Two studies from the University of Copenhagen show that Danes aren't quite as good as Chinese at discerning bitter tastes. The research suggests that this is related to anatomical differences upon the tongues of Danish and Chinese people. For several years, researchers have known that women are generally better than men at tasting bitter flavours. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that ethnicity may also play a role in how sensitive a person is to the bitter taste found in for example broccoli, Brussels sprouts and dark chocolate. By letting test subjects taste the bitter substance PROP, two studies demonstrate that Danish and Chinese people experience this basic taste differently. The reason seems to be related to an anatomical difference upon ...

A recent study by prof. Tone Bjørge, University of Bergen, and her team shows that thyroid cancer is related to in-utero exposures. Thyroid cancer is diagnosed at a younger age than most other malignancies and the incidence is higher in women than men. "The only established modifiable risk factors for thyroid cancer are childhood exposure to ionizing radiation and obesity. Few in-utero and early life risk factors have so far been identified" says Bjørge, professor at Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen. Maternal hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, goiter, and benign thyroid neoplasms ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...January 5, 2021 - Reopening Florida elementary and high schools in September was followed by increased COVID-19 infections, according to data analyzed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Harvard Medical School and Tel Aviv University researchers. The findings were just published in END ...

Researchers at Paderborn University have developed a new method of distance measurement for systems such as GPS, which achieves more precise results than ever before. Using quantum physics, the team led by Leibniz Prize winner Professor Christine Silberhorn has successfully overcome the so-called resolution limit, which causes the "noise" we may see in photos, for example. Their findings have just been published in the academic journal "Physical Review X Quantum" (PRX Quantum). In "Physics", the publisher's online magazine, the paper has also been highlighted with an expert Viewpoint - an honour which is given to only certain selected publications. Physicist Dr Benjamin Brecht explains the problem of the resolution limit: "In laser distance measurements ...

Assessing the ability of unresponsive patients with severe brain injury to understand what is being said to them could yield important insights into how they might recover, according to new research. A team at the University of Birmingham has shown that responses to speech can be measured using electroencephalography, a non-invasive technique used to record electrical signals in the brain. The strength of these responses can be used to provide an accurate prognosis that can help clinicians make the most effective treatment decisions. Significantly the assessments can be made while the patient is still in intensive care and does not require any conscious response from the patient - they do not have to ...

Brain metastases can only develop if cancer cells first exit the fine blood vessels and enter into the brain tissue. To facilitate this step, cancer cells influence blood clotting, as Heidelberg scientists from the German Cancer Research Center and from Heidelberg University Hospital have now been able to show in mice. The cancer cells actively promote the formation of clots, which helps them to arrest in the brain capillaries and then penetrate through the vessel wall. Drugs that inhibit the clotting factor thrombin were able to reduce the number of brain metastases in this experimental model. Brain metastases are a feared complication of advanced cancers. Different cancers differ in their tendency to colonize the brain. Advanced-stage melanoma ...

A recent study finds that, while youth think all bullying is bad, non-immigrant adolescents object less to bullying when the victim is an immigrant. However, the study found that the more contact immigrant and non-immigrant children had with each other, the more strongly they objected to bullying. "We know that bystanders can play a key role in stopping bullying, and wanted to better understand bystander responses to bias-based bullying," says Seçil Gönülta?, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University. "What role does a victim's background play? What role does the bystander's background play? Are children more or less likely to intervene if they come from different backgrounds?" To explore these questions, the researchers ...

BOSTON - Findings from the Nurses' Health Study, one of the longest running studies of women's health, show that five diet and lifestyle factors, including regular exercise, can make a significant impact on gastroesophageal reflux (GERD) or heartburn symptoms. GERD is a common condition, affecting about a third of the U.S. population; the main symptom is heartburn and it is often managed with medications. This new study suggests, however, that following diet and lifestyle guidelines may reduce symptoms substantially and could make medication unnecessary for some patients. It was published as a letter in JAMA Internal Medicine. The five factors include normal weight, never smoking, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity for at least 30 minutes daily, restricting coffee, tea ...

Microscopy -- Nanoscale commuting Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules. A team led by the University of Graz, Austria, used unique four-probe scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM, to move a single molecule between two independent probes and observe it disappear from one point and instantaneously reappear at the other. The STM, made available via the CNMS user program, operates under an applied voltage, scanning material ...

Five years after the Paris climate agreement, all eyes are on the world's progress on the road to a carbon-free future. A crucial part of this goal involves the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as sun, water, wind and wave energy. Among those, solar energy has always held the highest hope in the scientific community, as the most reliable and abundant energy source on Earth. In recent decades, solar cells have become cheaper, more efficient, and environment friendly. However, current solar cells tend to be opaque, which prevents their wider use and integration into everyday materials, constrained to being lined up on roofs and in remote solar farms. But ...

Operators of the primary particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are getting a new tool to help them quickly address issues that can prevent it from running smoothly. A new machine learning system has passed its first two-week test, correctly identifying glitchy accelerator components and the type of glitches they're experiencing in near-real-time. An analysis of the results of the first field test of the custom-built machine learning system was recently published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams. The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, ...

Microorganisms are the most abundant and diverse form of life on Earth. However, the vast majority of them remain unknown. Indeed, only a small fraction of the microorganisms of our planet can be cultured under traditional conditions, leaving a world of unculturable organisms out of our scope. This is especially true for bacteria thriving under extreme conditions as the harsh conditions are hardly reproducible in a lab. While some microbial studies have been performed in the Sahara, the Atacama, and the Gibson desert, European arid lands remain poorly studied. To finally explore the microbial community of some European deserts, researchers ...

An effective response to a pandemic like the COVID-19 will only be successful if people voluntarily follow the rules and guidelines of decision-makers and experts. Many of the required measures, such as avoiding social contact and significantly changing our daily habits require a strong commitment. Other necessary actions, such as regular hand washing, are often impossible to monitor and enforce. Adherence to the guidelines thus depends on people's personal commitment. The ability of policy makers and experts to communicate convincingly to citizens has a strong influence on whether ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Co-developing land for both solar photovoltaic power and agriculture could provide 20% of total electricity generation in the United States with an investment of less than 1% of the annual U.S. budget, a new paper by Oregon State University researchers found. Wide-scale installation of agrivoltaic systems could lead to an annual reduction of 330,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S - the equivalent of 75,000 cars off the road per year - and the creation of more than 100,000 jobs in rural communities, while minimally impacting crop yield, the researchers say. "Agrivoltaics provide a rare chance for true synergy: more food, more energy, lower water demand, lower carbon emissions, and more prosperous rural communities," said Chad Higgins, an associate ...

Durham, NC - Mid-term results of the first clinical trial designed specifically to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of two cell therapies that are showing early promise in treating angiitis-induced critical limb ischemia were released today in STEM CELLS Translational Medicine. The study, by researchers at Zhongshan Hospital/Fudan University in Shanghai, compared how transplantation of peripheral blood mononuclear cells fared versus transplantation of purified CD34+ cells in treating this condition. It revealed both therapies yielded satisfactory results and provided evidence for ...

DALLAS - Jan. 5, 2021 - Researchers at the Children's Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) have discovered a new metabolic vulnerability in a highly aggressive form of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). These findings could pave the way for new treatments for patients with mutations in two key genes - KRAS and LKB1. Patients whose tumors contain both of these mutations, known as KL tumors, have poor outcomes and usually do not respond to immunotherapy. "We used to think that most tumors rely on the same handful of metabolic pathways to grow, but we've learned over the last decade that this is an oversimplification. Instead, different tumor subclasses have particular metabolic needs arising from mutations ...

Trio of articles suggest that a single dose of vaccine, even if less effective than two doses, may have greater population benefit. Three articles published today in Annals of Internal Medicine discuss the most effective vaccination strategy for maximum impact against the COVID-19 pandemic. The articles are accompanied by an editorial from Thomas J. Bollyky, JD, Director of Global Health Program, Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Bollyky can be reached through Lauran Potter at lpotter@cfr.org. The full text of his editorial is available here: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-8280. Speed Versus Efficacy: Quantifying Potential Tradeoffs in COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-7866. Researchers from Yale School of Public ...

The combination of ibrutinib plus rituximab is approved for the treatment of adults with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). In an early benefit assessment, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) now examined which advantages and disadvantages this drug combination has for the patients. For patients who could also be treated with the chemo-immunotherapy FCR, the assessment found an indication of a major added benefit in comparison with this appropriate comparator therapy. No study data are available for patients for whom FCR or other chemo-immunotherapy is not an option due to their poorer general health. An added benefit is therefore ...

PULLMAN, Wash. - In what may be a sign of climate-change-induced conflict, researchers have captured rare photographic evidence of a jaguar killing another predatory wild cat at an isolated waterhole in Guatemala. In the footage, a male jaguar arrives near the waterhole and apparently lies in wait for an hour. It lets a potentially dangerous prey animal, a large tapir, pass by, but when the ocelot stops to drink, the jaguar pounces and carries off the smaller predator. The event, detailed in a recent study published in the journal Biotropica, was captured in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in March 2019, a dry month in a drought year for the tropical forest, by wildlife ecologists from Washington State University ...

LA JOLLA--(January 5, 2021) Lithium is considered the gold standard for treating bipolar disorder (BD), but nearly 70 percent of people with BD don't respond to it. This leaves them at risk for debilitating, potentially life-threatening mood swings. Researchers at the Salk Institute have found that the culprit may lie in gene activity--or lack of it. A new study led by Salk Professor and President Rusty Gage, which published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry on January 4, 2021, shows that decreased activation of a gene called LEF1 disrupts ordinary ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) describe an endoscopic modality for detecting upper gastrointestinal tract neoplasms by Linked Color Imaging that innovatively mixes light of different wavelengths to better depict mucosal changes Tokyo, Japan - Recently there have been significant advances on several fronts in the ongoing war against cancer of the alimentary tract. Now, Japanese researchers report the development of another weapon: Linked Color Imaging (LCI), a novel endoscopic technique that improves detection of cancer by viewing the upper digestive tract mucosa under illumination that combines specific wavelengths of light to intensify subtle color variations indicative of neoplastic change. Upper gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Ionis Pharmaceuticals, USA, report a modification wherein replacing the RNA strand of a heteroduplex oligonucleotide with DNA may enhance the efficacy of antisense oligonucleotide-based drugs Tokyo, Japan - Antisense oligonucleotides (ASO) hold great promise for pharmacotherapy. Now, researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) and Ionis Pharmaceuticals, advancing their earlier work on a heteroduplex oligonucleotide (HDO) model, have demonstrated augmentation of ASO-based ...

For the first time, researchers have used a novel catalyst process to recycle a type of plastic found in everything from grocery bags and food packaging to toys and electronics into liquid fuels and wax. The team published their results on Dec. 10 in Applied Catalysis B: Environmental. "Plastics are essential materials for our life because they bring safety and hygiene to our society," said paper co-authors Masazumi Tamura, associate professor in the Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis in the Advanced Research Institute for Natural Science and Technology in Osaka City University, and Keiichi Tomishige, professor in the Graduate School of Engineering in Tohoku University. "However, the growth of the global ...

An imbalance of the body's oxygen producing free radicals and its antioxidant cells could be the reason why gum disease and chronic kidney disease affect each other, a new study led by the University of Birmingham has found. Periodontitis - or gum disease - is a common, inflammatory disease which causes bleeding gums, wobbly or drifting teeth and can eventually result in tooth loss. Previous studies have shown a link between the severe oral inflammation caused by gum disease and chronic kidney disease (CKD) which demonstrated that those with worse inflammation of the gums have worse kidney function. Previous research also showed that patients with CKD and periodontitis experience ...

Practicing gratitude and looking to the future will help safeguard our mental wellbeing during Covid-19 lockdowns, a new study in the Journal of Positive Psychology reports. In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Surrey investigated the effectiveness of three psychological interventions -- nostalgia, a sentimentality for the past; gratitude, recognising the good things currently in our life; and best possible self, thinking about positive elements of the future -- and how they each affect wellbeing during lockdowns. Personal characteristics such as emotion regulation (the ability to respond ...