Two-dimensional (2D) materials have a huge potential for providing devices with much smaller size and extended functionalities with respect to what can be achieved with today's silicon technologies. But to exploit this potential we must be able to integrate 2D materials into semiconductor manufacturing lines - a notoriously difficult step. A team of Graphene Flagship researchers in Sweden and Germany now reports a new method to make this work. The technique, just published in Nature Communications by researchers from Graphene Flagship partners RWTH Aachen University, Universität der Bundeswehr ...

New research from Trinity College Dublin suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults. The team at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) (today, Wednesday, 10th February, 2021) show that older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required. The study, published in the journal Psychology and Aging (American Psychological Association) is the first to adjudicate between competing theories of age-related ...

In recent years, three meta-analyses of clinical studies have come to the conclusion that vitamin D supplementation was associated with a reduction in the mortality rate from cancer of around 13 percent. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now transferred these results to the situation in Germany and calculated: If all Germans over the age of 50 were to take vitamin D supplements, up to 30,000 cancer deaths per year could possibly be avoided and more than 300,000 years of life could be gained - in addition, health care costs could be saved. For several years now, scientists have been investigating the influence of an adequate supply of vitamin D on the ...

Overfishing, hunting and intensive agriculture and forestry can sometimes contribute to plants and animals becoming endangered. New research from Lund University in Sweden and University of Toronto can now show why this leads to entire populations becoming smaller in size, as well as reproducing earlier. The study is published in the journal PNAS. Researchers from Lund and Toronto are behind the study conducted on five different species of damselflies. They have studied how different environmental factors affect when and at what size the damselflies begin to reproduce. In the study, the researchers also shed light on how overfishing off the coast ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The death of a vampire bat 19 days after giving birth presented scientists studying the animals in 2019 with an unexpected chance to observe a rare event: a female bat's adoption of an unrelated baby. The researchers had captured common vampire bats in Panama as part of ongoing studies of the formation of cooperative relationships among strangers. The team used infrared surveillance cameras to observe six hours of vampire bat activity spaced over the span of each day. Two unrelated and unfamiliar female bats were observed forming a social bond based on mutual grooming and food sharing that increased over time. The researchers had named them BD and Lilith. Lilith ...

Respiratory tract diseases in young animals of the cattle are a big issue for world agriculture and food safety because a bacterium that causes them is resistant to most antibiotics. A team of veterinarians from RUDN University developed and tested a complex preparation called gentaminoseleferon that could help treat respiratory infection in calves. The results of the study were published in the Veterinary World journal. Bacteria of the genus Mycoplasma cause many infectious diseases in animals, including atypical pneumonia, other respiratory tract conditions, reproductive pathologies, arthritis, keratoconjunctivitis, mastitis, and so on. The genus includes about 200 species of bacteria, and all of them ...

Every day, people die from simple infections even though they have been treated with antibiotics. This is because more and more bacteria have become resistant to the types of antibiotics that doctors can prescribe. - It's a huge societal problem and a crisis that we must solve. For example, by developing new antibiotics that can defeat the resistant bacteria, says professor of chemistry at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark, Poul Nielsen. Resistant bacteria are not only known from pig farms, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the pigsties disease-free. Hospitals are also experiencing with increasing regularity that, for example, infectious diseases cannot be controlled in patients. Thus, ...

Can long-term stress lead to heart attacks? Most people would probably answer in the affirmative, but the scientific evidence of this is scarce. A new study by researchers from Linköping University in Sweden reveals that the levels of the stress hormone cortisol were increased in the months preceding a heart attack. The results, published in Scientific Reports, suggest that long-term stress is a risk factor for heart attacks. "The levels of the stress hormone cortisol differed between people who have had a heart attack and those not affected. This suggests that cortisol in hair may be a new risk marker for heart attacks. We must take stress seriously", says Professor Tomas Faresjö from the Department of Health, ...

Ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms (rAAA) are responsible for nearly 2% of all deaths in U.S. men over the age of 65. Endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) has emerged as a newer and less invasive alternative to open repair for rAAA, and current guidelines recommend EVAR as a first-line option for treatment of rAAA when certain criteria are met. But researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine have discovered that while EVAR is more commonly utilized for rAA, shortens hospital stay and has a lower initial mortality rate, the odds of ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan have discovered a recipe for continuous cyclical regeneration of cultured hair follicles from hair follicle stem cells. Scientists have been making waves in recent years by developing ways to grow a variety of useful items in laboratories, from meat and diamonds to retinas and other organoids. At the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan, a team led by Takashi Tsuji has been working on ways to regenerate lost hair from stem cells. In an important step, a new study identifies a population of hair follicle stem cells in the skin and a recipe for normal cyclical regeneration in the lab. The researchers took fur and whisker cells ...

Experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have joined together to untangle the different meanings of ancestry in the evolution of our species Homo sapiens. Most of us are fascinated by our ancestry, and by extension the ancestry of the human species. We regularly see headlines like 'New human ancestor discovered' or 'New fossil changes everything we thought about our ancestry', and yet the meanings of words like ancestor and ancestry are rarely discussed in detail. In the new paper, published in Nature, experts review our current understanding of how modern human ancestry around the globe can be traced into the distant ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (02/10/2021) -- University of Minnesota Medical School researchers studied SARS-CoV-2 infections at individual cellular levels and made four major discoveries about the virus, including one that validates the effectiveness of remdesivir - an FDA-approved antiviral drug - as a form of treatment for severe COVID-19 disease. "Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way that each individual responds differently to the infection has been closely studied. In our new study, we examined variations in the way individual cells reacted differently to the coronavirus and responded to antiviral treatment," said Ryan Langlois, PhD, senior author of the study, associate professor in the Department ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Past exposure to seasonal coronaviruses (CoVs), which cause the common cold, does not result in the production of antibodies that protect against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, according to a study led by Scott Hensley, PhD, an associate professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior studies have suggested that recent exposure to seasonal CoVs protects against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. However, research from Hensley's team, published in Cell, suggests that if there is such protection, it does not come from antibodies. "We found that many people possessed antibodies that could bind to SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, but these antibodies could not prevent infections," Hensley said. ...

Researchers from the University of Basel have developed a virtual reality app for smartphones to reduce fear of heights. Now, they have conducted a clinical trial to study its efficacy. Trial participants who spent a total of four hours training with the app at home showed an improvement in their ability to handle real height situations. Fear of heights is a widespread phenomenon. Approximately 5% of the general population experiences a debilitating level of discomfort in height situations. However, the people affected rarely take advantage of the available treatment options, such as exposure therapy, which involves putting the person in the anxiety-causing situation under the guidance of a professional. On the one hand, people ...

Rituximab, an anti-cancer drug targeting the membrane protein CD20, was the first approved therapeutic antibody against B tumor cells. Immunologists at the University of Freiburg have now solved a mystery about how it works. A team headed by Professor Dr. Michael Reth used cell cultures, healthy cells, and cells from cancer patients to investigate how CD20 organizes the nanostructures on the B cell membrane. If the protein is missing or Rituximab binds to it, the organization of the B cell surface changes. The resting B cell is activated in the process. The team has published the research in the journal PNAS as part of contributions by new members of the National Academy of Science. B cells are white blood cells and part of the immune system. When they recognize ...

Oncotarget recently published "Melatonin increases overall survival of prostate cancer patients with poor prognosis after combined hormone radiation treatment" which reported that a retrospective study included 955 patients of various stages of prostate cancer who received combined hormone radiation treatment from 2000 to 2019. Comprehensive statistical methods were used to analyze the overall survival rate of PCa patients treated with melatonin in various prognosis groups. The overall survival rate of PCa patients with favorable and intermediate prognoses treated or not treated ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (February 10, 2021) - Brain volume, verbal IQ, and overall IQ are lower in children with Type 1 diabetes (T1D) than in children without diabetes, according to a new longitudinal study published in Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association. The nearly eight-year study, led by Nelly Mauras, MD, a clinical research scientist at Nemours Children's Health System in Jacksonville, Florida, and Allan Reiss MD, a Professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, compared brain scans of young children who have T1D with those of non-diabetic children to assess the extent to which glycemic exposure may adversely affect the ...

It was reported that volume of the brain areas such as superior temporal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex reduces in schizophrenia but precise change of three-dimensional structure of neuron has remains unclear. Dr. Itokawa and colleague performed Nanotomography experiments using Fresnel zone plate optics at the BL37XU beamline of the SPring-8 synchrotron radiation facility and at the 32-ID beamline of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) of Argonne National Laboratory. A total of 34 three-dimensional image datasets of layer V of the BA22 cortex were blinded ...

The recent review, published in Environment International and led by the University of Tartu, summarises the effect of aquatic pollution on cancer prevalence in wild animals with the help of more than 300 reviewed studies. Authors shed light on understudied yet important fields in cancer research in wild animals - summarising the key effects and pointing to future research avenues to crack the puzzle of why cancer develops in polluted environments. „What was immediately evident was the bias towards fish in current research into aquatic wildlife cancer. However, given this bias it is especially interesting ...

Sophia Antipolis, 10 February 2021: A nationwide US study has found increasing death rates from heart disease in women under 65. The research is published in European Heart Journal - Quality of Care and Clinical Outcomes, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 The study found that while death rates from cancer declined every year between 1999 and 2018, after an initial drop, heart disease death rates have been rising since 2010. "Young women in the US are becoming less healthy, which is now reversing prior improvements in heart disease deaths," said senior author Dr. Erin Michos of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, US. "With ...

Satellite images reveal that the timing of algal blooms in the Red Sea may affect the next haul of sardines and squid by commercial fisheries. Rising temperatures in the Red Sea have changed the timing of phytoplankton blooms. These microscopic algae form the base of many marine food webs and so are critical to ocean biodiversity and the industries that they support on land, such as fisheries and tourism. A team led by KAUST climate modeler Ibrahim Hoteit has used satellite images to study the phenology of algal blooms in the northern Red Sea and ...

A new method has enabled the natural structure of particularly large and complex enzymes to be revealed. Scientists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and TU Berlin have published their findings in the journal Cell Reports. They investigated a multi-enzyme complex that plays an essential role in metabolism and have discovered that it functions differently than previously thought. This will help scientists better understand certain diseases. Enzymes are a cell's biocatalysts. They accelerate chemical reactions in the body or ensure that these reactions even take place at all. As a result, they play an extremely important role in metabolism. Individual enzymes frequently form a complex with many subunits, as in the case of the ...

In a study conducted at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 136 adults adhered to one of three study diets for 12 weeks. One of them corresponded to the average Finnish diet, containing roughly 70% animal-derived protein of total protein, while most of the plant-based protein originated from cereal products. In the second study diet, half of the protein was derived from plant products and the other half from animal products, while the third one contained 30% animal protein and 70% plant-based protein of total protein. Sources of animal protein, both red and white meat as well as dairy products, were partially replaced with plant-based proteins by adding a diverse range of legumes, nuts, ...

Your breath holds the key to monitoring fat burning, and now a research group from Tohoku University has created a compact and low-cost device that can measure how our body metabolizes fat. The device uses an ultraviolet lamp to gauge exhaled acetone gas, which is produced in the blood through the metabolic reaction of fat. "Precise measurements of acetone gas concentration allows us to determine the body's ability to metabolize fat and develop exercise methods for efficient fat burning," says Professor Yuji Matsuura from Tohoku University's Graduate School of Biomedical ...

Many natural and human-made networks, such as computer, biological or social networks have a connectivity structure that critically shapes their behavior. The academic field of network science is concerned with analyzing such real-world complex networks and understanding how their structure influences their function or behavior. Examples are the vascular network of our bodies, the network of neurons in our brain, or the network of how an epidemic is spreading through a society. The need for reliable null models The analysis of such networks often focuses on finding interesting properties and features. For example, does the structure of a particular contact network help diseases spread ...