Muscle weakness in patients with Becker disease is caused by unusual electrical activity in muscle fibres termed 'plateau potentials' that make them temporarily inactive, says a study published today in eLife. An understanding of these mechanisms and the ion channels involved may help the search for more effective therapies for weakness in Becker disease and other muscle diseases, and help understand how electrical activity is regulated in muscles. Recessive myotonia congenita, also known as Becker disease, is a heritable skeletal muscle disease caused by mutated chloride ...

New interfacial superconductor has novel properties that raise new fundamental questions and might be useful for quantum information processing or quantum sensing. Interfaces in solids form the basis for much of modern technology. For example, transistors found in all our electronic devices work by controlling the electrons at interfaces of semiconductors. More broadly, the interface between any two materials can have unique properties that are dramatically different from those found within either material separately, setting the stage for new discoveries. Like semiconductors, superconducting materials have many important implications for technology, from magnets for MRIs to speeding up electrical connections or perhaps making possible quantum technology. The ...

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2021 -- If a base station in a local area network tries to use a directional beam to transmit a signal to a user trying to connect to the network -- instead of using a wide area network broadcast, as base stations commonly do -- how does it know which direction to send the beam? Researchers from Rice University and Brown University developed a link discovery method in 2020 using terahertz radiation, with high-frequency waves above 100 gigahertz. For this work, they deferred the question of what would happen if a wall or other reflector nearby creates a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) path from the base station to the receiver and focused on the simpler situation where ...

The COVID-19 vaccine isn't having any trouble attracting suitors. But there's another, older model that's been mostly ignored by the young men of America: the HPV vaccine. Using data from the 2010-2018 National Health Interview Surveys, Michigan Medicine researchers found that just 16% of men who were 18 to 21 years old had received at least one dose of the HPV vaccine at any age. In comparison, 42% of women in the same age bracket had gotten at least one shot of the vaccine. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends two doses of the vaccine ...

WINSTON-SALEM, NC - April 27, 2021 -- An intestinal bowel disease that affects up to 10 percent of premature infants at a very vulnerable and developmentally crucial time can lead to serious infection and death. Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) are tackling the disease with a human placental-derived stem cell (hPSC) therapy strategy that is showing promising results. Necrotizing enterocolitis is a life-threatening intestinal disease that is a leading cause of mortality in premature infants and treatment options remain elusive. The ...

Abu Dhabi, UAE, April 27, 2021: As people around the world increasingly get their news from social media, online misinformation has emerged as an area of great concern. To improve news literacy and reduce the spread of misinformation, NYUAD Center for Cybersecurity researcher and lead author Nicholas Micallef is part of a team that designed Fakey, a game that emulates a social media news feed and prompts players to use available signals to recognize and scrutinize suspicious content and focus on credible information. Players can share, like, or fact-check individual articles. In a new study, Fakey: A Game Intervention to Improve News Literacy on Social Media published in the ACM Digital Library, Micallef and his colleagues ...

Aerosol products used in the home now emit more harmful volatile organic compound (VOC) air pollution than all the vehicles in the UK, new research shows. A new study by the University of York and the National Centre for Atmospheric Science reveals that the picture is damaging globally with the world's population now using huge numbers of disposable aerosols - more than 25 billion cans per year. This is estimated to lead to the release of more than 1.3 million tonnes of VOC air pollution each year, and could rise to 2.2 million tonnes by 2050. The chemicals now used in compressed aerosols ...

Arum Han, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, and his collaborators have designed an experimental system that shows exposure of SARS-CoV-2 to a very high temperature, even if applied for less than a second, can be sufficient to neutralize the virus so that it can no longer infect another human host. Applying heat to neutralize COVID-19 has been demonstrated before, but in previous studies temperatures were applied from anywhere from one to 20 minutes. This length of time is not a practical solution, ...

The Marcellus Formation straddles the New York State and Pennsylvania border, a region that shares similar geography and population demographics. However, on one side of the state line unconventional natural gas development - or fracking - is banned, while on the other side it represents a multi-billion dollar industry. New research takes advantage of this 'natural experiment' to examine the health impacts of fracking and found that people who live in areas with a high concentration of wells are at higher risk for heart attacks. "Fracking is associated ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. - Exercise appears to reduce the long-term risk of bronchiectasis, a potentially serious disease of the airways, according to a study published in the journal Radiology. Bronchiectasis is characterized by repeated cycles of inflammation and exacerbations that damage the airways, leaving them enlarged, scarred and less effective at clearing mucus. This creates an environment ripe for infections. Risk increases with age and the presence of underlying conditions like cystic fibrosis. There is no cure. Computed tomography (CT) is used to confirm or rule out the disease in patients with symptoms like shortness of breath ...

Remdesivir is currently the only antiviral drug approved in the U.S. for treating COVID-19 patients. In a paper published this week in Cell Reports, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai showed that four drugs used to treat hepatitis C render remdesivir 10 times better at inhibiting the coronavirus in cell cultures. These results indicate that a mixture containing remdesivir and a repurposed hepatitis C virus (HCV) drug could potentially function as a combination antiviral therapy for SARS-CoV-2. Such an antiviral could provide an immediate treatment for unvaccinated people who become infected and for vaccinated people whose immunity has waned. Because these hepatitis drugs are already ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- People up to age 40 living in economically depressed municipalities in the Greater Santiago, Chile, metropolitan area were three times more likely to die as a result of the infection than their counterparts in wealthier areas, researchers report in the journal Science. People ages 41-80 in low socioeconomic-status municipalities also suffered more from the pandemic than their peers in more affluent areas, the team found. The study used new methods to analyze COVID-19 death counts, reported cases, testing rates and delays in testing results across location, time ...

Cryopreservation, or the long-term storage of biomaterials at ultralow temperatures, has been used across cell types and species. However, until now, the practical cryopreservation of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) -- which is crucial to genetics research and critical to scientific breakthroughs benefiting human health -- has not been available. "To keep alive the ever-increasing number of fruit flies with unique genotypes that aid in these breakthroughs, some 160,000 different flies, laboratories and stock centers engage in the costly and frequent transfer of adults to fresh food, risking contamination and genetic drift," said Li Zhan, a postdoctoral associate with the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering and the Center for Advanced ...

In collaboration with researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a University of Maryland (UMD) postdoctoral researcher recently co-published a large-scale study examining the genetic diversity of mangroves over more than 1,800 miles of coastline in the Western Indian Ocean, including Eastern Africa and several islands. While the mangroves of Asia, Australia, and the Americas have been more extensively studied, little work has been done classifying and highlighting genetic diversity in African mangrove populations for conservation. Similar to other wetlands, mangrove ...

New research finds that children who were breastfed scored higher on neurocognitive tests. Researchers in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analyzed thousands of cognitive tests taken by nine and ten-year-olds whose mothers reported they were breastfed, and compared those results to scores of children who were not. "Our findings suggest that any amount of breastfeeding has a positive cognitive impact, even after just a few months." Daniel Adan Lopez, Ph.D. candidate in the Epidemiology program who is first author on the study recently ...

A team of scientists has found that women's football was common across Japan between the Meiji restoration and the start of the Second World War. In the process, they also uncovered the oldest known photograph of women playing football in Japan, from 1916. The history of men's football in Japan is well documented. In particular, the introduction of association football into Japan in the late 19th and 20th centuries has been extensively investigated. The same degree of attention had not been paid to women's football. A team of researchers from six institutions, including Associate Professor Yoshihiro ...

AMHERST Mass. - Scientists have long sought to invent materials that can respond to the external world in predictable, self-regulating ways. Now, new research conducted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences brings us one step closer to that goal. For their inspiration, the scientists looked to nature. Lampreys swimming, horses walking, and insects flying: each of these behaviors is made possible by a network of oscillators--mechanisms that produce a repetitive motion, such as wriggling a tail, taking a stride, or flapping a wing. What's more, these natural oscillators can respond to their environment in predictable ways. In ...

Much as yeast serves in bakeries as single-celled helper, the bacterium Escherischia coli is a must in every biotechnology lab. A team led by Prof. Dr. Barbara Di Ventura, professor of biological signaling research at the University of Freiburg, has developed a new so-called optogenetic tool that simplifies a standard method in biotechnology: Instead of feeding the bacteria with sugar as commonly done, the researchers can now simply shine light on them. Di Ventura, Prof. Dr. Mustafa Hani Khammash from ETH Zurich/Switzerland and their teams, foremost first authors Edoardo Romano and Dr. Armin Baumschlager, ...

A combination of inexpensive oral medications may be able to treat fatigue-inducing anemias caused by chronic diseases and inflammation, a new discovery from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests. This type of anemia is the second-most common kind, and it can be an added burden for organ-transplant recipients and people with autoimmune disorders, as well as patients battling cancer or kidney disease and others. In addition to causing severe fatigue, the anemia can trigger headaches, dizziness, rapid heartbeat and sweating. "Not only do these anemias cause unpleasant ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted health disparities for people of color, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. People with opioid use disorder (OUD) faced unique challenges when many mental health and addiction services were forced to scale back operations or temporarily close when social distancing guidelines were put in place. A group of researchers in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources recently published their findings in the Journal of Substance Abuse and Treatment about the experiences of racial-ethnic minorities during the COVID-19 pandemic among people with OUD. Doctoral ...

The Middle East and North Africa Region (MENA) is a climate change hot spot where summers warm much faster than in the rest of the world. Some parts of the region are already among the hottest locations globally. A new international study predicts that ignoring the signals of climate change and continuing business-as-usual will lead to extreme and life-threatening heatwaves in the region. Such extraordinary heat events will have a severe impact on the people of the area. The study, which aims at assessing emerging heatwave characteristics, was led by scientists from the Climate and Atmosphere Research Center (CARE-C) of The Cyprus Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, with the contribution of researchers from the CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean ...

People with certain blood types are more likely to have blood clots or bleeding conditions, kidney stones, or pregnancy-induced hypertension, suggests a study published today in eLife. The study confirms previously identified connections between certain blood types and the risk of blood clots and bleeding, and makes a new connection between kidney stones and having type B blood as compared to O. The discoveries may lead to new insights on how a person's blood type may predispose them to developing a certain disease. Previous studies have found that people with blood type A or B were more likely to have cardiovascular disease or experience ...

TROY, N.Y. -- When combined with drugs currently used to treat hepatitis C, the antiviral remdesivir is 10 times more effective in treating cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Published this week in Cell Reports, this finding -- from Gaetano Montelione, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Texas at Austin -- raises the potential for repurposing available drugs as COVID-19 antivirals in cases where a vaccine isn't practical or effective. Remdesivir, which blocks viral replication by interfering with a viral polymerase, must ...

ADELPHI, Md. -- Army researchers developed a technique that allows robots to remain resilient when faced with intermittent communication losses on the battlefield. The technique, called α-shape, provides an efficient method for resolving goal conflicts between multiple robots that may want to visit the same area during missions including unmanned search and rescue, robotic reconnaissance, perimeter surveillance and robotic detection of physical phenomena, such as radiation and underwater concentration of lifeforms. Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Nebraska, Omaha ...

In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain's normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels, waking the brain back up and restoring arousal. "There's a folk psychology or tacit assumption that what anesthesia does is simply 'turn off' the brain," said ...