GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Plants are DNA hoarders. Adhering to the maxim of never throwing anything out that might be useful later, they often duplicate their entire genome and hang on to the added genetic baggage. All those extra genes are then free to mutate and produce new physical traits, hastening the tempo of evolution. A new study shows that such duplication events have been vitally important throughout the evolutionary history of gymnosperms, a diverse group of seed plants that includes pines, cypresses, sequoias, ginkgos and cycads. Published today in Nature Plants, the research indicates that ...

FINDINGS A chemical modification that occurs in some RNA molecules as they carry genetic instructions from DNA to cells' protein-making machinery may offer protection against non-alcoholic fatty liver, a condition that results from a build-up of fat in the liver and can lead to advanced liver disease, according to a new study by UCLA researchers. The study, conducted in mice, also suggests that this modification -- known as m6A, in which a methyl group attaches to an RNA chain -- may occur at a different rate in females than it does in males, potentially explaining why females tend to have higher fat content in the liver. The researchers found that without the m6A modification, differences in liver fat content between the sexes were reduced dramatically. In ...

WOODS HOLE, Mass. - What's a hungry marine microbe to do when the pickings are slim? It must capture nutrients - nitrogen, phosphorus, or iron - to survive, yet in vast expanses of the ocean, nutrients are extremely scarce. And the stakes are high: Marine microbial communities drive many of the elemental cycles that sustain all life on Earth. One ingenious solution to this challenge is reported this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In low-nutrient environments, marine microbes can clump together and hook up with even tinier cells that have vibrating, hairlike appendages (cilia) on their surface. ...

New York, NY--July 19, 2021-- A new robotic neck brace from researchers at Columbia Engineering and their colleagues at Columbia's Department of Otolaryngology may help doctors analyze the impact of cancer treatments on the neck mobility of patients and guide their recovery. Head and neck cancer was the seventh most common cancer worldwide in 2018, with 890,000 new cases and 450,000 deaths, accounting for 3% of all cancers and more than 1.5% of all cancer deaths in the United States. Such cancer can spread to lymph nodes in the neck, as well as other organs in the body. Surgically removing lymph nodes in the neck can help doctors investigate the risk of spread, but may result in pain and stiffness in the shoulders and neck for years afterward. Identifying ...

CT scans for patients with concussion provide critical information about their risk for long-term impairment and potential to make a complete recovery - findings that underscore the need for physician follow-up. In a study led by UC San Francisco, researchers looked at the CT scans of 1,935 patients, ages 17 and over, whose neurological exams met criteria for concussion, or mild traumatic brain injury (TBI), at hospitals throughout the nation. While links between CT imaging features and outcome have already been established in moderate and severe TBI, the researchers believe this is the first time the link has been identified in patients ...

Hamilton, ON (July 19, 2021) - A potentially game-changing treatment for people with, or at risk of, blood clots has been found effective by an international team of researchers led by McMaster University's Jeffrey Weitz. Weitz's team compared abelacimab with enoxaparin as a control drug in 412 patients undergoing knee replacement surgery. Results showed that just one abelacimab injection prevents blood clots for up to a month after surgery, reducing the risk by about 80% compared with enoxaparin without increasing the risk of bleeding. Their findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine today, coinciding with Weitz's presentation of the research at the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis 2021 Congress. Weitz, a hematologist, is a professor of medicine ...

What The Study Did: This study investigated the association between time spent cycling and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease or any other cause among people with diabetes. Authors: Mathias Ried-Larsen, Ph.D., of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.3836) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  #  # Media advisory: The full study and editor's note are ...

What The Study Did: The experiences, perspectives and needs of transgender young people in accessing health care are described in this review of 91 studies. Authors: Lauren S. H. Chong, M.D., of the Children's Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, Australia, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.2061) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  ...

What The Study Did: These results suggest that substantial proportions of Latinx immigrants have immigration concerns about engaging in COVID-19-related testing, treatment and contact tracing. Authors: Carol L. Galletly, J.D., Ph.D., Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.17049) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  #  ...

What The Study Did: The association between daily coffee consumption and the risk of cardiac arrhythmias was evaluated in this study. Authors: Gregory M. Marcus, M.D., M.A.S., of the University of California, San Francisco, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.3616) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  #  # Media advisory: The full study and commentary are ...

What The Study Did: This study included a meta-analysis that combined the results of 74 studies with 2.7 million participants to estimate how common globally dementia is in people younger than age 65. Authors: Sebastian Köhler, Ph.D., of Maastricht University in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2021.2161) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and ...

What The Study Did: Researchers examined racial/ethnic disparities in outpatient visit rates to 29 physician specialties in the United States. Authors: Christopher Cai, M.D., of the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.3771) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full study is linked to this news release. Embed ...

An international team anchored by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which is known for capturing the first image of a black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, has now imaged the heart of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A in unprecedented detail. The astronomers pinpoint the location of the central supermassive black hole and reveal how a gigantic jet is being born. Most remarkably, only the outer edges of the jet seem to emit radiation, which challenges our theoretical models of jets. This work, led by Michael Janssen from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy ...

LA JOLLA--Fighting a tumor is a marathon, not a sprint. For cancer-fighting T cells, the race is sometimes just too long, and the T cells quit fighting. Researchers even have a name for this phenomenon: T cell exhaustion. In a new Nature Immunology study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) report that T cells can be engineered to clear tumors without succumbing to T cell exhaustion. "The idea is to give the cells a little bit of armor against the exhaustion program," says LJI Professor Patrick Hogan, Ph.D. "The cells can go into the tumor to do their job, ...

BOSTON - Lymph nodes are critical to the body's immune response against tumors but paradoxically, cancer cells that spread, or metastasize, to lymph nodes can often avoid being eliminated by immune cells. Recent experiments by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston University School of Medicine provide insights on the details behind this immune evasion, which could help scientists develop strategies to overcome it. The findings are published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. "We know that lymph nodes are often the first place cancer ...

A new USC study of a common, yet poorly understood type of white blood cell reveals the immune cell's response to pathogens differs greatly by sex and by age. In this mouse study, males proved much more susceptible to a condition called sepsis than females. However, the scientists also found that the female disease-defense system is hardly perfect; their system changes with age to become nearly as harmful as the males'. Those are the key findings in a study that appears today in Nature Aging. The study has important implications for studying disease and cures, especially for sepsis, a condition in which the body's defense ...

WHAT: A new study published in JAMA Neurology suggests that certain features that appear on CT scans help predict outcomes following mild traumatic brain injury (TBI). Patterns detected on the scans may help guide follow up treatment as well as improve recruitment and research study design for head injury clinical trials. Researchers led by Geoffrey Manley, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurological surgery at the University of California San Francisco, conducted CT scans in 1,935 subjects with mild TBI and followed their outcomes up to 12 months after injury. This research was part of the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) study, a large research effort funded by the National Institutes of ...

Michigan State University ecologists led an international research partnership of professional and volunteer scientists to reveal new insights into what's driving the already-dwindling population of eastern monarch butterflies even lower. Between 2004 and 2018, changing climate at the monarch's spring and summer breeding grounds has had the most significant impact on this declining population. In fact, the effects of climate change have been nearly seven times more significant than other contributors, such as habitat loss. The team published its report July 19 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. "What we do is develop models to understand why monarchs are declining ...

Determining the major drivers of species diversification and phenotypic innovation across the Tree of Life is one of the grand challeges in evolutionary biology. Facilitated by the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species of the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Prof. YI Tingshuang and Prof. LI Dezhu of KIB led a novel study on gymnosperm diversification with a team of international researchers. This study provides critical insight on the processes underlying diversification and phenotypic evolution in gymnosperms, with important broader implications for the major drivers of both micro- and macroevolution in plants. The results were published today online in Nature ...

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. - During development, brain cells may find different ways to connect with each other based on sex, according to researchers at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. The study, recently published in eNeuro, an open access journal for the Society of Neuroscience, showed a significantly more robust synaptogenic response in male-derived cells compared to female-derived cells when exposed to factors secreted from astrocytes, which are non-neuronal cells found throughout the central nervous system. This difference was driven largely by how neurons responded to thrombospondin-2 (TSP2), a protein with cell adhesion properties that is normally secreted by astrocytes. ...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, several reports have indicated that SARS-CoV-2 spillover events have occurred from humans to animals, as evidenced by the transmission of the virus between keepers and tigers and lions in the Bronx Zoo in New York. However, to date, the full range of animal species that are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection remains unclear. Typically, such information could be obtained by experimentally infecting a large variety of animal species with SARS-CoV-2 to see if they are susceptible. However, in order to reduce and refine such animal experiments, the researchers at the University of Bern and at the IVI set out to answer this question ...

A new study published in Accident Analysis & Prevention shows how biometric data can be used to find potentially challenging and dangerous areas of urban infrastructure before a crash occurs. Lead author Megan Ryerson led a team of researchers in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the School of Engineering and Applied Science in collecting and analyzing eye-tracking data from cyclists navigating Philadelphia's streets. The team found that individual-based metrics can provide a more proactive approach for designing safer roadways for bicyclists and pedestrians. Current federal rules for installing safe transportation interventions at an unsafe crossing--such as a crosswalk with a traffic signal--require either a minimum of 90-100 pedestrians crossing this location every hour ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Flavor is the name of the game for scientists who want to optimize food for consumption in ways that improve nutrition or combat obesity. But there is more to flavor than the substances that meet the mouth. Olfaction, our sense of smell, is a major contributor to how we perceive aromas, especially those related to what we eat. With hopes to capitalize on the smell factor in flavor development, researchers are exploring how the route an aroma takes to get to the olfactory system, through the nose or the back of the throat, influences our response to the scent in question. In a new study, when participants were asked to match a known scent such as rose with one of four unknown scents, they did best when the aromas were introduced ...

Champaign, IL, July 19, 2021 - For dairy cows, the transition period--the time between a cow giving birth and beginning to produce milk--brings the greatest possibility of health problems. The current widespread belief is that the effects of excess nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA) in the bloodstream and the ensuing hyperketonemia during this period, coupled with low levels of available calcium, are largely responsible for disorders such as mastitis, metritis, retained placenta, and poor fertility. Much attention has therefore been devoted to regulating NEFA and calcium levels in transition cows--yet all these efforts have not made the transition period less of a challenge to cows and, hence, to farmers, with approximately ...

The second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine induces a powerful boost to a part of the immune system that provides broad antiviral protection, according to a study led by investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding strongly supports the view that the second shot should not be skipped. "Despite their outstanding efficacy, little is known about how exactly RNA vaccines work," said Bali Pulendran, PhD, professor of pathology and of microbiology and immunology. "So we probed the immune response induced by one of them in exquisite detail." The study, ...