A new study using cells, transgenic mouse models, and cultured human lung tissue provides evidence that the ability to trigger programmed cell death (apoptosis) may enable highly pathogenic coronaviruses to spread within their hosts so successfully. Targeting this process may reduce the severity of coronavirus diseases, the study goes on to show. While scientists have been aware that highly pathogenic coronaviruses leave substantial cell death in their wake as they infiltrate the body, the importance of apoptosis to the internal spread of coronavirus infections ...

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed immune cell-mimicking nanoparticles that target inflammation in the lungs and deliver drugs directly where they're needed. As a proof of concept, the researchers filled the nanoparticles with the drug dexamethasone and administered them to mice with inflamed lung tissue. Inflammation was completely treated in mice given the nanoparticles, at a drug concentration where standard delivery methods did not have any efficacy. The researchers reported their findings in Science Advances on June 16. What's special ...

Parenting is one of life's greatest joys, right? Not for everyone. New research from Michigan State University psychologists examines characteristics and satisfaction of adults who don't want children. As more people acknowledge they simply don't want to have kids, Jennifer Watling Neal and Zachary Neal, both associate professors in MSU's department of psychology, are among the first to dive deeper into how these "child-free" individuals differ from others. "Most studies haven't asked the questions necessary to distinguish 'child-free' individuals -- those who choose not to have children -- from other types of nonparents," Jennifer Watling Neal said. ...

Chemokine receptors, located at the surface of many immune cells, play an important role in their function. Chemokines are small proteins that bind to these receptors and control the movement and behaviour of white blood cells. However, despite the importance of this family of receptors, their activation mechanism remains poorly understood. In Switzerland, a research consortium from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen has succeeded in decoding the activation mechanism of the CCR5 receptor, a member of this family implicated in several diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer, and the respiratory ...

New research published this week challenges a popular belief that intermittent fasting diets such as alternate day fasting or the '5:2' are the most effective ways to lose weight. Over recent years, diets which see people fast on a few days each week have increased in popularity, reinforced by images of people's miraculous weight transformations, and backed by celebrity endorsements. However, evidence to date about the effectiveness of fasting compared with more traditional diets which aim to reduce calorie intake over the course of a full week has been limited. Published in the prestigious journal Science Translational Medicine, the new study from a team of physiologists at the University of Bath builds this evidence and indicates that there is 'nothing ...

PHILADELPHIA (June 16, 2021) - The current Medicare reimbursement policy for nurse practitioners (NPs) allows NPs to directly bill Medicare for services that they perform, but they are reimbursed at only 85% of the physician rate. A growing number of states are granting full practice authority to nurse practitioners. Even more states have loosened practice restrictions due to COVID-19. Both of these reasons illustrate why payment parity is essential. In an article in The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, Alycia Bischof, MSN, APRN, PNP-BC, Senior Lecturer at the ...

The long relationships between stars and the planets around them - including the Sun and the Earth - may be even more complex than previously thought. This is one conclusion of a new study involving thousands of stars using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. By conducting the largest survey ever of star-forming regions in X-rays, a team of researchers has helped outline the link between very powerful flares, or outbursts, from youthful stars, and the impact they could have on planets in orbit. "Our work tells us how the Sun may have behaved and affected ...

An international team of physicists led by the University of Minnesota has discovered that a unique superconducting metal is more resilient when used as a very thin layer. The research is the first step toward a larger goal of understanding unconventional superconducting states in materials, which could possibly be used in quantum computing in the future. The collaboration includes four faculty members in the University of Minnesota's School of Physics and Astronomy--Associate Professor Vlad Pribiag, Professor Rafael Fernandes, and Assistant Professors Fiona Burnell and Ke Wang--along with physicists ...

Clinical research on COVID-19 has boomed in the 18 months since the disease first appeared. Countless papers have looked at the topic from almost every possible angle, including methods of detection. For a new paper published in the journal END ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Supermassive black holes, or SMBHs, are black holes with masses that are several million to billion times the mass of our sun. The Milky Way hosts an SMBH with mass a few million times the solar mass. Surprisingly, astrophysical observations show that SMBHs already existed when the universe was very young. For example, a billion solar mass black holes are found when the universe was just 6% of its current age, 13.7 billion years. How do these SMBHs in the early universe originate? A team led by a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has come up with an explanation: a massive seed black hole that the collapse of a dark matter halo could produce. Dark matter halo is the halo of invisible matter ...

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- A new approach to studying conjugated polymers made it possible for an Army-funded research team to measure, for the first time, the individual molecules' mechanical and kinetic properties during polymerization reaction. The insights gained could lead to more flexible and robust soft electronic materials, such as health monitors and soft robotics. Conjugated polymers are essentially clusters of molecules strung along a backbone that can conduct electrons and absorb light. This makes them a perfect fit for creating soft optoelectronics, such as wearable electronic devices; however, as flexible as they are, these polymers are difficult to study in bulk because they aggregate ...

DALLAS (SMU) -- A team of SMU biological scientists has confirmed that P-glycoprotein (P-gp) has the ability to remove a toxin from the brain that is associated with Alzheimer's disease. The finding could lead to new treatments for the disease that affects nearly 6 million Americans. It was that hope that motivated lead researchers James W. McCormick and Lauren Ammerman to pursue the research as SMU graduate students after they both lost a grandmother to the disease while at SMU. In the Alzheimer's brain, abnormal levels of amyloid-β proteins clump together to form plaques that collect between neurons and can disrupt cell function. ...

Why can some people weather the stress of social isolation better than others, and what implications does this have for their health? New research from the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania found that people who felt a strong sense of purpose in life were less lonely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Did they achieve less loneliness by flouting public health guidance? No. Although lonelier people were less likely to want to follow public health guidance, people with a stronger sense of purpose also expressed more willingness to engage in social distancing, hand washing, and other ...

A new study looking at the way human cells activate the immune system in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection could open the door to even more effective and powerful vaccines against the coronavirus and its rapidly emerging variants keeping the global pandemic smoldering. Researchers from Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard say it's the first real look at exactly what types of "red flags" the human body uses to enlist the help of T cells--killers sent out by the immune system to destroy infected cells. Until now, COVID vaccines have been focused on activating a different type of immune cell, B cells, which are responsible for creating antibodies. Developing vaccines to activate ...

Steroid (sex) hormones play a central role in sexual development: They help determine how boys become boys and girls become girls. If these hormones are disrupted during fetal life, it can lead to a string of reproductive disorders at birth and later in life, including malformed genitals and decreased fertility. Many environmental chemicals are known to disrupt the hormone system and are often referred to as endocrine disrupting chemicals. Azole fungicides constitute one group that can act as endocrine disruptors. Azoles are used to combat yeast infestations in seed and food crops, but are also used in medications for humans. Most azoles used in medicines are tightly regulated and their use is well controlled. However, some are sold over-the-counter, for ...

Philadelphia, June 16, 2021 - The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 may have the ability to reactivate dormant tuberculosis (TB). In a novel study scientists END ...

In a new publication from Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications; DOI https://doi.org/10.15212/CVIA.2021.0011, Xiao-lei Yin, Dong-xue Liang, Lu Wang, Jing Qiu, Zhi-yun Yang, Jian-zeng Dong and Zhao-yuan Ma from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; Capital Medical University, Beijing, China and The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, China analyse coronary angiography video interpolation methods to reduce x-ray exposure frequency based on deep learning. Cardiac coronary angiography is a major technique that assists physicians during interventional heart surgery. Under X-ray irradiation, the physician ...

In a new publication from Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications; DOI https://doi.org/10.15212/CVIA.2021.0013, Sharen Lee, Gary Tse, Xin Wang, Adrian Baranchuk and Tong Liu from Laboratory of Cardiovascular Physiology, Hong Kong, China, Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China and Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada consider ST-segment depression in leads I and aVL. The 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) is a routinely performed test but is susceptible to misinterpretation even by experienced physicians. The authors report a case of a 72-year-old lady with no prior cardiac history presenting with atypical chest pain. Her initial electrocardiogram shows an initial ST depression followed by positive deflections leads I and aVL. ...

Commonplace pharmaceuticals, such as ibuprofen, can carry with them an inherent flaw in their atomic structure, which pairs the active, beneficial ingredient with a potentially ineffective -- or even toxic -- counterpart. New research could hold the key to more easily isolating the good while removing the unwanted. Dr. Shoufeng Lan, assistant professor in the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is leading a team investigating the use of electromagnetic control over the synthesis of chiral compounds at an atomic level -- a process that could lead to a plethora of practical ...

How do top athletes talk about doping when they themselves are using performance-enhancing drugs? Or do they just avoid the issue? A new study by the University of Göttingen reveals that any decision to use drugs almost inevitably means the decision to engage in deceptive communication such as lying or omitting information. Those using drugs, for example, regularly describe anti-doping policies as being more intense than ever or overly restrictive, play down the extent of the doping problem, or portray themselves as victims. The results were published in the European Journal for Sport and Society. Dr Marcel Reinold, Head of Sport and Health Sociology at the Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences at Göttingen University, analysed autobiographies of professional ...

A new paper in the journal Cognition examines the visual complexity of written language and how that complexity has evolved. Using computational techniques to analyze more than 47,000 different characters from 133 living and extinct scripts, co-authors Helena Miton of the Santa Fe Institute and Oliver Morin of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, addressed several questions around why and how the characters of different writing systems vary in how complex they appear. "When we started this project, we wanted to test whether you find a general simplification of characters over time," Miton says. "Do scripts simplify their ...

The presence of pro-inflammatory cytokines in the blood can boost the effects of daily cannabis use and heighten the risk of developing psychosis in adulthood. Similar results have been observed, also in the presence of cytokines, when cannabis is used during adolescence. Psychotic disorders have symptoms such as delirium, loss of a sense of reality, hallucinations, hearing voices, and cognitive and social impairments. A study by researchers at the University of São Paulo's Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP) in Brazil, reported in an article in ...

RUDN University biologist studied the aggressive impact of environmental factors (water, salts, and ozone) on ultrathin nanofibers of biopolymers. The results will help choosing suitable bioplastic depending on the use; for example, for medical implants, biodegradable packaging or filters for water cleaning. The results are published in the journal Polymers. Bioplastics are an alternative to ordinary plastics. They are obtained from waste of plant and food industry. The safe composition allows using them as filters for gases and liquids, as "sponges" for cleaning reservoirs and medical implants. Depending on the field ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 16, 2021)--Spectacular images of a molecule that shuttles omega-3 fatty acids into the brain may open a doorway for delivering neurological therapeutics to the brain. "We've managed to obtain a three-dimensional structure of the transporter protein that provides a gateway for omega-3s to enter the brain. In this structure, we can see how omega-3s bind to the transporter. This information may allow for the design of drugs that mimic omega-3s to hijack this system and get into the brain," says first author Rosemary J. Cater, PhD, a Simons Society Fellow in the Mancia Lab at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. The study was published online on June 16 in the journal Nature. A major challenge in treating ...

Bay Area scientists have captured the real-time electrical activity of a beating heart, using a sheet of graphene to record an optical image -- almost like a video camera -- of the faint electric fields generated by the rhythmic firing of the heart's muscle cells. The graphene camera represents a new type of sensor useful for studying cells and tissues that generate electrical voltages, including groups of neurons or cardiac muscle cells. To date, electrodes or chemical dyes have been used to measure electrical firing in these cells. But electrodes and dyes measure the voltage at one point only; a graphene sheet measures the voltage ...