The human brain has about as many neurons as glial cells. These are divided into four major groups: the microglia, the astrocytes, the NG2 glial cells, and the oligodendrocytes. Oligodendrocytes function primarily as a type of cellular insulating tape: They form long tendrils, which consist largely of fat-like substances and do not conduct electricity. These wrap around the axons, which are the extensions through which the nerve cells send their electrical impulses. This prevents short circuits and accelerates signal forwarding. Astrocytes, on the other hand, supply the nerve cells with energy: Through their appendages they come into contact with blood vessels and absorb glucose from these. ...

AMES, Iowa - Even if you weren't a physics major, you've probably heard something about the Higgs boson. There was the title of a 1993 book by Nobel laureate Leon Lederman that dubbed the Higgs "The God Particle." There was the search for the Higgs particle that launched after 2009's first collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. There was the 2013 announcement that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize in Physics for independently theorizing in 1964 that a fundamental particle - the Higgs - is the source of mass in subatomic ...

BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - The World Health Organization END ...

WASHINGTON, January 19, 2021 -- A Velcro-like fastener with a microscopic design that looks like tiny mushrooms could mean advances for everyday consumers and scientific fields like robotics. In Biointerphases, published by AIP Publishing, researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands show how the design can use softer materials and still be strong enough to work. Probabilistic fasteners work, because they are designed with a tiny pattern on one surface that interlocks with features on the other surface. Currently available fasteners, like Velcro and 3M, are called hook and loop fasteners. That design requires harder, stiff material, which ...

Even prior to the pandemic, burnout among health care professionals was a pervasive public health concern, with END ...

Large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors, intended to improve global food security, had little to no benefit, increasing crop production in some areas while simultaneously threatening local food security in others, according to researchers who studied their effects. The END ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Tiny amounts of gender bias in employee hiring decisions contribute to concerning rates of discrimination and productivity losses that together represent significant costs, financial and otherwise, for employers, a new study from Oregon State University has found. Gender bias is a subtle, unintentional preference for one gender over the other. Despite significant efforts to reduce bias in hiring over the last several decades, it continues to persist and pose potential problems for companies, said Jay Hardy, an assistant professor of management in OSU's College ...

BOZEMAN, Montana (January 19, 2021) - A four-year study recently published in Ecology and Evolution concludes that the fungal disease, white-nose syndrome, poses a severe threat to many western North American bats. Since it was first detected in 2006, white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats in eastern and central North America. The spread of the fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome in hibernating bats has reached several western U.S. states, mostly likely through bat-to-bat spread, and is presently threatening western species. Bats with white-nose syndrome have fungus growing on their nose and wings, as the name implies, but the fungal infection also triggers a higher frequency of arousals from hibernation. ...

Anyone who has tried and failed to meditate knows that our minds are rarely still. But where do they roam? New research led by UC Berkeley has come up with a way to track the flow of our internal thought processes and signal whether our minds are focused, fixated or wandering. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure brain activity while people performed mundane attention tasks, researchers identified brain signals that reveal when the mind is not focused on the task at hand or aimlessly wandering, especially after concentrating on an assignment. Specifically, increased alpha brain waves were detected in the prefrontal cortex of ...

For the first time, scientists have successfully used satellite cameras coupled with deep learning to count animals in complex geographical landscapes, taking conservationists an important step forward in monitoring populations of endangered species. For this research, the satellite Worldview 3 used high-resolution imagery to capture African elephants moving through forests and grasslands. The automated system detected animals with the same accuracy as humans are able to achieve. The algorithm that enabled the detection process was created by Dr Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath in the UK. The project was a collaboration with the UK's University of Oxford and the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Dr ...

People's fear of 5G technology is rational. Such technology does emit radiation, even if it's at low levels. But 5G isn't all that different from 4G, and it certainly doesn't cause COVID-19 despite such rumors having spread rapidly across the globe. Researchers need to better understand how misinformation like this spreads in order to hone their intervention efforts and prevent misinformed perspectives from taking root. In society's virtual world, preventing technological misinformation, in particular, is important now more than ever. A research team led by Elaine Nsoesie, a Hariri Institute Faculty Fellow, investigated how COVID-19 misinformation proliferated using ...

A new study out of the University of Chicago and Stanford University on pairs of twins with and without food allergies has identified potential microbial players in this condition. The results were published on Jan. 19 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study grew out of prior research in the Nagler laboratory at UChicago on the fecal microbiota in infants. By transplanting fecal microbes from healthy and food-allergic infants to germ-free mice (who do not possess a microbiome), investigators found that the healthy infant microbiota was protective against the development ...

The synthetic chemicals known as PFAS, short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are found in soil and groundwater where they have accumulated, posing risks to human health ranging from respiratory problems to cancer. New research from the University of Houston and Oregon State University published in Environmental Science and Technology Letters suggests why these "forever chemicals" - so called because they can persist in the environment for decades - are so difficult to permanently remove and offers new avenues for better remediation practices. The work focused on the interactions sparked when firefighters use ...

The abnormal immune system response that causes multiple sclerosis (MS) by attacking and damaging the central nervous system can be triggered by the lack of a specific fatty acid in fat tissue, according to a new Yale study. The finding suggests that dietary change might help treat some people with the autoimmune disease. The study was published Jan. 19 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. Fat tissue in patients diagnosed with MS lack normal levels of oleic acid, a monounsaturated fatty acid found at high levels in, for instance, cooking oils, meats (beef, chicken, and pork), cheese, nuts, sunflower seeds, eggs, pasta, ...

With a name like glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, one would think it is a rare and obscure medical condition, but that's far from the truth. Roughly 400 million people worldwide live with potential of blood disorders due to the enzyme deficiency. While some people are asymptomatic, others suffer from jaundice, ruptured red blood cells and, in the worst cases, kidney failure. Now, a team led by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have uncovered the elusive mechanism behind the most severe cases of the ...

WASHINGTON, January 19, 2021 -- What causes brain concussions? Is it direct translational or rotational impact? This is one of the research areas currently being explored by Qianhong Wu's lab at Villanova University. Our brains consist of soft matter bathed in watery cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) inside a hard skull. An impact on the hard skull is transmitted through the thin layer of CSF within the subarachnoid space to the soft brain matter. In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, Wu and co-authors Ji Lang and Rungun Nathan describe studying another system with the same features, an egg, to search for answers. An egg resembles the brain, because its soft yolk is bathed within a liquid egg white inside a hard shell. Considering that in most concussive brain injuries, the skull does ...

For the first time ever, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have described in detail a dinosaur's cloacal or vent - the all-purpose opening used for defecation, urination and breeding. Although most mammals may have different openings for these functions, most vertebrate animals possess a cloaca. Although we know now much about dinosaurs and their appearance as feathered, scaly and horned creatures and even which colours they sported, we have not known anything about how the vent appears. Dr Jakob Vinther from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, along with colleagues Robert Nicholls, a palaeoartist, and Dr Diane Kelly, ...

With a small snout, a short and curled tail, and a big, round stomach, mini pigs are the epitome of cute--and sometimes, they snore. Now, researchers think these snoring pigs can be used to study obstructive sleep apnea. A study appearing January 19 in the journal Heliyon found that obese Yucatan mini pigs do have naturally occurring sleep apnea and that MRI scans taken while they're in sedated sleep can be used to gain new insights into what happens in the airways during sleep apnea episodes via computational flow dynamic (CFD) analysis. "These are very fat pigs," says first author Zi-Jun Liu, a research professor and principal investigator in the Department of Orthodontics ...

WASHINGTON, January 19, 2021 -- Biomedical engineers developed a technique to observe wound healing in real time, discovering a central role for cells known as fibroblasts. The work, reported in APL Bioengineering, by AIP Publishing, is the first demonstration of a wound closure model within human vascularized tissue in a petri dish. Prior investigations of wound healing have used animal models, but healing in humans does not occur the same way. One difference is that wounds in mice and rats, for example, can heal without granulation tissue, a type of tissue critical to the healing of human wounds. Granulation tissue forms after blood coagulates, and the wound scabs over. Coagulation creates a fibrin network that serves as a temporary matrix. Granulation tissue then takes over, ...

WASHINGTON, January 19, 2021 -- The quest for ever-smaller electronic components led an international group of researchers to explore using molecular building blocks to create them. DNA is able to self-assemble into arbitrary structures, but the challenge with using these structures for nanoelectronic circuits is the DNA strands must be converted into highly conductive wires. Inspired by previous works using the DNA molecule as a template for superconducting nanowires, the group took advantage of a recent bioengineering advance known as DNA origami to fold DNA into arbitrary shapes. In AIP ...

Youths with mood disorders who use and abuse cannabis (marijuana) have a higher risk for self-harm, death by all causes and death by unintentional overdose and homicide, according to research led by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Study findings are published in the JAMA Pediatrics. "Marijuana use and addiction is common among youth and young adults with mood disorders, but the association of this behavior with self-harm, suicide and overall mortality risk is poorly understood in this already vulnerable population. These findings ...

If you ever saw a honeybee hopping elegantly from flower to flower or avoiding you as you passed by, you may have wondered how such a tiny insect has such perfect navigation skills. These flying insects' skills are partially explained by the concept of optical flow: they perceive the speed with which objects move through their field of view. Robotics researchers have tried to mimic these strategies on flying robots, but with limited success. A team of TU Delft and the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences researchers therefore present an optical flow-based learning process that allows robots to estimate distances through the visual appearance (shape, color, texture) of the objects ...

The older we grow, the weaker our muscles get, riddling old age with frailty and physical disability. But this doesn't only affect the individual, it also creates a significant burden on public healthcare. And yet, research efforts into the biological processes and biomarkers that define muscle aging have not yet defined the underlying causes. Now, a team of scientists from lab of Johan Auwerx at EPFL's School of Life Sciences looked at the issue through a different angle: the similarities between muscle aging and degenerative muscle diseases. They have discovered protein aggregates that deposit in skeletal muscles during natural aging, and that blocking this can prevent the detrimental features of muscle ...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. -- Jan. 19, 2021 -- The results of a study led by Northern Arizona University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest the immune systems of people infected with COVID-19 may rely on antibodies created during infections from earlier coronaviruses to help fight the disease. COVID-19 isn't humanity's first encounter with a coronavirus, so named because of the corona, or crown-like, protein spikes on their surface. Before SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- humans have navigated at least 6 other types of coronaviruses. The study sought to understand how coronaviruses (CoVs) ignite the human immune system and conduct a deeper dive on the inner workings of the antibody response. The ...

Researchers looked at neurons within the basal ganglia, a part of the brain that, when damaged, can severely impact a person's motor ability, making seemingly simple reaching-and-grasping tasks near impossible They focused on a large group of neurons, which has two distinct types - D1 direct striatal output neurons and D2 indirect output neurons These neurons are implicated in the development of Parkinson's and Huntington's - neurodegenerative diseases that result in the progressive degeneration or death of nerve cells In this research, mice were trained to reach for and grasp a chocolate pellet, and optical methods were used to either excite or inhibit their D1 or D2 neurons The researchers ...