PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Humans have made a remarkable impact on the planet, from clearing forests for agriculture and urbanization to altering the chemistry of the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Now, a new study in the journal Nature reveals for the first time the extent of human impact on the global water cycle. The study used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) to assemble the largest ever dataset of seasonal water levels in more than 227,000 lakes, ponds and reservoirs worldwide. The data reveal that even though human-managed reservoirs comprise only a small percentage of all water bodies, they account for 57% of the total seasonal water storage changes globally. "We ...

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cardiff University say they have found the strongest evidence yet of a "migration gene" in birds. The team identified a single gene associated with migration in peregrine falcons by tracking them via satellite technology and combining this with genome sequencing. They say their findings add further evidence to suggest genetics has a strong role to play in the distance of migration routes. The study, published today in the journal Nature, also looks at the predicted effect of climate change on migration - and how this might interact with evolutionary factors. The researchers tagged 56 Arctic peregrine falcons and tracked their journeys by satellite, following their annual flight distances and directions in detail. They found the studied ...

At the beginning of an immune response, a molecule known to mobilize immune cells into the bloodstream, where they home in on infection sites, rapidly shifts position, a new study shows. Researchers say this indirectly amplifies the attack on foreign microbes or the body's own tissues. Past studies had shown that the immune system regulates the concentration of the molecule, sphingosine 1 phosphate (S1P), in order to draw cells to the right locations. The targeted cells have proteins on their surface that are sensitive to levels of this molecule, enabling them to follow the molecule's "trail," researchers say. S1P concentration gradients, for instance, can guide immune T cells to either stay in lymph nodes, connected glands in which these cells mature, or move into blood ...

New research shows 64 countries cut their fossil CO2 emissions during 2016-2019, but the rate of reduction needs to increase tenfold to meet the Paris Agreement aims to tackle climate change. This first global stocktake by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Stanford University and the Global Carbon Project examined progress in cutting fossil CO2 emissions since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Their results show the clear need for far greater ambition ahead of the important UN climate summit in Glasgow in November (COP26). The annual cuts of 0.16 billion tonnes of CO2 are only 10 ...

SPOKANE, Wash. - The researchers' findings showed that participants who were given A low-cost, easy-to-administer intervention that uses small prizes and other incentives to reward alcohol abstinence can serve as an effective tool to reduce alcohol use among American Indian and Alaska Native communities, new research suggests. Published today in JAMA Psychiatry, the study tested a culturally adapted version of an intervention known as contingency management in American Indian and Alaska Native adults diagnosed with alcohol dependence, a severe form of ...

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was a 34% increase in alcohol withdrawal (AW) rates among hospitalized patients at ChristianaCare, according to a research letter published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study is believed to be the first to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol withdrawal among hospitalized patients. The retrospective study conducted at ChristianaCare, one of the largest health systems in the mid-Atlantic region, found that the rate of alcohol withdrawal in hospitalized patients was consistently higher in 2020 compared to both 2019 and the average of 2019 and 2018. "Our findings are relevant nationally and serve as a clarion call to alert ...

What The Study Did: Whether alcohol withdrawal rates among hospitalized patients with alcohol use disorder increased during the COVID-19 pandemic was examined in this study. Authors: Ram A. Sharma M.D., of Christiana Care in ,Newark, Delaware, 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.2021.0422) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: Researchers in this randomized clinical trial examined the effectiveness of incentives offered for laboratory-confirmed abstinence from alcohol among American Indian and Alaska Native adults diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Authors: Michael G. McDonell, Ph.D., of Washington State University in Spokane, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.4768) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding and support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...

What The Study Did: This study combined the results of 27 studies with 10,000 participants to investigate the association between cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes and high blood pressure and cognitive impairment in people with schizophrenia. Authors: Christoph U. Correll, M.D., of the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0015) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest ...

Water levels in the world's ponds, lakes and human-managed reservoirs rise and fall from season to season. But until now, it has been difficult to parse out exactly how much of that variation is caused by humans as opposed to natural cycles. Analysis of new satellite data published March 3 in Nature shows fully 57 percent of the seasonal variability in Earth's surface water storage now occurs in dammed reservoirs and other water bodies managed by people. "Humans have a dominant effect on Earth's water cycle," said lead author Sarah Cooley, a postdoctoral scholar ...

Researchers from Bremen, together with their colleagues from the Max Planck Genome Center in Cologne and the aquatic research institute Eawag from Switzerland, have discovered a unique bacterium that lives inside a unicellular eukaryote and provides it with energy. Unlike mitochondria, this so-called endosymbiont derives energy from the respiration of nitrate, not oxygen. "Such partnership is completely new," says Jana Milucka, the senior author on the Nature. "A symbiosis that is based on respiration and transfer of energy is to this date unprecedented". In general, among eukaryotes, symbioses ...

An international research group led by the University of Basel has developed a promising strategy for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Using two different viruses as vehicles, they administered specific tumor components in experiments on mice with cancer in order to stimulate their immune system to attack the tumor. The approach is now being tested in clinical studies. Making use of the immune system as an ally in the fight against cancer forms the basis of a wide range of modern cancer therapies. One of these is therapeutic cancer vaccination: following diagnosis, specialists set about determining which components of the tumor could function as an identifying feature for the immune system. The patient is then administered ...

The universe was created by a giant bang; the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and then it started to expand. The expansion is ongoing: it is still being stretched out in all directions like a balloon being inflated. Physicists agree on this much, but something is wrong. Measuring the expansion rate of the universe in different ways leads to different results. So, is something wrong with the methods of measurement? Or is something going on in the universe that physicists have not yet discovered and therefore have not taken into account? It could very well be the latter, according to several physicists, i.a. Martin S. Sloth, Professor of Cosmology at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). In a new scientific article, he and his SDU ...

A new software tool allows researchers to quickly query datasets generated from single-cell sequencing. Users can identify which cell types any combination of genes are active in. Published in Nature Methods on 1st March, the open-access 'scfind' software enables swift analysis of multiple datasets containing millions of cells by a wide range of users, on a standard computer. Processing times for such datasets are just a few seconds, saving time and computing costs. The tool, developed by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, can be used much like a search engine, as users can input free text as well as gene names. Techniques to sequence the genetic material from an individual cell have advanced ...

Information is encoded in data. This is true for most aspects of modern everyday life, but it is also true in most branches of contemporary physics, and extracting useful and meaningful information from very large data sets is a key mission for many physicists. In statistical mechanics, large data sets are daily business. A classic example is the partition function, a complex mathematical object that describes physical systems at equilibrium. This mathematical object can be seen as made up by many points, each describing a degree of freedom of a physical system, that is, the minimum number of data that can describe all of its properties. An ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Boron, a metalloid element that sits next to carbon in the periodic table, has many traits that make it potentially useful as a drug component. Nonetheless, only five FDA-approved drugs contain boron, largely because molecules that contain boron are unstable in the presence of molecular oxygen. MIT chemists have now designed a boron-containing chemical group that is 10,000 times more stable than its predecessors. This could make it possible to incorporate boron into drugs and potentially improve the drugs' ability to bind their targets, the researchers say. "It's an entity ...

Judging by its massive, bone-crushing teeth, gigantic skull and powerful jaw, there is no doubt that the Anteosaurus, a premammalian reptile that roamed the African continent 265 to 260 million years ago - during a period known as the middle Permian - was a ferocious carnivore. However, while it was previously thought that this beast of a creature - that grew to about the size of an adult hippo or rhino, and featuring a thick crocodilian tail - was too heavy and sluggish to be an effective hunter, a new study has shown that the Anteosaurus would have been able to outrun, track down and kill its prey effectively. Despite its name and fierce appearance, ...

When the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted in April 2010, air traffic was interrupted for six days and then disrupted until May. Until then, models from the nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centres (VAACs) around the world, which aimed at predicting when the ash cloud interfered with aircraft routes, were based on the tracking of the clouds in the atmosphere. In the wake of this economic disaster for airlines, ash concentration thresholds were introduced in Europe which are used by the airline industry when making decisions on flight restrictions. However, a team of researchers, ...

The planet Mars has no global magnetic field, although scientists believe it did have one at some point in the past. Previous studies suggest that when Mars' global magnetic field was present, it was approximately the same strength as Earth's current field. Surprisingly, instruments from past Mars missions, both orbiters and landers, have spotted patches on the planet's surface that are strongly magnetized--a property that could not have been produced by a magnetic field similar to Earth's, assuming the rocks on both planets are similar. Ahmed AlHantoobi, an intern working with Northern Arizona University planetary scientists, assistant professor Christopher Edwards and postdoctoral ...

PITTSBURGH, March 3, 2021 - Women who experience an accelerated accumulation of abdominal fat during menopause are at greater risk of heart disease, even if their weight stays steady, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health-led analysis published today in the journal Menopause. The study--based on a quarter century of data collected on hundreds of women--suggests that measuring waist circumference during preventive health care appointments for midlife women could be an early indicator of heart disease risk beyond the widely used body mass index (BMI)--which is a calculation of weight vs. height. "We need to shift gears on how we think about heart disease risk in women, particularly as they approach and go through menopause," said senior ...

A review of nearly 28,000 emergency department records shows less than 2% of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 suffered an ischemic stroke but those who did had an increased risk of requiring long-term care after hospital discharge. Those are the findings from a study conducted by researchers from the University of Missouri School of Medicine and MU Health Care. The researchers teamed up with the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics and the Tiger Institute for Health Innovation to review data from 54 health care facilities. They found 103 patients (1.3%) developed ischemic stroke among 8,163 patients with COVID-19. ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 3, 2021) - According to a new study published in Medical Care, improving hospital nurse staffing as proposed in pending legislation in New York state would likely save lives. The cost of improving nurse staffing would be offset by savings achieved by reducing hospital readmissions and length of hospital stays. Researchers at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, conducted independent research in early 2020 on whether pending nurse staffing legislation in New York state is in the public's interest. The study of 116 hospitals and 418,000 Medicare patients documented large differences in patient-to-nurse ratios by hospital from an average of 4.3 patients for each nurse to as many ...

SALT LAKE CITY - Utah researchers report significant new insights into the development of blood cancers. In work published today in Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, scientists describe an analysis of published data from more than 7,000 patients diagnosed with leukemia and other blood disorders. Their findings provide new clues about mutations that may initiate cancer development and those that may help cancer to progress. The researchers sought to identify mutation hotspots, or frequent changes ...

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL...March 3, 2021 - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Researchers (BGU) have found for the first time that cigarette smoke toxicity impacts the protective biofilm in the lungs, particularly concerning when paired with COVID-19 respiratory issues. Though many health factors are known about smoking, little is known about the overall toxicity potential of its ingredients. Researchers developed a new smoke testing system called a bacterial panel with genetically modified bioluminescent bacteria to measure both filtered and unfiltered cigarette smoke's complex molecular mixture. According to the new study published in the journal Talanta, the researchers found that cigarette smoke affects communication between bacteria, which can affect microorganisms ...

HAMILTON, ON, March 3, 2021 -- Evolutionary forces drive a glaring gender imbalance in the occurrence of many health conditions, including autism, a team of genetics researchers has concluded. The human genome has evolved to favour the inheritance of very different characteristics in males and females, which in turn makes men more vulnerable to a host of physical and mental health conditions, say the researchers responsible for a new paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution. Their analysis shows that while there are certain conditions that occur only in women (cervical cancer and ovarian cancer, for example), or much more frequently in women (such as multiple sclerosis), men are more prone to medical conditions overall and, as a result, on average die sooner than ...