A new study from UCLA and Stanford University researchers finds that three-dimensional human stem cell-derived 'mini brain' organoids can mature in a manner that is strikingly similar to human brain development. For the new study, published in Nature Neuroscience February 22, senior authors Dr. Daniel Geschwind of UCLA and Dr. Sergiu Pasca of Stanford University conducted extensive genetic analysis of organoids that had been grown for up to 20 months in a lab dish. They found that these 3D organoids follow an internal clock that guides their maturation in sync with the timeline of human development. "This is novel -- Until now, nobody has grown and characterized these organoids for this amount of time, nor shown they will recapitulate human brain development in a laboratory environment ...

A two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo in Western Australia's Kimberley region has been identified as Australia's oldest intact rock painting. Using the radiocarbon dating of 27 mud wasp nests, collected from over and under 16 similar paintings, a University of Melbourne collaboration has put the painting at 17,500 and 17,100 years old. "This makes the painting Australia's oldest known in-situ painting," said Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Damien Finch who pioneered the exciting new radiocarbon technique. "This is a significant find as through these initial estimates, we can understand something of the ...

What The Study Did: Using COVID-19 data, this observational study looked at what are the independent associations of voluntary behavioral change and legal restrictions, such as state-mandated school closings, with the subsequent spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. Authors: Frederick J. Zimmerman, Ph.D., of the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA in Los Angeles, 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.2020.6371) Editor's Note: The article includes ...

A team of scientists has detected the presence of a high-energy neutrino--a particularly elusive particle--in the wake of a star's destruction as it is consumed by a black hole. This discovery, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, sheds new light on the origins of Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays--the highest energy particles in the Universe. The work, which included researchers from more than two dozen institutions, including New York University and Germany's DESY research center, focused on neutrinos--subatomic particles that are produced on Earth only in powerful ...

What The Study Did: Researchers examined changes in trauma admissions throughout Los Angeles County during the COVID-19 pandemic in California. Authors: Kazuhide Matsushima, M.D., of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, 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.2021.1320) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, ...

Scientists at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Torino (Italy), have developed a method to visualize and quantify alternative structures of RNA molecules. These alternative RNA 'shapes' can have important functional relevance in viruses and bacteria. The researchers used an algorithm to rapidly analyse large quantities of chemically modified RNA molecules and calculate how many differently folded conformations were present. This technique was used to identify a conserved structural switch in the ...

What The Article Says: How parents can identify whether their teens are vaping, how to help prevent it, and what to do if their teen is addicted are discussed in this JAMA Pediatrics Patient Page. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.6689) Editor's Note: 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 article is linked to this news release. Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.6689?guestAccessKey=8fe3a04c-4e0a-40f3-a883-916eaadb05bb&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=022221 ...

What The Study Did: This survey study looked at changes in abortion policies among states by examining legislation enacted between January 2017 and November 2020. Authors: Phillip M. Singer, Ph.D., of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, 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.2020.8781) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding ...

Diverse East Asians derive ancestry from a coastal expansion tens of thousands of years ago Researchers have long debated whether the peopling of East Asia by modern humans occurred mainly via a coastal or interior route. The answer is probably both. "Indigenous Andaman islanders of the Bay of Bengal, Indigenous Tibetans, ancient Taiwanese, and ancient and modern Japanese all derive ancestry from a deep shared lineage that split from other East Asian lineages more than 40,000 years ago," says David Reich, co-senior author of the study, who is a Professor of Genetics ...

Philadelphia, February 22, 2021 - Runt-related transcription factor 1 (RUNX1) has been linked to retinal neovascularization and the development of abnormal blood vessels, which result in vision loss in diabetic retinopathy. Now, scientists have found that RUNX1 inhibition presents a new therapeutic approach in the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly worldwide. Their END ...

Polished glass has been at the center of imaging systems for centuries. Their precise curvature enables lenses to focus light and produce sharp images, whether the object in view is a single cell, the page of a book, or a far-off galaxy. Changing focus to see clearly at all these scales typically requires physically moving a lens, by tilting, sliding, or otherwise shifting the lens, usually with the help of mechanical parts that add to the bulk of microscopes and telescopes. Now MIT engineers have fabricated a tunable "metalens" that can focus on objects at multiple depths, without changes to its physical position or shape. The lens is made not of solid glass but of a ...

Children exposed to air pollution, such as wildfire smoke and car exhaust, for as little as one day may be doomed to higher rates of heart disease and other ailments in adulthood, according to a new Stanford-led study. The analysis, published in Nature Scientific Reports, is the first of its kind to investigate air pollution's effects at the single cell level and to simultaneously focus on both the cardiovascular and immune systems in children. It confirms previous research that bad air can alter gene regulation in a way that may impact long-term health - a finding that could change the way medical experts and parents think about the air children ...

Abu Dhabi, UAE, February 22: By engineering common filter papers, similar to coffee filters, a team of NYU Abu Dhabi researchers have created high throughput arrays of miniaturized 3D tumor models to replicate key aspects of tumor physiology, which are absent in traditional drug testing platforms. With the new paper-based technology, the formed tumor models can be safely cryopreserved and stored for prolonged periods for on-demand drug testing use. These cryopreservable tumor models could provide the pharmaceutical industry with an easy and low cost method for investigating the outcomes of drug efficacy, potentially bolstering personalized ...

DURHAM, N.C. - The COVID-19 pandemic has heaped additional financial strains, childcare complications and other problems on already-burdened caregivers of children diagnosed with cancer, according to a study from researchers at Duke Health and other institutions. Surveying 360 parents and caregivers of children currently in treatment or still being monitored for cancer, the researchers found that half had to cancel or delay appointments, 77% reported increased feelings of anxiety and of those who had lost jobs or wages, 11% struggled to pay for basic needs. The survey findings appear online this month in the journal Pediatric Blood & Cancer. "Parents and caregivers ...

HOUSTON - (Feb. 22, 2021) -Tuberculosis bacteria have evolved to remember stressful encounters and react quickly to future stress, according to a study by computational bioengineers at Rice University and infectious disease experts at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS). Published online in the open-access journal mSystems, the research identifies a genetic mechanism that allows the TB-causing bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, to respond to stress rapidly and in manner that is "history-dependent," said corresponding author Oleg Igoshin, a professor of bioengineering at Rice. Researchers have long suspected that the ability of TB bacteria to remain dormant, sometimes for decades, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Fool the novel coronavirus once and it can't cause infection of cells, new research suggests. Scientists have developed protein fragments - called peptides - that fit snugly into a groove on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that it would normally use to access a host cell. These peptides effectively trick the virus into "shaking hands" with a replica rather than with the actual protein on a cell's surface that lets the virus in. Previous research has determined that the novel coronavirus binds to a receptor protein on a target cell's surface called ACE2. This receptor is located on certain types of human cells in the lung and nasal cavity, providing SARS-CoV-2 many access points to infect the body. For this work, Ohio State University scientists designed and tested peptides ...

Intravenous injection of bone marrow derived stem cells (MSCs) in patients with spinal cord injuries led to significant improvement in motor functions, researchers from Yale University and Japan report Feb. 18 in the Journal of Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery. For more than half of the patients, substantial improvements in key functions -- such as ability to walk, or to use their hands -- were observed within weeks of stem cell injection, the researchers report. No substantial side effects were reported. The patients had sustained, non-penetrating spinal cord injuries, in many cases from falls or minor trauma, several weeks prior to implantation of the stem cells. Their symptoms ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - In the same way that Lego pieces can be arranged in new ways to build a variety of structures, genetic elements can be mixed and matched to create new genes, according to new research. A long-proposed mechanism for creating genes, called exon shuffling, works by shuffling functional blocks of DNA sequences into new genes that express proteins. A study, "Recurrent Evolution of Vertebrate Transcription Factors by Transposase Capture," published Feb. 19 in Science, investigates how genetic elements called transposons, or "jumping genes," are added into the mix during evolution to assemble new genes through exon shuffling. Transposons, first discovered in the 1940s by Cornell alum and Nobel Prize-winner Barbara McClintock '23, M.A. '25, Ph.D. '27, are ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - A new study identifies a mechanism that makes bacteria tolerant to penicillin and related antibiotics, findings that could lead to new therapies that boost the effectiveness of these treatments. Antibiotic tolerance is the ability of bacteria to survive exposure to antibiotics, in contrast to antibiotic resistance, when bacteria actually grow in the presence of antibiotics. Tolerant bacteria can lead to infections that persist after treatment and may develop into resistance over time. The study in mice, "A Multifaceted Cellular Damage Repair and Prevention Pathway Promotes ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- When teachers encounter disruptive or noncompliant students in the classroom, they typically respond by focusing on the negative behavior. However, new research from the University of Missouri found that offering students more positive encouragement not only reduces disruptive classroom behavior, but can improve students' academic and social outcomes. "As educators, we often focus on communicating what we don't want our students to be doing in class, but we have found that just doesn't work," said Keith Herman, a professor in the University of Missouri College of Education. "Instead, we need to be setting clear expectations ...

When you slip into sleep, it's easy to imagine that your brain shuts down, but University of Michigan research suggests that groups of neurons activated during prior learning keep humming, tattooing memories into your brain. U-M researchers have been studying how memories associated with a specific sensory event are formed and stored in mice. In a study conducted prior to the coronavirus pandemic and recently published in Nature Communications, the researchers examined how a fearful memory formed in relation to a specific visual stimulus. They found that not only did the neurons activated by the visual ...

SAN ANTONIO -- Feb. 22, 2021 -- From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiter's clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data and determined that they had captured a bolide, an extremely bright meteoroid explosion in the gas giant's upper atmosphere. "Jupiter undergoes a huge number of impacts per year, much more than the Earth, so impacts themselves are not rare," said SwRI's Dr. Rohini Giles, lead author of a paper outlining these findings in Geophysical Research Letters. "However, they are so short-lived that it is relatively unusual to see them. Only larger impacts can be seen from Earth, and you have to be lucky to be pointing ...

Astronomers have long been looking into the vast universe in hopes of discovering alien civilisations. But for a planet to have life, liquid water must be present. The chances of that finding scenario have seemed impossible to calculate because it has been the assumption that planets like Earth get their water by chance if a large, ice asteroid hits the planet. Now, researchers from the GLOBE Institute at the University of Copenhagen have published an eye-opening study, indicating that water may be present during the very formation of a planet. According to the study's calculations, this is true for both Earth, Venus and Mars. 'All our data suggest that water was part of Earth's building blocks, right from the beginning. And because the water ...

New research by Swansea scientists in collaboration with scientists at the University of Bristol and the Francis Crick institute in London has indicated that consuming a diet high in the sugar fructose might prevent the proper functioning of peoples' immune systems in ways that has, until now, largely been unknown. Fructose is commonly found in sugary drinks, sweets and processed foods and is used widely in food production. It is associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and its intake has increased substantially throughout the developed world in recent years. However, understanding ...

Loneliness is a risk factor associated with adolescents being drawn into compulsive internet use. The risk of compulsive use has grown in the coronavirus pandemic: loneliness has become increasingly prevalent among adolescents, who spend longer and longer periods of time online. A study investigating detrimental internet use by adolescents involved a total of 1,750 Finnish study subjects, who were studied at three points in time: at 16, 17 and 18 years of age. The results have been published in the Child Development journal. Adolescents' net use is a two-edged sword: while the consequences of moderate use are positive, the effects of compulsive use can be detrimental. Compulsive ...