Tracking milk drinking in the ancient past is not straightforward. For decades, archaeologists have tried to reconstruct the practice by various indirect methods. They have looked at ancient rock art to identify scenes of animals being milked and at animal bones to reconstruct kill-off patterns that might reflect the use of animals for dairying. More recently, they even used scientific methods to detect traces of dairy fats on ancient pots. But none of these methods can say if a specific individual consumed milk. Now archaeological scientists are increasingly ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers used single-molecule imaging to compare the genome-editing tools CRISPR-Cas9 and TALEN. Their experiments revealed that TALEN is up to five times more efficient than CRISPR-Cas9 in parts of the genome, called heterochromatin, that are densely packed. Fragile X syndrome, sickle cell anemia, beta-thalassemia and other diseases are the result of genetic defects in the heterochromatin. The researchers report their findings in the journal Nature Communications. The study adds to the evidence that a broader selection of genome-editing tools is needed to target all parts of the genome, said Huimin Zhao, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois ...

A characteristic feature of all stem cells is their ability to self-renew. But how is this potential maintained throughout life? Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Heidelberg Institute for Stem Cell Technology and Experimental Medicine* (HI-STEM) have now discovered in mice that cells in the so-called "stem cell niche" are responsible for this: Blood vessel cells of the niche produce a factor that stimulates blood stem cells and thus maintains their self-renewal capacity. During aging, production of this factor ceases and blood stem cells begin to age. Throughout life, blood stem cells in the bone marrow ensure that our body is adequately supplied with mature blood cells. If there is no current need for cell ...

Much of the earth's carbon is trapped in soil, and scientists have assumed that potential climate-warming compounds would safely stay there for centuries. But new research from Princeton University shows that carbon molecules can potentially escape the soil much faster than previously thought. The findings suggest a key role for some types of soil bacteria, which can produce enzymes that break down large carbon-based molecules and allow carbon dioxide to escape into the air. More carbon is stored in soil than in all the planet's plants and atmosphere combined, and soil absorbs about 20% of human-generated carbon emissions. Yet, factors that affect carbon storage and release from soil have been challenging to study, placing limits on the relevance of ...

DALLAS, Jan. 27, 2021 -- Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, according to the American Heart Association's Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics -- 2021 Update, published today in the Association's flagship journal Circulation, and experts warn that the broad influence of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely continue to extend that ranking for years to come. Globally, nearly 18.6 million people died of cardiovascular disease in 2019, the latest year for which worldwide statistics are calculated. That reflects a 17.1% increase over the past decade. There were more than 523.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2019, an increase ...

(Boston)--When severely or chronically injured, the liver loses its ability to regenerate. A new study led by researchers at the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) now describes a safe new potential therapeutic tool for the recovery of liver function in chronic and acute liver diseases. Researchers utilized the lipid nanoparticle-encapsulated messenger RNA (mRNA-LNP) currently used in COVID-19 vaccines, to deliver regenerative factors to injured livers in a timely, controlled fashion. "We found that this intervention successfully induces the rapid expansion of the functional ...

New York - The results of the Peoples' Climate Vote, the world's biggest ever survey of public opinion on climate change are published today. Covering 50 countries with over half of the world's population, the survey includes over half a million people under the age of 18, a key constituency on climate change that is typically unable to vote yet in regular elections.  Detailed results broken down by age, gender, and education level will be shared with governments around the world by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), ...

DALLAS (SMU) - Wildfires are the enemy when they threaten homes in California and elsewhere. But a new study led by SMU suggests that people living in fire-prone places can learn to manage fire as an ally to prevent dangerous blazes, just like people who lived nearly 1,000 years ago. "We shouldn't be asking how to avoid fire and smoke," said SMU anthropologist and lead author Christopher Roos. "We should ask ourselves what kind of fire and smoke do we want to coexist with." An interdisciplinary team of scientists published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documenting centuries of fire management ...

The United States Department of Agriculture identifies a group of "big eight" foods that causes 90% of food allergies. Among these foods are wheat and peanuts. Sachin Rustgi, a member of the Crop Science Society of America, studies how we can use breeding to develop less allergenic varieties of these foods. Rustgi recently presented his research at the virtual 2020 ASA-CSSA-SSSA Annual Meeting. Allergic reactions caused by wheat and peanuts can be prevented by avoiding these foods, of course. "While that sounds simple, it is difficult in practice," says Rustgi. Avoiding wheat and peanuts means losing out ...

Tsukuba, Japan - Tomatoes are one of the most popular types of fresh produce consumed worldwide, as well as being an important ingredient in many manufactured foods. As with other cultivated crops, some potentially useful genes that were present in its South American ancestors were lost during domestication and breeding of the modern tomato, Solanum lycopersicum var. lycopersicum. Because of its importance as a crop, the tomato genome sequence was completed and published as long ago as 2012, with later additions and improvements. Now, the team at University of Tsukuba, in collaboration with TOKITA Seed Co. Ltd, have produced high-quality genome sequences of two wild ancestors of tomato from Peru, Solanum pimpinellifolium ...

Children of all ages can completely bypass age verification measures to sign-up to the world's most popular social media apps including Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype and Discord by simply lying about their age, researchers at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software have discovered. And even potential age verification solutions identified by the research team can be easily sidestepped by children, according to the team's most recent study: Digital Age of Consent and Age Verification: Can They Protect Children? Lead researcher Lero's Dr Liliana Pasquale, assistant professor at University College ...

Harpy eagles are considered by many to be among the planet's most spectacular birds. They are also among its most elusive, generally avoiding areas disturbed by human activity - therefore already having vanished from portions of its range - and listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as being 'Near-Threatened'. However, new research led by the University of Plymouth (UK) suggests estimates of the species' current distribution are potentially overestimating range size. Using a combination of physical sightings and environmental data, they developed a spatial modelling framework which aims to estimate current and past distributions based on the birds' preferred habitat conditions. The authors then used the model to estimate a ...

Multi-disciplinary researchers at The University of Manchester have helped develop a powerful physics-based tool to map the pace of language development and human innovation over thousands of years - even stretching into pre-history before records were kept. Tobias Galla, a professor in theoretical physics, and Dr Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, a specialist in historical linguistics, from The University of Manchester, have come together as part of an international team to share their diverse expertise to develop the new model, revealed in a paper entitled 'Geospatial distributions reflect temperatures of linguistic feature' authored by Henri Kauhanen, Deepthi Gopal, ...

(Scottsdale, Ariz. - January 27, 2021) HIRREM (the legacy research technology of Cereset - a Brain State Company) was utilized by the Wake Forest School of Medicine to study symptoms of traumatic stress in military personnel before and after use of Cereset (legacy) intervention. Whole brain, resting state magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was done pre- and post- Cereset intervention. Significant effects on brain network connectivity have been previously reported. For the current study, lateralization of brain connectivity was analyzed. Lateralization here refers to the distribution of brain connections within the right, and left side, or to the opposite side. This is important because common lobes in the ...

Montreal, January 27, 2021 - Taking cannabidiol, a chemical in the cannabis sativa plant, isn't an effective way to reduce your dependence on cocaine, researchers at the CHUM Research Centre find. In North America, close to 5.5 million people use cocaine regularly, and nearly one in five becomes addicted, developing cocaine use disorder, for which there is no clinical treatment. One solution has been touted, however: treatment with cannabidiol. Better known as CBD, it's a chemical in the cannabis sativa plant known for its protective effects on the brain and liver. But there is very little scientific evidence to support its use as a treatment for addiction. In fact, in a study published ...

Stopping the spread of COVID-19 is difficult enough. It's even more complicated and confusing when information and resources provided by governments are largely inaccessible to a variety of disabled populations. A newly-published global survey of national health authority websites in nearly 200 countries has directly quantified COVID-19 information accessibility. The survey, published on January 27, 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, was conducted by researchers and medical professionals from Bar-Ilan University's Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, the Galilee Medical Center and Tel Aviv ...

As the climate warms and Arctic sea ice retreats, research vessels and commercial ships are sailing into the Arctic Ocean more and more, but the accuracy and sensitivity of regional weather and marine forecasts for these hazardous waters still lag well behind those of their lower-latitude counterparts, with significant differences between regional models. Direct measurements of atmospheric conditions, such as cloud cover and solar radiation, can help to evaluate and improve these models. In a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a research team led by the National Institute of Polar Research in Tachikawa, ...

Sophia Antipolis, 27 January 2021: Pregnancy complications and early menopause increase women's future risk of heart disease. Cardiologists, gynaecologists and endocrinologists recommend how to help middle-aged women prevent later heart problems in a European Society of Cardiology (ESC) consensus document published today in European Heart Journal, a journal of the ESC.1 "Physicians should intensify the detection of hypertension in middle-aged women," states the document. Up to 50% of women develop high blood pressure before the age of 60 but the symptoms - for example hot flushes and palpitations - are often attributed ...

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Zhengzhou University have developed a powerful therapeutic platform that uses a modified virus for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. By using the virus in combination with other drugs, the treatment significantly extended survival in preclinical models of pancreatic cancer. Viruses that can selectively infect and destroy cancer cells, known as oncolytic viruses, are a promising new class of therapeutics for cancer. Through various mechanisms, oncolytic viruses kill cancer cells and elicit strong anti-tumour immune responses. However, current oncolytic virotherapy is unable to produce a long-term cure in patients, and the treatment has to be delivered directly into the tumour - a route that is not feasible for deeply embedded ...

A material that can be used in technologies such as solar power has been found to self-heal, a new study shows. The findings - from the University of York - raise the prospect that it may be possible to engineer high-performance self-healing materials which could reduce costs and improve scalability, researchers say. The substance, called antimony selenide (Sb2Se3), is a solar absorber material that can be used for turning light energy into electricity. Professor Keith McKenna from the Department of Physics said: "The process by which this semi-conducting material self-heals is rather like how a salamander is able to re-grow limbs when one is severed. Antimony selenide repairs broken bonds created when it is cleaved by ...

The disproportionately high Covid-19 infection rates observed in Black Americans could be linked to their daily commuting patterns, according to a new study published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The research found that increased exposure to other ethnic groups, for example as a result of an individual's job or use of public transport, can result in the emergence of an "infection gap" in the population, such as the abnormally high incidence of Covid-19 recorded in Black Americans. In some areas of the US Covid-19 incidence in Black Americans can be up to three to five times higher than would be expected based on population data. Previous studies have highlighted socio-economic factors including lower income and poorer access to healthcare facilities ...

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) results from a degeneration of the hematopoietic stem cells (leukemia stem cells), thereby leading to the uncontrolled formation of specific white blood cells, the so-called granulocytes. Research work at the Department of Medical Oncology at the Inselspital, Bern University Hospital and the University of Bern focused therefore on identifying the signaling pathways and control mechanisms of the leukemia stem cell. A promising approach is provided by working with MPR, an anti-emetic medication commonly used to treat nausea and vomiting. Specific blocking of leukemia stem cell proliferation with metoclopramide The exact role of the surface molecule CD93 (cluster of differentiation 93) in controlling the ...

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) have developed a technique to replicate bone tissue complexity and bone remodeling processes. This breakthrough could help researchers further their study of bone biology and assist in improving development of drugs for osteoporosis. Published in Science Advances, the researchers developed a new biomaterial they call demineralized bone paper. The team includes Jungwoo Lee, Yongkuk Park, Ryan Carpenter, chemical engineering; Eugene Cheong, ...

Our cells are filled with 'bones,' in a sense. Thin, flexible protein strands called actin filaments help support and move around the bulk of the cells of eukaryotes, which includes all plants and animals. Always on the go, actin filaments constantly grow, shrink, bind with other things, and branch off when cells move. Supercomputer simulations have helped solve the mystery of how actin filaments polymerize, or chain together. This fundamental research could be applied to treatments to stop cancer spread, develop self-healing materials, and more. "The major findings ...

A compound that extends lifespan in a tiny nematode worm slows bone loss in aging mice. That surprising result comes from a longitudinal and functional study of 700 aging mice at the Buck Institute, a project that provides a treasure trove of data for researchers aiming to develop therapeutics to slow aging and age-related diseases. The study is currently online in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research Plus. The project, which involved five Buck labs and took several years to complete, involved serially profiling the individual mice as they aged while testing several therapeutics that extended lifespan in simple model organisms ...