PULLMAN, Wash. - Even before the pandemic made Zoom ubiquitous, Washington State University researchers were using the video conferencing app to research a type of cannabis that is understudied: the kind people actually use. For the study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers observed cannabis users over Zoom as they smoked high-potency cannabis flower or vaped concentrates they purchased themselves from cannabis dispensaries in Washington state, where recreational cannabis use is legal. They then gave the subjects a series of cognitive tests. The researchers found no impact on the users' performance on decision-making tests in comparison to a sober control group but did find some memory impairments related to free ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- The vast majority of electronic health record (EHR) alerts attempting to reduce the prescribing of high-risk medications linked to dementia in older adults went unread in a study led by research scientists from Regenstrief Institute, Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine. The goal of the intervention was to facilitate the deprescribing of anticholinergics through both provider and patient-based alerts, however, engagement with the alerts was so low, the study team was unable to conclude if this approach could be ...

When blood flow to the brain is somehow reduced or restricted, a person can suffer what we know as a stroke (from "ischemic stroke" in medical jargon). Stroke is one of those conditions that seems fairly common. This isn't a misperception: just in Europe, there are over 1.5 million new cases each year. Some strokes can be lethal, and when they're not they often result in serious damage to the victim's ability to move. In fact, stroke is one of the major causes of long-term disability today. Recovery can be a long and arduous road. Again, in Europe, under 15% of the patients ...

Software to help towns and cities use street-planting to reduce citizens' exposure to air pollution has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham. Street planting, or 'green infrastructure', is an essential part of the urban realm, but there is a misconception that plants remove or 'soak up' a lot of pollution. Instead, planting at this scale primarily serves to redistribute pollution by changing air currents within streets and beside open roads. Because of this, not only the position and amount of planting within a street, but also ...

Astronomers have designed and trained a computer program which can classify tens of thousands of galaxies in just a few seconds, a task that usually takes months to accomplish. In research published today, astrophysicists from Australia have used machine learning to speed up a process that is often done manually by astronomers and citizen scientists around the world. "Galaxies come in different shapes and sizes" said lead author Mitchell Cavanagh, a PhD candidate based at The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). "Classifying the shapes of galaxies is an important step in understanding their formation and evolution, and can even shed light on the nature of the Universe itself." Mr Cavanagh said that ...

Most common bone and joint (orthopaedic) procedures, such hip replacements and shoulder repair surgery, are not backed up by high quality evidence, mainly because of a lack of definitive trials, suggests an analysis of data published by The BMJ today. Yet despite the lack of strong supporting evidence, some of these procedures are still recommended by national guidelines in certain situations, the findings show. Musculoskeletal conditions affect around 1 in 4 UK adults and account for over 25% of all NHS surgical interventions at a cost of £4.76 billion each year. National ...

Muscle relaxant drugs are largely ineffective for low back pain, despite being widely prescribed for this condition, suggests an analysis of the latest evidence published by The BMJ today. The findings show that muscle relaxants might reduce pain in the short term, but the effect is too small to be considered clinically meaningful, and there is an increased risk of side effects. But the researchers stress that the certainty of evidence is low and say large trials are urgently needed to resolve uncertainties around the use of these drugs for back pain. Low back pain is a global public health problem and muscle relaxants (a broad class of drugs that include ...

Mandatory covid-19 vaccination for care home workers is unnecessary, disproportionate and misguided, warn experts And is based on unreliable data In The BMJ today, experts argue that mandatory vaccination is "unnecessary, disproportionate, and misguided." The government decision to remove the right of care home staff in England to choose whether or not to be vaccinated against covid-19 is a profound departure from public health norms. The intended next step is a rapid and massive expansion of compulsory vaccination to legally require covid-19 and flu vaccination of all frontline health and social care workers, subject to consultation. But Lydia Hayes, Professor of Law at Kent ...

An estimated 8.4 billion people could be at risk from malaria and dengue by the end of the century if emissions keep rising at current levels, according to a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health. The research team estimates that this worst-case scenario would mean the population at risk of the diseases might increase by up to 4.7 additional billion people (relative to the period 1970-1999), particularly in lowlands and urban areas, if temperatures rise by about 3.7°C 1 by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels. The study was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) with partners from Umeå University, Sweden; Abdus Salam ...

LOS ANGELES - A new prognostic tool developed by researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and five other institutions helps predict which men with advanced metastatic prostate cancer will respond favorably to a novel targeted therapy. The tool, described in a study published today in Lancet Oncology, analyzes a wide spectrum of imaging and clinical data and is intended to assist physicians considering treating patients with Lutetium-177 prostate-specific membrane antigen, or LuPSMA. LuPSMA, which binds to PSMA proteins and delivers targeted radiation to prostate cancer tissue, offers a new option to men with PSMA-positive metastatic cancer that is castration-resistant, meaning it has stopped ...

The protein actin is ubiquitous and essential for life. In mammals, every cell expresses two of its forms, beta-actin and gamma-nonmuscle-actin. Despite having distinct roles, the two forms are nearly identical, sharing 99% of their amino acid sequence. Research by Anna Kashina of Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and colleagues has shown that, contrary to scientific dogma, it's not the slight differences in amino acid sequence that govern these proteins' discrete functions in the cell. Rather, their nucleotide sequences--the "letters" that make up their DNA coding sequence, which differ by roughly 13% between the two forms--are responsible for their individual roles in organisms' ...

Researchers have produced vaccine-like immune responses to a dangerous bacterium by colonizing 26 healthy volunteers with a related, but harmless, commensal bacterial species. The first-in-human, controlled infection study showed the strategy was safe, as no side effects were reported and the volunteers didn't transmit the commensal bacteria to bedroom-sharers over the 90-day study. Neisseria lactamica is a member of the microbiome that usually resides in the upper airways of children but can also safely colonize the airways of adults. Some researchers theorize that these bacteria ...

By 2050, faster adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and faster generation of renewable energy will result in 99% less fossil fuel consumed and 93% less CO2 emissions from passenger and freight vehicles on O?ahu. That's under the most ambitious scenario in an article published in World Electric Vehicle Journal, by University of Hawai?i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) faculty member Katherine McKenzie. McKenzie, based at the Hawai?i Natural Energy Institute in SOEST, created mathematical models of four scenarios based on projections for the switch to electric passenger and freight ...

Five years ago, researchers at Northwestern University made international headlines when they discovered that human eggs, when fertilized by sperm, release billions of zinc ions, dubbed "zinc sparks." Now, Northwestern has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Michigan State University (MSU) to reveal that these same sparks fly from highly specialized metal-loaded compartments at the egg surface when frog eggs are fertilized. This means that the early chemistry of conception has evolutionary roots going back at least 300 million years, to the last common ancestor between frogs and people. "This work may help inform our understanding of the interplay of dietary zinc status and human fertility." -- Thomas O'Halloran, professor, Michigan State ...

The measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic limited the access of citizens to natural objects. It is still unexplored, what consequences this had for the residents and what conclusions should be drawn for more effective urban planning. RUDN University scientists with colleagues from Australia and Germany studied how the restrictions associated with COVID-19 affected the use of blue and green infrastructure by citizens in Moscow (Russia) and Perth (Australia), and what consequences this had for their health. In the article "Human Dimensions of Urban Blue and Green Infrastructure during a Pandemic. The Case Study of Moscow (Russia) ...

Bahamian mosquitofish in habitats fragmented by human activity are more willing to explore their environment, more stressed by change and have smaller brain regions associated with fear response than mosquitofish from unaffected habitats. The new study from North Carolina State University shows that these fish have adapted quickly in specific ways to human-driven change, and cautions that environmental restoration projects should understand these changes so as not to damage adapted populations. The Bahamas mosquitofish is a small, coastal fish species that frequently inhabits tidal creeks - shallow, tidally influenced marine ecosystems. ...

In 2019, Anaïs Llorens and Athina Tzovara -- one a current, the other a former University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral scholar at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) -- were attending a scientific meeting and pleased that one session, on gender bias in academia, attracted nearly a full house. The problem: The audience of some 300 was almost all women. Where were the men, they wondered? More than 75% of all tenured faculty in Ph.D. programs around the world are men, making their participation key to solving the problem of gender bias, which negatively impacts the careers, work-life balance and mental health of all women in science, and even more ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE In what turned out to be one of the most important accidents of all time, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned to his laboratory after a vacation in 1928 to find a clear zone surrounding a piece of mold that had infiltrated a petri dish full of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), a common skin bacterium he was growing. That region of no bacterial growth was the unplanned birth of a medical miracle, penicillin, and would lead to the era of antibiotics. Now, END ...

When gravitational waves were first detected in 2015 by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they sent a ripple through the scientific community, as they confirmed another of Einstein's theories and marked the birth of gravitational wave astronomy. Five years later, numerous gravitational wave sources have been detected, including the first observation of two colliding neutron stars in gravitational and electromagnetic waves. As LIGO and its international partners continue to upgrade their detectors' sensitivity to gravitational waves, they will be able to probe a larger volume of the universe, thereby making the detection ...

As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes in the U.S., a new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) finds that hospitals nationwide may not be adequately prepared for the next pandemic. A 10-year analysis of hospitals' preparedness for pandemics and other mass casualty events found only marginal improvements in a measurement to assess preparedness during the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. The study was published last month in the Journal of Healthcare Management. "Our work links objective healthcare data to a hospital score that ...

If a virtual world has ever left you feeling nauseous or disorientated, you're familiar with cybersickness, and you're hardly alone. The intensity of virtual reality (VR)--whether that's standing on the edge of a waterfall in Yosemite or engaging in tank combat with your friends--creates a stomach-churning challenge for 30-80% of users. In a first-of-its kind study, researchers at the University of Maryland recorded VR users' brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) to better understand and work toward solutions to prevent cybersickness. The research was conducted by Eric Krokos, who received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2018, and Amitabh Varshney, a professor of computer science ...

Although wastewater disposal has been the primary driving force behind increased earthquake activity in southern Kansas since 2013, a new study concludes that the disposal has not significantly changed the orientation of stress in the Earth's crust in the region. Activities like wastewater disposal can alter pore pressure, shape and size within rock layers, in ways that cause nearby faults to fail during an earthquake. These effects are thought to be behind most recent induced earthquakes in the central and eastern United States. It is possible, however, that human activity could also lead to earthquakes by altering the orientation of stresses that act on faults in the region, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist ...

As more evidence emerges that opioid overdose deaths have increased dramatically since the onset of COVID-19, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), in collaboration with subject matter experts and medical regulatory authorities across Canada, have now released updated national clinical guidelines for the treatment of opioid use disorder. END ...

When someone is suspected of criminal activity, one of the most important questions they are asked is if they have a credible alibi. Playing back past events in our minds, however, is not like playing back a video recording. Recollections of locations, dates, and companions can become muddled with the passage of time. If a suspect's memories are out of line with documented events, a once-plausible alibi can crumble and may be seen as evidence of guilt. To put people's memories of past whereabouts to the test, a team of researchers tracked the locations of 51 volunteers for one month and found that their recollections were wrong approximately 36% of the time. "This is the first study to examine memory for where ...

Uppsala University scientists have designed a new mouse model that facilitates study of factors contributing to the progression of human bladder cancer and of immune-system activation when the tumour is growing. Using this model, they have been able to study how proteins change before, while and after a tumour develops in the bladder wall. The study has now been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. "The model was designed both to contain specific oncogenes, as they're called -- mutations that can drive tumour growth -- and to show a high incidence of harmful mutations, which we often see in people who get bladder cancer. These harmful mutations arise because of smoking, for instance, which is ...