HOUSTON - (Feb. 22, 2021) - Governments with strong female representation are more likely to deliver on campaign promises, according to new research from Rice University. "The Effects of Women's Descriptive Representation on Government Behavior" by author Jonathan Homola, an assistant professor of political science at Rice, examines campaign promises and subsequent policymaking by parties in power in 10 European countries, the United States and Canada along with data on women in party leadership and elected offices. The study also showed that promises are even more likely to be kept when women in government assume leadership roles. Homola said the research demonstrates the importance of women playing part in the ...

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found that transitioning land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to bioenergy agriculture can be advantageous for American landowners, the government, and the environment. Land enrolled in the CRP cannot currently be used for bioenergy crop production, wherein high-yielding plants (like miscanthus and switchgrass) are harvested for conversion into marketable bioproducts that displace fossil fuel- and coal-based energy. Established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1985, the CRP incentivizes landowners to retire environmentally ...

A new study by an international team of researchers found that adults with Down syndrome are more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population, supporting the need to prioritize vaccinating people with the genetic disorder. Investigators found that adults with Down syndrome were roughly three times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the general population. This increased risk was especially apparent in from fifth decade of life: A 40-year-old with Down syndrome had a similar risk of dying from COVID-19 as someone 30 years older in the general population. The study was published this week in The Lancet's ...

Strokes are a leading cause of poor quality of life or even death in Japan and the world over. Since its characterization, several researchers have been working tooth and nail to identify drug-accessible and effective therapeutic targets for this debilitating condition. One such region of interest for drug targets is the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is a structure located around the brain, which prevents the entry of unnecessary circulating cells and biomolecules into the brain. The blood vessels in the BBB are coated with a distinct and protective layer of sugar, called the endothelial glycocalyx, which prevents their entry. However, in the event of a stroke, which results in the blockage or severance of blood vessels in the brain, studies have shown that this ...

Skoltech researchers have designed a software-based algorithm for synchronizing time across smartphones that can be used in practical tasks requiring simultaneous measurements. This algorithm can essentially help turn several devices into a full-fledged network of sensors. The paper was published in the journal Sensors. If you want a network of intelligent devices - say, an array of cameras capturing a dynamic scene or another kind of network of sensors - to work properly, one of the fundamental tasks you have to solve is clock synchronization: all devices should have the same timeline, often up to sub-millisecond for the more challenging tasks. Modern smartphones can easily be used as multipurpose ...

Female physicians have better patient outcomes compared with their male peers, while female patients are less likely to receive guideline-recommended care when treated by a male physician, according to a systematic review from the American College of Cardiology's Cardiovascular Disease in Women section published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. While women make up over 50% of internal medicine residents, only 12.6% of cardiologists are female. A dedicated effort to increase diversity in the cardiovascular field could help to lower implicit bias, often considered an important factor in health care disparities. In a detailed systematic review, researchers looked at 13 studies ...

A new study from UCLA and Stanford University researchers finds that three-dimensional human stem cell-derived organoids can mature in a manner that is strikingly similar to human brain development. For the new study, published in Nature Neuroscience February 22, senior authors Dr. Daniel Geschwind of UCLA and Dr. Sergiu Pasca of Stanford University conducted extensive genetic analysis of organoids that had been grown for up to 20 months in a lab dish. They found that these 3D organoids follow an internal clock that guides their maturation in sync with the timeline of human development. "This is novel -- Until now, nobody has grown and characterized these organoids for this amount ...

A trio of recent studies highlight the need to incorporate behavioral and social science alongside the study of biological mechanisms in order to slow aging. The three papers, published in concert in Ageing Research Reviews, emphasized how behavioral and social factors are intrinsic to aging. This means they are causal drivers of biological aging. In fact, the influence of behavioral and social factors on how fast people age are large and meaningful. However, geroscience--the study of how to slow biological aging to extend healthspan and longevity--has traditionally not incorporated ...

Reno, Nev. (Feb. 22, 2021)- Normally, we think of the freezing point of water as 32°F - but in the world of weather forecasting and hydrologic prediction, that isn't always the case. In the Lake Tahoe region of the Sierra Nevada, the shift from snow to rain during winter storms may actually occur at temperatures closer to 39.5°F, according to new research from the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Lynker Technologies, and citizen scientists from the Tahoe Rain or Snow project The new paper, which published this month in Frontiers in Earth Science, used data collected by 200 volunteer weather spotters to identify the temperature cutoff between rain and snow in winter storms that occurred during the ...

Long before COVID-19 entered the picture, West Virginia had been battling two other major public health crises: opioids and HIV. Dr. Sally Hodder, a leading infectious disease expert at West Virginia University, believes that despite the threat of COVID-19, the opioid and HIV epidemics should not be ignored. The two have become so intertwined in the Mountain State, that they must be treated together, she said. "We cannot try to solve the opioid epidemic or our emerging HIV epidemic by combating them separately," said Hodder, who serves as director of the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute and associate vice president ...

In order to remember similar events, the brain exaggerates the difference between them. This results in divergent brain activity patterns but better memory performance, according to new research published in JNeurosci. Memory is subjective. Different people recall the same event in unique ways, and people exaggerate the difference between similar events in their own life. Yet this type of bias can be advantageous when it helps the brain distinguish between similar things and prevent confusion. In a study by Zhao et al., participants memorized different sets of faces paired with colored objects. Some ...

The cover for issue 46 of Oncotarget features Figure 6, "Establishment of a SARS-CoV-2 pseudovirus that expresses SPIKE protein variants on the envelope of a lentiviral core, infection of human airway epithelial cells or lung cancer cells, and demonstration of MEKi attenuation of infectivity on primary human cells," published in "MEK inhibitors reduce cellular expression of ACE2, pERK, pRb while stimulating NK-mediated cytotoxicity and attenuating inflammatory cytokines relevant to SARS-CoV-2 infection" by Zhou, et al. which reported that Natural Killer cells and innate-immune TRAIL ...

Walk along the beach after a winter storm and you'll see a shore littered with wracks of giant kelp, some 30 to 40 feet long -- evidence of the storm's impact on coastal kelp forests. Less apparent to the casual beachgoer is what happens to the submarine forests after the storm's fury dies down. This is precisely the topic of a new study led by Raine Detmer(link is external), a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. She developed a mathematical model describing the effects of severe storms on kelp forest ecosystems, particularly the seafloor, or benthic, communities. The research, published in Ecology (link is external), reveals an ecosystem whose variability is key to its diversity. Giant kelp ...

Graphs -- data structures that show the relationship among objects -- are highly versatile. It's easy to imagine a graph depicting a social media network's web of connections. But graphs are also used in programs as diverse as content recommendation (what to watch next on Netflix?) and navigation (what's the quickest route to the beach?). As Ajay Brahmakshatriya summarizes: "graphs are basically everywhere." Brahmakshatriya has developed software to more efficiently run graph applications on a wider range of computer hardware. The software extends GraphIt, a state-of-the-art graph programming language, to ...

Understanding how the immune system responds to acute brain hemorrhage could open doors to identifying treatments for this devastating disease. However, up until now, there has been limited information on inflammation in the brain from human patients, especially during the first days after a hemorrhagic stroke. This led a team of researchers to partner with a large clinical trial of minimally-invasive surgery to tackle defining the human neuroinflammatory response in living patients. "Our goal was to find out, for the first time, how certain key cells of the immune system are activated when they enter the brain after a hemorrhage and how this may shift over the first week. This ...

For only the second time, astronomers have linked an elusive particle called a high-energy neutrino to an object outside our galaxy. Using ground- and space-based facilities, including NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, they traced the neutrino to a black hole tearing apart a star, a rare cataclysmic occurrence called a tidal disruption event. "Astrophysicists have long theorized that tidal disruptions could produce high-energy neutrinos, but this is the first time we've actually been able to connect them with observational evidence," said Robert Stein, a doctoral student at the German Electron-Synchrotron (DESY) research center in ...

In a time of extreme political polarization, hearing that a political candidate has taken a stance inconsistent with their party might raise some questions for their constituents. Why don't they agree with the party's position? Do we know for sure this is where they stand? New research led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln political psychologist Ingrid Haas has shown the human brain is processing politically incongruent statements differently -- attention is perking up -- and that the candidate's conviction toward the stated position is also playing a role. In other words, there is a stronger neurological response happening when, for example, a Republican takes a position favorable to new taxes, ...

Abu Dhabi, UAE, February 22, 2021: Learning more about what motivates people to join violent ideological groups and engage in acts of cruelty against others is of great social and societal importance. New research from Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYUAD Jocelyn Bélanger explores the idea of ideological obsession as a form of addictive behavior that is central to understanding why people ultimately engage in ideological violence, and how best to help them break this addiction. In the new study, END ...

Establishing a consistent sleep schedule for a toddler can be one of the most challenging aspects of child rearing, but it also may be one of the most important. Research findings from a team including Lauren Covington, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware School of Nursing, suggest that children with inconsistent sleep schedules have higher body mass index (BMI) percentiles. Their findings, published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, suggest sleep could help explain the association between household poverty and BMI. "We've known for a while that physical activity and diet quality are very strong predictors of weight and BMI," said Covington, the lead author of the article. "I think it's really highlighting that ...

February 22, 2021 - Widely used medications for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) - also known as enlarged prostate - may be associated with a small, but significant increase in the probability of developing heart failure, suggests a study in The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is pub lished in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. The risk is highest in men taking a type of BPH medication called alpha-blockers (ABs), rather than a different type called 5-alpha reductase inhibitors (5-ARIs), according to the new research by D. Robert Siemens, MD, and ...

Oncotarget recently published in "MEK is a promising target in the basal subtype of bladder cancer" by Merrill, et al. which reported that while many resources exist for the drug screening of bladder cancer cell lines in 2D culture, it is widely recognized that screening in 3D culture is more representative of in vivo response. To address the need for 3D drug screening of bladder cancer cell lines, the authors screened 17 bladder cancer cell lines using a library of 652 investigational small-molecules and 3 clinically relevant drug combinations in 3D cell culture. Their goal was to identify compounds and classes of compounds with efficacy in bladder cancer. Utilizing ...

An international team of scientists, including two from Oregon State University, conducted a biological assessment of the world's rivers and the limited data they found presents a fairly bleak picture. "For the places that we have data, the situations are not really that good. There are many species that are declining, threatened or endangered," said Bob Hughes, co-author of the paper and a courtesy associate professor in Oregon State's Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. "But for most of the globe, there just is little rigorous data." The work by Hughes and the ...

By analyzing 50 years' worth of coral reef biodiversity studies, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on February 22 have quantified the practice of "parachute science," which happens when international scientists, typically from higher-income countries, conduct field studies in another, typically lower-income country, without engaging with local researchers. They found that institutions from several lower-middle- and upper-middle-income countries with abundant coral reefs produced less research than institutions based in high-income countries with fewer or in some cases no reefs. They also found that host-nation scientists (scientists from the nations where field research was conducted) were ...

Corn--or maize--has changed over thousands of years from weedy plants that make ears with less than a dozen kernels to the cobs packed with hundreds of juicy kernels that we see on farms today. Powerful DNA-editing techniques such as CRISPR can speed up that process. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor David Jackson and his postdoctoral fellow Lei Liu collaborated with University of Massachusetts Amherst Associate Professor Madelaine Bartlett to use this highly specific technique to tinker with corn kernel numbers. Jackson's lab is one of the first to apply CRISPR to corn's very complex ...

Tracing back a ghostly particle to a shredded star, scientists have uncovered a gigantic cosmic particle accelerator. The subatomic particle, called a neutrino, was hurled towards Earth after the doomed star came too close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of its home galaxy and was ripped apart by the black hole's colossal gravity. It is the first particle that can be traced back to such a 'tidal disruption event' (TDE) and provides evidence that these little understood cosmic catastrophes can be powerful natural particle accelerators, as the team led by DESY scientist Robert Stein reports in the journal Nature Astronomy. The observations also demonstrate the power of exploring the cosmos via ...