ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Fibroid symptoms, such as heavy menstrual bleeding and abdominal pain, are increasingly driving women to the emergency room. In fact, tens of thousands of women were seen annually in the emergency department for the condition, which involves benign growths in the uterus, over a 12-year period. But only 1 in 10 of these visits led to a hospital admission, suggesting that many cases may have been managed in an alternative, non-urgent health setting, according to recent Michigan Medicine research. "Fibroids are often a chronic disease, so we have opportunities to treat this through established care with a trusted health provider. Yet, we've seen a big increase in women using the emergency room ...

While the term "supergene" may bring to mind the genetic hocus-pocus of Peter Parker's transformation into Spiderman, supergenes are actually fairly common phenomena in the realm of biology. A supergene refers to a genomic region containing multiple genes or genetic elements that are tightly linked, allowing genetic variants across the region to be co-inherited. Supergenes may arise when there is a clear benefit to inheriting specific combinations of biological traits together. Perhaps the most well-known examples of supergenes are sex chromosomes, which allow traits that are beneficial to the reproductive success of one sex to be co-inherited. In humans, this ...

(Boston)--Only a small subset of people who get a lung infection go on to become very sick yet who will become severely ill or why is unclear. This is now widely recognized in the context of COVID-19, where most people have mild or no illness while others with the same infection become extremely sick or even die. Researchers now have discovered that after recovering from a respiratory infection, new cells get deposited in lung tissue, persist there and then become antibody secreting cells very quickly if the lungs later get re-infected by something similar. "It is increasingly clear that our lungs contain their own specialized immune system, different from the immune system throughout the rest of the body," explained corresponding ...

In some environments there is no way for a seed to know for sure when the best time to germinate is. In spring, cues like light, temperature and water may suggest to seeds that conditions are optimal for germination, but a week later an unpredictable drought or frost could kill the emerging seedlings. So how does a plant make sure that all of its offspring are not killed at once by an ill-timed environmental stress following germination? There is evidence that some plant species produce seeds that germinate at different times to hedge their bets against this risk. Many species produce seeds that can enter a dormant state and exist in the soil for several years and some also produce seeds that germinate at different ...

Research by scientists from University of Southampton (UK) and the Central University of Jharkhand (India) and has shown the first COVID-19 lockdown in India led to an improvement in air quality and a reduction in land surface temperature in major urban areas across the country. The study found that travel and work restrictions imposed early in the pandemic resulted in a significant environmental improvement, due to an abrupt reduction in industrial activities and a major decrease in the use of land and air transport. The international team used data from a range of Earth Observation sensors, including those from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5p and NASA's MODIS sensors, to measure changes in surface temperature and atmospheric ...

Efforts to contain the novel coronavirus have caused lockdowns and school closures around the world. These efforts and policies have unfortunately cut off many children from valuable resources such as the opportunity for exercise, access to clean water and food, learning, and socialization. Therefore, the effects on mental health and behavior may be found not just in adults but children. However, studies published thus far have been limited to elucidating the mood of middle school and high school students and the conditions for which mood problems occur ...

Drinking straws are single use plastic products which will be subjected to a Europe-wide sales ban from 2021 onwards. This is stated in EU Directive 2019/904 from 5 June 2019. Consequently, alternative materials have to be established for the production of drinking straws as well as other frequently used products which predominantly were made of plastic so far. As set out in the EU Framework Regulation for food contact material (Regulation (EC) No. 1935/2004), objects that come into direct contact with food must be safe. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has appraised straw, silicone, metal, paper and paper-board, durum wheat, and glass for their suitability to replace plastic ...

Using a brain-training app helps people eat less junk food and lose weight, new research suggests. The Food Trainer (FoodT app) trains people to tap on images of healthy foods - but to stop when they see unhealthy snacks, creating an association between these foods and stopping. The new study, by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki, found that playing the game about once a day for a month led to an average one-point reduction of junk food consumption on an eight-point scale (the scale ranges from four or more items per day, to one or zero items per month). Overall, people who used the app more also ...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder caused by the death of dopaminergic neurons in a part of the brain (known as substantia nigra pars compacta), which leads to a deficit of dopamine (DA), one of the main neurotransmitters active in the central nervous system. Symptomatic treatment focuses on increasing the concentration of dopamine into the brain. However, dopamine is not directly administered, because it is unable to cross the so called blood-brain barrier, which prevents some of the substances circulating in the blood to penetrate into the nervous system. Thus, DA precursor levodopa (L-DOPA) -an amino-acid which participates ...

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Craig S. Carlson and Michiel Postema, from University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and Tampere University, Tampere, Finland discuss deep impact of superficial skin inking: acoustic analysis of underlying tissue. Skin tattoos are a common decoration, but profound scientific study on whether a skin tattoo alters the acoustic response from superficial tissues, and therefore from underlying tissue, was previously lacking; thus, any quantitative effects were unknown. This study is the first to investigate the nature of artifacts in ultrasound images, which have been observed to originate from tattooed skin. The work was conducted theoretically and experimentally using ...

June 1, 2021 -- Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, Brazil found that when health workers were trained to promote infant healthy feeding practices to pregnant women their children consumed less fats and carbohydrates at 3 years of age and had lower measures of body fat at the age of 6. The study is the first to show that the roots for obesity start in the first year of life, after mothers stop breastfeeding. The findings are published online in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics. "The first year after ...

Aging is associated with an overall decline in health and increased frailty, and is a major risk factor for multiple chronic diseases. Frailty syndrome, characterized by weakness, fatigue and low physical activity, affects more than 30% of the elderly population. Increasing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the aging process is a top priority to facilitate the development of interventions that will lead to the preservation of health and improvements on survival and lifespan. Cumulative evidence suggests that diet and metabolism are key targetable regulators of healthy lifespan. Prof. Haim Cohen, Director of the Sagol Healthy Human Longevity Center at Bar-Ilan University, ...

This is the main finding of new research involving more than 50,000 participants in 97 samples, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The findings show that the more extreme choices and decisions of men can be both positive and negative. "The question of whether men and women make systematically different choices and decisions is one on the most fundamental (and controversial) questions in psychological research," Associate Professor Stefan Volk from the University of Sydney Business School said. "We found men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, either acting very ...

Investigators from Trinity College Dublin, the Irish Mycobacteria Reference Laboratory, St James's Hospital, and the Department of Public Health HSE East believe tuberculosis (TB) care in Irish Prisons should be supported, considering the findings of their study which is published today (Tuesday, 1st June, 2021) in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. The study describes an investigation into a large outbreak of tuberculosis which occurred in an Irish prison in 2011. This resulted in 34 people contracting active TB from a single infectious case. The use of Whole Genome Sequencing enabled ...

Researchers working under the leadership of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have conducted the first precise and comprehensive measurements of sea level rises in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. A new method now makes it possible to determine sea level changes with millimeter accuracy even in coastal areas and in case of sea ice coverage. This is of vital importance for planning protective measures. For the billions of people who live in coastal areas, rising sea levels driven by climate change can pose an existential threat. "To protect people and infrastructure - for example by building flood protection structures, securing ports or making ...

Cells have to constantly adapt to their surroundings in order to survive. A sudden increase in the environmental levels of an osmolyte, such as salt, causes cells to lose water and shrink. In a matter of seconds, they activate a mechanism that allows them to recover their initial water volume and avoid dying. Finding out which genes are involved in surviving osmotic stress was the subject of a study led by the laboratories of Dr. Posas and Dr. de Nadal at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and Dr. Valverde at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in collaboration with a group led by Dr. Moffat from the University of Toronto (Canada). wide-genome genetic screening, the scientists discovered the central role of a gene known as LRRC8A in cellular ...

In a joint effort, ct.qmat scientists from Dresden, Rostock, and Würzburg have accomplished non-Hermitian topological states of matter in topolectric circuits. The latter acronym refers to topological and electrical, giving a name to the realization of synthetic topological matter in electric circuit networks. The main motif of topological matter is its role in hosting particularly stable and robust features immune to local perturbations, which might be a pivotal ingredient for future quantum technologies. The current ct.qmat results promise a knowledge transfer from electric circuits to alternative optical platforms, and have just been published in Physical Review Letters. Topological defect tuning in non-Hermitian systems At the center of the currently reported work is the ...

Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is used to disinfect minor cuts at home and for oxidative reactions in industrial manufacturing. Now, the pandemic has further fueled demand for this chemical and its antiseptic properties. While affordable at the grocery store, H2O2 is actually difficult and expensive to manufacture at scale. A team led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has demonstrated a more efficient and environmentally friendly method to produce H2O2, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "While the two ingredients--hydrogen and oxygen--are either inexpensive or freely available from the atmosphere, hydrogen peroxide is highly reactive and unstable, which makes it very hard to produce," said first author Tomas ...

TAMPA, Fla. - Moffitt Cancer Center, a national leader in cancer care and research and the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center based in Florida, is presenting new data from dozens of clinical research studies at this year's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, the world's largest clinical cancer research meeting. Moffitt investigators will lead 25 abstract presentations, five education sessions, two cancer-based panels and two clinical science symposia. The virtual meeting is June 4-8. Highlights include: Oral Presentations: Dr. Bijal Shah will ...

Physicists at the University of Bath in the UK, in collaboration with researchers from the USA, have uncovered a new mechanism for enabling magnetism and superconductivity to co-exist in the same material. Until now, scientists could only guess how this unusual coexistence might be possible. The discovery could lead to applications in green energy technologies and in the development of superconducting devices, such as next-generation computer hardware. As a rule, superconductivity (the ability of a material to pass an electrical current with perfect efficiency) and magnetism (seen at work in fridge magnets) make poor bedfellows because the alignment of the tiny electronic magnetic particles in ferromagnets ...

A catastrophic drop in atmospheric ozone levels around the tropics is likely to have contributed to a bottleneck in the human population around 60 to 100,000 years ago, an international research team has suggested. The ozone loss, triggered by the eruption of the Toba supervolcano located in present-day Indonesia, might solve an evolutionary puzzle that scientists have been debating for decades. "Toba has long been posited as a cause of the bottleneck, but initial investigations into the climate variables of temperature and precipitation provided no concrete ...

In interstellar dust clouds, turbulence must first dissipate before a star can form through gravity. A German-French research team has now discovered that the kinetic energy of the turbulence comes to rest in a space that is very small on cosmic scales, ranging from one to several light-years in extent. The group also arrived at new results in the mathematical method: Previously, the turbulent structure of the interstellar medium was described as self-similar - or fractal. The researchers found that it is not enough to describe the structure mathematically as a single fractal, a self-similar structure as known from the Mandelbrot set. Instead, they added several different fractals, so-called multifractals. The new methods can thus be used to resolve ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new state-of-the-art method for controlling how artificial intelligence (AI) systems create images. The work has applications for fields from autonomous robotics to AI training. At issue is a type of AI task called conditional image generation, in which AI systems create images that meet a specific set of conditions. For example, a system could be trained to create original images of cats or dogs, depending on which animal the user requested. More recent techniques have built on this to incorporate conditions regarding an image layout. This allows users to specify which types of objects they want to appear in particular places on the screen. ...

Amsterdam, June 1, 2021 - The Treatabolome project is a research initiative to develop a freely available, interoperable online platform dedicated to disseminating rare disease and gene-specific treatment information to healthcare professionals regardless of their level of specialized expertise. Developed under the Solve-RD European Research Project, it is intended to reduce treatment delays for patients with rare diseases by directly linking diagnosis and treatment information. This initiative is highly relevant to neuromuscular disorders as they are rare diseases by definition. In this special issue of the Journal of Neuromuscular Diseases, experts contribute Treatabolome-feeding systematic literature reviews on rare neurological ...

Neutrons - Space ice, un-Earthly cold Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully created amorphous ice, similar to ice in interstellar space and on icy worlds in our solar system. They documented that its disordered atomic behavior is unlike any ice on Earth. The findings could help interpret data from future NASA missions such as Europa Clipper, which will assess the habitability of Jupiter's moon, Europa. Using the Spallation Neutron Source's SNAP instrument, the scientists replicated the cold vacuum of space and added a few molecules ...