Bone turnover markers, and specifically bone resorption markers, are commonly used to monitor patients' response to pharmacological treatment and adherence. In 2011, the Joint Committee on Bone Marker Standards of the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) and the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC) designated Procollagen type I N-propeptide (PINP) and the C-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (ß-CTX) in blood as reference bone turnover markers for bone formation and bone resorption, respectively, in osteoporosis. ...

Peer deeper into the heart of the atom than any microscope allows and scientists hypothesize that you will find a rich world of particles popping in and out of the vacuum, decaying into other particles, and adding to the weirdness of the visible world. These subatomic particles are governed by the quantum nature of the Universe and find tangible, physical form in experimental results. Some subatomic particles were first discovered over a century ago with relatively simple experiments. More recently, however, the endeavor to understand these particles has spawned the largest, most ambitious and complex experiments in the world, including ...

An international team of researchers has found that three commonly used antiviral and antimalarial drugs are effective in vitro at preventing replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The work also underscores the necessity of testing compounds against multiple cell lines to rule out false negative results. The team, which included researchers from North Carolina State University and Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, looked at three antiviral drugs that have proven effective against Ebola and the Marburg virus: tilorone, quinacrine and pyronaridine. "We were looking for compounds that could block the entry of the virus into the cell," says Ana Puhl, senior scientist at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals and ...

Scientists investigating the genetics of chilli pepper species have discovered a whole host of new chilli hybrids that can be grown by crossing domesticated peppers with their wild cousins. This will allow plant breeders to create new varieties that have better disease resistance and could increase productivity. Despite their huge world-wide culinary appeal, chillies are relatively difficult to cultivate, being prone to disease and sensitive to growing conditions. There are 35 species of pepper in the Capsicum family, including five domesticated species. The most well-known ...

The process of fabricating materials is complicated, time-consuming and costly. Too much of one material, or too little, can create problems with the product, forcing the design process to begin again. Advancements in the design process are needed to reduce the cost and time it takes to produce materials with targeted properties. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers at Texas A&M University are using advanced computational and machine-learning techniques to create a framework capable of optimizing the process of developing materials, cutting time and costs. "Our general focus ...

Curtin University research has uncovered the first solid clues about the very beginning of the supercontinent cycle of Earth, finding it was kick-started two billion years ago. Detailed in a paper published in Geology, a team of researchers from Curtin's Earth Dynamics Research Group found that plate tectonics operated differently before two billion years ago, and the 600 million years supercontinent cycle likely only started during the second half of Earth's life. Lead researcher Dr Yebo Liu from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences said that the shift in plate tectonics marked a regime change in the Earth System. "This regime change impacted on the eventual emergence of complex life and even ...

The talented athletes are there. The cheering fans are there. But the media? It's nowhere to be found. This is the reality of women's sports, which continue to be almost entirely excluded from television news and sports highlights shows, according to a USC/Purdue University study published on March 24th in Communication & Sport. The survey of men's and women's sports news coverage has been conducted every five years since 1989. In the latest study, researchers found that 95% of total television coverage as well as the ESPN sports highlights show SportsCenter focused on men's sports in 2019. They saw a similar lopsidedness ...

A research group at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) has found that glycans--sugar molecules--play an important role in the structural changes that take place when the virus which causes COVID-19 invades human cells. Their discovery, which was based on supercomputer-based simulations, could contribute to the molecular design of drugs for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. The research was published in the Biophysical Journal. When SARS-CoV-2--the coronavirus that causes COVID-19--invades a human cell, a spike protein on its surface binds to an enzyme called ACE2 on the surface of the cell. The ...

Osaka, Japan - Scientists from the Division of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Engineering at Osaka University employed deep learning artificial intelligence to improve mobile mixed reality generation. They found that occluding objects recognized by the algorithm could be dynamically removed using a video game engine. This work may lead to a revolution in green architecture and city revitalization. Mixed reality (MR) is a type of visual augmentation in which real-time images of existing objects or landscapes can be digitally altered. As anyone who has played Pokémon Go! or similar games knows, looking at a smartphone ...

Osaka, Japan - Most of the devices used in our daily lives are operated and controlled by electricity. From the standpoint of safety and the tight supply and demand of electricity, circuit design that satisfies low electromagnetic noise and power saving is becoming increasingly important. In an electric circuit, electric signals transmit inside the conductor, and electromagnetic fields radiate outside the conductor. Furthermore, the electromagnetic field propagates through the air and is converted into signals for itself and other circuits, which leads to electromagnetic noise. Now, a research team at Osaka University has formulated a numerical method ...

At the bottom of the world, there's a small island about four kilometers off the coast of Antarctica. In summer, temperatures climb to freezing with uninterrupted daylight for two months. In winter, they fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius without a single sunrise for two months. It is isolated and desolate, uninhabitable to all humans -- except for the Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE). Almost every year since 1956, a JARE team winters over on the island, staying in Syowa Station, from February to January to conduct various research projects. From 2004 to 2014, however, they were also research subjects themselves. As part of a joint project between the National Institute of Polar Research at the Research Organization of Information and Systems ...

Materials science likes to take nature and the special properties of living beings that could potentially be transferred to materials as a model. A research team led by chemist Professor Andreas Walther of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has succeeded in endowing materials with a bioinspired property: Wafer-thin stiff nanopaper instantly becomes soft and elastic at the push of a button. "We have equipped the material with a mechanism so that the strength and stiffness can be modulated via an electrical switch," explained Walther. As soon as an electric current is applied, the nanopaper becomes soft; when the current flow stops, it regains its strength. From an application perspective, this switchability could be interesting for damping ...

Tokyo, Japan - Scientists from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo calculated the efficiency of the sensory network that bacteria use to move towards food and found it to be optimal from an information theory standpoint. This work may lead to a better understanding of bacterial behavior and their sensory networks. Despite being single-celled organisms, bacteria such as E. Coli can perform some impressive feats of sensing and adaptation in constantly changing environmental conditions. For example, these bacteria can sense the presence of a chemical ...

Imbued with special electric, mechanical and other physical properties due to their tiny size, nanofibers are considered leading-edge technology in biomedical engineering, clean energy and water quality control, among others. Now, researchers in Italy and UK have developed an automatic process to assess nanofiber fabrication quality, producing 30% more accurate results than currently used techniques. Details were published on January 2021 in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint publication of the IEEE and the Chinese Association of Automation. "In recent years, nanostructured materials have gained continuously growing interest both in scientific and industrial contexts, because of their research appeal and versatile applications," ...

SMN or in full Survival Motor Neuron: Professor Utz Fischer has been analyzing this protein and the large molecular complex of the same name, of which SMN is one of the building blocks, for many years. He holds the Chair of the Department of Biochemistry at the Julius-Maximilian's University of Würzburg (JMU), and he first discovered the molecule during his search for the root cause of spinal muscular atrophy. As scientists found out a few years ago, this disease is caused by a lack of the SNM complex. The work group around Prof. Fischer has now succeeded in presenting a first three-dimensional model of the ...

In a ground-breaking first, researchers have fabricated 3D scaffold implants containing antibiotics at high temperatures. These scaffolds not only support bone regeneration but manage the bone infections that can arise as a result of injury or surgery. Each year, around 4 million people worldwide develop bone infection following an open fracture or surgery. The gold standard treatment consists of a lengthy antibiotic therapy, usually delivered orally or Intravenously, and the removal of infected bone tissue, which often leaves behind a hole too large for the body to fill via normal bone regeneration. In a study published in the KeAi journal Bioactive Materials, a group of researchers from the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, outline a new treatment ...

A genetic variation that regulates iron metabolism may enhance athletes' endurance performance, researchers at the University of Toronto have shown. The findings could help explain studies that show an association between the genetic variation and elite athletes across many sports, and may help competitive athletes fine-tune their iron intake to boost performance. The variation, found in the homeostatic iron regulator (HFE) gene, is a known cause of iron overload, a condition called hemochromatosis in which the body absorbs too much iron leading to organ and joint damage. Athletes at risk for hemochromatosis but with iron stores below potentially toxic levels could have ...

Bacteria plucked from a desert plant could help crops survive heatwaves and protect the future of food. Global warming has increased the number of severe heatwaves that wreak havoc on agriculture, reduce crop yields and threaten food supplies. However, not all plants perish in extreme heat. Some have natural heat tolerance, while others acquire heat tolerance after previous exposure to higher temperatures than normal, similar to how vaccines trigger the immune system with a tiny dose of virus. But breeding heat tolerant crops is laborious and expensive, and slightly warming entire fields is even trickier. There is growing interest in harnessing microbes to protect plants, and biologists have shown that root-dwelling bacteria can help their herbaceous ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identify biomaterials that can be used to modulate liver immune cell behavior Tokyo, Japan - Biomaterials are substances, natural or manmade, that are used in medicine to interact with the human body for various purposes, such as wound healing and tissue regeneration. Previous work on biomaterials has shown that they can affect cells in many ways, including how they grow, move, and the type of cell they develop into. Scientists have recently begun investigating biomaterials with properties that can be fine-tuned to optimize their use in regenerative ...

Usually scaled, the skin of fish can also be naked or made up of bony plates that form an armour, sometimes even covered with teeth. But how has this skin evolved over the ages? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have reconstructed the evolution of the protective skin structures in fish, going back to the common ancestor of ray-finned fish, more than 420 million years ago. They found that only fish that had lost their scales were able to develop a bony armour, and that the protective state of their skin influenced their choice of open water or sea floor habitats. This study, published in the journal Evolution Letters, provides a new explanation for the incredible ...

In spring 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit Finland, older adults drastically reduced their out-of-home activities. During the period of government restrictions, physical exercise was the most common reason to leave home, a recent study at the University of Jyväskylä Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences finds. "In spring 2020, it was feared that the closure of many activity destinations and the recommendations to avoid close contact with persons from other households put in place by the government would decrease physical activity levels, and thus, negatively affect older adults' physical functional capacity," Senior ...

The tiger shark is one of the largest predatory sharks known today. This shark is a cosmopolitan species occurring in all oceans worldwide. It is characterized by a striped pattern on its back, which is well marked in juveniles but usually fades in adults. The fossil history of modern sharks reaches back to the Permian, about 295 million years ago. Complete fossil shark skeletons are very rare - the skeleton, which consists almost entirely of cartilage, is only preserved under very special circumstances during the fossilization processes. Due to the lifelong continuous tooth replacement, most extinct sharks are therefore only known by their well-mineralized teeth, which, nonetheless, can provide deep insights into their evolutionary history. The ...

Heavy elements known as the actinides are important materials for medicine, energy, and national defense. But even though the first actinides were discovered by scientists at Berkeley Lab more than 50 years ago, we still don't know much about their chemical properties because only small amounts of these highly radioactive elements (or isotopes) are produced every year; they're expensive; and their radioactivity makes them challenging to handle and store safely. But those massive hurdles to actinide research may one day be a thing of the past. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have demonstrated how a world-leading ...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a pathological condition characterized by excessive fat stored in the liver that is not attributed to heavy alcohol consumption, which can lead to liver failure and even cancer. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, and high cholesterol levels are all risk factors for this disease, and like the global prevalence of obesity, the prevalence of NAFLD is coincidently expected to rise as well. It is therefore critical for clinicians to handle effective tools for diagnosing NAFLD. The current standard method for diagnosis is analysis of liver biopsy ...

Researchers led by TMDU fabricate a material that will aid bone healing, help medical practitioners clearly assess the full damage to bones after an injury, and clarify probable patient outcomes Tokyo, Japan - Bone repair wasn't generally successful until the late 1800s. Until then, there were few options to repair major bone damage. Most materials don't have the functionality of bone and don't support blood vessels growing through them. Repair materials such as clay were commonly used yet often failed. In 1892, medical practitioners started using gypsum--calcium ...