Air pollution is a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and a major contributor to the global burden of disease. Long-term exposure to air pollution has also been linked to an increased risk of death from COVID-19. This dangerous "triple threat" of air pollution, COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease should be taken seriously, warn major health authorities. Four leading cardiovascular organizations - the World Heart Federation (WHF), American College of Cardiology (ACC), American Heart Association (AHA) and European Society of Cardiology (ESC) - today released a joint statement urging the medical community and health authorities to mitigate the impact of air pollution on people's ...

A Quebec research team has discovered two early plasma markers to detect Alzheimer's disease five years before its onset. The results of this recent study led by the doctoral student Mohamed Raâfet Ben Khedher and postdoctoral student Mohamed Haddad, directed by Professor Charles Ramassamy of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions (TRCI). The diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is usually based on a series of psychometric ...

Support for policies prohibiting smoking and the use of tobacco products on Oregon State University's Corvallis campus grew substantially over a five-year span, especially among tobacco users, a recent OSU study found. The study, published earlier this month in the journal Preventive Medicine, is unique in its analysis of support for smoke- and tobacco-free campus policies over a long period of time. Most other studies of attitudes toward smoking policies only assess a single point in time. "Tobacco-free policies are one of the most effective things we can do to reduce the burden of tobacco use, and they are highly supported ...

Navigating, exploring and thinking about space are part of daily life, whether it's carving a path through a crowd, hiking a backcountry trail or maneuvering into a parking spot. For most of human history, the driving force for day-to-day wayfinding and movement across the landscape was a need for food. And unlike other primates, our species has consistently divided this labor along gender lines. In new research published in Nature Human Behaviour, scientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the increasingly gendered division of labor in human societies during the past 2.5 million years dramatically shaped how our species uses space, and possibly ...

A research team from HSE University and SkolTech, together with experts from the Smorodintsev Research Institute of Influenza in St. Petersburg and the RAS Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP), discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus independently entered Russia at least 67 times, mostly at the end of February and beginning of March 2020. The vast majority of introductions came from European countries. No cases of introduction from China were registered, which is likely due to the timely closure of borders with the country. Currently, nine local virus lineages are circulating in Russia, which are not present elsewhere in the world. Given that Russia was actively 'importing' the virus from abroad, the researchers have not detected any cases of 'exporting' ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In a new study published in Circulation, Mayo Clinic researchers provide the first preclinical, proof-of-concept study for hybrid gene therapy in long QT syndrome, a potentially lethal heart rhythm condition. Researchers demonstrated its potential therapeutic efficacy in two in vitro model systems using beating heart cells reengineered from the blood samples of patients with 1 long QT syndrome. They targeted the whole KCNQ1 gene rather than specific LQT1-causative mutations, making this study applicable to all patients with long QT ...

When you think of fungi, what comes to mind may be a crucial ingredient in a recipe or their amazing ability to break down dead organic matter into vital nutrients. But new research by Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geosciences with the Virginia Tech College of Science, and Tian Gan, a visiting Ph.D. student in the Xiao lab, highlights yet another important role that fungi have played throughout the Earth's history: helping the planet recover from an ice age. A team of scientists from Virginia Tech, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guizhou Education University, and University of Cincinnati has discovered the remains of a fungi-like microfossil that ...

A tick saliva study reveals immune responses that could lead to better protection for cattle. Scientists from Hokkaido University, Japan and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have revealed that substances in tick saliva activates immune response-suppressing proteins in cattle that facilitates the transmission of tick-borne diseases. The finding was published in the journal Scientific Reports and could help in the development of alternative control strategies. The Asian blue tick, Rhipicephalus microplus, feeds on cattle, causing skin lesions, ...

There's a better end for used food than taking up space in landfills and contributing to global warming. UC Riverside scientists have discovered fermented food waste can boost bacteria that increase crop growth, making plants more resistant to pathogens and reducing carbon emissions from farming. "Beneficial microbes increased dramatically when we added fermented food waste to plant growing systems," said UCR microbiologist Deborah Pagliaccia, who led the research. "When there are enough of these good bacteria, they produce antimicrobial compounds and metabolites that help plants grow better and faster." Since the plants in this experiment were grown in a greenhouse, the benefits of the waste ...

Earth is warming rapidly, but there is too little observational data in some regions such as the Arctic or high-altitude areas like the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau to adequately and consistently assess temperature variations across the globe. To better understand how temperatures have increased, an international team led by researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China has released a newly merged global surface temperature dataset, including reconstructed land and marine measurements from the 1850s to 2018. The study provides evidence that there was a consistent increased warming trend compared with previous estimations, which closely matches the available observational data and updated simulations covering the past two decades. The approach ...

A new paper in the Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press, finds that a generous parental leave policy nurses enjoyed in Denmark caused nursing shortages, which resulted in a decline in the quality of hospital and nursing home care. The study estimates a large increase in nursing home mortality. Beginning in 1994 a parental-leave program in Denmark offered any parent the opportunity to take up to a full year off work, paid, for every child under the age of nine. The researchers find that many nurses in Denmark took advantage of this program. Nurses, however, could not be replaced on net despite the Danish government's efforts to expand education and immigration ...

If you look deep into the eyes of a fish, it will tell you its life story. Scientists from the University of California, Davis, demonstrate that they can use stable isotopic analysis of the eye lenses of freshwater fish -- including threatened and endangered salmon -- to reveal a fish's life history and what it ate along the way. They conducted their study, published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, through field-based experiments in California's Central Valley. The study carries implications for managing floodplains, fish and natural resources; prioritizing habitat restoration efforts; and understanding how landscape disturbances impact fish. The technique had previously been used in marine environments, ...

Worldwide, over one billion people live with a disability. Historically, they have been discriminated against and stigmatized by society. To improve their rights, they should be included in political decision-making, yet there is a lack of political representatives who are known to have a disability. This under-representation may be due to several factors, including how voters perceive a political candidate with a disability. However, a new study published in Frontiers in Political Science, found for the first time that voters do not apply negative stereotypes when evaluating candidates with a disability. Rather, voters tend to perceive candidates with a disability as capable, ...

Prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with prices in the U.S. averaging 2.56 times those seen in 32 other nations, according to a new RAND Corporation report. The gap between prices in the U.S. and other countries is even larger for brand-named drugs, with U.S. prices averaging 3.44 times those in comparison nations. The RAND study found that prices for unbranded generic drugs -- which account for 84% of drugs sold in the U.S. by volume but only 12% of U.S. spending -- are slightly lower in the U.S. than in most other nations. "Brand-name drugs are the primary driver of the higher prescription drug prices in the U.S.," said Andrew Mulcahy, lead author of the study and a senior health policy researcher at RAND, a ...

SINGAPORE, 28 January 2021 - One in three adults, particularly women, younger adults, and those of lower socioeconomic status, are experiencing psychological distress related to COVID-19, researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, reported in the journal PLOS ONE. COVID-19 continues to pose serious threats to public health across the globe, and interventions such as lockdowns, quarantine and social distancing are having an adverse impact on the mental well-being of populations. The pandemic has escalated the burden of psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and insomnia. However, the factors associated with increased susceptibility to psychological distress among adults in the general population during COVID-19 ...

Results of study by Children's Hospital Colorado, presented at the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine's Annual Meeting, show a third of patients not needing narcotic pain pills after c-section Aurora, Colo. (Jan. 28, 2021) In a retrospective analysis of cesarean deliveries from 2015 through 2020, a team of doctors from the Colorado Fetal Care Center at Children's Hospital Colorado (Children's Colorado) found that using a wound infusion pump in combination with enhanced recovery efforts such as removing urinary catheters earlier and walking around the same day of surgery can reduce opioid use by more than 80%. Also notable, ...

Researchers from Western University, Indiana University, and Washington State University published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that uses the idea of psychological distance as a way to leverage qualities of existing consumer-brand relationships. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "They're Just Not That Into You: How to Leverage Existing Consumer-Brand Relationships through Social Psychological Distance" and is authored by Scott Connors, Mansur Khamitov, Matthew Thomson, and Andrew Perkins. Marketing managers want ...

Our genetic codes control not only which proteins our cells produce, but also - to a great extent - in what quantity. This ground-breaking discovery, applicable to all biological life, was recently made by systems biologists at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, using supercomputers and artificial intelligence. Their research, which could also shed new light on the mysteries of cancer, was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. DNA molecules contain instructions for cells for producing various proteins. This has been known since the middle of the last century when the double helix was identified as the information carrier ...

Running a successful business has its challenges, but the COVID-19 pandemic has required many owners to pivot and look for new ways to operate profitably while keeping employees and consumers safe. Research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business found that emotional intelligence - the ability to understand, use and manage emotions to relieve stress - may be more vital to a business' survival than previously thought. "We found that entrepreneurs benefit much more from emotional competences than other competencies -- such as IQ -- due to high uncertainty and ambiguity that comes with the world of entrepreneurship and ...

MIT researchers have developed a type of neural network that learns on the job, not just during its training phase. These flexible algorithms, dubbed "liquid" networks, change their underlying equations to continuously adapt to new data inputs. The advance could aid decision making based on data streams that change over time, including those involved in medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. "This is a way forward for the future of robot control, natural language processing, video processing -- any form of time series data processing," says Ramin Hasani, the study's lead author. "The potential is really significant." The research will ...

Philadelphia, January 28, 2021 - A collaborative study from the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) and the Center for Autism Research (CAR) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that compared with their non-autistic peers, young autistic drivers have lower rates of moving violations and license suspensions, as well as similar to lower crash rates. The findings were recently published online by the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Obtaining a driver's license is an important milestone for adolescents and young adults. One-third of autistic individuals without intellectual disability obtain ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - An improved extraction method involving chia seeds may provide new options for nutritional foods, medicine capsules and anti-aging products. A Purdue University team has developed and patented the method to separate mucilage from chia seeds, yielding a protein-rich chia seed flour with improved bioactivity and functionality compared with conventional methods. This work was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch Act formula funds project 1019794. Mucilage is a thick and gluey substance that surrounds chia seeds and can make processing the seeds for food or pharmaceutical uses much more difficult or nearly impossible. "We are excited about our ...

King's College London researchers have found evidence that minocycline, a widely used antibiotic with anti-inflammatory properties, gave greater improvement in depressive symptoms in patients with treatment resistant depression with low-grade peripheral inflammation. Improvement in depressive symptoms In a four-week randomised clinical MINDEP (MINocycline in DEPression) trial, 39 patients with major depressive disorder were recruited from services linked to South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and via public advertisement. The trial took place at the NIHR / Wellcome Trust King's Clinical Research Facility at King's College Hospital. The patients, who were taking their routine antidepressant treatment, were split into two ...

New research suggests that a higher dietary intake of long chain omega-3 fatty acids in childhood may reduce the risk of developing subsequent asthma, but only in children carrying a common gene variant. The study, led by Queen Mary University of London, is in collaboration with the University of Bristol and University of Southampton, UK, and Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. In the UK, 1.1 million children (1 in 11) are currently receiving treatment for asthma and most adult asthma begins in childhood. The NHS spends around £1 billion a year treating and caring for people with asthma. Senior author, Professor Seif Shaheen from Queen Mary ...

Helping people to self isolate after testing positive for covid-19 must now be a top priority for the UK government, argue experts in The BMJ today. Dr Muge Cevik at the University of St Andrews and colleagues say the focus should be on those working in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing, or without a home, and should include free and safe accommodation alongside adequate income support, job protection, and help with caring responsibilities. Most countries have used testing as a tool to interrupt transmission chains by encouraging ...