An interdisciplinary group of researchers from across the globe has comprehensively examined the sources and health effects of air pollution -- not just on a global scale, but also individually for more than 200 countries. They found that worldwide, more than one million deaths were attributable to the burning of fossil fuels in 2017. More than half of those deaths were attributable to coal. Findings and access to their data, which have been made public, were published today in the journal Nature Communications. Pollution is at once a global crisis and a devastatingly personal problem. It is analyzed by satellites, but PM2.5 -- tiny particles that can infiltrate a person's lungs -- can also sicken a person who cooks dinner nightly on a cookstove. "PM2.5 ...

Treatment options for a deadly liver cancer, fibrolamellar carcinoma, are severely lacking. Drugs that work on other liver cancers are not effective, and although progress has been made in identifying the specific genes involved in driving the growth of fibrolamellar tumors, these findings have yet to translate into any treatment. For now, surgery is the only option for those affected--mostly children and young adults with no prior liver conditions. Sanford M. Simon and his group understood that patients dying of fibrolamellar could not afford to wait. "There are people who need therapy now," he says. So his group threw the kitchen sink at the problem and tested over 5,000 compounds, either already approved for other clinical uses or in clinical ...

DALLAS - June 14, 2021 - Overweight cancer patients receiving immunotherapy treatments live more than twice as long as lighter patients, but only when dosing is weight-based, according to a study by cancer researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center. The findings, published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, run counter to current practice trends, which favor fixed dosing, in which patients are given the same dose regardless of weight. The study included data on nearly 300 patients with melanoma, lung, kidney, and head and neck cancers ...

Leesburg, VA, June 14, 2021--According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), high-dose intranodal lymphangiography (INL) with ethiodized oil is a safe and effective procedure for treating high-output postsurgical chylothorax with chest tube removal in 83% of patients. "To our knowledge," wrote corresponding author Geert Maleux of University Hospitals in Leuven, Belgium, "no data are available on the safety or potential beneficial effect of injecting higher doses of ethiodized oil to treat patients with refractory postoperative chylothorax." All 18 patients (mean, 67 years; range, ...

A team of scientists from Kaunas University of Technology and Lithuanian Energy Institute proposed a method to convert lint-microfibers found in clothes dryers into energy. They not only constructed a pilot pyrolysis plant but also developed a mathematical model to calculate possible economic and environmental outcomes of the technology. Researchers estimate that by converting lint microfibers produced by 1 million people, almost 14 tons of oil, 21.5 tons of gas and nearly 10 tons of char could be produced. Each year, the global population consumes approximately 80 billion pieces of clothing and approximately €140 million worth of it goes into landfill. This is accompanied by large amounts of emissions, causing serious environmental and health problems. One of the ways to lessen ...

A new study found higher education students are more engaged and motivated when they are taught using playful pedagogy rather than the traditional lecture-based method. The study was conducted by University of Colorado Denver counseling researcher Lisa Forbes and was published in the Journal of Teaching and Learning. While many educators in higher education believe play is a method that is solely used for elementary education, Forbes argues that play is important in post-secondary education to enhance student learning outcomes. Throughout the spring 2020 semester, Forbes observed students who were enrolled in three of her courses between the ages of 23-43. To introduce playful pedagogy, Forbes included games and play, not always tied to the ...

Solar flares jetting out from the sun and thunderstorms generated on Earth impact the planet's ionosphere in different ways, which have implications for the ability to conduct long range communications. A team of researchers working with data collected by the Incoherent Scatter Radar (ISR) at the Arecibo Observatory, satellites, and lightning detectors in Puerto Rico have for the first time examined the simultaneous impacts of thunderstorms and solar flares on the ionospheric D-region (often referred to as the edge of space). In the first of its kind analysis, the team determined that solar flares ...

The types of land around us play an important role in how major storms will unfold -- flood waters may travel differently over rural versus urban areas, for example. However, it's challenging to get an accurate picture of land types using only satellite image data because it is so difficult to interpret. Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering have, for the first time, applied a machine learning algorithm to measure the surface roughness of different types of land with a high level of detail. The team used a type of satellite imagery that is more dependable and easier to capture than typical optical photographs but also more challenging to analyze. And they are working to integrate this data into storm surge models to give a clearer ...

Both during and after infection with the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, patients may suffer from severe neurological symptoms, including "anosmia", the loss of taste and smell typically associated with COVID-19. Along with direct damage caused by the virus, researchers suspect a role for excessive inflammatory responses in the disease. A team of researchers from the Freiburg University Medical Center and the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS has now shown that a severe inflammatory response can develop in the central nervous system of COVID-19 patients involving different immune cells around the vascular ...

Dr Sebastian Hess and his team at the University of Cologne's Institute of Zoology have studied a very rare and puzzling tripartite symbiosis. This consortium consists of a ciliate as host and two types of endosymbionts: a green alga and a previously unknown purple bacterium. Through genetic analyses of the pink-green ciliate, the researchers discovered that the endosymbiotic bacterium belongs to the so-called 'purple sulfur bacteria' (family Chromatiaceae), but has lost the ability to oxidize reduced sulfur compounds, a hallmark of the other members of the Chromatiaceae. The genome of the purple bacterium is greatly reduced, suggesting that the bacterium became mainly specialized in carbon fixation through photosynthesis. It is probably no longer able to live outside of the host cell. Thus, ...

Boston - Hypertension, or high blood pressure, kills more Americans than any other health condition. It is especially prevalent in Black Americans and is exacerbated by structural barriers to accessing high quality healthcare. In a 2018 randomized trial called the Los Angeles Barbershop Blood Pressure Study (LABBS), barbers were trained to screen their Black male patrons for hypertension and refer them to a pharmacist who visited the barbershop to counsel and treat individuals with high blood pressure. Participants in the barbershop-based, pharmacist-led program saw a 20-point drop in systolic (top number) blood pressure that they were able to sustain ...

An international research team led by Professor Dr Frank Schäbitz has published a climate reconstruction of the last 200,000 years for Ethiopia. This means that high-resolution data are now available for the period when early Homo sapiens, our ancestors, made their way from Africa to Europe and Asia. Schäbitz and his colleagues determined the dates using a drill core of lake sediments deposited in southern Ethiopia's Chew Bahir Basin, which lies near human fossil sites. Temporal resolution of the samples, reaching nearly 10 years, revealed that from 200,000 to 125,000 years before our ...

Does evolution explain why we can't resist a salty chip? Researchers at NC State University found that differences between the elemental composition of foods and the elemental needs of animals can explain the development of pleasing tastes like salty, umami and sweet. Taste tells us a lot about foods before they are swallowed and digested, and some tastes correspond with the elemental composition of foods. For example, an aged steak lights up the umami taste receptors, because it has a high concentration of the element nitrogen, which occurs in amino acid molecules. Nitrogen is essential for survival, but often occurs in low concentrations relative ...

(Boston)-- The concept of rationing medical resources during the height of COVID-19 pandemic created tremendous anxiety in the patient and healthcare communities. In planning for that possibility Massachusetts created a triage scoring system focusing on an acute survival score that considers chronic life-limiting medical conditions of the patient, but it does not provide specifics about how to value those conditions in the equation. Now a new study supports prioritizing resources to those who are most likely to survive an acute illness as several chronic medical conditions had less of an impact on longer-term survival than previously suspected. "No one ...

(Boston)--Despite evidence regarding the benefits of vaginal birth after cesarean and recommendations to support shared decision making to reduce cesarean rates, minority women face many impediments that limit their access to appropriate health information and opportunities for such discussions. Haitian women in Massachusetts have the highest rates of cesarean section and low rates of vaginal birth after cesarean, despite evidence suggesting that many are eligible to attempt vaginal birth after a previous cesarean. Now a new study explores how Haitian women's beliefs, values and attitudes influence their decision making about pregnancy and birth after having had a cesarean delivery. In conjunction with the providers' views about Haitian women, the information ...

Farmed foxes selectively bred for tameness and aggressiveness exhibit similar changes to their brain anatomy, according to research recently published in JNeurosci. Both lineages also have larger brains than conventional farm-bred foxes, complicating leading theories on domestication. Domesticated species provide insight into complex evolutionary processes on a condensed timeframe. When a species splits from its wild counterpart, its brain, body, and behavior undergo rapid changes. Studies with chickens, sheep, cats, dogs, and more indicate domestication shrinks the brain. But the same pattern does not extend to foxes in the expected way. Hecht et al. used MRI to measure the brain size ...

When Erin Hecht was earning her Ph.D. in neuroscience more than a decade ago, she watched a nature special on the Russian farm-fox experiment, one of the best-known studies on animal domestication. The study, running since 1958, tries to replicate the natural domestication of wolves to dogs by selectively breeding two strains of silver foxes so they exhibit certain behaviors. Scientists breed one to be tame and display dog-like behaviors with people, such as licking and tail wagging. The other is bred to react with defensive aggression when faced with human contact, while a third strain acts as the control and isn't bred for any specific behaviors. Hecht, who's now an assistant professor in the Harvard Department of Human ...

Niigata, Japan - In the recent past, there has been a paradigm shift towards renewable sources of energy in order to address the concerns pertaining to environmental degradation and dwindling fossil fuels. A variety of alternative green energy sources such as solar, wind, hydrothermal, tidal etc., have been gaining attention to reduce the global carbon footprints. One of the key challenges with these energy generation technologies is that they are intermittent and are not continuously available. "We cannot use solar energy at night and wind energy when the wind is not blowing. But we can store the generated electricity in some other forms and utilize it whenever required. That is how water splitting bridges the gap and has emerged as a very promising energy storage ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Inequitable access to health care is a pressing global health concern, and care of our teeth is no exception. In fact, the World Health Organization established the Global Goals for Oral Health 2020 in its efforts to help counter socioeconomic-related imbalances. Economically advanced Japan has plentiful dentists, as well as a universal health insurance system, yet it also has oral care-related inequities, according to a new study. A team of researchers centered at University of Tsukuba in Japan examined a huge set of claims and checkup data in search of regional and socioeconomic trends. Their findings included the key observation that regional lower ...

The potential of a class of materials called perovskites to enable solar cells to better absorb sunlight for energy production is widely known. However, this potential has yet to be fully realised, particularly under real-world operating conditions. New research published today in the prestigious journal Nature Energy, has revealed defects in a popular perovskite light absorber that impede solar cell performance. The researchers found a change in the nature and density of these 'intragrain planar defects' correlated with a change in solar cell performance. The discovery by an international team of researchers, led by Monash ...

Cities and nations around the globe are shooting for carbon neutrality, with some experts already talking about the need to ultimately reach carbon negativity. Carbon footprint declarations are used in construction to ease product selection for low carbon building, but these standards don't yet exist for green elements like soil, bushes and plants. A new study led by Aalto University is the first to map out how green infrastructure can be a resource for cities on the path to carbon neutrality. The study, done in collaboration with the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki, charted out the lifecycle phases of plants, soils and mulches to determine the basic considerations needed to create standards for products commonly used in green ...

The National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency (NPRA) of Malaysia has granted a conditional registration for a safe, effective hepatitis C treatment developed by a public-private partnership bringing together the Malaysian Ministry of Health, not-for-profit research and development organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), Egyptian pharmaceutical company Pharco, Malaysian pharmaceutical company Pharmaniaga Berhad, and non-governmental-organization Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). This is the very first drug for hepatitis C virus (HCV) to be developed through South-South collaboration and with funding and clinical support from non-profit organizations. This partnership ...

A current challenge for sustainable aquaculture is how to increase the quantities of farmed fish while also reducing waste products that can lead to the accumulation of harmful fish sludge. New research aims to understand how this fish waste can be treated for use in aquaponics systems, by removing excessive carbon, yet preserving the mineral nutrients required by plants to grow. In this study in Frontiers in Plant Science, researchers from the Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, demonstrate a novel and effective way to convert this fish sludge into plant fertilizer and therefore improving the nutrients available for plants in hydroponic ...

DNA is an abundant and nutritious food source for microbes The diet of microbes is vast: They are able to use different molecules as nutrients, including biomolecules such as proteins and lipids of dead and decaying organisms. This includes so called extracellular DNA molecules which are not or no longer present in intact cells. "From the bacteria's perspective DNA is particularly nutritious," says Kenneth Wasmund, a microbiologist at the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CMESS) at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study. "It's essentially a fertilizer. After all, it is a chain of millions of pieces of sugar and phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing bases." Extracellular ...

Universal school lunch programs make students healthier, and increase their lifetime income by 3%, according to a unique study from Lund University in Sweden published in The Review of Economic Studies. Health disparities arise early in life and play a major role in economic outcomes among adults. Yet there are few studies on the long-term effects of school-based nutrition policies aimed at counteracting them. Researchers from Lund University and Stockholm University can now show that universal school lunch programs have significant long-term benefits for students' education, general health and income. "Today, we take school lunches for granted in Sweden. But the fact is, it was a very conscious ...