TORONTO, Jan. 13, 2021 - Close to 5,700 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere may permanently lose ice cover this century, 179 of them in the next decade, at current greenhouse gas emissions, despite a possible polar vortex this year, researchers at York University have found. Those lakes include large bays in some of the deepest of the Great Lakes, such as Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, which could permanently become ice free by 2055 if nothing is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions or by 2085 with moderate changes. Many of these lakes that are ...

SILVER SPRING, Md.--A new study confirms that treatment with Bimagrumab, an antibody that blocks activin type II receptors and stimulates skeletal muscle growth, is safe and effective for treating excess adiposity and metabolic disturbances of adult patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes. "These exciting results suggest that there may be a novel mechanism for achieving weight loss with a profound loss of body fat and an increase in lean mass, along with other metabolic benefits," said Steve Heymsfield, MD, FTOS, past president of The Obesity Society and corresponding author of the study. Heymsfield is professor and director of the Metabolism and Body Composition Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. A ...

LAWRENCE -- Parents around the world have long told us that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Soon, basketball coaches may join them. Researchers at the University of Kansas have published a study showing that eating breakfast can improve a basketball player's shooting performance, sometimes by significant margins. The study, along with one showing that lower body strength and power can predict professional basketball potential, is part of a larger body of work to better understand the science of what makes an elite athlete. Breakfast and better basketball shooting Dimitrije Cabarkapa left his native Novi Sad, Serbia, to play basketball at James Madison University. Never a fan of 6 a.m. workouts, he was discussing ...

A team of researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan has discovered an antibody that blocks the spread within the body of the dengue virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that infects between 50 and 100 million people a year. The virus causes what is known as dengue fever, symptoms of which include fever, vomiting and muscle aches, and can lead to more serious illnesses, and even death. "Protein structures determined at the APS have played a critical role in the development of drugs and vaccines for several diseases, and these new results are key to the development of a potentially effective treatment against flaviviruses." -- Bob Fischetti, group leader with Argonne's X-ray Sciences Division and life sciences ...

The fascinating compound eyes of insects consist of hundreds of individual eyes known as "facets". In the course of evolution, an enormous variety of eye sizes and shapes has emerged, often representing adaptations to different environmental conditions. Scientists, led by an Emmy Noether research group at the University of Göttingen, together with scientists from the Andalusian Centre for Developmental Biology (CABD) in Seville, have now shown that these differences can be caused by very different changes in the genome of fruit flies. The study was published ...

HOUSTON - (Jan. 13, 2021) - Pyrolyzed plastic ash is worthless, but perhaps not for long. Rice University scientists have turned their attention to Joule heating of the material, a byproduct of plastic recycling processes. A strong jolt of energy flashes it into graphene. The technique by the lab of Rice chemist James Tour produces turbostratic graphene flakes that can be directly added to other substances like films of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) that better resist water in packaging and cement paste and concrete, dramatically increasing their compressive strength. ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A dramatic decline in bees and other pollinating insects presents a threat to the global food supply, yet it's getting little attention in mainstream news. That's the conclusion of a study from researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, published this week in a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was based on a search of nearly 25 million news items from six prominent U.S. and global news sources, among them The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press. The study found "vanishingly low levels of attention to pollinator population topics" over several decades, even compared with ...

Wetlands are the dominant natural source of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas which is second only to carbon dioxide in its importance to climate change. Anthropogenic climate change is expected to enhance methane emissions from wetlands, resulting in further warming. However, wetland methane feedbacks were not fully assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, posing a challenge to meeting the global greenhouse gas mitigation goals set under the Paris Agreement. To understand how wetland methane cycling may evolve and drive climate feedbacks in the future, scientists are increasingly looking to Earth's past. "Ice core records indicate ...

People worldwide want their coffee to be both satisfying and reasonably priced. To meet these standards, roasters typically use a blend of two types of beans, arabica and robusta. But, some use more of the cheaper robusta than they acknowledge, as the bean composition is difficult to determine after roasting. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have developed a new way to assess exactly what's in that cup of joe. Coffee blends can have good quality and flavor. However, arabica beans are more desirable than other types, resulting in a higher market value for blends containing a higher proportion of this variety. In some cases, producers dilute their blends with the less expensive robusta beans, yet that is hard for consumers ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Biomedical engineers at Duke University have devised an algorithm to remove contaminated microbial genetic information from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). With a clearer picture of the microbiota living in various organs in both healthy and cancerous states, researchers will now be able to find new biomarkers of disease and better understand how numerous cancers affect the human body. In the first study using the newly decontaminated dataset, the researchers have already discovered that normal and cancerous organ tissues have a slightly different microbiota composition, that bacteria from these diseased sites can enter the bloodstream, and that this bacterial information could help diagnose ...

Liver transplant priority in the U.S. goes to the sickest patients, which fails to consider other important factors, including how long patients are likely to survive post-transplant. Researchers with Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are collaborating with faculty at the University of Pennsylvania to develop a risk score that more comprehensively prioritizes liver cancer patients for transplantation. Their paper documenting the development and validation of the LiTES-HCC score to predict post-transplant survival for hepatocellular carcinoma, or liver cancer, patients was published in the highly respected peer-reviewed Journal of Hepatology. The ...

Egg cells are among the largest cells in the animal kingdom. If moved only by the random jostlings of water molecules, a protein could take hours or even days to drift from one side of a forming egg cell to the other. Luckily, nature has developed a faster way: cell-spanning whirlpools in the immature egg cells of animals such as mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. These vortices enable cross-cell commutes that take just a fraction of the time. But until now, scientists didn't know how these crucial flows formed. Using mathematical modeling, researchers now have an answer. The gyres result from the collective behavior of rodlike molecular ...

Many students, especially non-science majors, dread chemistry. The first lesson in an introductory chemistry course typically deals with how to interpret the periodic table of elements, but its complexity can be overwhelming to students with little or no previous exposure. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Chemical Education introduce an innovative way to make learning about the elements much more approachable -- by using "pseudo" periodic tables filled with superheroes, foods and apps. One of the fundamental topics taught in first-year undergraduate chemistry courses is ...

WASHINGTON -- In a new study, researchers show that a light-based analytical technique known as Raman spectroscopy could aid in early detection of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). OSCC is the most prevalent type of oral cancer and ranks among the most common cancers diagnosed worldwide. Although effective treatments are available, the cancer is often not detected until a late stage, resulting in overall poor prognosis. "Raman spectroscopy is not only label-free and non-invasive, but it can potentially be used in ambient light conditions," says research team leader Levi Matthies from University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. "This makes it promising for use as a potential screening tool ...

Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications, publishes selected abstracts from the 31st Great Wall International Cardiology (GW-ICC) Conference, October 19 - 25, 2020 Beijing, January 13, 2021: Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA), in its role as the official journal of the Great Wall International Cardiology Conference (GW-ICC), has published selected abstracts from the 31st GW-ICC. Abstracts are now online at https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cscript/cvia/2020/00000005/a00101s1/art00001 Co-Editors-in-Chief of CVIA Dr. C. Richard Conti, past president of the American College of Cardiology, and Dr Jianzeng Dong, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China commented that CVIA is delighted to be ...

Thousands of genetic markers have already been robustly associated with complex human traits, such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, obesity, or height. To discover these associations, researchers need to compare the genomes of many individuals at millions of genetic locations or markers, and therefore require cost-effective genotyping technologies. A new statistical method, developed by Olivier Delaneau's group at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Lausanne (UNIL), offers game-changing possibilities. For less than $1 in computational cost, GLIMPSE is able to statistically infer a complete human genome from a very small amount of data. The method offers ...

Researchers at Brazil's National Space Research Institute (INPE), in partnership with colleagues in the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa, have recorded for the first time the formation and branching of luminous structures by lightning strikes. Analyzing images captured by a super slow motion camera, they discovered why lightning strikes bifurcate and sometimes then form luminous structures interpreted by the human eye as flickers. The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP. An article outlining its results is published in Scientific Reports. "We managed to obtain the first optical observation of these phenomena and find a possible explanation for branching and flickering," Marcelo Magalhães Fares Saba, ...

Spatial isolation is known to promote speciation - but researchers at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have now shown that, at least in yeast, the opposite is also true. New ecological variants can also evolve within thoroughly mixed populations.  The idea that speciation is based on the selection of variants that are better adapted to the local environmental conditions is at the heart of Charles Darwin's theory of the origin of species - and it is now known to be a central component of biological evolution, and thus of biodiversity. Geographic isolation of populations is often regarded as a necessary condition for ecotypes to diverge ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [January 13, 2021] -- New research in the January 2021 issue of JNCCN--Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network finds more than a third of eligible people miss timely screening tests for colorectal cancer and at least a quarter appear to miss timely screening tests for breast and cervical cancers. The study comes from the University of Alberta, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry in Alberta, Canada, with findings based on self-reported results from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) from 2007-2016. According to the author, the results also ...

WHAT: Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium bacteria (S. Typhimurium) commonly cause human gastroenteritis, inflammation of the lining of the intestines. The bacteria live inside the gut and can infect the epithelial cells that line its surface. Many studies have shown that Salmonella use a "run-and-tumble" method of short swimming periods (runs) punctuated by tumbles when they randomly change direction, but how they move within the gut is not well understood. National Institutes of Health scientists and their colleagues believe they have identified a S. Typhimurium protein, McpC ...

Research into the neuronal basis of emotion processing has so far mostly taken place in the laboratory, i.e. in unrealistic conditions. Bochum-based biopsychologists have now studied couples in more natural conditions. Using electroencephalography (EEG), they recorded the brain activity of romantic couples at home while they cuddled, kissed or talked about happy memories together. The results confirmed the theory that positive emotions are mainly processed in the left half of the brain. A group led by Dr. Julian Packheiser, Gesa Berretz, Celine Bahr, Lynn Schockenhoff and Professor Sebastian Ocklenburg from the Department of Biopsychology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum ...

(Boston)--Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) provide a new genomics resource that details the small RNA transcriptomes (gene expression) of four bio-medically important mosquito species. This is the first study to provide a platform for biologists to compare the characteristics of these small RNAs between these four mosquitoes as well as the most widely used insects for genetic experiments, the fruit fly, Drosophila. Although previous studies looked at each of the individual mosquito species separately, this study is the first to allow comparisons between all four species. "Although ...

As anxious passengers are often reassured, commercial aircrafts can easily continue to fly even if one of the engines stops working. But for drones with four propellers - also known as quadcopters - the failure of one motor is a bigger problem. With only three rotors working, the drone loses stability and inevitably crashes unless an emergency control strategy sets in. Researchers at the University of Zurich and the Delft University of Technology have now found a solution to this problem: They show that information from onboard cameras can be used to stabilize the drone and keep it flying autonomously after one rotor suddenly gives out. Spinning like a ballerina "When one rotor fails, the drone begins to spin ...

A recent Point of Reference article, "The meat of the matter: Environmental dissemination of beef cattle agrochemicals," published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, points at synthetic chemical cocktails being emitted from cattle feed yards into the environment and how they can impact our ecosystem and our health. Industrial meat production facilities have a bad reputation for their impact on the environment. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are known to release greenhouse gases related to global warming and for discharge of manure to watersheds, which affects water quality. A less publicized impact of modern beef production is the excessive use of ...

Our immune system is never idle. Their task is to detect and eliminate invasive pathogens, and they have no time to lose. The adaptive immune system identifies infectious organisms by recognizing foreign proteins on the surfaces of bacteria, viruses and unicellular protozoans. The interaction of these antigens with immune cells triggers a series of downstream events, which in most cases leads to the elimination of the pathogen. But pathogenic organisms have developed strategies that enable them to escape detection by the immune system, and the strategies employed by remotely related organisms are often remarkably similar to each other. One way of confusing the immune system is to increase the structural heterogeneity of the antigens it encounters. ...