DALLAS - May 21, 2021 - One member of a large protein family that is known to stop the spread of bacterial infections by prompting infected human cells to self-destruct appears to kill the infectious bacteria instead, a new study led by UT Southwestern scientists shows. However, some bacteria have their own mechanism to thwart this attack, nullifying the deadly protein by tagging it for destruction. The findings, published online today in Cell, could lead to new antibiotics to fight bacterial infections. And insight into this cellular conflict could shed light on a number of other conditions in which this protein is involved, including asthma, Type 1 diabetes, primary biliary cirrhosis, and Crohn's disease. "This ...

OKLAHOMA CITY AND DENMARK - Campylobacter infection, one of the most common foodborne illnesses in the Western world, can also be spread through sexual contact, according to a new research discovery by an OU Hudson College of Public Health faculty member, working in conjunction with colleagues in Denmark. The team's research has been published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is the first known study to prove this mode of transmission for Campylobacter. During a time when COVID-19 has dominated news about infectious diseases, the research is a reminder that many other pathogens affect lives around the world every day. The study was led by infectious disease epidemiologist Katrin ...

Over 20 Indonesian islands mysteriously disappear. One of the world's deadliest criminal syndicates rises to power. Eight cities the size of New York will be built every year for the next three decades. What connects them is sand, embedded in the concrete of nearly all of the world's buildings, roads, and cities, the glass in the windows, laptops and phone screens, and COVID-19 vaccine vials. The unexamined true costs of sand - broadly, construction aggregates production -- has spurred a group of scientists to call for a stronger focus on understanding the physical dimension of sand use and extraction. They also suggest new ways to achieve economic and environmental justice. Four years ago, an international group of scientists, including two from Michigan State University (MSU), called ...

What The Study Did: Medication use among hospitalized patients for COVID-19-related treatment in a large university health care system was examined in this study. Authors: Jonathan H. Watanabe, Pharm.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, School of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.10775) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: ...

What The Study Did: Oregon's Reproductive Health Equity Act ensured coverage for family planning (abortion and contraception) using state funds for all low-income state residents regardless of citizenship status. Researchers in this study describe the first two years of abortion services covered and the distances traveled by women to receive care. Authors: Maria I. Rodriguez, M.D., M.P.H., of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.0402) Editor's ...

What The Study Did: Variation in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and socioeconomic disadvantage among a Mayan-Latinx population in Fruitvale, California, was examined in this study. Authors: Paul Wesson, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.10789) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

What The Study Did: This observational study found no association between long-term dietary intake of gluten and cognitive function among a large group of middle-age women without celiac disease. Authors: Andrew T. Chan, M.D., M.P.H., of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.13020) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. #  ...

One trait shared by all humans is that they don't remember specific life episodes that occurred before the age of 3 or 4. Many scientists have attributed this so-called "infantile amnesia" to a lack of development in the hippocampus, an area of the brain located in the temporal lobe that is crucial to encoding memory. However, a new brain imaging study by Yale scientists shows that infants as young as three months are already enlisting the hippocampus to recognize and learn patterns. The findings were published May 21 in the journal Current Biology. "A fundamental mystery ...

Irvine, Calif. - A record of medicine utilization patterns assembled by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the UC San Diego School of Medicine reveals the thought, care and scientific rigor clinicians at UC Health medical centers applied in their treatment of patients with COVID-19 in 2020. For a study published today in Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, the investigators examined data on the usage rates of 10 different medicines and medicine categories to map how drugs were used on people hospitalized with the viral infection. The authors got their data ...

Micropollutants such as steroid hormones contaminate drinking water worldwide and pose a significant threat to human health and the environment even in smallest quantities. Until now, easily scalable water treatment technologies that remove them efficiently and sustainably have been lacking. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) developed a new chemical process for removing hormones. It takes advantage of the mechanisms of photocatalysis and transforms the pollutants into potentially safe oxidation products. The team reports on this in the scientific ...

The findings of a clinical trial by Trinity College Dublin researchers of treatment for atopic dermatitis have been published today in The Lancet journal (Friday, 21st May, 2021). Results of the clinical trial at the School of Medicine, Trinity College and St James's Hospital, Dublin have shown the drug upadacitinib to be the most effective treatment to date for this chronic, relapsing inflammatory condition. The research is vital as there is an unmet need which exists for therapies that provide remission of symptoms in moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis. The publication reports efficacy and safety results of upadacitinib compared with placebo for the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis in adults and adolescents. This pivotal Global Phase ...

An international study led by the ICTA-UAB states that recognizing indigenous peoples' and local communities' rights and agency is critical to addressing the current biodiversity crisis Policies established by the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) could be ineffective if the rights and agency of indigenous peoples and local communities are not recognized and fully incorporated into biodiversity management. This is supported by an international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and recently published in the journal Ambio. The ...

Scientists at the Ural Federal University (UrFU, Russia) have created clay bricks that are able to attenuate ionizing radiation to a level that is safe for the human body. To the composition of bricks scientists add waste from the industry, which protects against radiation. The article describing the technology was published in the journal Applied Radiation and Isotopes. "Bricks are a relatively cheap and convenient material with which we can quickly erect protective rooms, structures, walls around objects with radiation," says scientific head of the project, associate professor of the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources at UrFU Oleg Tashlykov. "The bricks ...

Chronic skin itching drives more people to the dermatologist than any other condition. In fact, the latest science literature finds that 7% of U.S. adults, and between 10 and 20% of people in developed countries, suffer from dermatitis, a common skin inflammatory condition that causes itching. "Itch is a significant clinical problem, often caused by underlying medical conditions in the skin, liver, or kidney. Due to our limited understanding of itch mechanisms, we don't have effective treatment for the majority of patients," said Liang Han, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Biological Sciences who is also a researcher in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Until ...

When Charles Darwin published Descent of Man 150 years ago, he launched scientific investigations on human origins and evolution. This week, three leading scientists in different, but related disciplines published "Modern theories of human evolution foreshadowed by Darwin's Descent of Man," in Science, in which they identify three insights from Darwin's opus on human evolution that modern science has reinforced. "Working together was a challenge because of disciplinary boundaries and different perspectives, but we succeeded," said Sergey Gavrilets, lead author and professor in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Their goal with this review summary was to apply the framework ...

CLEVELAND - Follow-up data from the landmark SPRINT study of the effect of high blood pressure on cardiovascular disease have confirmed that aggressive blood pressure management -- lowering systolic blood pressure to less than 120 mm Hg -- dramatically reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, and death from these diseases, as well as death from all causes, compared to lowering systolic blood pressure to less than 140 mm Hg. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) is the upper number in the blood pressure measurement, 140/90, for example. In findings published in the May 20, 2021 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators presented new evidence of the effectiveness of reducing SBP to a target range of less than 120 ...

Depressive disorders are among the most frequent illnesses worldwide. The causes are complex and to date only partially understood. The trace element lithium appears to play a role. Using neutrons of the research neutron source at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), a research team has now proved that the distribution of lithium in the brains of depressive people is different from the distribution found in healthy humans. Lithium is familiar to many of us from rechargeable batteries. Most people ingest lithium on a daily basis in drinking water. International studies have shown that ...

Beijing, 19 May 2021: the journal Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA) has just published a new issue, Volume 5 Issue 4. This issue brings together important research from leading cardiologists in US and China in a combination of reviews, original research and case reports. REVIEWS Pei Huang, Yi Zhang, Yi Tang, Qinghua Fu, Zhaofen Zheng, Xiaoyan Yang and Yingli Yu Progress in the Study of the Left Atrial Function Index in Cardiovascular Disease: A Literature Review (https://tinyurl.com/3vruva37) Nikhil H. Shah, Steven J. Ross, Steve A. Noutong Njapo, Justin Merritt, Andrew Kolarich, Michael Kaufmann, ...

Social scientists have had a longstanding fixation on moral character, demographic information, and socioeconomic status when it comes to analyzing crime and arrest rates. The measures have become traditional markers used to quantify and predict criminalization, but they leave out a crucial indicator: what's going on in the changing world around their subjects. An unprecedented longitudinal study, published today in the American Journal of Sociology, looks to make that story more complete and show that when it comes to arrests it can come down to when someone is rather than who someone is, a theory the researchers refer to as the birth lottery of history. Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson and Ph.D. candidate Roland Neil followed arrests in the lives of more than ...

Paleontologists had to adjust to stay safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many had to postpone fossil excavations, temporarily close museums and teach the next generation of fossil hunters virtually instead of in person. But at least parts of the show could go on during the pandemic -- with some significant changes. "For paleontologists, going into the field to look for fossils is where data collection begins, but it does not end there," said Christian Sidor, a University of Washington professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology ...

When one of the largest modern earthquakes struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi automatically shut down, as designed. The emergency systems, which would have helped maintain the necessary cooling of the core, were destroyed by the subsequent tsunami. Because the reactor could no longer cool itself, the core overheated, resulting in a severe nuclear meltdown, the likes of which haven't been seen since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Since then, reactors have improved exponentially in terms of safety, sustainability and efficiency. Unlike the light-water reactors at Fukushima, which had liquid coolant and uranium ...

"Abominable mystery" -- the early origin and evolution of angiosperms (flowering plants) was such described by Charles Robert Darwin. So far, we still have not completely solved the problem, and do not know how the earth evolved into such a colorful and blooming world. Recently, a new angiosperm was reported based on numerous exceptionally well-preserved fossils from the Lower Cretaceous of Jiuquan Basin, West Gansu Province, Northwest China. The new discovery is the earliest and unique record of early angiosperms in Northwest China. The study has been accepted for publication in the journal National Science Review and is currently available online at https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwab084. The new angiosperm was named Gansufructus saligna, and all the fossil specimens ...

Atmospheric ozone, which can regulate the amount of incoming ultraviolet radiation on the Earth's surface, is important for the atmospheric environment and ecosystems. Tropospheric ozone, primarily originating from photochemical reactions, is the third most prominent greenhouse gas causing climate warming. A research team led by Dr. Jinqiang Zhang from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences tried to analyze vertical ozone distributions and explore the influence of deep stratospheric intrusions and wildfires on ozone variation in the northern Tibetan Plateau (TP) during the Asian summer monsoon period. Their findings were published in Atmospheric Research. Ozone variation over the TP can influence weather and climate change. ...

Researchers from the University of Surrey have revealed a new method that enables common laboratory scanning electron microscopes to see graphene growing over a microchip surface in real time. This discovery, published in ACS Applied Nano Materials, could create a path to control the growth of graphene in production factories and lead to the reliable production of graphene layers. Dispensing with the use of expensive bespoke systems, the new technique not only produces graphene sheets reliably but also allows to use fast-acting catalysts that reduce growth times from several hours to only a few minutes. With the use of video imagining, the team from Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) have shown graphene growing over an iron catalyst, using a silicon nitride ...

Sloughed off skin and bodily fluids are things most people would prefer to avoid. But for marine biologist like Cheryl Lewis Ames, Associate Professor of Applied Marine Biology in the Graduate School of Agricultural Science at Tohoku University (Japan), such remnants of life have become a magical key to detecting the unseen. Any organism living in the ocean will inevitably leave behind traces containing their DNA - environmental DNA (eDNA) - detectable in water samples collected from the ocean Only recently has molecular sequencing technology become ...