An international research team led by Professor Dr Frank Schäbitz has published a climate reconstruction of the last 200,000 years for Ethiopia. This means that high-resolution data are now available for the period when early Homo sapiens, our ancestors, made their way from Africa to Europe and Asia. Schäbitz and his colleagues determined the dates using a drill core of lake sediments deposited in southern Ethiopia's Chew Bahir Basin, which lies near human fossil sites. Temporal resolution of the samples, reaching nearly 10 years, revealed that from 200,000 to 125,000 years before our ...

Does evolution explain why we can't resist a salty chip? Researchers at NC State University found that differences between the elemental composition of foods and the elemental needs of animals can explain the development of pleasing tastes like salty, umami and sweet. Taste tells us a lot about foods before they are swallowed and digested, and some tastes correspond with the elemental composition of foods. For example, an aged steak lights up the umami taste receptors, because it has a high concentration of the element nitrogen, which occurs in amino acid molecules. Nitrogen is essential for survival, but often occurs in low concentrations relative ...

(Boston)-- The concept of rationing medical resources during the height of COVID-19 pandemic created tremendous anxiety in the patient and healthcare communities. In planning for that possibility Massachusetts created a triage scoring system focusing on an acute survival score that considers chronic life-limiting medical conditions of the patient, but it does not provide specifics about how to value those conditions in the equation. Now a new study supports prioritizing resources to those who are most likely to survive an acute illness as several chronic medical conditions had less of an impact on longer-term survival than previously suspected. "No one ...

(Boston)--Despite evidence regarding the benefits of vaginal birth after cesarean and recommendations to support shared decision making to reduce cesarean rates, minority women face many impediments that limit their access to appropriate health information and opportunities for such discussions. Haitian women in Massachusetts have the highest rates of cesarean section and low rates of vaginal birth after cesarean, despite evidence suggesting that many are eligible to attempt vaginal birth after a previous cesarean. Now a new study explores how Haitian women's beliefs, values and attitudes influence their decision making about pregnancy and birth after having had a cesarean delivery. In conjunction with the providers' views about Haitian women, the information ...

Farmed foxes selectively bred for tameness and aggressiveness exhibit similar changes to their brain anatomy, according to research recently published in JNeurosci. Both lineages also have larger brains than conventional farm-bred foxes, complicating leading theories on domestication. Domesticated species provide insight into complex evolutionary processes on a condensed timeframe. When a species splits from its wild counterpart, its brain, body, and behavior undergo rapid changes. Studies with chickens, sheep, cats, dogs, and more indicate domestication shrinks the brain. But the same pattern does not extend to foxes in the expected way. Hecht et al. used MRI to measure the brain size ...

When Erin Hecht was earning her Ph.D. in neuroscience more than a decade ago, she watched a nature special on the Russian farm-fox experiment, one of the best-known studies on animal domestication. The study, running since 1958, tries to replicate the natural domestication of wolves to dogs by selectively breeding two strains of silver foxes so they exhibit certain behaviors. Scientists breed one to be tame and display dog-like behaviors with people, such as licking and tail wagging. The other is bred to react with defensive aggression when faced with human contact, while a third strain acts as the control and isn't bred for any specific behaviors. Hecht, who's now an assistant professor in the Harvard Department of Human ...

Niigata, Japan - In the recent past, there has been a paradigm shift towards renewable sources of energy in order to address the concerns pertaining to environmental degradation and dwindling fossil fuels. A variety of alternative green energy sources such as solar, wind, hydrothermal, tidal etc., have been gaining attention to reduce the global carbon footprints. One of the key challenges with these energy generation technologies is that they are intermittent and are not continuously available. "We cannot use solar energy at night and wind energy when the wind is not blowing. But we can store the generated electricity in some other forms and utilize it whenever required. That is how water splitting bridges the gap and has emerged as a very promising energy storage ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Inequitable access to health care is a pressing global health concern, and care of our teeth is no exception. In fact, the World Health Organization established the Global Goals for Oral Health 2020 in its efforts to help counter socioeconomic-related imbalances. Economically advanced Japan has plentiful dentists, as well as a universal health insurance system, yet it also has oral care-related inequities, according to a new study. A team of researchers centered at University of Tsukuba in Japan examined a huge set of claims and checkup data in search of regional and socioeconomic trends. Their findings included the key observation that regional lower ...

The potential of a class of materials called perovskites to enable solar cells to better absorb sunlight for energy production is widely known. However, this potential has yet to be fully realised, particularly under real-world operating conditions. New research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Energy, has revealed defects in a popular perovskite light absorber that impede solar cell performance. The researchers found a change in the nature and density of these 'intragrain planar defects' correlated with a change in solar cell performance. The discovery by an international team of researchers, led by Monash ...

Cities and nations around the globe are shooting for carbon neutrality, with some experts already talking about the need to ultimately reach carbon negativity. Carbon footprint declarations are used in construction to ease product selection for low carbon building, but these standards don't yet exist for green elements like soil, bushes and plants. A new study led by Aalto University is the first to map out how green infrastructure can be a resource for cities on the path to carbon neutrality. The study, done in collaboration with the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki, charted out the lifecycle phases of plants, soils and mulches to determine the basic considerations needed to create standards for products commonly used in green ...

The National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) of Malaysia has granted a conditional registration for a safe, effective hepatitis C treatment developed by a public-private partnership bringing together the Malaysian Ministry of Health, not-for-profit research and development organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), Egyptian pharmaceutical company Pharco, Malaysian pharmaceutical company Pharmaniaga Berhad, and non-governmental-organization Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). This is the very first drug for hepatitis C virus (HCV) to be developed through South-South collaboration and with funding and clinical support from non-profit organizations. This partnership ...

A current challenge for sustainable aquaculture is how to increase the quantities of farmed fish while also reducing waste products that can lead to the accumulation of harmful fish sludge. New research aims to understand how this fish waste can be treated for use in aquaponics systems, by removing excessive carbon, yet preserving the mineral nutrients required by plants to grow. In this study in Frontiers in Plant Science, researchers from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, demonstrate a novel and effective way to convert this fish sludge into plant fertilizer and therefore improving the nutrients available for plants in hydroponic ...

DNA is an abundant and nutritious food source for microbes The diet of microbes is vast: They are able to use different molecules as nutrients, including biomolecules such as proteins and lipids of dead and decaying organisms. This includes so called extracellular DNA molecules which are not or no longer present in intact cells. "From the bacteria's perspective DNA is particularly nutritious," says Kenneth Wasmund, a microbiologist at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CMESS) at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study. "It's essentially a fertilizer. After all, it is a chain of millions of pieces of sugar and phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing bases." Extracellular ...

Universal school lunch programs make students healthier, and increase their lifetime income by 3%, according to a unique study from Lund University in Sweden published in The Review of Economic Studies. Health disparities arise early in life and play a major role in economic outcomes among adults. Yet there are few studies on the long-term effects of school-based nutrition policies aimed at counteracting them. Researchers from Lund University and Stockholm University can now show that universal school lunch programs have significant long-term benefits for students' education, general health and income. "Today, we take school lunches for granted in Sweden. But the fact is, it was a very conscious ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Yuhao Chen, Yue Li, Meng Du, Jinsui Yu, Fei Gao, Zhen Yuan and Zhiyi Chen from The Third Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China, University of South China, Hunan, China and University of Macau, China discuss ultrasound neuromodulation: integrating medicine and engineering for neurological disease treatment. Neurological diseases associated with dysfunctions of neural circuits, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), depression and epilepsy, have become increasingly prevalent. To tackle these issues, artificial stimulation or regulation ...

Niigata, Japan - Biomarkers are important determinants of appropriate and effective therapeutic approaches for various diseases including cancer. There is ample evidence pointing toward the significance of immune check point inhibitors (ICI) against cancer, and they showed promising clinical benefits to a specific group of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC). Several reports demonstrated the efficacy of biomarkers such as programmed death-1 protein ligand (PD-L1), density of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), and tumor mutational burden (TMB), to determine the patient responsiveness for the efficient use of ICIs as therapeutics against cancer. A high level of TMB (TMB-H), ...

Quantum technologies are based on quantum properties of light, electrons, and atoms. In recent decades, scientists have learned to master these phenomena and exploit them in applications. Thus, the construction of a quantum computer for commercial applications is also coming within reach. One of the emerging technologies that is currently being advanced very successfully is ion trap quantum computers. Here, charged particles are trapped with electromagnetic fields in a vacuum chamber and prepared in such a way that they can serve as carriers for information and be used for computing, which includes cooling them to the lowest temperatures permitted by quantum mechanics. However, the quantum mechanical ...

Various platforms which offer food home delivery services through courier services, such as riders or other types of distributors, have proliferated very quickly in recent years, especially in big cities. Due to this boom in last-mile delivery or logistics, UOC experts have studied the operation of the main food home delivery platforms, such as Just Eat, Glovo and Deliveroo, which work in the city of Barcelona, to analyse the profitability of these business models and estimate the number of orders needed to achieve this profitability. "It's very difficult for these business models to be profitable by themselves", said Eduard J. Álvarez Palau, a researcher from the SUMA research group of the UOC's Faculty of Economics and Business, the main author of this work ...

Near-field light is invisible light at the subwavelength scale. Harnessed for a variety of practical applications, such as wireless power transfer, near-field light has an increasingly significant role in the development of miniature on-chip photonic devices. Controlling the direction of near-field light propagation has been an ongoing challenge that is of fundamental interest in photonics physics and can significantly advance a variety of applications. So far, propagation of near-field light in a single direction is achieved by specific interactions between ...

The human gut microbiome is a complex community of trillions of microbes that are constantly interacting with each other and our bodies. It supports our wellbeing, immune system and mental health - but how is it sustained? Researchers in the UK and Germany, alongside other international collaborators, have investigated the evolution of bacteria in the human gut microbiome - asking how these microbes persist throughout their lifetimes - taking into account internal and external influencing factors. The results of the study will help inform tailored probiotics, live bacteria found in particular foods or supplements, as well as dietary ...

The structure of a biomolecule can reveal much about its functioning and interaction with the surrounding environment. The double-helical structure of DNA and its implications for the processes of transmission of genetic information form an obvious example. In a new study by SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, published in Nucleic Acids Research, experimental data were combined with computer simulations of molecular dynamics to examine the conformation of an RNA fragment involved in protein synthesis and its dependence on the salts present in the solution. The research has led to a new method for high-resolution definition of the structures of biomolecules in their physiological environments. ...

BOSTON - Bronchiolitis--the most common lung infection in young children, and which is most often caused by respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV--is the leading cause of hospitalizations in U.S. infants, and about 30% of those with severe bronchiolitis later develop asthma. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has uncovered four distinct molecular subtypes of RSV bronchiolitis and has linked a certain subtype to a higher asthma risk. The findings are published in Nature Communications. "While bronchiolitis has been considered a single ...

These are the findings of an Imperial-led study using data from thousands of children in England over a number of years, which looked at the health impact of consuming ultra-processed foods (UPFs) - food and drink heavily processed during their making, such as frozen pizzas, fizzy drinks, mass-produced packaged bread and some ready meals. Researchers found that not only do UPFs make up a considerably high proportion of children's diets (more than 40% of intake in grams and more than 60% of calories on average), but that the higher the proportion of UPFs they consume, ...

Coronavirus disruption to weddings has highlighted the complexity and antiquity of marriage law and reinforced the need for reform, a new study shows. During the pandemic the ease and speed with which couples were able to marry has depended on their chosen route into marriage - religious or civil - experts have found. Rules to prevent the spread of the pandemic attempted to strike a balance between getting married as a legal event and a wedding as a social event, and this has failed to please anyone, according to the research. As lockdown loomed, couples marrying in the Anglican church were able to apply for a common or special licence rather than waiting to ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A clinical trial conducted at the University of Louisville has shown for the first time that heart failure treatments using cells derived from the patient's own bone marrow and heart resulted in improved quality of life and reduced major adverse cardiac events for patients after one year. "This is a very important advance in the field of cell therapy and in the management of heart failure. It suggests that a treatment, given only once, can produce long-term beneficial effects on the quality of life and prognosis of these patients," said Roberto Bolli, M.D., ...