New research published today in the journal Blood Advances finds that certain factors, such as a history of severe pain episodes and coexisting organ conditions, increase the risk of severe COVID-19 illness, including hospitalization, in individuals living with sickle cell disease (SCD). According to researchers, the study results underscore the need for COVID-19 risk reduction strategies and vaccination for this medically vulnerable population. SCD is the most common inherited red blood cell disorder in the United States, affecting an estimated 100,000 people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, SCD affects one out of ...

Understanding how viral infection occurs can provide important clues for researchers to develop strategies to prevent viral transmission and develop effective therapeutic agents and vaccines. SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, enters the host cells through interaction between the virus's spike protein and the extracellular receptor binding domain of ACE2. The viral entry into the cells is completed by various proteases, which allow the viral and cell membranes to fuse together. While it is known that the upper respiratory tract becomes compromised in the early infection, the exact types of the cells that the virus infects at the earliest stage have not yet been identified. Led by Director ...

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in collaboration with the University of Liverpool and the Karolinska Institute, has shown that many of the symptoms in fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) are caused by antibodies that increase the activity of pain-sensing nerves throughout the body. The results show that fibromyalgia is a disease of the immune system, rather than the currently held view that it originates in the brain. The study, published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, demonstrates that the increased ...

Extreme differences in flight altitude between day and night may have been an undetected pattern amongst migratory birds - until now. The observation was made by researchers at Lund University in Sweden in a study of great snipes, where they also measured a new altitude record for migratory birds, irrespective of the species, reaching 8 700 metres. Great snipes are shorebirds that breed in Sweden, among other places, and spend the winter in areas near the equator in Africa. Previous studies have shown that great snipes make long marathon flights of up to 6 000 kilometres lasting 60-90 hours when they migrate between breeding sites in Sweden and wintering ...

Chatbots have already become a part of our everyday lives with their quick and intuitive way to complete tasks like scheduling and finding information using natural language conversations. Researchers at Aalto University have now harnessed the power of chatbots to help designers and developers develop new apps and allow end users to find information on the apps on their devices. The chatbot -- 'Hey GUI' (pronounced goo-ee), short for Graphical User Interface, which will be presented at ACM Designing Interactive Systems 2021 on 1 July -- can answer questions by showing images and screenshots of apps, or through simple text phrases. "Hey GUI eliminates the need for coding skills or technical ...

Hundreds of different bacterial species live in and on leaves and roots of plants. A research team led by Julia Vorholt from the Institute of Microbiology at ETH Zurich, together with colleagues in Germany, first inventoried and categorised these bacteria six years ago. Back then, they isolated 224 strains from the various bacterial groups that live on the leaves of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). These can be assembled into simplified, or "synthetic" plant microbiomes. The researchers thus laid the foundations for their two new studies, which were just published in the journals Nature Plants and Nature Microbiology. Volume control of the plant response In the first study, the researchers investigated ...

A team of scientists has devised a more accurate way to predict the effects of climate change on plants and animals -- and whether some will survive at all. Frequently, ecologists assess an organism's fitness relative to the climate by quantifying its functional traits. "These are physical properties you can measure -- height, diameter, the thickness of a tree," said UC Riverside biologist Tim Higham. "We believe more information is needed to understand how living things will respond to a changing world." The team, led by Higham, outlines an alternative model for researchers in an article ...

NEW YORK, NY (July 1, 2021)--Lowering levels of a hormone called PTHrP can prevent metastases and improve survival in mice with pancreatic cancer and could lead to a new way to treat patients, according to a study from cancer researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center and with collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania. When patients are first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the cancer usually has spread to other organs. Because of these metastases, nearly all patients will succumb to their cancer within one year of diagnosis, but no drugs exist to prevent metastasis. In an effort to find treatments, cancer researchers at Columbia--led by ...

What if a microscope allowed us to explore the 3D microcosm of blood vessels, nerves, and cancer cells instantaneously in virtual reality? What if it could provide views from multiple directions in real time without physically moving the specimen and worked up to 100 times faster than current technology? UT Southwestern scientists collaborated with colleagues in England and Australia to build and test a novel optical device that converts commonly used microscopes into multiangle projection imaging systems. The invention, described in an article in today's Nature Methods, could open new avenues ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--June 28, 2021--While vaccines are doing a remarkable job of slowing the COVID-19 pandemic, infected people can still die from severe illness and new medications to treat them have been slow to arise. What kills these patients in the end doesn't seem to be the virus itself, but an over-reaction of their immune system that leads to massive inflammation and tissue damage. By studying a type of immune cells called T cells, a team of Gladstone scientists has uncovered fundamental differences between patients who overcome severe COVID-19 and those who succumb to it. The team, working together with researchers from UC San Francisco and Emory University, also found that dying patients harbor relatively large numbers of T cells able to infiltrate the lung, which may contribute ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Patients with Type 2 diabetes who were prescribed SGLT2 inhibitors lost more weight than patients who received GLP-1 receptor agonists, according to a University at Buffalo-led study. The research, which sought to evaluate the difference in weight loss caused by the antidiabetic medications -- both of which work to control blood sugar levels -- found that among 72 patients, people using SGLT2 inhibitors experienced a median weight loss of more than 6 pounds, while those on GLP-1 receptor agonists lost a median of 2.5 pounds. The findings, published last month ...

The adult brain is more malleable than previously thought, according to researchers from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. They trained a 50-year-old man, blind from birth, to "see" by ear, and found that neural circuits in his brain formed so-called topographic maps - a type of brain organization previously thought to emerge only in infancy. This finding reported recently in END ...

Rochester, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered that genetic variants in a neuro-associated gene called SPTBN1 are responsible for causing a neurodevelopmental disorder. The study, published in Nature Genetics, is a first step in finding a potential therapeutic strategy for this disorder, and it increases the number of genes known to be associated with conditions that affect how the brain functions. "The gene can now be included in genetic testing for people suspected of having a neurodevelopmental disorder, which may end the diagnostic odyssey these people and their families have endured," says Margot Cousin, Ph.D., a translational ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In the late 1800s, scientists were stumped by the "yellow cells" they were observing within the tissues of certain temperate marine animals, including sea anemones, corals and jellyfish. Were these cells part of the animal or separate organisms? If separate, were they parasites or did they confer a benefit to the host? In a paper published in the journal Nature in 1882, biologist Sir Patrick Geddes of Edinburgh University proffered that not only were these cells distinct entities, but they were also beneficial to the animals in which they lived. He assigned them to a new genus, Philozoon -- from the Greek phileo, meaning 'to love ...

Giving women in India's Madhya Pradesh state greater digital control over their wages encouraged them to enter the labor force and liberalized their beliefs about working women, concluded a new study co-authored by Yale economists Rohini Pande and Charity Troyer Moore. The study, published in the American Economic Review, found that a relatively simple intervention directed to poor women -- providing them access to their own bank accounts and direct deposit for their earnings from a federal workfare program, along with basic training on how to use local bank kiosks -- increased the amount ...

Based on fossil finds, we know that the vast majority of species that once inhabited the earth have become extinct. For example, there are about 5,500 mammal species living on the planet today, but we know of at least 160,000 fossil species, so for every mammal species living today, there are at least 30 extinct ones. We therefore know with great certainty that the lineages of living things come and go along immense time scales. But what factors cause these lineages to come into being and disappear is still an unsolved question. To investigate ...

Additive manufacturing has the potential to allow one to create parts or products on demand in manufacturing, automotive engineering, and even in outer space. However, it's a challenge to know in advance how a 3D printed object will perform, now and in the future. Physical experiments -- especially for metal additive manufacturing (AM) -- are slow and costly. Even modeling these systems computationally is expensive and time-consuming. "The problem is multi-phase and involves gas, liquids, solids, and phase transitions between them," said University of Illinois Ph.D. student Qiming ...

Early 2020 saw the world break into what has been described as a "war-like situation": a pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the likes of which majority of the living generations across most of the planet have not ever seen. This pandemic has downed economies and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. At the dawn of 2021, vaccines have been deployed, but before populations can be sufficiently vaccinated, effective treatments remain the need of the hour. Thus, other than fast-tracking research into novel drugs, scientists have also been exploring their ...

Breeding better crops through genetic engineering has been possible for decades, but the use of genetically modified plants has been limited by technical challenges and popular controversies. A new approach potentially solves both of those problems by modifying the energy-producing parts of plant cells and then removing the DNA editing tool so it cannot be inherited by future seeds. The technique was recently demonstrated through proof-of-concept experiments published in the journal Nature Plants by geneticists at the University of Tokyo. "Now we've got a way to modify chloroplast genes specifically and measure their potential to make a good plant," said Associate Professor Shin-ichi ...

"We know that children use a lot of different information sources in their social environment, including their own knowledge, to learn new words. But the picture that emerges from the existing research is that children have a bag of tricks that they can use", says Manuel Bohn, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. For example, if you show a child an object they already know - say a cup - as well as an object they have never seen before, the child will usually think that a word they never heard before belongs with the new object. Why? Children use information ...

In a rapidly changing Arctic, one area might serve as a refuge - a place that could continue to harbor ice-dependent species when conditions in nearby areas become inhospitable. This region north of Greenland and the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago has been termed the Last Ice Area. But research led by the University of Washington suggests that parts of this area are already showing a decline in summer sea ice. Last August, sea ice north of Greenland showed its vulnerability to the long-term effects of climate change, according to a study published July 1 in the open-access journal Communications Earth & Environment. "Current thinking is that this area may be the last refuge for ice-dependent ...

Elephants and their forebears were pushed into wipeout by waves of extreme global environmental change, rather than overhunting by early humans, according to new research. The study, published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, challenges claims that early human hunters slaughtered prehistoric elephants, mammoths and mastodonts to extinction over millennia. Instead, its findings indicate the extinction of the last mammoths and mastodonts at the end of the last Ice Age marked the end of progressive climate-driven global decline among elephants over millions of years. Although elephants today are restricted to just three endangered species in the African and Asian tropics, these are survivors of a once far more diverse and widespread group of giant herbivores, known ...

FINDINGS Men with high-risk prostate cancer with at least one additional aggressive feature have the best outcomes when treated with multiple healthcare disciplines, known as multimodality care, according to a UCLA study led by Dr. Amar Kishan, assistant professor of radiation oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a researcher at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. The study found no difference in prostate cancer-specific deaths across treatment modalities when patients received guideline-concordant multimodality therapy, which in this case was inclusion of hormone therapy for men receiving radiation ...

A water disinfectant created on the spot using just hydrogen and the air around us is millions of times more effective at killing viruses and bacteria than traditional commercial methods, according to scientists from Cardiff University. Reporting their findings today in the journal Nature Catalysis, the team say the results could revolutionise water disinfection technologies and present an unprecedented opportunity to provide clean water to communities that need it most. Their new method works by using a catalyst made from gold and palladium that takes in hydrogen and oxygen to form ...

As many expectant mothers know, getting enough folate is key to avoiding neural tube defects in the baby during pregnancy. But for the individuals who carry certain genetic variants, dealing with folate deficiency can be a life-long struggle which can lead to serious neurological and heart problems and even death. Now a Donnelly Centre study offers clues to how to recognize early those who are most at risk. Defects in an enzyme called MTHFR, or 5,10-methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, which modifies folate, or vitamin B9 as it is also known, to produce ...