New research by the National Institutes of Health found that unbalanced progesterone signals may cause some pregnant women to experience preterm labor or prolonged labor. The study in mice -- published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences -- provides novel insights for developing treatments. During pregnancy, the hormone progesterone helps to prevent the uterus from contracting and going into labor prematurely. This occurs through molecular signaling involving progesterone receptor types A and B, referred to as PGR-A and PGR-B. In this ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 11, 2021--A long-time question in astrophysics appears to finally be answered, thanks to a collection of large, high-tech water tanks on a mountainside in Mexico. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) data shows that the highest-energy cosmic rays come not from supernovae, but from star clusters. "The origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays in the galaxy has been an open question in astrophysics for more than 60 years," said Patrick Harding, a Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist doing research using HAWC. "Very few regions of the galaxy have both the power to produce high-energy ...

Black women have 80% higher risk of preterm birth between 32 and 33 weeks of pregnancy if a Black person who lives in their neighborhood is killed by police during the pregnancy, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. The study by scientists at the UCSF California Preterm Birth Initiative (PTBI-CA) and UC Berkeley School of Public Health, studied the records of 3.8 million pregnant women to assess whether fatal police violence occurring in their neighborhood during pregnancy was associated with extremely early, early, moderate or late preterm delivery. "Our findings suggest that deaths due to police violence, which already differentially affect Black and Brown communities, adversely affect the health of mothers and babies ...

BOSTON - As COVID-19 infection rates continue to fall, Massachusetts officials are signaling it's almost time to end remote learning and send all school-aged children back to the classroom. While emerging data suggest young children and schools have not been primary drivers of the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence to guide best practices to prevent the spread of the virus in the school setting has been limited and, as a result, national and international recommendations are inconsistent. A study led by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) physician-researchers provides new, much-needed data about the optimal physical ...

Climate change is affecting the water balance of our planet: depending on the region and the time of year, this can influence the amount of water in rivers potentially resulting in more flooding or drought. River flow is an important indicator of water resources available to humans and the environment. The amount of available water also depends on further factors, such as direct interventions in the water cycle or land use change: if, for example, water is diverted for irrigation or regulated via reservoirs, or forests are cleared and monocultures grown in their place, this can have an impact on river flow. However, how river flow ...

Using the same principles that make polarized sunglasses possible, a team of researchers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have developed a technique that will help better defend against asteroids on a collision course with Earth. A new study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal found a better way to interpret radar signals bounced off asteroids' surfaces. The data can better tell us if an asteroid is porous, fluffy or rocky, which matters because there are hundreds of near-Earth asteroids that could potentially hit the planet. "Learning more about the physical properties of asteroids is crucial in Planetary Defense," says Dylan Hickson the lead author and a research scientist at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. "A porous, fluffy asteroid does ...

The planet GJ 1132 b appears to have begun life as a gaseous world with a thick blanket of atmosphere. Starting out at several times the radius of Earth, this so-called "sub-Neptune" quickly lost its primordial hydrogen and helium atmosphere, which was stripped away by the intense radiation from its hot, young star. In a short period of time, it was reduced to a bare core about the size of Earth. To the surprise of astronomers, new observations from Hubble [1] have uncovered a secondary atmosphere that has replaced the planet's first atmosphere. It is rich in hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane and ammonia, and also has a hydrocarbon haze. Astronomers theorise that hydrogen from the original atmosphere was absorbed into the planet's molten magma mantle and is now being slowly released ...

Breast cancer is harmful enough on its own, but when cancer cells start to metastasize -- or spread into the body from their original location -- the disease becomes even more fatal and difficult to treat. Thanks to new research published in Oncogene from the lab of University of Colorado Cancer Center associate director of basic research Heide Ford, PhD, in collaboration with Michael Lewis, PhD, from Baylor College of Medicine, doctors may soon have a better understanding of one mechanism by which metastasis happens, and of potential ways to slow it down. "Metastasis is a huge problem nobody's tackled very well," says Ford, who ...

The universe is filled with magnetic fields. Understanding how magnetic fields are generated and amplified in plasmas is essential to studying how large structures in the universe were formed and how energy is divided throughout the cosmos. An international collaboration, co-led by researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of Oxford, and the University of Chicago, conducted experiments that captured for the first time in a laboratory setting the time history of the growth of magnetic fields by the turbulent dynamo, a physical mechanism thought to be responsible for generating ...

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM), a new hybrid imaging technique, allows us to listen to the sound of light and see the color of biological tissue itself. It can be used for live, multicontrast functional imaging, but the limited wavelength choice of most commercial lasers and the limitations of the existing scanning methods have meant that OR-PAM can obtain only one or two different types of contrast in a single scan. These limitations have made multicontrast functional imaging time-consuming, and it's been difficult to capture the ...

Ann Arbor, March 11, 2020 - Black and Hispanic people experience a higher risk for COVID-19 and severe illness, influenced by factors such as discrimination, housing, and healthcare access and utilization. Now, a END ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The chronic stress of living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence and poverty alters gene activity in immune cells, according to a new study of low-income single Black mothers on the South Side of Chicago. The changes in stress-related gene expression reflect the body's "hunker down" response to long-term threat, a physiological strategy for lying low and considering new actions rather than launching an immediate "fight-or-flight" response. This has implications for health outcomes in communities of color and other marginalized populations, said researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators at the University of Kentucky and UCLA. The researchers published the study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. "The ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The showy colors of some butterflies could advertise their speed and nimbleness, much like a coat of bright yellow paint on a sports car. A new study shows birds can learn to recognize these visual cues, avoiding not only butterflies they've failed to nab in the past but similar-looking species as well. The research provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the idea of evasive mimicry, a strategy in which animals protect themselves from predators by matching the colors or patterns of agile relatives. First proposed more than 60 years ago, the hypothesis has been a challenge to test. But in an experimental setting, ...

SAN ANTONIO -- Surgically opening the windpipe, or trachea, within the first seven days of the start of mechanical ventilation decreases the time patients spend on ventilators, shortens their ICU stay and lowers their risk of ventilator-associated pneumonia, according to a systematic review published Thursday (March 11) in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. "We analyzed the existing medical literature to unravel a question that is very pertinent to adult critical care," said senior author Alvaro Moreira, MD, MSc, of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San ...

The global battle against antibiotic resistance can only succeed if local contexts are taken into account. "A tailored approach is needed in each country," says Heiman Wertheim of Radboud university medical center. "There is no "one-size-fits-all' solution." This was the main finding of a study on antibiotic resistance in African and Asian countries funded by the British Wellcome Trust. Wertheim is the lead investigator of a large group of international researchers who recently published an article on this study in The Lancet Global Health. Antibiotics are powerful treatments for bacterial infections. They are indispensable for controlling infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, or blood poisoning (sepsis) caused by bacteria. But they are ineffective for treating ...

Sugar has been called "evil," "toxic," and "poison." But the body needs sugars, too. Sugar molecules help cells recognize and fight viruses and bacteria, shuttle proteins from cell to cell, and make sure those proteins function. Too much or too little can contribute to a range of maladies, including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, inflammation, diabetes, and even cancer. About 85 percent of proteins, including those associated with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, are beyond the reach of current drugs. One critical and abundant sugar (O-GlcNAc, pronounced o-glick-nack) is found on over 5,000 proteins, often those considered "undruggable." But now, researchers at Harvard University ...

Boston, MA - Vaccinating adults age 26 and older against the human papillomavirus (HPV)--the virus that causes more than 90% of cervical cancers as well as several other cancers--may not be cost-effective, according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health. "Our study found that the added health benefit of increasing the vaccination age limit beyond 26 years is minimal, and that the cost-effectiveness is much lower than in pre-adolescents, the target age group for the HPV vaccine," said Jane Kim, K.T. Li Professor of Health Economics and lead author of the study. The study will be published March 11, 2021, in PLOS Medicine. HPV vaccines have been shown to be highly effective in preventing ...

Eating is a dangerous business. Naturally occurring toxins in food and potentially harmful foodborne microbes can do a number on our intestines, leading to repeated minor injuries. In healthy people, such damage typically heals in a day or two. But in people with Crohn's disease, the wounds fester, causing abdominal pain, bleeding, diarrhea and other unpleasant symptoms. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Cleveland Clinic have discovered that a fungus found in foods such as cheese and processed meats can infect sites of intestinal damage in mice and people with Crohn's and prevent healing. Moreover, treating infected mice with antifungal medication eliminates the fungus and allows the wounds ...

Insights into how bacterial proteins work as a network to take control of our cells could help predict infection outcomes and develop new treatments. Much like a hacker seizes control of a company's software to cause chaos, disease-causing bacteria, such as E. coli and Salmonella, use miniature molecular syringes to inject their own chaos-inducing agents (called effectors) into the cells that keep our guts healthy. These effectors take control of our cells, overwhelming their defences and blocking key immune responses, allowing the infection to take hold. Previously, studies have investigated single effectors. Now a team led by scientists at Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer ...

A team led by Christoph Utschick and Prof. Rudolf Gross, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a coil with superconducting wires capable of transmitting power in the range of more than five kilowatts contactless and with only small losses. The wide field of conceivable applications include autonomous industrial robots, medical equipment, vehicles and even aircraft. Contactless power transmission has already established itself as a key technology when it comes to charging small devices such as mobile telephones and electric toothbrushes. Users would also like to see contactless charging made available for larger electric machines such as industrial robots, medical equipment and electric vehicles. Such devices could ...

How do you turn "dumb" headphones into smart ones? Rutgers engineers have invented a cheap and easy way by transforming headphones into sensors that can be plugged into smartphones, identify their users, monitor their heart rates and perform other services. Their invention, called END ...

Irvine, Calif., March 11, 2021 - Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage - from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut. In a study published this week in Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of California, Irvine and the Georgia Institute of Technology describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in which isolated ...

LAWRENCE -- Much like coronavirus, circulating HIV-1 viruses mutate into diverse variants that pose challenges for scientists developing vaccines to protect people from HIV/AIDS. "AIDS vaccine development has been a decades-long challenge partly because our immune systems have difficulty recognizing all the diverse variants of the rapidly mutating HIV virus, which is the cause of AIDS," said Brandon DeKosky, assistant professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and chemical & petroleum engineering at the University of Kansas. In the past five years, tremendous progress has been ...

Philadelphia, March 12, 2021 - Researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have determined what happens at a cellular level as the lung alveolus forms and allows newborns to breathe air. Understanding this process gives researchers a better sense of how to develop therapies and potentially regenerate this critical tissue in the event of injury. The findings were published online today by the journal Science. The lung develops during both embryonic and postnatal stages, during which lung tissue forms and a variety of cell types perform specific roles. During the transition from embryo to newborn is when the alveolar region of the lung ...

Skoltech researchers were able to show that patterns that can cause neural networks to make mistakes in recognizing images are, in effect, akin to Turing patterns found all over the natural world. In the future, this result can be used to design defenses for pattern recognition systems currently vulnerable to attacks. The paper, available as an arXiv preprint, was presented at the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21). Deep neural networks, smart and adept at image recognition and classification as they already are, can still be vulnerable ...