Describing the genetic diversity of human populations is essential to improve our understanding of human diseases and their geographical distribution. However, the vast majority of genetic studies have been focused on populations of European ancestry, which represent only 16% of the global population. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, Collège de France, and CNRS have looked at understudied human populations from the South Pacific, which are severely affected by a variety of diseases, including vector-borne infectious diseases such as Zika virus, dengue, and chikungunya, and metabolic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Using genome sequencing of ...

In physics, things exist in "phases", such as solid, liquid, gas. When something crosses from one phase to another, we talk about a "phase transition" - think about water boiling into steam, turning from liquid to gas. In our kitchens water boils at 100oC, and its density changes dramatically, making a discontinuous jump from liquid to gas. However, if we turn up the pressure, the boiling point of water also increases, until a pressure of 221 atmospheres where it boils at 374oC. Here, something strange happens: the liquid and gas merge into a single phase. Above this ...

Bruising caused by physical abuse is the most common injury to be overlooked or misdiagnosed as non-abusive before an abuse-related fatality or near-fatality in a young child. A refined and validated bruising clinical decision rule (BCDR), called TEN-4-FACESp, which specifies body regions on which bruising is likely due to abuse for infants and young children, may improve earlier recognition of cases that should be further evaluated for child abuse. Findings were published in the journal JAMA Network Open. "Bruising on a young child is often dismissed as a minor injury, but depending on where the bruise appears, it can ...

What The Study Did: Data from the Ohio Department of Health were used to evaluate changes in drug overdose mortality in that state by type of drug and age of the user during the first seven months of the COVID-19 epidemic. Authors: Janet M. Currie, Ph.D., of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, 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.2021.7112) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

What The Study Did: Researchers estimated the risk of suicide among nurses and physicians compared to the general population in the United States. Authors: Matthew A. Davis, M.P.H., Ph.D., of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, 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.2021.0154) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The ...

What The Study Did: The association between severity of eczema among children and risk of being diagnosed with a learning disability was investigated in this study. Authors: Joy Wan, M.D., M.S.C.E., of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, 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/jamadermatol.2021.0008) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (4/14/2021) -- Using abundant cobalt and a unique experimental approach to probe ways to speed a sluggish catalytic reaction to harvest hydrogen from water, researchers from Boston College and Yale University discovered a mechanistic switch in the oxygen evolution reaction, a significant step towards optimizing electrocatalysts for water splitting to produce clean energy. The mechanism switches by varying the amount of voltage, or applied potential, the team reports in the journal Chem. At moderate potential, two oxygen atoms bound to the catalyst surface react to form the oxygen-oxygen ...

In the cell nucleus histones play a crucial role packaging DNA into chromatin. Histones are however very sticky to both DNA and RNA, so to ensure they are transported to the cell nucleus after synthesis and bind to the right portion of DNA to organize the chromatin, they are guarded by complexes of histone chaperones. Histone chaperones are proteins that bind to histones to help protect them from non-specific binding events until they reach their goal. This process fails sometimes and histones get stuck during their supply to chromatin without any purpose. In a study published in Molecular Cell, researchers have shown that the protein DNAJC9 holds an important role in ...

Reconfigurable materials can do amazing things. Flat sheets transform into a face. An extruded cube transforms into dozens of different shapes. But there's one thing a reconfigurable material has yet to be able to change: its underlying topology. A reconfigurable material with 100 cells will always have 100 cells, even if those cells are stretched or squashed. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a method to change a cellular material's fundamental topology at the microscale. The research is published in Nature. "Creating ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) use genetic engineering in mice to further understand how cell fate is determined in the head Tokyo, Japan - Mammalian embryonic development is an extremely complex and precise process. Specific molecular events act as cues that tell cells in the embryo where to move and what type to mature into. The expression levels of different genes in these cells can change at certain points of development, helping produce the signals that further the progression. Now, researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University ...

The Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota, renowned for its exceptionally well preserved volcanic-influenced ecosystem, was buried in lacustrine and occasionally fluvial sediments in northern Hebei and western Liaoning, China. It includes large amount of evolutionarily significant taxonomy, e.g. feathered dinosaurs, early birds, mammals and flowering plants, representing one of the most diversified terrestrial biotas of the Mesozoic and providing exceptional windows into some major fundamental issues in earth and biological sciences, such as the origins of birds and angiosperm, and co-evolution of life and environments. The evolutionary radiation of the Jehol Biota can be broadly divided to ...

In Austria, suicides have fallen by 4% since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, thereby consolidating the pre-2019 trend. An international study now shows that this pattern is similar to the global suicide trends during the initial phase of the coronavirus pandemic up until the end of October. "Figures are now also available from Statistik Austria for the whole of 2020 and these confirm the results of the study," says Thomas Niederkrotenthaler from the Center for Public Health (Department of Social and Preventive Medicine), who took part in the study on behalf of MedUni Vienna along with Paul Plener, Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. A total of around 70 scientists in 21 countries were involved in the study. On average, the trends were found ...

Common ragweed is an annual plant native to parts of the United States and southern Canada. It's an invasive species that has spread to Europe. An important agricultural weed, this plant is particularly well-adapted to living at roadsides, and there are several theories why. Its rapid expansion in Europe can't be explained by its natural dispersal rate, which is limited to distances of around 1 meter. Rather, there are other factors in play, human-mediated, that support its invasion success - along roads, for example, it spreads mainly thanks to agricultural machineries, soil movements, roadside maintenance and ...

Ethiopia may produce less specialty coffee and more rather bland tasting varieties in the future. This is the result of a new study by an international team of researchers that looked at the peculiar effects climate change has on Africa's largest coffee producing nation. Their results are relevant both for the country's millions of smallholder farmers, who earn more on specialty coffee than on ordinary coffee, as well as for baristas and coffee aficionados around the world. "Climate change has conflicting impacts on coffee production in Ethiopia. The area that is suitable for average quality coffee might actually increase ...

Chronic inflammation is increasingly a focus of research. A recent study has now identified differences in indicators of inflammation between novel diabetes subgroups. But what does this mean for the future? Symptoms that increase with age, such as cardiovascular disease, kidney damage or dementia, are common consequences of type 2 diabetes. In addition to metabolic disorders, chronic inflammatory reactions are important causes. The inflammatory cytokines typical for this can have numerous effects on various organs. One of the consequences of this is that the organs ...

An innovative new technique that encourages cancer cells in the kidneys to self-destruct could revolutionise the treatment of the disease, a new study in the journal Pharmaceutics reports. During this unique study, researchers from the University of Surrey and Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University in Russia investigated whether certain naturally occurring proteins within the body can be used to treat cancer. Focusing on cathepsin S, a member of the lysosomal cathepsin proteins that are known to affect cancer progression, and p21 BAX, a protein that can stimulate cell destruction, researchers found that both can be deployed simultaneously ...

BROOKLYN, New York, Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - Studies show wearing masks and social distancing can contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but their combined effectiveness was not precisely known. Researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and Politecnico di Torino in Italy developed a network model to study the effects of these two measures on the spread of airborne diseases like COVID-19. The model shows viral outbreaks can be prevented if at least 60% of a population complies with both measures. "Neither social distancing nor mask wearing alone are likely sufficient to halt the spread of COVID-19, unless almost the entire population adheres to the single measure," said Maurizio Porfiri, institute ...

Costing anywhere from 15 to 70 dollars per mushroom depending on the quality, matsutake mushrooms are some of the most valuable edible fungi in the world. Revered for their delicate scent, matsutake mushrooms are cooked in rice or soups as an Autumn celebration delicacy in Japan. However, there is no way to cultivate matsutake mushrooms and naturally occurring habitats are decreasing with fewer forests conducive to their growth with the changing climate. Corresponding author Professor Akiyoshi Yamada of Shinshu University's Department of Agriculture, Department of Bioscience and Biotechnology, and Institute for Mountain Science with 9 other researchers set out to present concrete evidence that matsutake spores germinate, reach the roots of the host, and coexist to produce offspring that ...

As the countdown to the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic games reaches 100 days, plans to hold the games this summer must be reconsidered as a matter of urgency, argue experts in The BMJ today. Kazuki Shimizu at the London School of Economics and Political Science and colleagues say huge uncertainty remains about the trajectory of the pandemic and they warn that international mass gathering events such as Tokyo 2020 "are still neither safe nor secure." Instead, they say "we must accelerate efforts towards containing and ending the pandemic by maintaining ...

Supplementation of cocoa powder in the diet of high-fat-fed mice with liver disease markedly reduced the severity of their condition, according to a new study by Penn State researchers, who suggest the results have implications for people. Cocoa powder, a popular food ingredient most commonly used in the production of chocolate, is rich in fiber, iron and phytochemicals reported to have positive health benefits, including antioxidant polyphenols and methylxanthines, noted study leader Joshua Lambert, professor of food science in the College of Agricultural Sciences. "While it is typically considered an indulgence food because of its high sugar and fat content, epidemiological and human-intervention ...

TAMPA, Fla. (April 14, 2021)- The order in which your senses interact with food has a tremendous impact on how much you like it. That's the premise of a new study led by the University of South Florida (USF). The findings published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology show that food tastes better if you see it before smelling it. Researchers came to this conclusion following four experiments involving cookies, fruit snacks and lemonade. In the first study, nearly 200 participants interacted with the food, each item wrapped in an opaque versus a transparent package. The ...

For centuries, ivory was often used to make art objects. But to protect elephant populations, the ivory trade was banned internationally in 1989. To restore ivory parts of old art objects, one must therefore resort to substitute materials - such as bones, shells or plastic. However, there has not been a really satisfactory solution so far. TU Wien (Vienna) and the 3D printing company Cubicure GmbH, created as a spin-off of TU Wien, have now developed a high-tech substitute in cooperation with the Archdiocese of Vienna's Department for the Care of Art and Monuments and Addison Restoration: the novel material "Digory" consists of synthetic resin and calcium phosphate particles. It is processed in a hot, liquid state and hardened in the 3D printer with UV ...

International scientists from around the world are warning that chemical pollutants in the environment have the potential to alter animal and human behaviour. A scientific forum of 30 experts formed a united agreement of concern about chemical pollutants and set up a roadmap to help protect the environment from behaviour altering chemicals. The conclusions of their work have been published today in a paper led by Professor Alex Ford, Professor of Biology at the University of Portsmouth, in Environmental Science and Technology. Until now the effect of chemical pollutants on wildlife has ...

Metabolic bone disease is a common complication of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and involves a broad spectrum of disorders of mineral metabolism that result in both skeletal and extra-skeletal consequences. A new special issue of Calcified Tissue International brings together a comprehensive series of state-of-the-art reviews which discuss key issues in CKD and mineral and bone disorders, known as CKD-MBD. Authored by a multidisciplinary group of leading international experts, the wide-ranging reviews aim to improve the understanding and management of CKD-MBD, and advance interdisciplinary knowledge. Professors ...

According to a Finnish study, the structure and function of the brain areas involved in emotions and their regulation are altered in both psychopathic criminal offenders and otherwise well-functioning individuals who have personality traits associated with psychopathy. Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterised by persistent antisocial behaviour, impaired empathy, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits. However, similar antisocial traits are also common, yet less pronounced, with people who are well-off psychologically and socially. It is possible that the characteristics related to psychopathy form a continuum where only the extreme characteristics ...