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 ...

Bern's ice core researchers were already able to demonstrate in 2008 how the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has changed over the past 800,000 years. Now, using the same ice core from the Antarctic, the group led by Bernese climate researcher Hubertus Fischer shows the maximum and minimum values between which the mean ocean temperature has fluctuated over the past 700,000 years. The results of the reconstruction have just been published in the journal Climate of the Past. The study's key findings: Mean ocean temperatures have been very similar over the last seven ice ages, averaging about 3.3 °C colder than the pre-industrial reference period, as already suggested by syntheses of deep water ...

It is an open question to what extent protection against reinfection persists after overcoming a SARS-CoV-2 infection. The "Rhineland Study", a population-based study conducted by DZNE in the Bonn area, is now providing new findings in this regard. Blood samples taken last year indicate that an important component of immunity - the levels of specific neutralizing antibodies against the coronavirus - had dropped in most of the study participants with a previous infection after four to five months. In some, antibody titers even fell below the detection limit. These results, published in the scientific journal "Nature Communications", lay the groundwork for planned follow-up studies. Between April ...

Research breakthrough in understanding how neural systems process and store information. A team of scientists from the University of Exeter and the University of Auckland have made a breakthrough in the quest to better understand how neural systems are able to process and store information. The researchers, including lead author Dr Kyle Wedgwood from the University of Exeter's Living Systems Institute, have made a significant discovery in how a single cell can store electrical patterns, similar to memories. They compared sophisticated mathematical modelling to lab-based experiments to determine how different parameters, such as how long it takes ...

In a new study, Dr. LU Xiankai and his colleagues from the South China Botanical Garden (SCBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) found that tropical forests can capture carbon dioxide (CO2) into soils and thus reduce emitted CO2. But how exactly do tropical forest soils capture atmospheric CO2? Current knowledge of forest soil carbon sequestration mainly focuses on temperate and boreal forests, where most ecosystems are nitrogen-limited, and an increase in nitrogen supply can enhance net primary productivity (NPP) and subsequent soil carbon ...

A group of researchers from Kobe University and Chiba University has successfully developed a flexible and simple method of artificially producing genetic switches for yeast, a model eukaryotic organism. The group consisted of Researcher TOMINAGA Masahiro*1, Associate Professor ISHII Jun*2 and Professor KONDO Akihiko*3 (of Kobe University's Graduate School of Science, Technology and Innovation/Engineering Biology Research Center), and Professor UMENO Daisuke et al. (of Chiba University's Graduate School of Engineering). Genetic switches are gene regulatory networks that control gene expression. The researchers established a platform for ...

Oakland, CA-In the first study to report on the health effects of exposure to a toxic environmental chemical over three human generations, a new study has found that granddaughters whose grandmothers were exposed to the pesticide DDT have higher rates of obesity and earlier first menstrual periods. This may increase the granddaughters' risk for breast cancer as well as high blood pressure, diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. The research by the Public Health Institute's Child Health and Development Studies (CHDS) and the University of California at Davis was published today ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - April 14, 2021 - Investigators at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health, have identified a set of new genetic markers that could potentially lead to new personalized treatments for lung cancer. The study appears online in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. This study was built on a previous discovery by the precision oncology team at Wake Forest Baptist's Comprehensive Cancer Center, directed by Wei Zhang, Ph.D., professor of cancer biology at Wake Forest School of Medicine and a co-corresponding author of this study. Using DNA sequencing technologies, Zhang's team found that tumors with mutated KMT2 genes, a family of proteins, exhibit a feature ...

A new study based on daily COVID-19 data from Brazil details the fast spread of both cases and deaths in the country, with distinct patterns by state, and where inequities regarding the implementation of policies and resources exacerbated the spread in lower-income regions. Despite an extensive network of primary care availability, Brazil - which did not pursue a coordinated national pandemic response strategy - has suffered greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic. "[T]he federal response has been a dangerous combination of inaction and wrongdoing," write Marcia Castro and colleagues. Using daily data from State Health Offices, Castro ...

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 ...