CRISPR-based technologies offer enormous potential to benefit human health and safety, from disease eradication to fortified food supplies. As one example, CRISPR-based gene drives, which are engineered to spread specific traits through targeted populations, are being developed to stop the transmission of devastating diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. But many scientists and ethicists have raised concerns over the unchecked spread of gene drives. Once deployed in the wild, how can scientists prevent gene drives from uncontrollably spreading across populations ...

CHICAGO -- Women who experience acute aortic dissection--a spontaneous and catastrophic tear in one of the body's main arteries--not only are older and have more advanced disease than men when they seek medical care, but they also are more likely to die, according to research published online today in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. "Data over the course of the last few decades demonstrate differences in both presentation and outcomes between males and females who have acute aortic dissection, with greater mortality among females," said Thomas G. Gleason, MD, from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. "This study underscores ...

Can you trust the map on your smartphone, or the satellite image on your computer screen? So far, yes, but it may only be a matter of time until the growing problem of "deep fakes" converges with geographical information science (GIS). Researchers such as Associate Professor of Geography Chengbin Deng are doing what they can to get ahead of the problem. Deng and four colleagues -- Bo Zhao and Yifan Sun at the University of Washington, and Shaozeng Zhang and Chunxue Xu at Oregon State University -- co-authored a recent article in Cartography and Geographic Information Science that explores the problem. In "Deep ...

Popcorn. What would movies and sporting events without this salty, buttery snack? America's love for this snack goes beyond these events. We consume 15 billion quarts of popped popcorn each year. When it comes to popcorn, consumers want a seed-to-snack treat that leaves more snacks than seeds when popped. This means when they pop the corn, there shouldn't be many unpopped kernels left in the bowl. Maria Fernanda Maioli set out to determine the properties affecting popping expansion in popcorn. The team's research was recently published in Agronomy Journal, a publication of the American Society of Agronomy. "The way kernels expand is a basic, ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...June 2, 2021 - As drones become more ubiquitous in public spaces, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have conducted the first studies examining how people respond to various emotional facial expressions depicted on a drone, with the goal of fostering greater social acceptance of these flying robots. The research, which was presented recently at the virtual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, reveals how people react to common facial expressions superimposed on drones. "There is a lack of research on how drones are perceived and understood by humans, which is vastly different than ground robots." says Prof. Jessica Cauchard together with Viviane Herdel of BGU's Magic Lab, in the BGU Department of Industrial ...

New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to nine liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second -- a speed 50 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per second/330 mph). The Georgia Tech College of Engineering study sought to better understand the physics of how elephants use their trunks to move and manipulate air, water, food and other objects. They also sought to learn if the mechanics could inspire the creation of more efficient robots that use air motion to hold and move things. While octopus use jets of water to move and archer fish shoot water above the surface to catch insects, the Georgia Tech researchers found that elephants ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Article topics include Zealandia, Earth's newly recognized continent; the topography of Scandinavia; an interfacial energy penalty; major disruptions in North Atlantic circulation; the Great Bahama Bank; Pityusa Patera, Mars; the end-Permian extinction; and Tongariro and Ruapehu volcanoes, New Zealand. These Geology articles are online at https://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent. Mass balance controls on sediment scour and bedrock erosion in waterfall plunge pools Joel S. Scheingross; Michael P. Lamb Abstract: Waterfall plunge pools experience cycles of sediment aggradation and scour that modulate ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC - Research published by JAMA Network Open shows how non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like mask wearing and physical distancing can help prevent spikes in COVID-19 cases as populations continue to get vaccinated. The study, led by Mehul Patel, PhD, a clinical and population health researcher in the department of Emergency Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, focuses on the state of North Carolina. Similar modeling studies have been used in different states, and can serve as guidance to leaders as they make decisions to relax restrictions and safety protocols. "The computer simulation modeling allows us to look at multiple factors that play a role in decreasing the spread of COVID-19 as vaccines are ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- By delivering small electrical pulses directly to the brain, deep brain stimulation (DBS) can ease tremors associated with Parkinson's disease or help relieve chronic pain. The technique works well for many patients, but researchers would like to make DBS devices that are a little smarter by adding the capability to sense activity in the brain and adapt stimulation accordingly. Now, a new algorithm developed by Brown University bioengineers could be an important step toward such adaptive DBS. The algorithm removes a key hurdle that makes it difficult for DBS systems to sense brain signals while simultaneously delivering stimulation. "We know that there are electrical signals ...

Researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have developed a robotic mechanism for mushroom picking and trimming and demonstrated its effectiveness for the automated harvesting of button mushrooms. In a new study, the prototype, which is designed to be integrated with a machine vision system, showed that it is capable of both picking and trimming mushrooms growing in a shelf system. The research is consequential, according to lead author Long He, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, because the mushroom industry has been facing labor shortages and rising labor costs. Mechanical or robotic picking can help alleviate those problems. "The mushroom industry in Pennsylvania is producing about two-thirds of the mushrooms ...

Older adults with cognitive impairment are two to three times more likely to fall compared with those without cognitive impairment. What's more, the increasing use of pain medications for chronic pain by older adults adds to their falls risk. Risks associated with falls include minor bruising to more serious hip fractures, broken bones and even head injuries. With falls a leading cause of injury for people aged 65 and older, it is an important public health issue to study in order to allow these adults increased safety and independence as they age. Although elevated risk of falls due to use of pain medication by older adults has been widely studied, less ...

In a study of mice, researchers showed how the act of seeing light may trigger the formation of vision-harming tumors in young children who are born with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) cancer predisposition syndrome. The research team, funded by the National Institutes of Health, focused on tumors that grow within the optic nerve, which relays visual signals from the eyes to brain. They discovered that the neural activity which underlies these signals can both ignite and feed the tumors. Tumor growth was prevented or slowed by raising young mice in the dark or treating them with an experimental cancer drug during a critical period of cancer development. "Brain cancers recruit the resources they need from the environment ...

Researchers world-wide are focused on clearing the toxic mutant Huntingtin protein that leads to neuronal cell death and systemic dysfunction in Huntington's disease (HD), a devastating, incurable, progressive neurodegenerative genetic disorder. Scientists in the Buck Institute's Ellerby lab have found that the targeting the protein called FK506-binding protein 51 or FKBP51 promotes the clearing of those toxic proteins via autophagy, a natural process whereby cells recycle damaged proteins and mitochondria and use them for nutrition. Publishing in Autophagy , researchers showed that FKBP51 promotes autophagy through a new mechanism that could avoid worrisome side ...

Despite a name straight from a Tarantino movie, natural killer (NK) cells are your allies when it comes to fighting infections and cancer. If T cells are like a team of specialist doctors in an emergency room, NK cells are the paramedics: They arrive first on the scene and perform damage control until reinforcements arrive. Part of our innate immune system, which dispatches these first responders, NK cells are primed from birth to recognize and respond to danger. Learning what fuels NK cells is an active area of research in immunology, with important clinical implications. "There's a lot of interest right now ...

Army scientists working as part of an international consortium have developed and tested an antibody-based therapy to treat Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), which is carried by ticks and kills up to 60 percent of those infected. Their results are published online today in the journal Cell. Using blood samples donated by disease survivors, the study's authors characterized the human immune response to natural CCHFV infection. They were able to identify several potent neutralizing antibodies that target the viral glycoprotein--a component of the virus that plays a key role ...

AMES, Iowa - An unexpected discovery by an Iowa State University researcher suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago - nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought. Andrew Somerville, an assistant professor of anthropology in world languages and cultures, says he and his colleagues made the discovery while studying the origins of agriculture in the Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. As part of that work, they wanted to establish a date for the earliest human occupation of the Coxcatlan Cave in the valley, so they obtained radiocarbon dates for several rabbit and deer bones that were collected from the cave in the 1960s as part of the Tehuacan Archaeological-Botanical Project. The dates for the bones suddenly ...

Key takeaways The surgical simulator can realistically simulate multiple trauma scenarios at once, compared with traditional simulators that can only simulate one or a limited number of conditions. Trauma team members who tested the simulator preferred it for its realism, physiologic responses, and feedback. The benefits of this innovative simulator may be able to extend to other surgical procedures and settings. CHICAGO (June 1, 2021): Simulators have long been used for training surgeons and surgical teams, but traditional simulator platforms typically have a built-in limitation: they often simulate one or a limited ...

University of South Florida researchers recently developed a novel approach to mitigating electromigration in nanoscale electronic interconnects that are ubiquitous in state-of-the-art integrated circuits. This was achieved by coating copper metal interconnects with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), an atomically-thin insulating two-dimensional (2D) material that shares a similar structure as the "wonder material" graphene. Electromigration is the phenomenon in which an electrical current passing through a conductor causes the atomic-scale erosion of the material, eventually resulting in device failure. Conventional semiconductor technology addresses this challenge by using a barrier or liner material, but this takes up precious space on the wafer that could otherwise be used to pack in ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- In 1916 and 1917, a musician and book dealer named Giovanni Concina sold three ornately decorated seventeenth-century songbooks to a library in Venice, Italy. Now, more than 100 years later, a musicologist at Penn State has discovered that the manuscripts are fakes, meticulously crafted to appear old but actually fabricated just prior to their sale to the library. The manuscripts are rare among music forgeries in that the songs are authentic, but the books are counterfeit. Uncovering deception was not what Marica Tacconi, professor of musicology and associate ...

A new study carried out in pig cells suggests previous infection with swine influenza virus (SIV) can protect against the development of porcine respiratory coronavirus (PRCoV) if there is a zero- or three-day interval between infections. The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Virulence, may also be relevant to influenza and coronavirus infection in humans. Ju-Yi Peng of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover and colleagues used air liquid interface cultures of cells taken from pigs' windpipes to investigate the interactions between the two viruses. They found that prior infection by swine influenza virus completely inhibited coronavirus infection when the cells were infected ...

Berkeley -- Global land-use changes -- including forest fragmentation, agricultural expansion and concentrated livestock production -- are creating "hot spots" favorable for bats that carry coronaviruses and where conditions are ripe for the diseases to jump from bats to humans, finds an analysis published this week by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the Politecnico di Milano (Polytechnic University of Milan) and Massey University of New Zealand. While the exact origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remain unclear, scientists believe that the disease likely emerged when a virus that infects horseshoe bats was able to jump to humans, either ...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most common cause of chronic liver disease worldwide. NAFLD patients are at higher risk of developing Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which causes severe and chronic liver inflammation, fibrosis and liver damage. A patient with NASH is believed to be at high risk for developing a form of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Apart from lifestyle interventions, there are currently no approved treatments for NASH. A liver transplant is sometimes the only remedy. While risk factors for NASH (obesity, type-2 diabetes and gene mutations like PNPLA3) and HCC ...

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina--Researchers have discovered a gene, OTUD7A, that impacts the development of Ewing sarcoma, a bone cancer that occurs mainly in children. They have also identified a compound that shows potential to block OTUD7A protein activity. The finding, by scientists at the University of North Carolina and the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, appeared online June 1, 2021, in Advanced Science. About 250 children and young adults are diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma each year in the U.S. About half of those diagnosed will ultimately succumb to the disease, pointing to the need for better therapies. "Our primary research focus targeted the EWS-FLI1 fusion protein found in about 85 percent of Ewing sarcoma patients," said UNC Lineberger's ...

"SWOG always brings an impressive portfolio of work to the ASCO annual meeting," said SWOG Chair Charles D. Blanke, MD, "and this year I'm particularly excited about the research our investigators are presenting because it includes results that are likely to be practice-changing." Investigators will present 12 abstracts from SWOG-led or co-led studies and 11 abstracts from studies led by other groups within the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). Results from S1216 will be presented orally by study chair Neeraj Agarwal, MD, of the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah. S1216 compared androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) combined with TAK-700 to the standard ...

Quantum computing and quantum sensing have the potential to be vastly more powerful than their classical counterparts. Not only could a fully realized quantum computer take just seconds to solve equations that would take a classical computer thousands of years, but it could have incalculable impacts on areas ranging from biomedical imaging to autonomous driving. However, the technology isn't quite there yet. In fact, despite widespread theories about the far-reaching impact of quantum technologies, very few researchers have been able to demonstrate, using the technology available now, that quantum methods have an advantage over their classical counterparts. In a paper published on June 1 in the journal Physical Review X, University of Arizona researchers experimentally ...