(Boston)--Despite the availability of numerous effective birth control methods, more than 40 percent of pregnancies worldwide are unintended. In addition to contributing significantly to population growth, unintended pregnancies can have pronounced adverse effects on maternal physical, mental and economic wellbeing. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and ZabBio (San Diego, CA) have developed an anti-sperm monoclonal antibody, the Human Contraception Antibody (HCA), which they found to be safe and possess potent sperm agglutination (clumping) and immobilization activity in laboratory tests. "HCA appears to be suitable for contraceptive use and could be administered vaginally in a dissolvable film for a ...

A research team from the University of Göttingen and the University of British Columbia (Canada) has investigated how people in five different countries react to various usages of genome editing in agriculture. The researchers looked at which uses are accepted and how the risks and benefits of the new breeding technologies are rated by people. The results show only minor differences between the countries studied - Germany, Italy, Canada, Austria and the USA. In all countries, making changes to the genome is more likely to be deemed acceptable when used in crops rather than in livestock. The study was published in Agriculture and Human Values. Relatively new breeding technologies, such as CRISPR gene editing, have enabled a range of new opportunities for plant and animal breeding. ...

The sensory cells in the inner ear and the touch receptors in the skin actually have a lot in common, according to a new study from the USC Stem Cell laboratory of Neil Segil published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS). "There are striking similarities in the development of two types of specialized sensory cells: the so-called 'hair cells' that receive sound vibrations in the inner ear, and the Merkel cells that sense light touch at the surface of the skin," said Segil, who is a Professor in the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, and the USC Tina and Rick Caruso Department of Otolaryngology ...

The Lucinidae family, lucinids for short, comprises approximately 500 living species of bivalves. They are at least 400 million years old, according to fossil records, and have managed to colonize a wide variety of habitats, from beautiful beaches to the abyssal depths untouched by the sun over a kilometer below the sea surface. Their ability to thrive in a wide variety of habitats is made possible by their 'partner in crime', a sulfur-oxidizing bacterial symbiont that utilizes hydrogen sulfide, better known as 'rotten egg gas', as an energy source to power primary production. This process is not unlike photosynthesis used by plants, yet not dependent on sunlight, ...

BOSTON - By implementing a long-term, prospective approach to the development of celiac disease, a collaborative group of researchers has identified substantial microbial changes in the intestines of at-risk infants before disease onset. Using advanced genomic sequencing techniques, MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) researchers, along with colleagues from institutions in Italy and the University of Maryland, College Park, uncovered distinct preclinical alterations in several species, pathways and metabolites in children who developed celiac disease compared to at-risk children who did not develop celiac disease. As part of the MGHfC Celiac Disease, Genomic, Microbiome and Metabolomic (CDGEMM) Study, researchers ...

Communities trying to fight sea-level rise could inadvertently make flooding worse for their neighbors, according to a new study from the END ...

Better treatments of HER2-positive breast cancer are closer at hand, thanks to new research by a team led by Université de Montréal professor Jean-François Côté at the cytoskeleton organization and cell-migration research unit of the UdeM-affiliated Montreal Clinical Research Institute. Published in PNAS, the journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the new research by Marie-Anne Goyette, a doctoral student in Côté's laboratory, reveals a highly promising therapeutic target to counter the HER2-positive breast cancer. In HER2-positive breast cancer, a gene called HER2 is expressed that promotes an aggressive form of the disease. Affecting 20 per cent of ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Traces of the gas phosphine point to volcanic activity on Venus, according to new research from Cornell University. Last autumn, scientists revealed that phosphine was found in trace amounts in the planet's upper atmosphere. That discovery promised the slim possibility that phosphine serves as a biological signature for the hot, toxic planet. Now Cornell scientists say the chemical fingerprint support a different and important scientific find: a geological signature, showing evidence of explosive volcanoes on the mysterious planet. "The phosphine is not telling us about the biology ...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Lead exposure in childhood may lead to less mature and less healthy personalities in adulthood, according to a new study lead by psychology researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sampled more than 1.5 million people in 269 U.S. counties and 37 European nations. Researchers found that those who grew up in areas with higher levels of atmospheric lead had less adaptive personalities in adulthood -- lower levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher levels of neuroticism. "Links between lead exposure and personality traits are quite impactful, because we take our personalities with us everywhere," ...

Sugarcane is one of the most productive plants on Earth, providing 80 percent of the sugar and 30 percent of the bioethanol produced worldwide. Its size and efficient use of water and light give it tremendous potential for the production of renewable value-added bioproducts and biofuels. But the highly complex sugarcane genome poses challenges for conventional breeding, requiring more than a decade of trials for the development of an improved cultivar. Two recently published innovations by University of Florida researchers at the Department of Energy's Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) demonstrated the ...

Butterflies and moths have beautiful wings: the bright flare of an orange monarch, the vivid stripes of a swallowtail, the luminous green of a Luna moth. But some butterflies flutter on even more dramatic wings: parts of their wing, or sometimes the entire wing itself, are actually transparent. Many aquatic organisms, including jellies and fish, are transparent. But transparent butterfly and moth wings are so arresting that merely catching a glimpse of one typically causes a human to lunge for a camera or at least point it out to their friends. These enigmatic, transparent butterfly wings have not been studied comprehensively. Doris Gomez and Marianne Elias (French National Center for Scientific Research) set out to change that. Last week, along with a multidisciplinary ...

Chronic alcohol abuse and hepatitis can injure the liver and lead to fibrosis, the buildup of collagen and scar tissue. As a potential approach to treating liver fibrosis, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers and their collaborators are looking for ways to stop liver cells from producing collagen. "So we thought...what if we take immunotoxins and try to get them to kill collagen-producing cells in the liver," said team lead Tatiana Kisseleva, MD, PhD, associate professor of surgery at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "If these antibodies carrying toxic molecules can find and bind the cells, the cells will eat up the 'gift' and die." In a study published July 12, 2021 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kisseleva ...

Having a home near a busy airport certainly has its perks. It is close to many establishments and alleviates the problem of wading through endless traffic to catch flights. But it does come at a cost -- tolerating the jarring sounds of commercial airplanes during landing and takeoff. Researchers at Texas A&M University have conducted a computational study that validates using a shape-memory alloy to reduce the unpleasant plane noise produced during landing. They noted that these materials could be inserted as passive, seamless fillers within airplane wings ...

MRI-guided focused ultrasound combined with microbubbles can open the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and allow therapeutic drugs to reach the diseased brain location under the guidance of MRI. It is a promising technique that has been shown safe in patients with various brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's diseases, Parkinson's disease, ALS, and glioblastoma. While MRI has been commonly used for treatment guidance and assessment in preclinical research and clinical studies, until now, researchers did not know the impact of the static magnetic field generated by the MRI scanner on the BBB opening size and ...

Children with a devastating genetic disorder characterized by severe motor disability and developmental delay have experienced sometimes dramatic improvements in a gene therapy trial launched at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals. The trial includes seven children aged 4 to 9 born with deficiency of AADC, an enzyme involved in the synthesis of neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine, that leaves them unable to speak, feed themselves or hold up their head. Six of the children were treated at UCSF and one at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center. Children in the study experienced improved motor function, better mood, and longer sleep, and were able to interact more fully with their ...

Historically, shared resources such as forests, fishery stocks, and pasture lands have often been managed with an aim toward averting "tragedies of the commons," which are thought to result from selfish overuse. Writing in BioScience, Drs. Senay Yitbarek (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Karen Bailey (University of Colorado Boulder), Nyeema Harris (Yale University), and colleagues critique this model, arguing that, all too often, such conservation has failed to acknowledge the complex socioecological interactions that undergird the health of resource ...

Learning changes the brain, but when learning Braille different brain regions strengthen their connections at varied rates and time frames. A new study published in JNeurosci highlights the dynamic nature of learning-induced brain plasticity. Learning new skills alters the brain's white matter, the nerve fibers connecting brain regions. When people learn to read tactile Braille, their somatosensory and visual cortices reorganize to accommodate the new demands. Prior studies only examined white matter before and after training, so the exact time course of the changes was not known. Molendowska and Matuszewski et al. used diffusion MRI to measure changes in the white matter strength of sighted adults as they learned Braille over the course of eight months. They took measurements ...

Imagine sitting out in the sun, reading a digital screen as thin as paper, but seeing the same image quality as if you were indoors. Thanks to research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, it could soon be a reality. A new type of reflective screen - sometimes described as 'electronic paper' - offers optimal colour display, while using ambient light to keep energy consumption to a minimum. Traditional digital screens use a backlight to illuminate the text or images displayed upon them. This is fine indoors, but we've all experienced the difficulties of viewing such screens in bright sunshine. Reflective screens, however, attempt to use the ambient light, mimicking the way our eyes respond to natural paper. "For reflective screens to compete with the energy-intensive ...

Smoking among young teens has become an increasingly challenging and costly public healthcare issue. Despite legislation to prevent the marketing of tobacco products to children, tobacco companies have shrewdly adapted their advertising tactics to circumvent the ban and maintain their access to this impressionable--and growing--market share. How they do it is the subject of a recent study led by Dr. Yael Bar-Zeev at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)'s Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine at HU-Hadassah Medical Center. She also serves as Chair of the Israeli Association for Smoking Cessation and Prevention, and teamed up with colleagues at HU and George Washington University. They published their findings in Nicotine and Tobacco Research. Their study ...

July 12, 2021 - Transitions between healthcare sites - such as from the hospital to home or to a skilled nursing facility - carry known risks to patient safety. Many programs have attempted to improve continuity of care during transitions, but it remains difficult to establish and compare the benefits of these complex interventions. An update on patient-centered approaches to transitional care research and implementation is presented in a supplement to the August issue of Medical Care, sponsored by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Medical Care is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters ...

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a new technique that can alter plant metabolism. Tested in tobacco plants, the technique showed that it could reduce harmful chemical compounds, including some that are carcinogenic. The findings could be used to improve the health benefits of crops. "A number of techniques can be used to successfully reduce specific chemical compounds, or alkaloids, in plants such as tobacco, but research has shown that some of these techniques can increase other harmful chemical compounds while reducing the target compound," said De-Yu Xie, professor of plant and microbial biology at NC State and the corresponding author of a paper describing the research. "Our technology ...

Snowmelt - the surface runoff from melting snow - is an essential water resource for communities and ecosystems. But extreme snow melt, which occurs when snow melts too rapidly over a short amount of time, can be destructive and deadly, causing floods, landslides and dam failures. To better understand the processes that drive such rapid melting, researchers set out to map extreme snowmelt events over the last 30 years. Their findings are published in a new paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. "When we talk about snowmelt, people want to know the basic numbers, just like the weather, but no one has ever provided anything like that before. It's like if nobody told you the maximum and minimum temperature or record temperature in your city," said study co-author ...

The transportation sector is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and a lot of attention has been devoted to electric passenger vehicles and their potential to help reduce those emissions. But with the rise of online shopping and just-in-time shipping, electric delivery fleets have emerged as another opportunity to reduce the transportation sector's environmental impact. Though EVs represent a small fraction of delivery vehicles today, the number is growing. In 2019, Amazon announced plans to obtain 100,000 electric delivery vehicles. UPS has ordered 10,000 of them and FedEx plans to be fully electric by 2040. Now, a study from University of Michigan ...

New Brunswick, NJ--Children and adolescents with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) who are treated initially with intravenous immune globulin (IVIG) and glucocorticoids have reduced risk for serious short-term outcomes, including cardiovascular dysfunction, than those who receive an initial treatment of IVIG alone, a new study finds. MIS-C is a rare but serious--and sometimes fatal--condition associated with COVID-19, in which different body organs or systems become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal system. It can occur weeks after having COVID-19 and even if the child or caregivers did not know the child had been infected. The new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, analyzed treatment ...

Taken together, the bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes that live in our intestines form the gut microbiome, which plays a key role in the health of people and animals. In new research from the University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame and Duke University, scientists found that genetics nearly always plays a role in the composition of the gut microbiome of wild baboons. "In humans, research has shown that family members share a significant portion of microbes in their gut, but it's hard to answer if our microbiome is shaped more by nature, such as those ...