Chronic stress could be the prevailing condition of our time. In the short term, our jaws or stomachs may clench; in the long term, stress can lead to metabolic disease and speed up diseases of aging, as well as leading to more serious psychological disorders. The physical manifestations of stress originate in the brain, and they move along a so-called "stress axis" that ends in the adrenal glands. These glands then produce the hormone cortisol. When the stress axis is continually activated, changes occur in the cells and organs along the way, and the continual production of cortisol then substantially contribute the symptoms of chronic stress. The stress response axis starts with the hypothalamus in the brain, ...

Scientists say stable seafood consumption amongst the world's poorer coastal communities is linked to how local habitat characteristics influence fishing at different times of the year. In the coastal communities of low-income countries, the seafood people catch themselves is often a main food source. In a new study, scientists focused on an often-overlooked type of fishing called gleaning: collecting molluscs, crabs, octopus and reef fish by hand close to shore. "We surveyed 131 households in eight coastal communities on a small island off Timor-Leste," said study lead author Ruby Grantham from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Grantham said even though gleaning is important for food security ...

(Boston)--There have been great advances in treating melanoma over the past five years, however, even with these treatments many patients quickly develop drug resistance and die from their disease. A new study from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has discovered that a drug (YK-4-279) that was previously created to target one specific type of protein has much broader use against a family of proteins that act to promote melanoma. "We find that this drug inhibited melanoma from becoming more aggressive in human cells and in experimental models. We also found a specific pathway that this drug acts through to be anti-cancer: inhibiting proteins that drive genes that promote cancer cell growth and metastasis," ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Antarctic ice is melting, contributing massive amounts of water to the world's seas and causing them to rise - but that melt is not as linear and consistent as scientists previously thought, a new analysis of 20 years' worth of satellite data indicates. The analysis, built on gravitational field data from a NASA satellite system, shows that Antarctica's ice melts at different rates each year, meaning the models scientists use to predict coming sea level rise might also need adjusting. "The ice sheet is not changing with a constant rate - it's more complicated than a linear change," said Lei Wang, assistant professor ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas have developed and demonstrated a new approach for designing photonic devices. The advance allows them to control the direction and polarization of light from thin-film LEDs, paving the way for a new generation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. "This is a fundamentally new device architecture for photonic devices," says Franky So, corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "And we've demonstrated that, using our approach, directional and polarized emissions from an organic LED or a perovskite LED without external optical elements can be realized." So is the ...

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and their collaborators found that inhaling unfragmented hyaluronan improves lung function in patients suffering from severe exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Hyaluronan, a sugar secreted by living tissue that acts as a scaffold for cells, is also used in cosmetics as a skin moisturizer and as a nasal spray to moisturize lung airways. Utilized as a treatment, hyaluronan shortened the amount of time COPD patients in intensive care needed breathing support, decreased their number of days in the hospital, and saved money by reducing their hospital stay. The study, published online in Respiratory Research, is a good example of how examining the impacts of environmental pollution on the lungs can ...

Self-control significantly affects well-being and objective success in life. Although many agree that a high degree of self-control is beneficial, helping people develop more self-control is a tricky challenge. Self-control training, like training in any domain, is affected by the basic question of whether a person is motivated to improve self-control. Recent work has found that people differ as to how strongly they desire better self-control, and reveals some of the factors affecting this desire. Desire for self-control (DSC) reflects a wish to have an improved self-control ability. This desire is influenced by societal or cultural ...

HOUSTON - (Feb. 1, 2021) - When aboveground storage tanks fail during a storm and their toxic contents spread, the threat to human health can and probably will flow downwind of the immediate area. Rice University engineers have developed a model to quantify what could happen when a hurricane or other natural disaster causes such damage based on data gathered from the Houston Ship Channel, the largest petrochemical complex in the United States, during and after two hurricanes, Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017. Pollutants like toxic organic chemicals evaporate ...

There is a considerable gap in our current understanding of gift-giving because much of what has been studied has focused on gift-giving as an affair between just two consumers--a single giver and a recipient. Little is known about the impact other gifts have on the recipient of the gifts, even though some of the most common occasions for giving a gift, such as birthdays, the winter holidays, Mothers' and Fathers' Day, graduations, bridal showers, baby showers, bachelor and bachelorette parties, going away parties, and retirement parties, all typically involve a recipient receiving gifts from several different givers. Researchers from ...

(DENVER--February 1, 2021, 10:00 a.m. EST) The first comprehensive, prospective study of smoking habits in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were enrolled in a phase III early-stage trial revealed that there was a high rate of smoking reduction and cessation following study entry, according to research published today in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. The JTO is the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer. Continued smoking after a lung cancer diagnosis is associated with an approximate ...

Good news: The bacteria living on your toothbrush reflect your mouth - not your toilet. After studying microbial communities living on bristles from used toothbrushes, Northwestern University researchers found those communities matched microbes commonly found inside the mouth and on skin. This was true no matter where the toothbrushes had been stored, including shielded behind a closed medicine cabinet door or out in the open on the edge of a sink. The study's senior author, Erica Hartmann, was inspired to conduct the research after hearing concerns that flushing a toilet might generate a cloud of aerosol particles. She ...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU sector) cover the 24% of global emissions, representing the second hot spot in the contribution to climate change after the energy sector. The main drivers are CO2 emissions from deforestation, methane (CH4) emissions produced by ruminant livestock and by anaerobic fermentation of organic matter, mainly from rice crops, and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from fertilizer use. Thus, the land sector plays a crucial role in the contribution to climate change. A new study lead by the CMCC Foundation explores to which extent sustainable land management options applied at small-scale rural landscape level can be a valuable solution for increasing the mitigation potential of the land sector. ...

That is the question that Prof. Alan Deidun, resident academic within the Department of Geosciences of the Faculty of Science, along with a cohort of high-profile co-authors, posed within a study recently published in the Microplastics and Nanoplastics journal. Specifically, the study overviews a plethora of marine litter monitoring survey data available for different regions of the world ocean, as well as modelling data, in order to answer this compelling question. The study, whose lead author is renowned litter researcher Dr Francois Galgani from IFREMER, concludes that, despite the well-known increase in the volume of plastics making their way ...

The impact of ozone on soybean production can be predicted more accurately thanks to improvements to a computer modelling system. Surface ozone is a pollutant that affects plant growth by entering leaves and reducing the rate of photosynthesis, and rising ozone levels could severely limit production of crops including soy. Being able to estimate this damage on soybean production using a "climate-vegetation model" is vital for predicting global and regional soy yields in the future. This study uses results from a field experiment in the USA, which found that a normal ozone level of 10ppm/h (AOT40) could reduce soybean yield by 10%. At extreme ozone levels - comparable to those observed on very polluted days in some parts of the world - soybean production fell to less than ...

Increases in life expectancy in the UK and elsewhere had slowed even before 2016 - and COVID-19 is expected to further eliminate any gains, Newcastle University studies show. After 2011, over the post-financial crisis period the authors find that the UK performed poorly, in almost all measures, compared to the 28 countries of the European Union (EU28). Life expectancy at birth, and age 65, in the UK were increasing rapidly in 2008 but slowed around 2011 and Germany, Portugal and France showed evidence of a similar slowing. Furthermore, years of good health, called Healthy Life Years, at birth in the UK decreased, whereas it increased in most EU28 countries. The UK experienced a period ...

Using salt as a key ingredient, Chinese and British researchers have designed a new type of rechargeable battery that could accelerate the shift to greener, electric transport on our roads. Many electric vehicles (EV) are powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they can lose energy and power over time. Under certain conditions, such batteries can also overheat while working or charging, which can also degrade battery life and reduce miles per charge. To solve these issues, the University of Nottingham is collaborating with six scientific ...

The year 2020 played host to an uncharacteristically large number of natural disasters. The year began with large wildfires in the Amazon rainforest and Australia. A series of wildfires broke out in the American states of California during summer and Oregon in September 2020. In particular, the Oregon wildfire intensified to an uncontrollable extent and was spread over a wide area by strong gusts of wind that carried it forward. These unseasonably strong winds may have been stoked by an unexpected source: typhoons on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. In late August and early September, three storms--Bavi, Mayask, and Haishen--occurred just two weeks apart in the Korean peninsula, causing floods, mudslides, and several casualties. In a recently ...

T-cells are an important component of our immune system: with the receptors they carry on their surface, they can recognise highly specific antigens. Upon detection of an intruder, an immune response is triggered. It is still unclear exactly what happens when antigens are recognised: How many antigens are necessary to elicit an immune response, and does the response depend on their spatial arrangement? These effects take place in the nanometer range - on the size scale of molecules, far below what can be seen with ordinary microscopes. To study all this, tiny tools are needed. Therefore, an unusual method was used at TU Wien: DNA molecules were folded in an ingenious way, similar to the paper folding ...

Students from lower socio-economic groups (SEG) are less likely to participate in sport or physical activity at university, research from Sheffield Hallam University has found. The main barriers affecting participation were found to be down to cost of being part of a sports team, lack of time due to academic commitments, part-time working or their social life taking precedence and limited prior knowledge of and participation in sport before starting university. Funded by British Universities and Colleges Sport and published in the peer-reviewed Sport, Education and Society journal, the study surveyed over 700 students from 20 universities and found those that had participated in sport and physical ...

A collaboration between the Pericàs group with Prof. Timothy Noël and Dr. Paola Riente at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, The Netherlands), has crystallised in a Nature Communications paper where they provide key insight into the chemical nature of the true photocatalyst involved in the Bi2O3-driven atom-transfer radical addition (ATRA) reaction. Back in 2014, ICREA professors Miquel Pericàs and Emilio Palomares together with former postdoctoral researcher Dr. Riente published a paper on Angewandte Chemie International Edition pioneering the research on organic transformations in mild reactions conditions ...

The work of the research group under the guidance of Professor Leonid Martyushev (co-authors: Roman Bando and Evgenia Chervontseva) will help to predict the behavior of fluids in various environments. "When oil wells are depleted, water is pumped there under pressure to force the residual oil to the surface. If the interface between water and oil were an even layer, then it would be safe to say that as a result of water injection we recover all the residual oil. But since the interface between the two liquids is a highly distorted section, oil, contrary to expectations, can still remain underground, while water comes out to the surface. This is where our calculations come in ...

The coronavirus crisis has led to some of the general public developing a critical view of the current food consumption model, as shown by a recent survey by the Catalan Consumer Agency, which reveals that 60.5% of all Catalans tend to think that the pandemic will promote more responsible, sustainable and fair consumption. Moreover, the various lockdowns have caused a significant increase in online shopping throughout Spain, with a 92% rise in volume and a 114.5% rise in value, according to aggregated consumption data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. This change in shopping habits and the awareness of the food model may also ...

The human body strives to keep itself in homeostasis, or balance. When blood clots are created, the body's innate response is to break the clots down to prevent significant health problems from arising. Research has found that patients with COVID-19 are prone to serious blood clotting. This is why many patients receive high dose anticoagulants as part of their treatment. But a new study in Scientific Reports, led by senior author Daniel Lawrence, Ph.D., a Professor of Basic Research in Cardiovascular Medicine at Michigan Medicine, found that aside ...

New research by Swansea University scientists found that boat ramps facilitate the dispersal of the highly invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha). To contain the dispersion of this invasive species Dr Marta Rodriguez-Rey and co-authors suggest in the new study, that strict control measures and target monitoring around boat ramps should be implemented. Invasive bivalves are a problem as they can cause widespread environmental damage, and eradication has proved difficult. The zebra mussel is one of the most damaging invasive bivalves - it reproduces fast, disperses widely, and damages the economy. In Great Britain, £5 million are lost each year due to pipe fouling and damage to water infrastructures caused ...

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles decorated by gold absorb about 96% of the solar spectrum and turn it into heat. The material can accelerate the evaporation in desalination plants up to 2.5 times and can track hazardous molecules and compounds. An international research team with representatives from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), ITMO University, and the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a related article in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. Access to safe water is included in the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Children's Fund (UNICEF) addressed the problem in 2019 report, noting that 2.2 ...