Every pandemic affects life and actions of people, which in turn controls the course of the pandemic. Until now the factors that determine our social, political and psychological sphere could not be described by mathematical models, making it difficult to venture forecasts for the Corona pandemic. The new study will improve the situation. Researcher Prof. Kai Wirtz of the Hereon Institution for Coastal Systems - Analysis and Modeling quantitatively describes the social phenomena hinted at above. "As a scientist, social modeling has been driving me for a while. It has also reached coastal research in the meantime. The greatest challenge in this development was the integration ...

In spite of many clinical options, people with mental health problems including eating disorders often do not access professional help within the crucial first 12 months - in part because of lack of information in the community about accessing targeted services. Anxiety and depression are normal reactions to situations such as pandemic lockdowns but arming yourself with some useful strategies can alleviate this, says Flinders University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Tracey Wade. For example, a randomised trial of 'unguided' low intensity cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) was found to decrease signs of anxiety and depression in the comparative study led by Curtin University and international experts, including Matthew Flinders Professor Wade. The results of the study ...

Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, convert sustenance into energy, fueling the cell's activities. In addition to power, mitochondria also produce reactive oxygen species, byproduct molecules primed to help facilitate communication among the other units in the cells. But when produced too abundantly, they damage DNA and render some cellular components dysfunctional. Now, an international research team has revealed how mitochondria keep their reactive oxygen species production in check. They published their results on June 30 in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. "Excessive generation of reactive oxygen species in mitochondria damages ...

A lump in the thyroid gland is called a thyroid nodule, and 5-10% of all thyroid nodules are diagnosed as thyroid cancer. Thyroid cancer has a good prognosis, a high survival rate, and a low recurrence rate, so early diagnosis and treatment are crucial. Recently, a joint research team in Korea has proposed a new non-invasive method to distinguish thyroid nodules from cancer by combining photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound image technology with artificial intelligence. The joint research team - composed of Professor Chulhong Kim and Dr. Byullee Park of POSTECH's Department of Electrical Engineering, Department of Convergence IT Engineering and Department of Mechanical ...

Evidence suggests that what happens in one generation--diet, toxin exposure, trauma, fear--can have lasting effects on future generations. Scientists believe these effects result from epigenetic changes that occur in response to the environment and turn genes on or off without altering the genome or DNA sequence. But how these changes are passed down through generations has not been understood, in part, because scientists have not had a simple way to study the phenomenon. A new study by researchers at the University of Maryland provides a potential tool for unraveling the mystery of how experiences can cause inheritable changes to an animal's biology. By mating nematode worms, they produced permanent epigenetic changes that lasted for more than 300 generations. The research ...

Eyewitnesses can identify perpetrators more accurately when they are able to manipulate 3D images of suspects, according to a new study. A team of researchers in the University of Birmingham's School of Psychology developed and tested new interactive lineup software which enables witnesses to rotate and view lineup faces from different angles. When the eyewitnesses were able to rotate the image to match the alignment of the face in their memory, they were more likely to accurately pick out the criminal from the lineup. Lineups are used around the globe to help police identify criminals. Typically these involve ...

Most countries have not introduced nationwide prostate-cancer screening, as current methods result in overdiagnoses and excessive and unnecessary biopsies. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, which is published in The New England Journal of Medicine, indicates that screening by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and targeted biopsies could potentially cut overdiagnoses by half. The results are presented today at the European Association of Urology Congress. "Our results from a large, randomised study show that modern methods for prostate cancer screening maintain the benefits of screening, while decreasing the harms substantially. This addresses the greatest barrier to the introduction of nationwide screening," ...

Players of the popular game Red Dead Redemption 2 learn how to identify real American wildlife, new research shows. The game, set in the American West in 1899, features simulations of about 200 real species of animals. The new study, by the University of Exeter and Truro and Penwith College, challenged gamers to identify photographs of real animals. On average, RDR2 players were able to identify 10 of 15 American animals in a multiple-choice quiz - three more than people who had not played the game. The best performers were players who had completed the game's main storyline (meaning they had played for at least 40-50 hours) ...

Oncotarget published "Transcriptome analyses of urine RNA reveal tumor markers for human bladder cancer: validated amplicons for RT-qPCR-based detection" which reported that in case of bladder cancer, urine RNA represents an early potentially useful diagnostic marker. Here the authors describe a systematic deep transcriptome analysis of representative pools of urine RNA collected from healthy donors versus bladder cancer patients according to established SOPs. This analysis revealed RNA marker candidates reflecting coding sequences, non-coding sequences, and circular RNAs. Next, they designed and validated PCR amplicons for a set of novel marker candidates and tested them in human bladder cancer cell lines. This ...

INDIANAPOLIS - A new study from U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Regenstrief Institute, IUPUI and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers reports that primary care physicians recognize the need for better coordination and welcome health information exchange (HIE) event notifications as a means of improving the flow of information to enable provision of better patient care. Individuals often receive medical care from more than one healthcare system. Care coordination among providers, for example after discharge from an emergency department or hospital in one system, with the patient's primary care physician in another, is ...

Should we delay covid-19 vaccination in children? The net benefit of vaccinating children is unclear, and vulnerable people worldwide should be prioritised instead, say experts in The BMJ today. But others argue that covid-19 vaccines have been approved for some children and that children should not be disadvantaged because of policy choices that impede global vaccination. Dominic Wilkinson, Ilora Finlay, and Andrew Pollard say for a health system to offer any vaccine to a child, two key ethical questions must be asked. First, do the benefits outweigh the risks? Second, if the vaccine is in short supply, does someone else need it more? "Careful attention ...

*Note: this paper is being presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and is being published in The Lancet Rheumatology. Please credit both the congress and the journal in your stories* A new study presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and published in The Lancet Rheumatology, shows that the antibody - but not the T-cell - response to the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is weakened in patients taking the immunosuppressant methotrexate. In contrast, antibody and T cell responses are preserved in patients taking biological drugs such as tumour necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors. Around 3% to 7% of people in Europe and North America have ...

*Note: this paper is being presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and is being published in The Lancet Microbe. Please credit both the congress and the journal in your stories* A new study presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and published in The Lancet Microbe, shows that antibodies generated by CoronaVac, an inactivated COVID-19 vaccine, work less well against the P.1 Brazil (Gamma) variant. It also suggests that the P.1 variant may be able to reinfect individuals who previously had COVID-19. ...

Interim data from a phase 3 trial of a COVID-19 vaccine developed in China (CoronaVac) suggests that two doses offer 83.5% protection against symptomatic COVID-19. The preliminary findings, published in The Lancet and presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), indicate that CoronaVac induces a robust antibody response. No severe adverse events or deaths were reported among the more than 10,000 trial participants in Turkey, with most adverse events mild and occurring within 7 days of an injection. However, more research is needed to confirm vaccine efficacy in the long term, in a more diverse group of participants, and against emerging variants of concern. CoronaVac uses an inactivated whole virus. When people receive the vaccine, ...

Led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Avenir Health, the research team carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of syphilis prevalence among MSM between 2000 to 2020, drawing on data from 275 studies involving more than 600,000 study participants across 77 countries. The worldwide prevalence of syphilis among MSM was 15x higher than most recent estimates for men in the general population (7.5% versus 0.5%). Researchers further estimated the prevalence across eight regions of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and six regions of the WHO. Latin America and the Caribbean region had the highest prevalence of syphilis (10.6%), whereas Australia and New Zealand had the lowest (1.9%). ...

A new paper in Nature lays out the way natural ecosystems parallel U.S. supply chains and how American cities can use these tools to strengthen their supply chains. The paper, "Supply chain diversity buffers cities against food shocks," is co-authored by Benjamin Ruddell, director of the FEWSION Project and the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University, and Richard Rushforth, an assistant research professor in SICCS, in collaboration with FEWSION project researchers at Penn State. FEWSION is an NSF-funded collaboration that uses comprehensive data mapping to monitor domestic supply chains for food, water and energy down to the county level. This research looks at the importance of diversity within the ...

Remember Napster? The peer-to-peer file sharing company, popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depended on users sharing their music files. To promote cooperation, such software "could mislead its users," says Bryce Morsky, a postdoc in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences. Some file-sharing companies falsely asserted that all of their users were sharing. Or, they displayed the mean number of files shared per user, hiding the fact that some users were sharing a great deal and many others were not. Related online forums promoted the idea that sharing was both ethical and the norm. ...

As light detection and ranging (lidar) technology evolves, forest ecology and ecological restoration researchers have been using these tools in a wide range of applications. "We needed an accounting of relative accuracy and errors among lidar platforms within a range of forest types and structural configurations," said associate professor Andrew Sánchez Meador, executive director of NAU's Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI). Sánchez Meador led a study recently published in Remote Sensing, "Adjudicating Perspectives on Forest Structure: How Do Airborne, ...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada's Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid. A trove of fossils and rock layers formed on that ancient ocean floor have now been unearthed by an international team of scientists along the banks of the Peel River a few hundred miles south of the Arctic's Beaufort Sea. The discovery reveals oxygen changes at the seafloor across nearly 120 million years of the early Paleozoic era, a time that fostered the most rapid development and diversification of complex, multi-cellular life in Earth's history. "It's unheard of to have that much of Earth's history in one place," said Stanford University geological ...

Our gut microbiome -- the ever-changing "rainforest" of bacteria living in our intestines -- is primarily affected by our lifestyle, including what we eat or the medications we take, most studies show. But a University of Notre Dame study has found a much greater genetic component at play than was once known. In the study, published recently in END ...

Nonprofits and companies planting trees in the tropics may often pick species for their commercial rather than ecological value, researchers found in a new analysis of organizations' publicly available data. They also found many may not have tracked the trees' survival. Tree planting is a promising, but controversial, restoration strategy for fighting climate change. A new study in the journal Biological Conservation provides a detailed look at what restoration organizations across the tropics are actually doing on the ground. "We found some organizations placed an emphasis on biological diversity and forest restoration in their mission statements. When we looked at the species they reported ...

Major ecosystem changes like sea-level rise, desertification and lake warming are fueling uncertainty about the future. Many initiatives - such as those fighting to fully eradicate non-native species, or to combat wildfires - focus on actively resisting change to preserve a slice of the past. However, resisting ecosystem transformation is not always a feasible approach. According to a new paper published today in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, accepting and directing ecosystem change are also viable responses, and should not necessarily be viewed as fallback options or as last resorts. The paper presents a set of guiding principles for applying a "RAD" strategy - a framework that involves ...

BENGALURU, India (July 8, 2021) - A new study led by WCS-India documents how a big cat deity worshipped by Indigenous Peoples facilitates coexistence between humans and leopards. The study, published in a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science: Human-Wildlife Dynamics called Understanding Coexistence with Wildlife documents how the Indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra, India, worship Waghoba, a leopard/tiger deity to gain protection from leopards, and how they have lived side-by-side with them for centuries (formerly tigers, too). The researchers have identified over 150 shrines dedicated ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that a type of echocardiogram, a common test to evaluate whether a person's heart is pumping properly, may be useful in predicting which patients with COVID-19 are most at risk of developing atrial fibrillation -- an irregular heartbeat that can increase a person's risk for heart failure and stroke, among other heart issues. The new findings, END ...

Ever since the 1986 discovery that copper oxide materials, or cuprates, could carry electrical current with no loss at unexpectedly high temperatures, scientists have been looking for other unconventional superconductors that could operate even closer to room temperature. This would allow for a host of everyday applications that could transform society by making energy transmission more efficient, for instance. Nickel oxides, or nickelates, seemed like a promising candidate. They're based on nickel, which sits next to copper on the periodic table, and the two elements have some common characteristics. It ...