A new report tracks the evolution of a variant lineage of SARS-CoV-2 associated with rapid transmission in Manaus, Brazil, that evolved in November 2020. The study's authors suggest this variant, "P.1," may be more transmissible and more likely to evade protective immunity elicited by previous infection with non-P.1 lineages. Manaus, Brazil, reached unprecedented levels of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in mid-2020. And after a momentary respite, cases surged with fatal consequences. Using molecular clock analysis, Nuno Faria et al. tracked the evolution of a new, more aggressive lineage called P.1, which possesses 17 mutations, including three (K417T, ...

We refer to the microbiome as the community of microorganisms that exist in or on all organisms, including bacteria and fungi. A team from the Institute of Environmental Biotechnology at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) led by Institute head Gabriele Berg has now investigated the microbiomes of apples and oil pumpkins in two independent studies. The researchers have found that bacteria useful to plants are largely "inherited," i.e., passed on to the next generation, while the community of fungi in the microbiome is highly dependent on the particular soil microbiome and thus on the locality. Microbiome-guided breeding of oil pumpkins The breeding ...

When people are asked to draw the flower of a sunflower plant, almost everyone draws a large circle encircled by yellow petals. "Actually, that structure is the flower head, or the capitulum, which may be composed of hundreds of flowers, also known as florets. The surrounding 'petals' are florets different in structure and function to those closer to the centre," says Professor of Horticulture Paula Elomaa from the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, University of Helsinki, Finland. A giant inflorescence is beneficial, as it is effective in attracting pollinators. When pollinators move around the inflorescence, they pollinate hundreds of individual florets over the course of ...

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, a part of The University of Tokyo, have developed a new method of producing concrete without cement. They have directly bonded sand particles via a simple reaction in alcohol with a catalyst. This may help both to slash carbon emissions and to construct buildings and structures in desert regions, even on the Moon or Mars. Concrete consists of two parts: the aggregate (typically made of sand and gravel) and cement (responsible for 8% of total global CO2 emissions). Despite there being a huge amount of sand in the world, the availability of sand for concrete production is fairly limited because sand particles must have a specific size distribution ...

A recent study has unveiled the reason behind the exceptional catalytic performance of non-noble metal-base mixed catalysts. This is thanks to a new synthetic strategy for the production of cube-shaped catalysts that could further simplify the structure of complex catalysts. This breakthrough has been led by Professor Kwangjin An and his research team in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Taeghwan Hyeon and his research team from Seoul National University. In their study, the researchers found a new principle that active charge transfer, which appears at the interface created between the two types of non-noble ...

TMDs vdW heterostructures generally possess a type-II band alignment which facilitates the formation of interlayer excitons between the constituent monolayers. Manipulation of the interlayer excitons in TMDs vdW heterostructures hold great promise for developing excitonic integrated circuits that serve as the counterpart of electronic integrated circuits, which allows the photons and excitons transforming between each other and thus bridges the optical communication and signal processing at the integrated circuit. Consequently, numerous researches have been carried out in order to get a deep insight ...

A wide range of objects, from biological cells to integrated circuits, are tomographically imaged to identify their interior structures. Volumetric reconstruction of the objects' interiors is of practical implications, for instance, quantitative phase imaging of the cells and failure analysis of the circuits to validate their designs. Limiting the tomographic angular range is often desirable to reduce the time of radiation exposure and avoid any devastating effects upon the samples, or even unavoidable due to the structure of objects like in the case of tomosynthesis for mammography. However, tomographic reconstruction from limited angular views is not always welcome in an algorithmic sense, ...

Research by Australian scientists could pave the way to a new treatment for a currently incurable brain cancer in children called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG. Affecting about 20 children in Australia each year, DIPG is a devastating disease with an average survival time of just nine months after diagnosis. The research, led by scientists at Children's Cancer Institute and published this week in the international journal, Cell Reports, offers an exciting new therapeutic approach for the treatment of DIPG by using a new anti-cancer drug. The new drug, CBL0137, is an anti-cancer compound developed from the antimalarial drug quinacrine. The researchers found that CBL0137 directly ...

Intestinal worm infections can leave women in sub-Saharan Africa more vulnerable to sexually-transmitted viral infections, a new study reveals. The rate and severity of sexually-transmitted viral infections (STI) in the region are very high, as are those of worm infections, which when caught in the intestine can change immunity in other parts of the body. Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham and Cape Town led an international team which discovered that intestinal worm infection can change vaginal immunity and increase the likelihood of Herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) infection - the main cause of genital herpes. ...

Non-alcoholic fatty liver, NAFLD, is associated with several health risks. According to a new registry study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, NAFLD is linked to a 17-fold increased risk of liver cancer. The findings, published in Hepatology, underscore the need for improved follow-up of NAFLD patients with the goal of reducing the risk of cancer. "In this study with detailed liver histology data, we were able to quantify the increased risk of cancer associated with NAFLD, particularly hepatocellular carcinoma," says first author, Tracey G. Simon, researcher at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, and hepatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard ...

An outbreak of vomiting among dogs has been traced back to a type of animal coronavirus by researchers. Vets across the country began reporting cases of acute onset prolific vomiting in 2019/20. The Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNet) at the University of Liverpool asked vets for help in collecting data, with 1,258 case questionnaires from vets and owners plus 95 clinical samples from 71 animals. Based on this data, a team from the universities of Liverpool, Lancaster, Manchester and Bristol identified the outbreak as most likely to ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Women's increased agricultural labor during harvest season, in addition to domestic house care, often comes at the cost of their health, according to new research from the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI). Programs aimed at improving nutritional outcomes in rural India should account for the tradeoffs that women experience when their agricultural work increases, according to the study, "Seasonal time trade-offs and nutrition outcomes for women in agriculture: Evidence from rural India," which published in the journal Food Policy on March ...

PHILADELPHIA-- Humans have a uniquely high density of sweat glands embedded in their skin--10 times the density of chimpanzees and macaques. Now, researchers at Penn Medicine have discovered how this distinctive, hyper-cooling trait evolved in the human genome. In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, researchers showed that the higher density of sweat glands in humans is due, to a great extent, to accumulated changes in a regulatory region of DNA--called an enhancer region--that drives the expression of a sweat gland-building gene, explaining why humans are the sweatiest ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- April 13, 2021 -- Findings of a study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, suggest that increasing expression of a gene known as ABCC1 could not only reduce the deposition of a hard plaque in the brain that leads to Alzheimer's disease, but might also prevent or delay this memory-robbing disease from developing. ABCC1, also known as MRP1, has previously been shown in laboratory models to remove a plaque-forming protein known as amyloid beta (Abeta) from specialized endothelial cells that surround and protect ...

Compared to newborns conceived traditionally, newborns conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are more likely to have certain chemical modifications to their DNA, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The changes involve DNA methylation--the binding of compounds known as methyl groups to DNA--which can alter gene activity. Only one of the modifications was seen by the time the children were 9 years old. The study was conducted by Edwina Yeung, Ph.D., and colleagues in NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human ...

A team of UBC Okanagan researchers has determined that the type of fats a mother consumes while breastfeeding can have long-term implications on her infant's gut health. Dr. Deanna Gibson, a biochemistry researcher, along with Dr. Sanjoy Ghosh, who studies the biochemical aspects of dietary fats, teamed up with chemistry and molecular biology researcher Dr. Wesley Zandberg. The team, who conducts research in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, explored the role of feeding dietary fat to gestating rodents to determine the generational effects of fat exposure on their offspring. "The goal was to investigate how maternal dietary habits can impact an offspring's gut microbial communities and their associated sugar molecule patterns ...

HANOVER, N.H. - April 14, 2021 - Scientists have searched for years to understand how cells measure their size. Cell size is critical. It's what regulates cell division in a growing organism. When the microscopic structures double in size, they divide. One cell turns into two. Two cells turn into four. The process repeats until an organism has enough cells. And then it stops. Or at least it is supposed to. The complete chain of events that causes cell division to stop at the right time is what has confounded scientists. Beyond being a textbook problem, the question relates to serious medical challenges: ...

LOS ANGELES (April 13, 2021) -- The Lundquist Institute (TLI) Investigator Dong W. Chang, MD, and his colleagues' study on critically ill patients and ICU treatments was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study - "Evaluation of Time-Limited Trials Among Critically Ill Patients with Advanced Medical Illnesses and Reduction of Nonbeneficial ICU Treatments" - found that training physicians to communicate with family members of critically ill patients using a structured approach, which promotes shared decision-making, improved the quality of family meetings. This intervention was associated with reductions in invasive ICU treatments that prolonged suffering without benefit for patients and their families. "Invasive ICU treatments are frequently delivered to patients ...

In April 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole in galaxy M87 using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). However, that remarkable achievement was just the beginning of the science story to be told. Data from 19 observatories released today promise to give unparalleled insight into this black hole and the system it powers, and to improve tests of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. "We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking," says Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a co-author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that ...

If global warming continues unchecked, summer monsoon rainfall in India will become stronger and more erratic. This is the central finding of an analysis by a team of German researchers that compared more than 30 state-of-the-art climate models from all around the world. The study predicts more extremely wet years in the future - with potentially grave consequences for more than one billion people's well-being, economy, food systems and agriculture. "We have found robust evidence for an exponential dependence: For every degree Celsius of warming, monsoon rainfalls will likely increase by about 5%," says lead author Anja Katzenberger from the Potsdam-Institute ...

A team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, with colleagues from Goethe University, Frankfurt, has found the first evidence for ancient honey hunting, locked inside pottery fragments from prehistoric West Africa, dating back some 3,500 years ago. Honeybees are an iconic species, being the world's most important pollinator of food crops. Honeybee hive products, including beeswax, honey and pollen, used both for food and medicinal purposes, support livelihoods and provide sources of income for local communities across much of Africa, through both beekeeping ...

A potential treatment for dementia and epilepsy could look to reduce the amounts of a toxic gas in the brain has been revealed in a new study using rat brain cells. The research published in Scientific Reports today [Wednesday 14 April] shows that treatments to reduce levels of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) in the brain may help to ward off damage caused by the gas. By testing rat brain cells, the team of scientists from the University of Reading, University of Leeds and John Hopkins University in the USA found that H2S is involved in blocking a key brain cell gateway ...

If you were to visit the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau a thousand years ago, you'd find conditions remarkably familiar to the present. The climate was warm, but drier than today. There were large populations of Indigenous people known as the Fremont, a who hunted and grew crops in the area. With similar climate and moderate human activity, you might expect to see the types of wildfires that are now common to the American West: infrequent, gigantic and devastating. But you'd be wrong. In a new study led by the University of Utah, researchers found that ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (April 14, 2021)--Despite all the advances in medicine, some basic questions remain. For example, people cannot be told with any certainty how long they'll live. Nor can it be predicted exactly when a woman's childbearing years will end. However, a new study offers insights into factors that might predict a woman's age at natural menopause. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Factors that affect age at natural menopause are one of the most frequently studied topics in menopause-related research in recent decades, and with good reason. Knowing when a woman will enter menopause could be ...

Researchers have developed a new superbug-destroying coating that could be used on wound dressings and implants to prevent and treat potentially deadly bacterial and fungal infections. The material is one of the thinnest antimicrobial coatings developed to date and is effective against a broad range of drug-resistant bacteria and fungal cells, while leaving human cells unharmed. Antibiotic resistance is a major global health threat, causing at least 700,000 deaths a year. Without the development of new antibacterial therapies, the death toll could rise to 10 million people a year by 2050, equating to $US100 trillion in health care costs. While the health burden of fungal infections is less recognised, globally they kill about ...