa) and that alterations in this structure can affect fertility. The research, published in Nature Communications, describes the 3D genome organisation in germ cells of wild populations of house mice (Mus musculus domesticus) with chromosomal rearrangements, ...

Since they are far more compact than today's accelerators, which can be kilometers long, plasma accelerators are considered as a promising technology for the future. An international research group has now made significant progress in the further development of this approach: With two complementary experiments at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU), the team was able to combine two different plasma technologies for the first time and build a novel hybrid accelerator. The concept could advance accelerator development ...

An international team, led by researchers from Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain, David Andreu and Rafael Maldonado, has developed a peptides family that allows delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main component of Cannabis sativa, to fight pain in mice without side effects. The study, published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, was carried out together with researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ??the University of Barcelona, and the University of Lisbon. At present, there are two main types of pain relievers prescribed based on the severity of the pain. Nonsteroidal ...