A gene variant that lowers white blood cell levels and is common in individuals with African ancestry contributes to unnecessary bone marrow biopsies, according to a study published June 28 in JAMA Internal Medicine. The findings from three institutions, led by investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, provide an example of how using genetic data could reduce a health disparity. "We've essentially created this racial health disparity by not fully considering how genetic variation affects white blood cell levels," said Jonathan Mosley, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at VUMC. "Our study supports genotyping African Americans before ...

Most people associate the term "wearable" with a fitness tracker, smartwatch, or wireless earbuds. But what if you could wear cutting-edge biotechnology in your clothing, and it could warn you when you were exposed to something dangerous? A team of researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found a way to embed synthetic biology reactions into fabrics, creating wearable biosensors that can be customized to detect pathogens and toxins and alert the wearer. The team has integrated this technology into standard face masks to detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a patient's breath. The button-activated mask ...

Researchers at Northwestern and George Washington (GW) universities have developed the first-ever transient pacemaker -- a wireless, battery-free, fully implantable pacing device that disappears after it's no longer needed. The thin, flexible, lightweight device could be used in patients who need temporary pacing after cardiac surgery or while waiting for a permanent pacemaker. All components of the pacemaker are biocompatible and naturally absorb into the body's biofluids over the course of five to seven weeks, without needing surgical extraction. The device wirelessly harvests energy from an external, remote antenna using near-field ...

A worldwide team led by UC Santa Barbara scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory has discovered the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion -- an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized for 40 years, real-world examples have been elusive. They are thought to arise from the explosions of massive super-asymptotic giant branch (SAGB) stars, for which there has also been scant evidence. The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, also sheds new light on the thousand-year mystery of the supernova from A.D. 1054 that was visible all over the world in the daytime, before eventually becoming the Crab Nebula. Historically, supernovae have ...

A worldwide team led by scientists at Las Cumbres Observatory has discovered the first convincing evidence for a new type of stellar explosion -- an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized for 40 years, real-world examples have been elusive. They are thought to arise from the explosions of massive super-asymptotic giant branch (SAGB) stars, for which there has also been scant evidence. The discovery also sheds new light on the thousand-year mystery of the supernova from A.D. 1054 that was seen all over the world in the daytime, before eventually becoming the Crab Nebula. Historically, there have been two main supernova types. One is a thermonuclear supernova -- the explosion of a white dwarf star after it gains matter in a binary star system. These white ...

Engineers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a novel face mask that can diagnose the wearer with Covid-19 within about 90 minutes. The masks are embedded with tiny, disposable sensors that can be fitted into other face masks and could also be adapted to detect other viruses. The sensors are based on freeze-dried cellular machinery that the research team has previously developed for use in paper diagnostics for viruses such as Ebola and Zika. In a new study, the researchers showed that the sensors could be incorporated into not only face masks but also clothing such as lab coats, potentially offering a new way to ...

All life on Earth 500 million years ago lived in the oceans, but scientists know little about how these animals and algae developed. A newly discovered fossil deposit near Kunming, China, may hold the keys to understanding how these organisms laid the foundations for life on land and at sea today, according to an international team of researchers. The fossil deposit, called the Haiyan Lagerstätte, contains an exceptionally preserved trove of early vertebrates and other rare, soft-bodied organisms, more than 50% of which are in the larval and juvenile stages of development. Dating to the Cambrian geologic period approximately 518 million years ago and providing researchers with ...

The world of microbes living in the human gut can have far-reaching effects on human health. Multiple diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), are tied to the balance of these microbes, suggesting that restoring the right balance could help treat disease. Many probiotics -- living yeasts or bacteria -- that are currently on the market have been optimized through evolution in the context of a healthy gut. However, in order to treat complex diseases such as IBD, a probiotic would need to serve many functions, including an ability to turn off inflammation, reverse damage and restore the gut microbiome. Given all of these needs, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital have developed a "designer" ...

A new discovery in rats shows that the brain responds differently in immersive virtual reality environments versus the real world. The finding could help scientists understand how the brain brings together sensory information from different sources to create a cohesive picture of the world around us. It could also pave the way for "virtual reality therapy" for learning and memory-related disorders ranging including ADHD, Autism, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and depression. Mayank Mehta, PhD, is the head of W. M. Keck Center for Neurophysics and a professor in the departments of physics, neurology, and electrical and computer engineering at UCLA. His laboratory studies a brain region called the hippocampus, which is a primary driver of learning and memory, ...

An international team of astronomers has observed the first example of a new type of supernova. The discovery, confirming a prediction made four decades ago, could lead to new insights into the life and death of stars. The work is published June 28 in Nature Astronomy. "One of the main questions in astronomy is to compare how stars evolve and how they die," said Stefano Valenti, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis, and a member of the team that discovered and described supernova 2018zd. "There are many links still missing, so this is very exciting." There ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 28, 2021)--In the first analysis of its kind, researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and several other institutions have linked distinct patterns of genetic mutations with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in humans. The work, published online June 28 in Nature Neuroscience, confirms the validity of targeting specific genes to develop new OCD treatments and points toward novel avenues for studying this often debilitating condition. OCD, which affects 1% to 2% of the population, often runs in families and genes are known to play a large role in determining who develops the disease. However, the identity of many OCD genes remains unknown. "Many neurological diseases are ...

Slow earthquakes are long-period earthquakes that are not so dangerous alone, but are able to trigger more destructive earthquakes. Their origins lie in tectonic plate boundaries where one plate subsides below another. Though the causal mechanism is already known, there has been a lack of data to accurately model the life cycle of slow earthquakes. For the first time, researchers use deep-sea boreholes to gauge pressures far below the seafloor. They hope data from this and future observations can aid the understanding of earthquake evolution. The surface of the Earth lies upon gargantuan ...

New York, NY--June 28, 2021--Predicting what someone is about to do next based on their body language comes naturally to humans but not so for computers. When we meet another person, they might greet us with a hello, handshake, or even a fist bump. We may not know which gesture will be used, but we can read the situation and respond appropriately. In a new study, Columbia Engineering researchers unveil a computer vision technique for giving machines a more intuitive sense for what will happen next by leveraging higher-level associations between people, animals, and objects. "Our algorithm is a step toward machines being able to make better predictions about human behavior, and ...

Sixteen of the 146 health-related All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) in the Houses of Parliament (UK) received over a £1 million in payments from 35 pharmaceutical companies between 2012-2018 according to a new study. The researchers behind the analysis from the University of Bath's Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy suggest their findings reveal a worrying lack of transparency over payments received and potential conflicts of interests towards public policy. Through their research they extracted details from 6,624 entries about funding ...

Experts estimate more than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's dementia. But a recent study, led by the University of Cincinnati, sheds new light on the disease and a highly debated new drug therapy. The UC-led study, conducted in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, claims that the treatment of Alzheimer's disease might lie in normalizing the levels of a specific brain protein called amyloid-beta peptide. This protein is needed in its original, soluble form to keep the brain healthy, but sometimes it hardens into "brain stones" or clumps, called amyloid plaques. The study, which appears in the journal EClinicalMedicine (published by the Lancet), comes on the heels of the FDA's conditional approval of a new medicine, aducanumab, that ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University researchers have some good news for the well-meaning masses who place bird feeders in their yards: The small songbirds who visit the feeders seem unlikely to develop an unhealthy reliance on them. "There's still much we don't know about how intentional feeding might induce changes in wild bird populations, but our study suggests that putting out food for small birds in winter will not lead to an increased dependence on human-provided food," said Jim Rivers, an animal ecologist with the OSU College of Forestry. Findings from the research, which looked at black-capped chickadees outfitted with radio frequency identification tags, ...

New York, NY (June 28, 2021) - Patients with a type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma had a widely variable response to COVID-19 vaccines--in some cases, no detectable response--pointing to the need for antibody testing and precautions for these patients after vaccination, according to a study that will be published in Cancer Cell this week. Mount Sinai researchers found that multiple myeloma patients mount variable and sometimes suboptimal responses after receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Almost 16 percent of these patients developed no detectible antibodies after both vaccine doses. These findings may be relevant to other cancer patients undergoing treatment and to immunocompromised patients. "This study ...

Did you know chocolate comes from cocoa beans grown in some of the most biodiverse tropical landscapes on the planet? The cocoa tree (Theobroma cacao) is farmed within biodiversity hotspots of West Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Cocoa was traditionally grown under a canopy of native trees that provided habitat for birds and other wildlife. However, pressure to increase cocoa production has pushed many farmers to clear forest and eliminate the shade trees on their farms. An estimated 2-3 million hectares of tropical forest were converted to cocoa from 1988-2008 with severe consequences for biodiversity. Unsustainable cocoa monocultures (agricultural ...

Multi-business firms have flexibility advantages over single-business rivals because they have the option to redeploy resources across businesses. This flexibility, it has been assumed without empirical evidence, is purported to inspire quicker exits from markets. A 2017 survey revealed that 70 percent of corporate executives expected to make at least one divestment in the subsequent two years, with the primary motive being strategic realignment of portfolios as non-core assets are shed. A large number of academic studies have established that parent firms tend ...

Imagine having feelings of distress and negativity at some point as you are going about your day. Then imagine feeling that way every day, for almost 21 days. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth don't have to imagine having negative feelings at some point throughout the day for an extended period of days. A new study from American University reveals just how pervasive emotional distress is related to stigma around sexual orientation. "Although we know that LGBTQ youth experience bullying, discrimination, and microaggressions during adolescence, we don't know how prevalent these experiences ...

The electrochemical nitrogen reduction reaction (e-NRR) under ambient conditions is an emerging strategy to tackle the hydrogen- and energy-intensive processes entailed in industrial ammonia (NH3) synthesis via the traditional Haber-Bosch process. However, the e-NRR performance is currently impeded by the inherent inertness of N2 molecules, extremely slow kinetics, and overwhelming competition from the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), all of which result in an unsatisfactory yield and ammonia selectivity (Faradaic efficiency, FE). To achieve a high-selectivity and high-performance NRR under ambient conditions, the rational design of efficient electrocatalysts is urgently required. Defect and interface engineering ...

A team of computer scientists at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering set out to develop new tools automate and organize social science data. What did they use as their data sets? Twitter posts from coastal capitals, New York City and Los Angeles. The researchers found that they could identify similar tweets that do not have hashtags by using natural language processing and neural networks to create clusters of alike tweets. "It's using AI to create a map of similar tweets," says Mayank Kejriwal, a Research Assistant Professor in the USC Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and a Research Lead at the USC Information ...

Scientists at The University of Toledo discovered new movement in sperm that provides innovative avenues for diagnostics and therapeutic strategies for male infertility. The research published in Nature Communications finds that the atypical centriole in the sperm neck acts as a transmission system that controls twitching in the head of the sperm, mechanically synchronizing the sperm tail movement to the new head movement. The centriole has historically been considered a rigid structure that acts like a shock absorber. "We think the atypical centriole in the sperm's neck is an evolutionary innovation whose function is to make your sperm move better," said Dr. Tomer Avidor-Reiss, professor of biological sciences in the UToledo College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. "Reproductive ...

DALLAS, June 28, 2021 -- People who must spend $1,000 or more annually in out-of-pocket medical deductibles under their health care insurance plan were less likely to seek care in the ER for chest pain and less likely to be admitted to the hospital during these visits, compared to people who have health insurance plans with an annual deductible of $500 or less, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association's flagship journal Circulation. Chest pain can occur when the heart muscle doesn't get enough oxygen-rich blood. It may feel like pressure or squeezing in the chest. The discomfort also can occur in the shoulders, arms, neck, jaw or back and may also feel like indigestion. Chest pain may be a symptom of an underlying heart problem, usually coronary heart disease ...

28 June 2021: The risk of cancer in children born as a result of fertility treatment has been found to be no greater than in the general population. Results presented today at the 37th Annual Meeting of ESHRE from an 18-year median follow up study demonstrate that the overall chance of developing malignant disease did not increase in ART-conceived offspring. Details of the analysis are presented today online by Dr Mandy Spaan from the Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC) and Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam, at the virtual Annual Meeting of ESHRE. The ...