From the bark of a puppy to the patter of rain against the window, our brains receive countless signals every second. Most of the time, we tune out inconsequential cues--the buzz of a fly, the soft rustle of leaves in the tree--and pay attention to important ones--the sound of a car horn, a bang on the door. This allows us to function, navigate and, indeed, survive in the world around us. The brain's remarkable ability to sift through this ceaseless flow of information is enabled by an intricate neural network made up of billions of synapses, specialized junctions that regulate signal transmission between and ...

PITTSBURGH, July 6, 2021 - Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine described a new phenomenon in which the deletion of a single gene involved in liver embryogenesis completely wipes out bile ducts of newborn mice. But despite a major defect in their bile excretion system, those animals don't die immediately after birth. Rather, they survive for up to eight months and remain physically active, if small and yellow-tinted. Published today in the journal Cell Reports, the finding offers clues as to why some patients with cholestasis--or impaired ...

What The Study Did: Rates at which patients with type 2 diabetes received diabetes-related health services prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic are compared in this study. Authors: Ateev Mehrotra, M.D., M.P.H., of Harvard Medical School in Boston, 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.2021.3047) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, ...

What The Study Did: COVID-19 vaccine-associated messenger RNA (mRNA) wasn't detected in 13 human milk samples collected after vaccination from seven breastfeeding mothers. Authors: Stephanie L. Gaw, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, 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.2021.1929) 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 ...

What The Study Did: This study in the Lombardy region of Italy examined the association of different health care professional categories and operational units, including in-hospital wards and outpatient facilities, with the seroprevalence of positive IgG antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2 and the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Authors: Piero Poletti, Ph.D., of the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy, and Marcello Tirani, M.D., Directorate General for Health, Lombardy region, in Milan, are the corresponding authors. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.15699) Editor's Note: The article includes ...

What The Study Did: This national analysis examined the association between the travel distance to the nearest abortion care facility and abortion rate and the effect of reduced travel distance. Authors: Kirsten M. J. Thompson, M.P.H., of the University of California, San Francisco, 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.2021.15530) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...

What The Study Did: The amount Medicare pays for common generic prescriptions in Part D was compared with prices available to patients without insurance at Costco. Authors: Erin Trish, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California, 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/jamainternmed.2021.3366) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. 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 study is linked ...

Melbourne researchers have identified a way to improve the immune response in the face of severe viral infections. It is widely known that severe viral infections and cancer cause impairments to the immune system, including to T cells, a process called immune 'exhaustion'. Overcoming immune exhaustion is a major goal for the development of new therapies for cancer or severe viral infections. A team from the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) led by University of Melbourne's Dr Sarah Gabriel, Dr Daniel Utzschneider and Professor Axel Kallies has been able to identify why immune exhaustion occurs and how this may be overcome. The team had previously identified that while some T cells ...

Most human cells are able to repair damage by dividing at wounds. But mature nerve cells (neurons) in our brain are different. If they attempt division, they will likely die - and this is what happens during brain injury, or in conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Now new research led by the University of Plymouth has uncovered a pathway that has shed new light on how these divisions may be triggered. The research, published today in Cell Reports, has focused on intracellular structures called microtubules - which are found in most animal cells, and can be damaged by a build-up of a protein called Tau in the brain during AD. The study was conducted in fruit flies, with comparison to postmortem brain samples ...

Can you remember the smell of flowers in your grandmother's garden or the tune your grandpa always used to whistle? Some childhood memories are seemingly engrained into your brain. In fact, there are critical periods in which the brain learns and saves profound cognitive routines and memories. The structure responsible for saving them is called the perineuronal net. This extracellular structure envelops certain neurons, thereby stabilizes existing connections - the synapses - between them and prevents new ones from forming. But what if we could remove the perineuronal net and restore the adaptability of a young brain? The neuroscientist Sandra Siegert and her research group at IST Austria now ...

Dinosaurs were generally huge, but a new study of the unusual alvarezsaurs show that they reduced in size about 100 million years ago when they became specialised ant-eaters. The new work is led by Zichuan Qin, a PhD student at the University of Bristol and Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. He measured body sizes of dozens of specimens and showed that they ranged in size from 10-70 kg, the size of a large turkey to a small ostrich, for most of their existence and then plummeted rapidly to chicken-sized animals at the same time as they adopted a remarkable ...

An international team of scientists has used high-powered X-rays at the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, to show how an extinct South African 200-million-year-old dinosaur, Heterodontosaurus tucki, breathed. The study is published in eLife on 6 July 2021. In 2016, scientists from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, came to the ESRF, the European Synchrotron in Grenoble, France, the brightest synchrotron light source, for an exceptional study: to scan the complete skeleton of a small, 200-million-year-old plant-eating dinosaur. The dinosaur specimen is the most complete fossil ever discovered of a species known as Heterodontosaurus tucki. The fossil was found in ...

At the end of life, people may have to rely on others for help with showering, dressing and going to the toilet. This loss of privacy and independence can be confronting and difficult. Now Australian occupational therapy (OT) researchers have interviewed 18 people receiving palliative care about how they feel about losing independence with self-care, specifically their intimate hygiene, as function declines with disease progression. The study aims to raise awareness of how to provide better care for people at the end of life. Lead researcher Dr Deidre Morgan, a Flinders University occupational ...

A research team at POSTECH has uncovered a promising new zeolite, anticipated to be a turning point for the oil refining and petrochemical industries. This research was recently published in the scientific journal Science on July 2, 2021. The team of researchers led by Suk Bong Hong, a professor in the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at POSTECH, synthesized two thermally stable three-dimensional (3D) large-pore (12-ring)1 zeolites - PST-32 (POSTECH No. 32) and PST-2, the hypothetical SBS/SBT intergrowth structure2 - by using the "multiple inorganic cation" and the "charge density mismatch" synthetic strategies, respectively. The research team identified their structures by using both powder X-ray diffraction ...

New research in BMC Cancer has shown myelosuppressive chemotherapy destabilises gut microbiome in patients with solid organ cancers. The study from SAHMRI and Flinders University assessed the gut health of men and women who underwent conventional chemotherapy on cancers, such as breast and lung cancer, without exposure to antibiotics. "We know that myelosuppressive chemotherapy reduces white blood cell count significantly during the first seven to 10 days of treatment, making the body more vulnerable to infection," says lead author Dr Lito Papanicolas, an infectious diseases expert and clinical microbiologist. "In this study we focused on how much the individual's microbiome changed over this period, when the ...

Scientists at UC San Francisco have shown that gene-edited cellular therapeutics can be used to successfully treat cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, potentially paving the way for developing less expensive cellular therapies to treat diseases for which there are currently few viable options. The study, in mice, is the first in the emerging field of regenerative cell therapy to show that products from specially engineered induced pluripotent stem cells called "HIP" cells can successfully be employed to treat major diseases while evading the ...

A 15-year reciprocal transplant study on Guam's native cycad tree, Cycas micronesica, by the Plant Physiology Laboratory at the University of Guam's Western Pacific Tropical Research Center has revealed that acute adaptation to local soil conditions occurs among the tree population and is important in the survival rate of transplanted cycads. The results show that 70% to 100% of cycads that were transplanted in local conditions survived versus less than 10% that were transplanted in foreign conditions. The article describing the study has been published in the peer-reviewed journal Diversity (doi: 10.3390/d13060237). Transplantation ...

Vertical greenery 'planted' on the exterior of buildings may help to buffer people against stress, a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) study has found. The benefits of nature on mental health and for wellbeing have long been recognised, and now a team of NTU Singapore psychologists has used Virtual Reality (VR) to examine whether vertical greenery has a stress buffering effect (ability to moderate the detrimental consequences of stress) in an urban environment. Using VR headsets, 111 participants were asked to walk down a virtual street for five minutes. Participants were randomly assigned to either a street that featured rows of planted greenery (e.g., on balconies, walls, and pillars of buildings), ...

Attention training in young people with autism can lead to significant improvements in academic performance, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK along with institutions in São Paolo, in Brazil, tested a computer programme designed to train basic attention skills among a group of autistic children aged between eight and 14 years old. They found participants achieved improvements in maths, reading, writing and overall attention both immediately after undergoing the training and at a three-month follow up assessment. Their results are published in Autism Research. Lead researcher, Dr Carmel Mevorach, in the University of Birmingham's Centre for Human Brain Health, and School of Psychology, says: "It's ...

The urgency to remember a dangerous experience requires the brain to make a series of potentially dangerous moves: Neurons and other brain cells snap open their DNA in numerous locations--more than previously realized, according to a new study--to provide quick access to genetic instructions for the mechanisms of memory storage. The extent of these DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) in multiple key brain regions is surprising and concerning, said study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, because while the breaks are routinely repaired, that process may become more flawed and fragile with age. Tsai's lab has shown that lingering DSBs are associated with neurodegeneration ...

Peptide: N-glycanase (NGLY1) is an evolutionarily conserved enzyme for removing N-linked glycans (N-glycans) from glycoproteins and is involved in proteostasis of N-glycoproteins in the cytosol. In 2012, a rare genetic disorder called NGLY1 deficiency was discovered by an exome analysis. Symptoms in patients with NGLY1 deficiency include global developmental delay, hypotonia, hypo/alacrima, movement disorder, scoliosis, abnormal liver, brain functions and peripheral neuropathy. Unfortunately, no therapeutic treatment is currently available to this devastating ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) find proteins that bind to and regulate tocopherol-conjugated heteroduplex oligonucleotides during gene silencing Tokyo, Japan - Gene silencing therapies are used to interfere with, or "silence", the expression of genes that are associated with disorders. Now, a team at TMDU has uncovered some of the cellular mechanisms by which the silencing therapies act in cells. Antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) therapies use small strands of DNA or RNA that are antisense, or complementary, to the associated gene to interfere with its expression. ASO therapies are already available for some diseases, particularly neurological disorders, but their use is at a very ...

China's lunar exploration project can be divided into three steps: "orbiting", "landing" and "returning". At present, the first two have been completed, and the third step, "return", will be achieved by the CE-5, which is the first sample return satellite of China and is expected to drill at a depth of no less than 2 m and bring back about 2 kg of scientific samples. In June 2017, the landing region of CE-5 lunar probe was selected as the Rümker region, which is located in the northern Oceanus Procellarum on the lunar near side and has a long volcanic history and complex geological composition. Because the geographical scope of the region is not clearly defined, the extent determined by the researchers is 35°-45°N ...

The change from early years services into formal educational settings has long been considered an integral transition point for young people. Now research from Flinders University now asks, "Is service integration actually important to the children?" A recent paper, published in Children's Geographies, led by Flinders University PhD Dr Jennifer Fane, who is now based at Capilano University in Canada, actually seems to have little impact on children's experiences of this transition. The Australian Government has supported the Integrated Early Years Services since 2005, following what is considered best practice policy for supporting children and families. It is considered to constitute services that are connected ...

Tantalising evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of "free-floating" planets, planets that may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The study, led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the Open University, UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. During this two-month campaign, Kepler monitored a crowded field of millions ...