DURHAM, N.C. -- You dash into a convenience store for a quick snack, spot an apple and reach for a candy bar instead. Poor self-control may not be the only factor behind your choice, new research suggests. That's because our brains process taste information first, before factoring in health information, according to new research from Duke University. "We spend billions of dollars every year on diet products, yet most people fail when they attempt to diet," said study co-author Scott Huettel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "Taste seems to have an advantage that sets us up for failure." "For many individuals, health information enters the decision process ...

Injecting sulphur into the stratosphere to reduce solar radiation and stop the Greenland ice cap from melting. An interesting scenario, but not without risks. Climatologists from the University of Liège have looked into the matter and have tested one of the scenarios put forward using the MAR climate model developed at the University of Liège. The results are mixed and have been published in the journal The Cryosphere. The Greenland ice sheet will lose mass at an accelerated rate throughout the 21st century, with a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the extent of Greenland's mass loss. To combat this phenomenon, and therefore global warming, it is essential to reduce ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - An interdisciplinary team of Cornell and Harvard University researchers developed a machine learning tool to parse quantum matter and make crucial distinctions in the data, an approach that will help scientists unravel the most confounding phenomena in the subatomic realm. The Cornell-led project's paper, "Correlator Convolutional Neural Networks as an Interpretable Architecture for Image-like Quantum Matter Data," published June 23 in Nature Communications. The lead author is doctoral student Cole Miles. The Cornell team was led by Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who partnered with Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computing and information science in the Cornell Ann S. ...

When you insist you're not racist, you may unwittingly be sending the opposite message. That's the conclusion of a new study* by three Berkeley Haas researchers who conducted experiments with white participants claiming to hold egalitarian views. After asking them to write statements explaining why they weren't prejudiced against Black people, they found that other white people could nevertheless gauge the writers' underlying prejudice. "Americans almost universally espouse egalitarianism and wish to see themselves as non-biased, yet racial prejudice persists," says Berkeley ...

A genetic map of an aggressive childhood brain tumour called medulloblastoma has helped researchers identify a new generation anti-cancer drug that can be repurposed as an effective treatment for the disease. This international collaboration, led by researchers from The University of Queensland's (UQ) Diamantina Institute and WEHI in Melbourne, could give parents hope in the fight against the most common and fatal brain cancer in children. UQ lead researcher Dr Laura Genovesi said the team had mapped the genetics of these aggressive brain tumours for five years to find new pathways that existing drugs could potentially target. "These are drugs already approved for other diseases or cancers but have never been tested in paediatric brain tumours," Dr Genovesi ...

ST. LOUIS -- In the United States, low-income and minority students are completing college at low rates compared to higher-income and majority peers -- a detriment to reducing economic inequality. Double-dose algebra could be a solution, according to a new study published in roceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, "Effects of Double-Dose Algebra on College Persistence and Degree Attainment," is the culmination of a series of studies that followed two cohorts of ninth-grade students over a period of 12 years in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) where double-dose algebra ...

Miniaturization is rapidly reshaping the field of biochemistry, with emerging technologies such as microfluidics and "lab-on-a-chip" devices taking the world by storm. Chemical reactions that were normally conducted in flasks and tubes can now be carried out within tiny water droplets not larger than a few millionths of a liter. Particularly, in droplet-array sandwiching techniques, such tiny droplets are orderly laid out on two parallel flat surfaces opposite to each other. By bringing the top surface close enough to the bottom one, each top droplet makes contact with the opposite bottom droplet, exchanging chemicals and transferring particles or even cells. In quite a literal way, these droplets can act as small reaction ...

BUFFALO, N.Y -- Children who eat slower are less likely to be extroverted and impulsive, according to a new study co-led by the University at Buffalo and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The research, which sought to uncover the relationship between temperament and eating behaviors in early childhood, also found that kids who were highly responsive to external food cues (the urge to eat when food is seen, smelled or tasted) were more likely to experience frustration and discomfort and have difficulties self-soothing. These findings are critical because faster eating and greater responsiveness to food cues have been linked to obesity risk in children, ...

A new study examining why young South Asian heart attack patients have more adverse outcomes found this patient population was often obese, used tobacco products, and had a family history of heart disease or risk factors that could have been prevented, monitored for or treated before heart attacks happen. The study will be presented at the ACC Asia 2021 Together with SCS 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting Virtual being held July 9-11, 2021. "South Asians tend to have multiple co-morbidities including diabetes and obesity at younger ages which is different from the white population," said Salik ur Rehman Iqbal, ...

Research conducted at Cruzeiro do Sul University in São Paulo, Brazil, can contribute to earlier diagnosis of diabetic neuropathy, a disorder characterized by damage to peripheral nerves, with symptoms such as pain and paresthesia (pricking, burning and numbness), mainly in the legs and feet. In the study, a group led by Professor Paulo Barbosa de Freitas Júnior measured grip force in diabetic patients while they were holding and handling objects. The results were compared with data for healthy subjects and patients with other neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and carpal tunnel syndrome (pain, numbness and tingling in the hand and arm caused by a pinched nerve in the wrist). Freitas and his ...

July 7, 2021 - The murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans have prompted a national outcry against structural racism and police brutality. How are leading nursing organizations and schools of nursing defining their positions on racism? That's the topic of a special article in the July/August issue of The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (JANAC). The official journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, JANAC is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. Three major national nursing organizations and many top-ranked schools ...

Colorado researchers have published new findings in Emerging Infectious Diseases that take a first look at the use of SARS-CoV-2 mathematical modeling to inform early statewide policies enacted to reduce the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic in Colorado. Among other findings, the authors estimate that 97 percent of potential hospitalizations across the state in the early months of the pandemic were avoided as a result of social distancing and other transmission-reducing activities such as mask wearing and social isolation of symptomatic individuals. The modeling team was led by faculty and researchers in the Colorado School of Public Health and involved experts from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, University of Colorado Denver, University of Colorado ...

Immunologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have identified a biological pathway that selectively controls how key immune cells, called T follicular helper cells, mature into functional components of the immune system. The finding offers the promise of developing drugs to activate the metabolic pathway to enhance the effectiveness of vaccines, including those that protect against COVID-19. Such medications could stimulate the immune system to respond more vigorously following immunization to produce more antibodies against a virus or bacterium. The work also lays the foundation for drugs that dial down the pathway to alleviate autoimmune diseases such as lupus. In such disorders, an overactive immune system produces antibodies that attack the body's own tissues. Led by ...

URBANA, Ill. ¬- Bioenergy from crops is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. New crops such as energycane can produce several times more fuel per acre than soybeans. Yet, challenges remain in processing the crops to extract fuel efficiently. Four new studies from the University of Illinois explore chemical-free pretreatment methods, development of high-throughput phenotyping methods, and commercial-scale techno-economic feasibility of producing fuel from energycane in various scenarios. The studies are part of the ROGUE (Renewable Oil Generated with Ultra-productive Energycane) project at U of I. ROGUE focuses on bioengineering ...

What The Study Did: Wearable sensor data were used to examine the duration and variation of recovery among COVID-19-positive and COVID-19-negative participants. Authors: Jennifer M. Radin, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, 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.2021.15959) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please ...

What The Study Did: The characteristics and factors associated with deaths among individuals detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities from 2011 to 2018 were examined in this study. Authors: Parveen Parmar, M.D., M.P.H., of the Keck School of Medicine 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.2021.16019) 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 ...

Diversification in the sourcing of food into cities can go a long way to tempering "food shock" -- a sudden drop in food supply due to unforeseen events, according to a team of researchers from Penn State and Northern Arizona University, who developed a statistical risk model linking supply chain diversity to the probability of a city experiencing food shocks. "The model is simple, operationally useful and hazard-agnostic," the researchers report today (July 8) in Nature. "Using this method cities can improve their resistance to food supply shocks with policies that increase the food supply chain diversity." The researchers investigated four types of food -- crops, live animals, feed and meat -- over a four-year period from ...

A massive explosion from a previously unknown source - 10 times more energetic than a supernova - could be the answer to a 13-billion-year-old Milky Way mystery. Astronomers led by David Yong, Gary Da Costa and Chiaki Kobayashi from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence in All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) based at the Australian National University (ANU) have potentially discovered the first evidence of the destruction of a collapsed rapidly spinning star - a phenomenon they describe as a "magneto-rotational hypernova". The previously unknown type of cataclysm - which occurred barely a billion years after the Big Bang - is the most likely explanation ...

Our cells fight microbial invaders by engulfing them into membrane sacs - hostile environments in which pathogens are rapidly destroyed. However, the pathogen Salmonella enterica, which grows and reproduces inside our cells, has evolved ways to detoxify such hostile compartments, turning them into a comfortable home where Salmonella can survive and thrive. A team of scientists led by EMBL group leader Nassos Typas has uncovered new details of Salmonella´s survival strategies. The researchers analysed protein interactions in Salmonella-infected cells to identify the diverse biological processes of the host cell that the bacterium uses. Salmonella targets and modifies cellular protein machineries and pathways, ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin are homing in on a recipe that would enable the future production of entirely renewable, clean energy from which water would be the only waste product. Using their expertise in chemistry, theoretical physics and artificial intelligence, the team is now fine-tuning the recipe with the genuine belief that the seemingly impossible will one day be reality. Initial work in this area, reported just under two years ago, yielded promise. That promise has now been amplified significantly in the exciting work just published in leading journal, Cell Reports Physical Science. Energy ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a patch that plants can "wear" to monitor continuously for plant diseases or other stresses, such as crop damage or extreme heat. "We've created a wearable sensor that monitors plant stress and disease in a noninvasive way by measuring the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by plants," says Qingshan Wei, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. Wei is an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State. Current methods of testing for plant stress or disease involve taking plant tissue samples and conducting an assay in a lab. However, this ...

The Hikurangi Margin, located off the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, is where the Pacific tectonic plate dives underneath the Australian tectonic plate, in what scientists call a subduction zone. This interface of tectonic plates is partly responsible for the more than 15,000 earthquakes the region experiences each year. Most are too small to be noticed, but between 150 and 200 are large enough to be felt. Geological evidence suggests that large earthquakes happened in the southern part of the margin before human record-keeping began. Geophysicists, geologists, and geochemists from throughout the world have been working together to understand why this plate boundary behaves as it does, producing both imperceptible silent earthquakes, but also potentially major ...

Reston, VA--For patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC), molecular imaging can improve staging and clinical management of the disease, according to research published in the June issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. In a retrospective study of PDAC patients, the addition of PET/CT imaging with 68Ga-FAPI led to restaging of disease in more than half of the patients, most notably in those with local recurrence. PDAC is a highly lethal cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 10 percent. Optimal imaging of PDAC is crucial for accurate initial TNM (tumor, node, metastases) staging and selection ...

Dancing with music can halt most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's disease First-of-its-kind York U study shows participating in weekly dance training improves daily living and motor function for those with mild-to-moderate Parkinson's TORONTO, July 7, 2021 - A new study published in Brain Sciences today, shows patients with mild-to-moderate Parkinson's disease (PD) can slow the progress of the disease by participating in dance training with music for one-and-a-quarter hours per week. Over the course of three years, this activity was found to reduce daily motor issues such as those related to balance and speech, ...

When a head of state or government official travels to another country to meet with his/her counterpart, the high-level visit often entails a range of public diplomacy activities, which aim to increase public support in the host country. These activities often include events such as hosting a joint press conference, attending a reception or dinner, visiting a historic site, or attending a social or sports event. A new study finds that public diplomacy accompanying a high-level visit by a national leader increases public approval in the host country. The findings are published in the American Political ...