BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, June 23, 2021 -- Owing to their tunable properties, hydrogels comprising stimuli-sensitive polymers are among the most appealing molecular scaffolds because their versatility allows for applications in tissue engineering, drug delivery and other biomedical fields. Peptides and proteins are increasingly popular as building blocks because they can be stimulated to self-assemble into nanostructures such as nanoparticles or nanofibers, which enables gelation -- the formation of supramolecular hydrogels that can trap water and small molecules. Engineers, to generate such smart biomaterials, are developing systems that can respond to a multitude of stimuli including heat. Although thermosensitive hydrogels are among widely ...

Irvine, CA - June 23, 2021 - A new University of California, Irvine-led study finds that the persistence of a marker of chronic cellular stress, previously associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), also takes place in the brains of Huntington's disease (HD) patients. Chronic cellular stress results in the abnormal accumulation of stress granules (SGs), which are clumps of protein and RNAs that gather in the cell. Prior to this study, published in the Journal of Clinical ...

Boston, MA--Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, many African leaders implemented prevention measures such as lockdowns, travel bans, border closures, and school closures. While these efforts may have helped slow the spread of the virus on the continent and continue to be important for its containment, they inadvertently disrupted livelihoods and food systems and curtailed access to critical nutrition, health, and education services. A new series of studies by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and colleagues from the Africa Research, Implementation Science and Education (ARISE) Network finds that these disruptions may have serious ...

AMES, Iowa -- A new study of small Iowa towns found that vulnerable populations within those communities face significantly more public health risks than statewide averages. The study, published this week in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed open access journal, was led by Benjamin Shirtcliff, associate professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University. He focused on three Iowa towns - Marshalltown, Ottumwa and Perry - as a proxy for studying shifting populations in rural small towns, in particular how vulnerable populations in these towns ...

Our planet is warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; but the warming differs from region to region, and it can also vary seasonally. Over the last four decades scientists have observed a persistent austral summer cooling on the eastern side of Antarctica. This puzzling feature has received world-wide attention, because it is not far away from one of the well-known global warming hotspots - the Antarctic Peninsula. A new study published in the journal Science Advances by a team of scientists from the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Ewha Womans University, and National Taiwan ...

A new study from archaeologists at University of Sydney and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, has provided important new evidence to answer the question "Who exactly were the Anglo-Saxons?" New findings based on studying skeletal remains clearly indicates the Anglo-Saxons were a melting pot of people from both migrant and local cultural groups and not one homogenous group from Western Europe. Professor Keith Dobney at the University of Sydney said the team's results indicate that "the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early Medieval Britain were strikingly similar to contemporary Britain - full of people of different ancestries sharing a common language and culture". The Anglo-Saxon (or early medieval) period in England runs from the 5th-11th centuries AD. Early Anglo-Saxon dates from ...

Newspapers regularly carry stories of terrifying shark attacks, but in a paper published today, Oxford-led researchers reveal their discovery of a 3,000-year-old victim - attacked by a shark in the Seto Inland Sea of the Japanese archipelago. The research in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, shows that this body is the earliest direct evidence for a shark attack on a human and an international research team has carefully recreated what happened - using a combination of archaeological science and forensic techniques. The grim discovery of the victim was made by Oxford researchers, J. Alyssa White and Professor Rick Schulting, while investigating evidence for violent trauma on the skeletal remains of prehistoric hunter-gatherers at ...

SAN ANTONIO, June 23, 2021 - A typical Western high-fat diet can increase the risk of painful disorders common in people with conditions such as diabetes or obesity, according to a groundbreaking paper authored by a team led by The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, also referred to as UT Health San Antonio. Moreover, changes in diet may significantly reduce or even reverse pain from conditions causing either inflammatory pain - such as arthritis, trauma or surgery - or neuropathic pain, such as diabetes. The novel finding could help treat chronic-pain patients by simply altering diet or developing drugs that block ...

By José Tadeu Arantes | Agência FAPESP – Mathematical models that describe the physical behavior of magnetic materials can also be used to describe the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. This is the conclusion of a study conducted in Brazil by researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Rio Claro and Ilha Solteira and reported in an article published in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. The study was part of a project led by Mariano de Souza, a professor at UNESP’s Rio Claro Physics Department, and of the PhD research of Isys Mello, whose thesis advisor is Souza, last author of the article. Another co-author is Antonio Seridonio, a professor at UNESP’s Ilha Solteira Physics ...

Only 1 in 10 older adults in a large national survey who were found to have cognitive impairment consistent with dementia reported a formal medical diagnosis of the condition. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study to develop a nationally representative sample of roughly 6 million Americans age 65 or older, researchers at the University of Michigan, North Dakota State University and Ohio University found that 91% of people with cognitive impairment consistent with dementia told questioners they had a formal medical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease or dementia. "(The discrepancy) was higher than I was expecting," ...

Flavoring can change how the brain responds to e-cigarette aerosols that contain nicotine, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Andrea Hobkirk and her team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to understand how the brain's reward areas react to e-cigarette aerosol with and without flavor. "There are nearly 12 million e-cigarette users in the United States," Hobkirk, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at Penn State College of Medicine, said. "The vast majority use e-cigarettes with menthol, mint, fruity and dessert-type flavors. Although regulations that limit the sale of flavored e-cigarettes may help curb use among youth, they might also stop adults from using e-cigarettes as a smoking ...

Researchers from Bentley University have been exploring how readers at partisan news sites respond to news events that challenge their worldview. In a forthcoming paper in the journal ACM Transactions on Social Computing, they report results of a study that examines reader comments on stories surrounding the 2017 Roy Moore Alabama senate race at two partisan news sites: a left-leaning news site (Daily Kos) and a right-leaning news site (Breitbart). They consider the alleged sexual misconduct of Mr. Moore as a challenging news event for the right-leaning readers; and the subsequent nomination of Mr. Moore as the Republican candidate as a challenging news event for the left-leaning readers. Their analysis identifies the obstacles that readers face as they try to make sense ...

NEW YORK CITY, June 23, 2021 -- From amoebas to zebras, all living things evolve. They change over time as pressures from the environment cause individuals with certain traits to become more common in a population while those with other traits become less common. Cancer is no different. Within a growing tumor, cancer cells with the best ability to compete for resources and withstand environmental stressors will come to dominate in frequency. It's "survival of the fittest" on a microscopic scale. But fitness -- how well suited any particular individual is to its environment -- isn't set in stone; it can change when the environment changes. The cancer cells that might do best in an environment saturated ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--June 23, 2021--A healthy heart is a pliable, ever-moving organ. But under stress--from injury, cardiovascular disease, or aging--the heart thickens and stiffens in a process known as fibrosis, which involves diffuse scar-like tissue. Slowing or stopping fibrosis to treat and prevent heart failure has long been a goal of cardiologists. Now, researchers at Gladstone Institutes have discovered a master switch for fibrosis in the heart. When the heart is under stress, they found, the gene MEOX1 is turned on in cells called fibroblasts, spurring fibrosis. Their new study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that blocking ...

HOUSTON - (June 23, 2021) - Bone cancer is hard to treat and prone to metastasis. Research teams at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have a new strategy to attack it. Chemist Han Xiao at Rice and biologist Xiang Zhang at Baylor and their labs have developed an antibody conjugate called BonTarg that delivers drugs to bone tumors and inhibits metastasis. Their open-access study, which appears in Science Advances, shows how Xiao's pClick technology can be used to link bone-targeting antibodies and therapeutic molecules. In experiments, they used pClick to couple a molecule used to treat osteoporosis, alendronate, with the HER2-targeting antibody trastuzumab used to treat breast cancer and found it significantly enhanced the concentration ...

Most survivors of squamous cell head and neck cancers report that their sense of taste is dulled, changed or lost during radiation treatment, causing them to lose interest in eating and diminishing their quality of life. In a study of taste and smell dysfunction with 40 cancer survivors, scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that the tips of these individuals' tongues were significantly less sensitive to bitter, salty or sweet tastes than peers in the control group who had never been diagnosed with cancer. In a paper published in the journal Chemical Senses, the U. of I. team said this diminished taste sensitivity suggested that the taste ...

In New England, constraints in the supply of natural gas have led to nearly a quarter of all unscheduled power plant outages. In a new study, researchers used data from power plant failures in the 2010s to develop a supply curve of the costs required for generators to mitigate fuel shortages in the region. The study found that storing both oil and gas on-site could reduce dependence by power plants on gas grids in geographic areas with few pipelines. The study was conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), The Pennsylvania State University, and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. It is published in The Electricity Journal. "Gas ...

Toronto - Last winter, Goldman Sachs reported it was working to make things better after a group of junior analysts revolted against 100-hour work weeks. That's a smart thing to do, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Drawing from more than 6,000 employee reviews of their workplaces and data on their firms' forecasting accuracy, the research shows that making improvements to hardworking analysts' work-life balance produces dividends for the company and for the analysts' careers. "There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but here we provide large-scale evidence that supports the recent push to grant these employees at least some reprieve from the extremes of their jobs," said Ole-Kristian Hope, who is the Deloitte Professor of Accounting ...

The Gerontological Society of America's highly cited, peer-reviewed journals are continuing to publish scientific articles on COVID-19. The following were published between May 4 and June 14; all are free to access: Cardiometabolic therapy and mortality in very old patients with diabetes hospitalized due to COVID-19: Research article in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences by Jose Manuel Ramos-Rincón, MD, PhD, Luis M. Pérez-Belmonte, MD, PhD, Francisco Javier Carrasco-Sánchez, MD, PhD, Sergio Jansen-Chaparro, MD, PhD, Mercedes De-Sousa-Baena, MD, José Bueno-Fonseca, MD, ...

Best known for its presence in house cats and a tendency to infect and alter the behaviors of rodents and humans, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) is also associated with bold behavior among wild hyena cubs and risk of death during interactions with lions, finds new research from the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published this week in Nature Communications, reinforce previous research which has found the parasite can prompt profound behavioral changes in its hosts, and potentially in the 2 billion people worldwide estimated to be infected by it. While T. gondii has been well studied in laboratory settings with humans and wild-caught ...

Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the University of California in San Francisco were able to show for the first time that a very low calorie diet significantly alters the composition of the microbiota present in the human gut. In a current Nature* publication, the researchers report that dieting results in an increase of specific bacteria - notably Clostridioides difficile, which is associated with antibiotic-induced diarrhea and colitis. These bacteria apparently affect the body's energy balance by exerting an influence on the absorption of nutrients ...

WHAT: National Institutes of Health scientists and their collaborators have identified an internal communication network in mammals that may regulate tissue repair and inflammation, providing new insights on how diseases such as obesity and inflammatory skin disorders develop. The new research is published in Cell. The billions of organisms living on body surfaces such as the skin of mammals--collectively called microbiota--communicate with each other and the host immune system in a sophisticated network. According to the study, viruses integrated in the host genome, remnants of previous infections called endogenous retroviruses, can ...

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science and the RIKEN BioResource Research Center in Japan, along with collaborators at the State University of New York at Buffalo, have created a mouse model that allows the study of naturally occurring melatonin. Published in the Journal of Pineal Research, these first experiments using the new mice showed that natural melatonin was linked to a pre-hibernation state that allows mice to slow down their metabolism and survive when food is scarce, or temperatures are cold. Melatonin is called "the hormone of darkness" because it's released by the brain in the dark, which usually means at night. It tells the body when it's dark outside so that the body can switch to 'night mode'. Although other hormones are easily studied in the laboratory, ...

How many tree species are there in the forest? How are the trees scattered throughout? How high are the individual tree crowns? Are there fallen trees or hollowed-out tree trunks? Forest scientists characterize forests according to structural factors. "Structural richness is very important for biodiversity in forests. But forests used for forestry are generally poor in terms of structure," says Tristan Eckerter from the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology at the University of Freiburg. Therefore, together with research teams from the Chair of Silviculture and the Black Forest National Park, he investigated ...

A new article published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research presents a neural model of maladaptive consumption. Consumption (of, for instance, substances, food, and online media) is driven mainly by expected rewards that stem from the ability of the consumption act to satisfy intrinsic (e.g., curiosity) and extrinsic (e.g., job performance) needs. In the article, "A Triple-System Neural Model of Maladaptive Consumption," the authors define maladaptive consumption as a state of compulsive seeking and consumption of rewarding products or experiences, which are sustained despite the negative consequences of such behaviors. "Understanding the neural basis of maladaptive ...