Less than one percent of people in the United States use kratom, a plant-based substance commonly used to manage pain and opioid withdrawal, according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. However, the use of kratom--which is legal but carries the risk of addiction and harmful side effects--is more prevalent among people who use other drugs, particularly those with opioid use disorder. Derived from a tree native to Southeast Asia, kratom can be taken as a pill, capsule, or extract, or brewed as a tea. It acts on the brain's opioid receptors; at low doses, kratom is a stimulant, while at higher doses, it can relieve pain. Some people report using kratom as a substitute for opioids in an effort ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers have created a new, open-access tool that allows doctors and scientists to evaluate infant brain health by assessing the concentration of various chemical markers, called metabolites, in the brain. The tool compiled data from 140 infants to determine normal ranges for these metabolites. Published in the journal NMR in Biomedicine, the study describes an easier and more reliable way to evaluate metabolite concentrations in the infant brain than was previously available, said study lead Ryan Larsen, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Metabolites play an important role in normal brain growth, development and function, said study co-author ...

When they go to the dentist to get a tooth pulled or another procedure, patients might not think that the prescription they receive to ease their pain could put them or their family at risk of an opioid overdose. But a new study from the University of Michigan shows that overdose rates were two and a half times higher among patients who filled a prescription for an opioid medication after a dental procedure, compared with those who didn't fill such a prescription. Overdose rates were also higher among the family members of such patients - possibly from misuse of the leftover pills. The study is published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by a team from the U-M Medical School and School of Dentistry. It used data from 8.5 million teen and adult ...

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) has announced the development of an effective structural monitoring technique to monitor massive infrastructures, such as long-span bridge. The method provides accurate and precise responses over whole structural system densely by fusing advantages of multi-fidelity data. Rapid advances in sensing and information technologies have led to condition-based monitoring in civil and mechanical structural systems. The structural monitoring system plays a key role in condition-based monitoring to evaluate structural safety from responses measured by sensors. In other words, following method allows to examine the health of an existing structures, such ...

A ship's container lost overboard in the North Atlantic has resulted in printer cartridges washing up everywhere from the coast of Florida to northern Norway, a new study has shown. It has also resulted in the items weathering to form microplastics that are contaminated with a range of metals such as titanium, iron and copper. The spillage is thought to have happened around 1,500 km east of New York, in January 2014, with the first beached cartridges reported along the coastline of the Azores in September the same year. Since then, around 1,500 more have been reported on social media, with the greatest quantities ...

VANCOUVER, Wash. - Putting on a happy face might not be enough for entrepreneurs to win over potential investors. Despite perceptions that entrepreneurs should always be positive about their ventures, a study led by a Washington State University researcher found that entrepreneurs whose facial expressions moved through a mix of happiness, anger and fear during funding pitches were more successful. "Our findings show that there's a role for different emotions in pitches," said Ben Warnick, WSU assistant professor in WSU's Carson College of Business and lead author on the study published in the Journal of Business Venturing. "For example, an angry facial expression can convey how much you care about something, instead of just smiling, which on the extreme end ...

New York nurses caring for COVID-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic experienced anxiety, depression, and illness--but steps their hospitals took to protect them and support from their coworkers helped buffer against the stressful conditions, according to a study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing. "A critical part of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic should be supporting the mental health of our frontline workers. Our study demonstrates that institutional resources--such as supportive staff relationships, professional development, providing temporary housing, ...

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology developed a new strategy for producing a wide range of organotin compounds, which are the building blocks of many organic synthesis methods. Their approach is based on the photoexcitation of stannyl anions, which alters their electronic state and increases their selectivity and reactivity to form useful compounds. This protocol will be helpful for the efficient synthesis of many bioactive products, novel drugs, and functional materials. Organotin compounds, also known as stannanes, are made of tin (Sn), hydrocarbons, and sometimes other elements like nitrogen and oxygen. During the 1970s, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Though more than 131 million Americans have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine to date, public confusion and uncertainty about the importance of second doses and continued public health precautions threaten to delay a U.S. return to normalcy, according to Cornell-led research published April 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a nationally representative survey of more than 1,000 American adults conducted in February, less than half of respondents said they believed the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines provided strong protection against COVID-19 a week or two after a second dose, consistent with guidance from the U.S. Centers for Diseases ...

NEW YORK, NY-- Diagnosing chronic kidney disease, which is often undetected until it causes irreversible damage, may soon become automated with a new algorithm that interprets data from electronic medical records. The algorithm, developed by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, automatically scours a patient's electronic medical record for results of blood and urine tests and, using a mix of established equations and machine learning to process the data, can alert physicians to patients in the earliest stages of chronic kidney disease. A study of the algorithm was published in the journal npj Digital Medicine in April. "Identifying ...

These mysterious earthquakes originate between 400 and 700 kilometers below the surface of the Earth and have been recorded with magnitudes up to 8.3 on the Richter scale. Xanthippi Markenscoff, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is the person who solved this mystery. Her paper " END ...

In an effort to fight the millions of tons of marine litter floating in the ocean, Florida State University researchers have developed a new virtual tool to track this debris. Their work, which was published in Frontiers in Marine Science, will help provide answers to help monitor and deal with the problem of marine litter. Eric Chassignet, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies and professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. "Marine litter is found around the world, and we do not fully understand its ...

Researchers at the University of Bonn and the research center caesar have succeeded in ultra-fast freezing proteins after a precisely defined period of time. They were able to follow structural changes on the microsecond time scale and with sub-nanometer precision. Owing to its high spatial and temporal resolution, the method allows tracking rapid structural changes in enzymes and nucleic acids. The results are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. If you want to know what the spatial structure of a biomolecule looks like, you have a formidable arsenal of tools at your disposal. The most popular ones are electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, which can reveal even the smallest ...

Researchers have long noted that readers with dyslexia employ eye movements that are significantly different from non-dyslexics. While these movements have been studied in small sample sizes in the past, a new paper written by Concordia researchers and published in the Nature journal END ...

The ability to turn on and off a physical process with just one photon is a fundamental building block for quantum photonic technologies. Realizing this in a chip-scale architecture is important for scalability, which amplifies a breakthrough by City College of New York researchers led by physicist Vinod Menon. They've demonstrated for the first time the use of "Rydberg states" in solid state materials (previously shown in cold atom gases) to enhance nonlinear optical interactions to unprecedented levels in solid state systems. This feat is a first step towards realizing chip-scale scalable single photon switches. In solid state systems, exciton-polaritons, half-light ...

Nearly one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, amounting to some 9 million square miles, is layered with permafrost -- soil, sediment, and rocks that are frozen solid for years at a time. Vast stretches of permafrost can be found in Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Arctic, where persistently freezing temperatures have kept carbon, in the form of decayed bits of plants and animals, locked in the ground. Scientists estimate that more than 1,400 gigatons of carbon is trapped in the Earth's permafrost. As global temperatures climb, and permafrost thaws, this frozen reservoir could potentially escape into the ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (4/28/2021) -- The vast frozen terrain of Arctic permafrost thawed several times in North America within the past 1 million years when the world's climate was not much warmer than today, researchers from the United States and Canada report in today's edition of Science Advances. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. But the researchers found that the thawings -- which expel stores of carbon dioxide sequestered deep in frozen vegetation -- were not accompanied by increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The surprising finding runs counter to predictions that as the planet ...

About a quarter of a percent of the entire gross domestic product of industrialized countries is estimated to be lost through a single technical issue: the fouling of heat exchanger surfaces by salts and other dissolved minerals. This fouling lowers the efficiency of multiple industrial processes and often requires expensive countermeasures such as water pretreatment. Now, findings from MIT could lead to a new way of reducing such fouling, and potentially even enable turning that deleterious process into a productive one that can yield saleable products. The findings are the result of years of work by recent MIT graduates Samantha McBride PhD '20 and Henri-Louis Girard PhD '20 with professor of mechanical ...

Two teams have created a new generation of highly specific CAR T cells, which safely cleared solid tumors in mice with mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma while outlasting and outperforming conventional CAR T cell designs. The results suggest these cells could minimize the risk of dangerous side effects and address the traditionally poor performance of CAR T cells against solid tumors in the clinic. CAR T cells are genetically modified human T cells and have shown impressive performance in patients with leukemia. However, CAR T cells don't work as well against solid tumors, as these cancers lack molecular targets that the cells can easily recognize. ...

The number of distinctive sources and voices on the internet is proven to be in long-term decline, according to new research. A paper entitled 'Evolution of diversity and dominance of companies in online activity' published in the PLOS ONE scientific journal has shown between 60 and 70 percent of all attention on key social media platforms in different market segments is focused towards just 10 popular domains. In stark contrast, new competitors are struggling to survive against such dominant players, with just 3 percent of online domains born in 2015 still active today, compared to nearly 40 percent of those formed back in 2006. The researchers say ...

The subseafloor constitutes one of the largest and most understudied ecosystems on Earth. While it is known that life survives deep down in the fluids, rocks, and sediments that make up the seafloor, scientists know very little about the conditions and energy needed to sustain that life. An interdisciplinary research team, led from ASU and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sought to learn more about this ecosystem and the microbes that exist in the subseafloor. The results of their findings were recently published in Science Advances, with ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration assistant professor and geobiologist ...

Organ development in plants mostly occurs through combinatorial activity of so-called meristems. Meristems are plant cells or tissues that give rise to new organs, similar to stem cells in human - including spikelets. Spikelets are components of the spike and form florets (flowers) themselves, which in turn produce grains after fertilisation. Inflorescence morphogenesis in grasses (Poaceae) is complex and based on a specialised floral meristem, the spikelet meristem, from which all other floral organs arise and which also gives rise to the grain. The fate of the spikelet thus determines not only reproductive success, ...

DETROIT (April 28, 2021) - The results of a large, national heart attack study show that patients with a deadly complication known as cardiogenic shock survived at a significantly higher rate when treated with a protocol developed by cardiologists at Henry Ford Hospital in END ...

Anyone researching the global carbon cycle has to deal with unimaginably large numbers. The Southern Ocean - the world's largest ocean sink region for human-made CO2 - is projected to absorb a total of about 244 billion tons of human-made carbon from the atmosphere over the period from 1850 to 2100 under a high CO2 emissions scenario. But the uptake could possibly be only 204 or up to 309 billion tons. That's how much the projections of the current generation of climate models vary. The reason for this large uncertainty is the complex circulation of the Southern Ocean, which ...

A protein variant common in malignant bladder tumor cells may serve as a new avenue for treating bladder cancer. A multi-institution study led by END ...