In a world that's changing fast, the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network can seem almost an anachronism. Yet the patience and persistence that have generated 40 years of careful, reliable science about the Earth's changing ecosystems may prove to be just what's needed in this rapidly shifting world. We can't wait for a crystal ball -- and we don't have to. By harnessing decades of rich data, scientists are beginning to forecast future conditions and plan ways to manage, mitigate, or adapt to likely changes in ecosystems that will impact human economies, health and wellbeing. The National Science Foundation established the LTER Network more than 40 years ago to provide an alternative to funding models that favored constant innovation over continuity. The model has proven to be extraordinarily ...

An international study has found that four out of five women in prison in Scotland have a history of head injury, mostly sustained through domestic violence. Published recently in The Lancet, researchers, including SFU psychology graduate student Hira Aslam, say the study has important implications for the female prison population more broadly and could help to inform mental health and criminal justice policy development. "The findings are incredibly sobering," says Aslam. "While we anticipated that the incidence of head injuries among women who are involved in the criminal justice system would be high, these estimates exceeded our expectations." Researchers also found that violent criminal behaviour was three times more likely among women who had a history of significant head injury, ...

ATS 2021, New York, NY - Air quality standards recommended by the American Thoracic Society (ATS) have the potential to prevent more illness and death than standards adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to research presented at the ATS 2021 International Conference. Laura Gladson, MS, a research scholar with the Air Quality Program at the Marron Institute of Urban Management, New York University (NYU) and colleagues from NYU and the ATS assessed differences between the potential public health protections provided by EPA air quality standards and the more stringent standards proposed by the ATS. Comparing real-world ...

Two components of imagination -- constructing and evaluating imagined scenarios -- rely on separate subnetworks in the default mode network, according to research recently published in JNeurosci. Even when you aren't doing anything, your brain is hard at work. The default mode network (DMN) activates during the brain's resting state and has been linked to daydreaming, planning, and imagining the future. In previous studies, scientists noticed the DMN could be divided into two subnetworks, ventral and dorsal, but their different roles were debated. Lee et al. used fMRI to measure participants' brain activity while they imagined scenarios listed on prompts, like "Imagine you win the lottery." The scenarios ...

KINGSTON, R.I. - May 17, 2021 - An article recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, written by University of Rhode Island END ...

Clinicians and surgeons are increasingly using medical devices based on artificial intelligence. These AI devices, which rely on data-driven algorithms to inform health care decisions, presently aid in diagnosing cancers, heart conditions and diseases of the eye, with many more applications on the way. Given this surge in AI, two Stanford University faculty members are calling for efforts to ensure that this technology does not exacerbate existing heath care disparities. In a new perspective paper, Stanford faculty discuss sex, gender and race bias in medicine and how these biases could be perpetuated by AI devices. The authors suggest several short- and long-term approaches to prevent AI-related ...

BOSTON - Peripheral artery disease (PAD), or blockages in the arteries outside of the heart, affects more than 200 million people worldwide and 12.5 million people in the United States. Patients with this circulatory disorder may develop severe leg pain or unhealing wounds that require a minimally invasive revascularization procedure to open the blood vessels to improve blood flow. For nearly a decade, proceduralists and surgeons have depended on devices coated with a drug called paclitaxel -- which reduces the need for another procedure by up to 50 percent -- during procedures to open the arteries of the leg. However, in the wake of a 2018 study that found a potential link between ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio ­- Up to 38.6% of people with colon cancer who have a hereditary cancer syndrome--including 6.3% of those with Lynch syndrome--could have their conditions remain undetected with current universal tumor-screening methods, and at least 7.1% of people with colorectal cancer have an identifiable inherited genetic mutation, according to new data published by scientists at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James). Experts say their data, which was gathered from a cohort of more than 3,300 colorectal cancer patients treated at 51 hospitals across Ohio, makes a strong scientific argument for implementing multi-gene panel ...

A team of Welsh academics has developed a new method of supporting health professionals to make clinical decisions about people who may be at risk of taking their own lives. While the UK may have one of the lowest rates of suicide in the world, it is still the biggest cause of death in men under 45, so being able to make a Structured Professional Judgement about who might attempt suicide and knowing how to intervene is vitally important. Researchers at Swansea and Cardiff universities have put together the Risk of Suicide Protocol (RoSP) which guides a professional to look at 20 aspects of a person's life known ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 17, 2021) - Researchers have known for some time that insulin plays a vital role in regeneration and growth in some types of neurons that relay environmental sensory information to our brains, such as sight. However, they know relatively little about the role of insulin in the sense of smell. Now, investigators at the Monell Chemical Senses Center have shown that insulin plays a critical role in the maturation, after injury, of immature olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). The team published their findings in eNeuro earlier this month. "Our findings suggest ...

One of the projected effects of a warming climate for species living on mountain slopes is moving their distributions upslope as their habits shift upwards. Eventually, since mountains have a limit to their elevation, a species may have no more habitat to move up to and therefore go extinct. Tracking how and where this is happening is tough, though, if you don't have a good idea of where the species are now. That's the situation in places such as Africa, which have tremendous biodiversity but spotty ecological baseline data. So University of Utah researchers set out to assess the status of bird species in Ethiopia's Bale Mountains through six years' worth of bird banding efforts at five sites. The sites spanned ...

Mothers who are Hispanic or who come from rural or low socioeconomic status neighborhoods are less likely to have their child's critical heart condition diagnosed before birth, according to a new study in the journal Circulation. This is the largest and most geographically diverse study of these challenges to date. The study compared patient data of more than 1,800 children from the United State and Canada diagnosed with two of the most common, and the most serious, critical congenital heart defects: hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS), when the left side of the heart is not developed completely, and transposition of ...

Patients with chronic kidney disease and Type 2 diabetes who took the experimental drug finerenone were about 30% less likely to develop the heart rhythm disorder atrial fibrillation (AFib) than those taking a placebo, according to data presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. Last year, researchers reported that the trial, called FIDELIO-DKD, met its primary endpoint showing a significant benefit of finerenone, a nonsteroidal, selective mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, in terms of a composite of sustained decrease in kidney function, kidney failure and renal death. The new analysis reveals that patients derived these benefits regardless of their history with AFib and suggests that taking finerenone also reduced the rate of ...

A subgroup of patients who experienced an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) that did not respond to standard advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), were immediately transported to a cardiac care center, and placed on a device similar to a heart-lung bypass machine were more likely to have survived with good brain function six months later than similar patients who received standard care at the site where the OHCA occurred. The study was presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. "This study--the largest randomized clinical trial that has been conducted to address this question--shows that a hyperinvasive ...

The ocean is a big place with many deep, dark mysteries. Humans have mapped no more than 20% of the sea, and explored less. Even the kelp forests of Southern California -- among the best studied patches of ocean on the planet -- hide species not yet described by science. Now, UC Santa Barbara's Thomas Turner has published a paper in the journal Zootaxa describing four new species of sponges. These novel specimens weren't dredged from the murky depths or found on some distant seamount, but collected locally from popular dive spots. The study brings Turner's new species count to five, and the scientist believes there may be dozens yet to discover and describe along the West ...

Southern lesser galagos (Galago moholi), a species of primate that lives in southern Africa, boast big, round eyes and are so small they can fit in your hand. A new study from an international team of scientists, however, suggests that there may be a downside to their cuteness: The trade in lesser galagos, also known as bushbabies, which some people keep as pets, may have shifted the genetics within their wild populations over the span of decades, according to the research. Those changes could undercut the ability of the critters to adapt as human farms and cities grow throughout the region. The study was published recently in the journal Primates and ...

Alcohol appears to have an immediate--or near-immediate--effect on heart rhythm, significantly increasing the chance that an episode of atrial fibrillation (AFib) will occur, according to new data presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. The data revealed that just one glass of wine, beer or other alcoholic beverage was associated with twofold greater odds of an episode of AFib occurring within the next four hours. Among people having two or more drinks in one sitting, there was a more than threefold higher chance of experiencing AFib. Using an alcohol sensor placed on participants' ankles, which passively monitored alcohol intake, the investigators ...

As Covid-19 spread around the world, stock markets in individual countries took a major hit - yet stock markets in China where the disease first struck avoided significant falls - researchers at Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software found. A research paper Immune or at-risk? Stock markets and the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic by a Lero team based at University of Limerick confirmed that the growth in COVID-19 cases largely explained changes in stock prices, but surprisingly did not have the same impact in China or on the global index ...

Top experts from Brigham and Women's Hospital presented outcomes from some of the most-anticipated clinical trials in cardiology at the virtual American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. In four Late-Breaking Clinical Trial presentations, Brigham cardiologists shared their latest findings on strategies to prevent future cardiovascular events in at-risk patient populations, results of a randomized clinical trial of a statin drug among patients critically ill with COVID-19, and more. ...

On Sept. 9, 2018, astronomers spotted a flash from a galaxy 860 million light years away. The source was a supermassive black hole about 50 million times the mass of the sun. Normally quiet, the gravitational giant suddenly awoke to devour a passing star in a rare instance known as a tidal disruption event. As the stellar debris fell toward the black hole, it released an enormous amount of energy in the form of light. Researchers at MIT, the European Southern Observatory, and elsewhere used multiple telescopes to keep watch on the event, labeled AT2018fyk. To their surprise, they observed that as the ...

The entire ecosystem of the planet, including humans, depends on clean water. When carbonate rock weathers, karst areas are formed, from which around a quarter of the world's population obtains its drinking water. Scientists have been studying how quickly pollutants can reach groundwater supplies in karst areas and how this could affect the quality of drinking water. An international team led by Junior Professor Dr. Andreas Hartmann of the Chair of Hydrological Modeling and Water Resources at the University of Freiburg compared the time it takes water to seep down from the surface to the subsurface with the time it takes for pollutants to decompose ...

Among patients with both heart failure and atrial fibrillation (AFib), treatment strategies focused on controlling the heart rhythm (using catheter ablation) and those focused on controlling the heart rate (using drugs and/or a pacemaker) showed no significant differences in terms of death from any cause or progression of heart failure, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. The trial was stopped early and, as a result, has limited statistical power to reveal differences between the two treatment approaches; however, trends observed in the study suggest the type of heart failure a patient has may influence which approach is optimal, researchers said. Heart failure is a condition ...

Irvine, Calif., May 17, 2021 -- Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollution emitted by human activities are responsible for increases in the frequency, intensity and duration of droughts around the world, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In a study published recently in Nature Communications, scientists in UCI's Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering showed that over the past century, the likelihood of stronger and more long-lasting dry spells grew in the Americas, the Mediterranean, western and southern Africa and eastern Asia. "There has always been natural variability in drought events around the world, but our research shows the clear human influence on drying, specifically from anthropogenic aerosols, carbon dioxide and other ...

DETROIT (May 17, 2021) - A national study on childhood asthma led by Henry Ford Health System has found that family history, race and sex are associated in different ways with higher rates of asthma in children. In a study published in JAMA Pediatrics (hyperlink goes here), researchers found that children with at least one parent with a history of asthma had two to three times higher rates of asthma, mostly through age 4. They also reported that asthma rates in black children were much higher than white children during their preschool years, but the rates of incidence dropped in black children after age 9, while they increased for white children later in childhood. "These findings help us ...

Archaeologists at Northern Arizona University are hoping a new technology they helped pioneer will change the way scientists study the broken pieces left behind by ancient societies. The team from NAU's Department of Anthropology have succeeded in teaching computers to perform a complex task many scientists who study ancient societies have long dreamt of: rapidly and consistently sorting thousands of pottery designs into multiple stylistic categories. By using a form of machine learning known as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the archaeologists created a computerized method that roughly emulates the thought processes of the human mind in analyzing visual information. ...