Washington, D.C. - April 28, 2021 - As of April 2021, more than 3 million people worldwide have died of COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, researchers developed accurate diagnostic tests and identified health conditions that correlated with worse outcomes. However, a clinical predictor of who faces the highest risk of being hospitalized, put on a ventilator or dying from the disease has remained largely out of reach. This week in mSphere, an open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers describe a two-step prognostic test that can help predict a patient's response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. The test combines a disease risk factor score with a test ...

LAWRENCE -- College students across the country struggle with a vicious cycle: Test anxiety triggers poor sleep, which in turn reduces performance on the tests that caused the anxiety in the first place. New research from the University of Kansas just published in the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine is shedding light on this biopsychosocial process that can lead to poor grades, withdrawal from classes and even students who drop out. Indeed, about 40% of freshman don't return to their universities for a second year in the United States. "We were interested ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Socially just policies aimed at limiting the Earth's human population hold tremendous potential for advancing equity while simultaneously helping to mitigate the effects of climate change, Oregon State University researchers say. In a paper published this week in Sustainability Science, William Ripple and Christopher Wolf of the OSU College of Forestry also note that fertility rates are a dramatically understudied and overlooked aspect of the climate emergency. That's especially true relative to the attention devoted to other climate-related topics including energy, short-lived pollutants and ...

Biologists use the term adaptive radiation to describe a phenomenon in which new species rapidly evolve from an ancestral species, often in response to changes in the local environment that lead to new biological niches becoming available. To understand this process, biologists often turn to the cichlids of Lake Victoria, in which over 500 species of the fish have evolved over the past 14,600 years. As Professor Masato Nikaido of Tokyo Tech explains, "The level of genetic differentiation among species is considered very low due to the short period of time after these different species began evolving, and this limited genetic differentiation provides us with a great opportunity to find candidate genes that have contributed to adaptive ...

Predatory bacteria--bacteria that eat other bacteria--grow faster and consume more resources than non-predators in the same soil, according to a new study out this week from Northern Arizona University. These active predators, which use wolfpack-like behavior, enzymes, and cytoskeletal 'fangs' to hunt and feast on other bacteria, wield important power in determining where soil nutrients go. The results of the study, published in the journal mBio this week, show predation is an important dynamic in the wild microbial realm, and suggest that these predators play an outsized role in how elements are stored in or released from soil. Like every other life form on earth, bacteria belong to intricate food webs in which organisms are connected ...

Constantina Theofanopoulou wanted to study oxytocin. Her graduate work had focused on how the hormone influences human speech development, and now she was preparing to use those findings to investigate how songbirds learn to sing. The problem was that birds do not have oxytocin. Or so she was told. "Everywhere that I looked in the genome," she says, "I was unable to find a gene called oxytocin in birds." Theofanopoulou eventually came across mesotocin, the analogue for oxytocin in birds, reptiles, and amphibians. But as she plumped the literature in Erich Jarvis's lab at Rockefeller, the waters grew muddier. If she and Jarvis wanted to find studies on oxytocin in fish, they ...

Researchers from Erasmus School of Economics, IESE Business School, and New York University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines what business schools do wrong when conducting academic research and what changes they can make so that research contributes to improving society. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Faculty Research Incentives and Business School Health: A New Perspective from and for Marketing" and is authored by Stefan Stremersch, Russell Winer, and Nuno Camacho. In February 2020, an article in ...

The flightless kakapo of New Zealand is in trouble. The world's heaviest parrot--representing one of the most ancestral branches of the parrot family tree--is nearly extinct, with barely 200 adults plodding the underbrush of four small islands. Whether the last of the kakapos had the genetic resilience to survive was a question that only high-quality genomic analysis could answer. But a high-quality genome assembly did not exist for the kakapo--nor for most of the 70,000 vertebrate species alive today. Questions about how best to prevent the extinction of species ranging ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Difficult-to-treat, chronic wounds in preclinical models healed with normal scar-free skin after treatment with an acellular product discovered at Mayo Clinic. Derived from platelets, the purified exosomal product, known as PEP, was used to deliver healing messages into cells of preclinical animal models of ischemic wounds. The Mayo Clinic research team documented restoration of skin integrity, hair follicles, sweat glands, skin oils and normal hydration. Ischemic wounds occur when arteries are clogged or blocked, preventing important nutrients and oxygen from reaching the skin to drive repair. This groundbreaking study titled, "TGF-β Donor Exosome Accelerates Ischemic ...

To be more energy efficient, many people have replaced their incandescent lights with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs. However, those currently on the market emit a lot of blue light, which has been linked to eye troubles and sleep disturbances. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a prototype LED that reduces -- instead of masks -- the blue component, while also making colors appear just as they do in natural sunlight. LED light bulbs are popular because of their low energy consumption, long lifespan and ability to turn on and off quickly. Inside the bulb, an LED chip converts electrical current into high-energy light, including invisible ultraviolet (UV), violet ...

The highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 variant that recently emerged in South Africa, known as B.1.351, has scientists wondering how existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies can be improved to ensure strong protection. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry have used computer modeling to reveal that one of the three mutations that make variant B.1.351 different from the original SARS-CoV-2 reduces the virus' binding to human cells -- but potentially allows it to escape some antibodies. Since the original SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, several new variants have emerged, including ones from the U.K., South Africa and Brazil. Because the new variants appear to be more highly ...

Uncapped, idle oil wells could be leaking millions of kilograms of methane each year into the atmosphere and surface water, according to a study by the University of Cincinnati. Amy Townsend-Small, an associate professor of geology and geography in UC's College of Arts and Sciences, studied 37 wells on private property in the Permian Basin of Texas, the largest oil production region on Earth. She found that seven had methane emissions of as much as 132 grams per hour. The average rate was 6.2 grams per hour. "Some of them were leaking a lot. Most of them were leaking a little or not at all, which is a ...

April 28, 2021 -- Using naturalistic driving data and machine learning techniques, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed highly accurate algorithms for detecting mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers. Naturalistic driving data refer to data captured through in-vehicle recording devices or other technologies in the real-world setting. These data could be processed to measure driving exposure, space and performance in great detail. The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics. The researchers developed random forests models, a statistical technique ...

People of color, those with a higher income and younger individuals are more likely to participate in clinical trials during their cancer treatment according to a new study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Clinical trials are research studies that involve people who volunteer to take part in tests of new drugs, current approved drugs for a new purpose or medical devices. The study analyzed data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, which is an annual national telephone survey designed to collect health-related data from U.S. adults. Survey years selected included the question, "Did you participate in a clinical trial ...

Chocolate is a beloved treat, but sometimes the cocoa beans that go into bars and other sweets have unpleasant flavors or scents, making the final products taste bad. Surprisingly, only a few compounds associated with these stinky odors are known. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have identified the two compounds that cause musty, moldy scents in cocoa -- work that can help chocolatiers ensure the quality of their products. Cocoa beans, when fermented correctly, have a pleasant smell with sweet and floral notes. But they can have an off-putting scent when fermentation goes wrong, or when storage conditions ...

When seasonal rains arrive late in Indonesia, farmers often take it as a sign that it is not worth investing in fertilizer for their crops. Sometimes they opt out of planting annual crops altogether. Generally, they're making the right decision, as a late start to the rainy season is usually associated with the state of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and low rainfall in the coming months. New research published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports shows that ENSO, the weather-shaping cycle of warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean along the Equator, is a strong predictor of cacao harvests up to two years before a harvest. This is potentially ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A higher ratio of green spaces at the county level is associated with a lower racial disparity in coronavirus infection rates, according to a new study. It is the first study to report the significant relationship between the supply of green spaces and reduced disparity in infectious disease rates. The research team included William Sullivan, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was led by Bin Jiang, a landscape architecture professor at The University of Hong Kong who received his Ph.D. at Illinois, and Yi Lu, an architecture professor at City University of Hong Kong. They reported their findings in the journal Environment ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- There are hard-to-please customers in almost every industry, with certain people being picky about which clothes, houses and even romantic partners they will consider. A new series of studies has found that shopper pickiness can go beyond shopping for the "best" option. The researchers define what it means to be "picky" and also developed a scale for measuring shopper pickiness. Margaret Meloy, department chair and professor of marketing at Penn State, said the findings could help companies devise the best strategies for satisfying their pickier customers. "If a company knows they have a lot of picky customers, they may need to change the way they reward salespeople or dedicate specific salespeople to their pickiest customers, because ...

In collaboration with VGP, the research group has published a research paper in Nature on platypus and echidna genomes early this year (see report in the right column). In the Nature current special issue, the research group published another study on the genome of the common marmoset, an important primate model for neurodegenerative diseases, drug development and other biomedical research. The genome includes two sets of chromosomes, one inherited from the mother, the other from the father. In traditional genome sequencing efforts including the human genome project, the sequencing only produced a mosaic reference ...

While evolution is normally thought of as occurring over millions of years, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that bacteria can evolve in response to climate change in 18 months. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, biologists from UCI found that evolution is one way that soil microbes might deal with global warming. Soil microbiomes - the collection of bacteria and other microbes in soil - are a critical engine of the global carbon cycle; microbes decompose the dead plant material to recycle nutrients back into the ecosystem and release carbon back into the atmosphere. Multiple environmental factors influence the composition and functioning of soil microbiomes, ...

The neurotransmitter noradrenaline, which plays a key role in the fight-or-flight stress response, impairs immune responses by inhibiting the movements of various white blood cells in different tissues, researchers report April 28th in the journal Immunity. The fast and transient effect occurred in mice with infections and cancer, but for now, it's unclear whether the findings generalize to humans with various health conditions. "We found that stress can cause immune cells to stop moving and prevents immune cells from protecting against disease," says senior study author University of Melbourne's Scott Mueller (@SMuellerLab) of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute). "This is novel because it was not known that ...

Psychedelic drugs have shown promise for treating neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. However, due to their hallucinatory side effects, some researchers are trying to identify drugs that could offer the benefits of psychedelics without causing hallucinations. In the journal Cell on April 28, researchers report they have identified one such drug through the development of a genetically encoded fluorescent sensor--called psychLight--that can screen for hallucinogenic potential by indicating when a compound activates the serotonin 2A receptor. "Serotonin reuptake inhibitors have long been used for treating depression, but we don't ...

A genetically encoded sensor to detect hallucinogenic compounds has been developed by researchers at the University of California, Davis. Named psychLight, the sensor could be used in discovering new treatments for mental illness, in neuroscience research and to detect drugs of abuse. The work is published April 28 in the journal Cell. Compounds related to psychedelic drugs such as LSD and dimethyltryptamine (DMT) show great promise for treating disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorder. These drugs are called psychoplastogens ...

It's one of the most audacious projects in biology today - reading the entire genome of every bird, mammal, lizard, fish, and all other creatures with backbones. And now comes the first major payoff from the Vertebrate Genome Project (VGP): near complete, high-quality genomes of 25 species, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator Erich Jarvis with scores of coauthors report April 28, 2021, in the journal Nature. These species include the greater horseshoe bat, the Canada lynx, the platypus, and the kākāp? parrot - one of the first high-quality ...

Researchers have big ideas for the potential of quantum technology, from unhackable networks to earthquake sensors. But all these things depend on a major technological feat: being able to build and control systems of quantum particles, which are among the smallest objects in the universe. That goal is now a step closer with the publication of a new method by University of Chicago scientists. Published April 28 in Nature, the paper shows how to bring multiple molecules at once into a single quantum state--one of the most important goals in quantum physics. "People have been trying to do this for decades, so we're very excited," said senior author Cheng Chin, a professor of physics at UChicago who said he has wanted ...