Patients who have preexisting respiratory conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and live in areas with high levels of air pollution have a greater chance of hospitalization if they contract COVID-19, says a University of Cincinnati researcher. Angelico Mendy, MD, PhD, assistant professor of environmental and public health sciences, at the UC College of Medicine, looked at the health outcomes and backgrounds of 1,128 COVID-19 patients at UC Health, the UC-affiliated health care system in Greater Cincinnati. Mendy led a team of researchers in an individual-level study which used a statistical model to evaluate the association between long-term exposure to particulate matter less or equal to 2.5 micrometers -- it refers to a mixture of tiny particles and ...

Researchers have found a long-sought enzyme that prevents cancer by enabling the breakdown of proteins that drive cell growth, and that causes cancer when disabled. Publishing online in Nature on April 14, the new study revolves around the ability of each human cell to divide in two, with this process repeating itself until a single cell (the fertilized egg) becomes a body with trillions of cells. For each division, a cell must follow certain steps, most of which are promoted by proteins called cyclins. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the work revealed that an enzyme called AMBRA1 labels a key class of cyclins for destruction by cellular machines that break down proteins. The work finds that the enzyme's control of cyclins is essential ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Eurasian Blackcaps are spunky and widespread warblers that breed across much of Europe. Many of them migrate south to the Mediterranean region and Africa after the breeding season. But thanks to a changing climate and an abundance of food resources offered by people across the United Kingdom and Ireland, some populations of Blackcaps have recently been heading north for the winter, spending the colder months in backyard gardens of the British Isles. New research published this week in Global Change Biology shows some of the ways that bird feeders, fruit-bearing plants, and a warming world are changing both the movements and the physiology of the Blackcaps that spend the winter in Great Britain and Ireland. "Many migratory birds are ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Most young women already know that tanning is dangerous and sunbathe anyway, so a campaign informing them of the risk should take into account their potential resistance to the message, according to a new study. Word choice and targeting a specific audience are part of messaging strategy, but there is also psychology at play, researchers say - especially when the message is telling people something they don't really want to hear. "A lot of thought goes into the content, but possibly less thought goes into the style," said Hillary Shulman, senior author of the study and an assistant ...

Philadelphia, April 14, 2021 - In late 2020, several concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants emerged globally. They are believed to be more easily transmissible, and there is concern that some may reduce the effectiveness of antibody treatments and vaccines. An extensive genome sequencing program run by the Houston Methodist health system has identified all six of the currently identified SARS-CoV-2 variants in their patients. A new study appearing in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, finds that the variants are widely spread across the Houston metropolitan area. "Before the SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived in Houston, we planned an integrated strategy to confront ...

A new study by former University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduate student Jeffrey Kwang, now at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Abigail Langston, of Kansas State University; and Illinois civil and environmental engineering professor Gary Parker takes a closer look at the vertical and lateral – or depth and width – components of river erosion and drainage patterns. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “A tree’s dendritic structure exists to provide fresh ends for leaves to grow and collect as much light as possible,” Parker said. “If you chop off some branches, they will regrow in a dendritic pattern. ...

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - April 14, 2021 - Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have shown that two existing drug candidates--JAK inhibitors and Mepron--hold potential as treatments for a deadly acute myeloid leukemia (AML) subtype that is more common in children. The foundational study, published in the journal Blood, is a first step toward finding effective treatments for the hard-to-treat blood cancer. "While highly successful therapies have been found for other blood cancers, most children diagnosed with this AML subtype are still treated with harsh, toxic chemotherapies," says Ani Deshpande, Ph.D., assistant professor in Sanford Burnham Prebys' ...

Half a century had passed, but UC Santa Barbara Professor Armand Kuris was sure he'd been here before. In fact, he was completely certain. After all, he had detailed notes of the location, written carefully in India ink when he was still a graduate student. This time, though, Kuris served as a seasoned mentor for several young researchers who hadn't even been born when he first visited the site. Truth be told, many of their parents hadn't yet been born. This was just one of many shorelines along the coast of the Pacific Northwest where the group was repeating ecological field work Kuris conducted in 1969 and 70. He teamed up with Assistant Professor Chelsea Wood of the University of Washington and her lab -- all parasite ...

A new study co-authored by University of Colorado Cancer Center researcher Srinivas Ramachandran, PhD, shows how DNA segments known as enhancers function in cells. The paper published last month in Molecular Cell highlighted the work from Ramachandran, along with Satyanarayan Rao, both part of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the CU School of Medicine, and Kami Ahmad from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Enhancers are DNA sequences that drive cell-type-specific gene expression, developmental transitions, and cellular responses to external stimuli. They typically have multiple binding sites for transcription factors, which are proteins that help turn specific genes "on" or "off" by binding to nearby DNA. Ramachandran ...

URBANA, Ill. - Food waste and obesity are major problems in developed countries. They are both caused by an overabundance of food, but strategies to reduce one can inadvertently increase the other. A broader perspective can help identify ways to limit food waste while also promoting healthy nutrition, two University of Illinois researchers suggest. "You can reduce food waste by obtaining less or eating more. Our concern was that if people are reducing waste by eating more, what does that mean for nutrition? And how do we think about these tradeoffs in a way that promotes both good nutrition outcomes and good food waste outcomes? ...

By Luciana Constantino | Agência FAPESP – Adults with periodontitis transmit bacteria that can cause the disease in future to their children, and the bacteria remain in the oral cavity even when the children undergo treatment of various kinds, reinforcing the need for preventive care in the first year of a baby’s life. This is the main conclusion of a study conducted at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. An article on the study is published in Scientific Reports. Periodontitis is an inflammation of the periodontium, the tissue that supports the teeth and maintains them in the maxillary and mandibular bones. The disease is triggered by bacterial infection. Symptoms include bleeding of the gums and halitosis. In severe cases, it ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it's not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material. That could be changing. In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing graphene aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles -- scalability and creating a version of the material that's stable enough for repeated use -- for water treatment. "The goal is to safely remove contaminants from water without releasing any problematic chemical residue," says study co-author Nirupam Aich, PhD, assistant professor of environmental engineering at the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "The aerogels ...

HERSHEY, Pa. -- People who trust television and Facebook to provide them with accurate news about the coronavirus pandemic are less knowledgeable about COVID-19, according to a new study, which assessed people's knowledge of the virus in the earliest stages of the pandemic. The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Medical Research & Opinion, surveyed 5,948 adults in Pennsylvania between March 25-31, 2020, and found that those who relied on social media and TV for news were less likely to get the facts right about the coronavirus. In fact, adults that used Facebook as an additional ...

URBANA, Ill. - Before humans can benefit from new drug therapies and nutritional additives, scientists test their safety and efficacy in animals, typically mice and rats. But, as much as they've done for biomedical research, rodents aren't always the best research model for studies on neonatal brain development and nutrition. That's where pigs can play an important role. University of Illinois researchers say the domestic pig is ideal for these studies because their brain size, rate of development, and digestive system are excellent analogues for human newborns. They know a lot about pig brains, having built the first - and recently, the second - complete, MRI-based atlases of the organ. They've used the first to study ...

La Jolla, CA--The human genome contains the instructions to make tens of thousands of proteins. Each protein folds into a precise shape--and biologists are taught that defined shape dictates the protein's destined function. Tens of thousands of singular shapes drive the tens of thousands of needed functions. In a new Cell Reports study, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology demonstrate how Ebola virus has found a different way to get things done. The virus encodes only eight proteins but requires dozens of functions in its lifecycle. ...

New research by a team at Resources for the Future (RFF) has found that at least 27% of new pests in the United States were initially detected by members of the general public. The study, which was published today in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, seeks to understand who is identifying new invasive species that make their way into the United States. The RFF team developed and analyzed a new dataset of pest discoveries in the United States, using a sample size of 169 detections from 2010 to 2018. Researchers divided discovery sources into three categories: government agencies, local extension specialists and researchers, and members of the public, with the latter category including community ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Just as humans are challenged from the social isolation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, a new study finds that a solitary lifestyle has profound effects on the brains of a social insect: paper wasps. Paper wasps recognize the brightly colored faces of other paper wasps, an ability they lose when reared in isolation. The wasps' ability to remember faces is similar to primates and humans, but unlike other social insects. The study revealed that when adult wasps are housed in solitude, visual areas of their brains - especially those involved with identifying nuanced color patterns and shapes - are smaller and less developed ...

Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain https://www.hse.ru/en/neuroling/ have, for the first time, described the language abilities of Russian children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at all linguistic levels (e.g., phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, and discourse), using a language test that takes into account the psycholinguistic variables most relevant for Russians. The study was published in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. In 2020, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in every 54 children in the country is diagnosed with ASD. Usually, ...

Ultralight bosons are hypothetical particles whose mass is predicted to be less than a billionth the mass of an electron. They interact relatively little with their surroundings and have thus far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they exist, ultralight bosons such as axions would likely be a form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe. Now, physicists at MIT's LIGO Laboratory have searched for ultralight bosons using black holes -- objects that are mind-bending orders of magnitude ...

Little is known about azhdarchid pterosaurs, gigantic flying reptiles with impressive wingspans of up to 12 meters. Cousins of dinosaurs and the largest animals ever to fly, they first appeared in the fossil record in the Late Triassic about 225 million years ago and disappeared again at the end of the Cretaceous period about 66 million years ago. One of their most notable features for such a large flighted animal was a neck longer than that of a giraffe. Now, researchers report an unexpected discovery in the journal iScience on April 14: their thin neck vertebrae got their strength from an intricate internal structure unlike anything ...

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 ...