A study carried out by the University of Granada indicates that smoking cannabis significantly alters key visual functions, such as visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, three-dimensional vision (stereopsis), the ability to focus, and glare sensitivity Yet, more than 90% of users believe that using cannabis has no effect on their vision, or only a slight effect A group of researchers from the Department of Optics of the University of Granada (UGR) has studied the effects of smoking cannabis on various visual parameters compared to the effect that the users themselves perceive the drug to have on their vision. This study, led by Carolina Ortiz Herrera and Rosario González Anera, has been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Its main author, Sonia Ortiz Peregrina, explains that ...

Concerns about climate change are driving a growing number of states, utilities, and corporations to set the goal of zeroing out power-sector carbon emissions. To date 17 states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico have adopted laws or executive orders to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity in the next couple of decades. Additionally, 46 U.S. utilities have pledged to go carbon free no later than 2050. Altogether, these goals cover about half of the U.S. population and economy. These are ambitious targets, but a new look at the past 15 years in the electricity sector shows that large reductions in emissions are possible. New research from the Department of Energy's Lawrence ...

As the Rhode Island legislature considers designating the Northern Star Coral an official state emblem, researchers are finding that studying this local creature's recovery from a laboratory-induced stressor could help better understand how to protect endangered tropical corals. A new study published today in mSystems, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology, investigates antibiotic-induced disturbance of the coral (Astrangia poculata) and shows that antibiotic exposure significantly altered the composition of the coral's mucus bacterial microbiome, but that all the treated corals recovered ...

A new study published in Elementa by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz and NOAA examines traditional aspects of seafood sustainability alongside greenhouse gas emissions to better understand the "carbon footprint" of U.S. tuna fisheries. Fisheries in the United States are among the best managed in the world, thanks to ongoing efforts to fish selectively, end overfishing, and rebuild fish stocks. But climate change could bring dramatic changes in the marine environment that threaten seafood productivity and sustainability. That's one reason why researchers ...

Physicists from Swansea University are part of an international research collaboration which has identified a new technique for testing the quality of quantum correlations. Quantum computers run their algorithms on large quantum systems of many parts, called qubits, by creating quantum correlations across all of them. It is important to verify that the actual computation procedures lead to quantum correlations of desired quality. However, carrying out these checks is resource-intensive as the number of tests required grows exponentially with the number of qubits involved. Researchers from the College of Science, working with colleagues from Spain ...

Biomedical scientists are increasingly using deconvolution methods, those used to computationally analyze the composition of complex mixtures of cells. One of their challenges is to select one method that is appropriate for their experimental conditions among nearly 50 available. To help with method selection, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital have extensively evaluated 11 deconvolution methods that are based on RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data analysis, determining each method's ...

Almost all bacteria rely on the same emergency valves--protein channels that pop open under pressure, releasing a deluge of cell contents. It is a last-ditch effort, a failsafe that prevents bacteria from exploding and dying when stretched to the limit. If we understood how those protein channels worked, antibiotic drugs could be designed to open them on demand, draining a bacterium of its nutrients by exploiting a floodgate common to many species.  But these channels are tricky to operate in the lab. And how precisely they open and close, passing through a sub-conducting state and ending in a desensitized state under the influence of mechanical forces, remains poorly understood. Now, new research from ...

A study done in rooms where COVID-19 patients were isolated shows that the virus's RNA - part of the genetic material inside a virus - can persist up to a month in dust. The study did not evaluate whether dust can transmit the virus to humans. It could, however, offer another option for monitoring COVID-19 outbreaks in specific buildings, including nursing homes, offices or schools. Karen Dannemiller, senior author of the study, has experience studying dust and its relationship to potential hazards like mold and microbes. "When the pandemic started, we really wanted to find a way that we could help ...

WHAT: Many people who have COVID-19 make a full recovery and return to their baseline state of health; however, some people have symptoms or other sequelae weeks or months after initial SARS-CoV-2 infection. These heterogeneous symptoms were the subject of the virtual "Workshop on Post-acute Sequelae of COVID-19" hosted on Dec. 2 and 4, 2020, by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in collaboration with other institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health. A paper published recently in Annals of Internal Medicine ...

Researchers have identified molecular signatures of the aging process in mice, publishing their results today in the open-access eLife journal. Their analyses provide one of the most comprehensive characterisations of the molecular signatures of aging across diverse types of cells from different tissues in a mammal, and will aid future studies on aging and related topics. Aging leads to the decline of major organs and is the main risk factor for many diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. While previous studies have highlighted different hallmarks of the aging process, the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms ...

In the search for life on other planets, the presence of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere is one potential sign of biological activity that might be detected by future telescopes. A new study, however, describes several scenarios in which a lifeless rocky planet around a sun-like star could evolve to have oxygen in its atmosphere. The new findings, published April 13 in AGU Advances, highlight the need for next-generation telescopes that are capable of characterizing planetary environments and searching for multiple lines of evidence for life in addition to detecting oxygen. "This ...

After interviewing various stakeholders from public and private healthcare systems (in Lithuania and the US), researchers Dr Agne Gadeikiene, Prof Asta Pundziene, Dr Aiste Dovaliene from Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), Lithuania designed a detailed structure revealing added value of remote healthcare services, i.e. telehealth. Adopting the concept of value co-creation common in business research to healthcare, the scientists claim that this is the first comprehensive analysis of this kind in the healthcare field involving two different healthcare systems. According to the researchers, although in the US the consultations via phone with physician have been available for more than fifty ...

A gene therapy protects eye cells in mice with a rare disorder that causes vision loss, especially when used in combination with other gene therapies, shows a study published today in eLife. The findings suggest that this therapy, whether used alone or in combination with other gene therapies that boost eye health, may offer a new approach to preserving vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa or other conditions that cause vision loss. Retinitis pigmentosa is a slowly progressive disease, which begins with the loss of night vision due to ...

Violent blows or jolts to the head can cause traumatic brain injury (TBI), and there are currently about five million people in the U.S. living with some form of chronic impairment after suffering a TBI. Even in a mild form, TBI can lead to lifelong nerve cell deterioration associated with a wide array of neuropsychiatric conditions. Tragically, there are no medicines to protect nerve cells after injury. Behind aging and genetics, TBI is the third leading cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD), yet the link between these two conditions is not understood. In a new study, published online today in Cell, researchers have discovered a new way to prevent brain nerve cells from deteriorating after injury, which also revealed a potential mechanistic ...

AMES, Iowa - Narratives are a powerful tool that can help explain complex issues, but they can also serve as sources of misinformation, which presents a challenge as public health agencies work to educate people about COVID-19 vaccine. In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, author Michael Dahlstrom, a professor and director of Iowa State University's Greenlee School of Journalism and Mass Communication, examined how narratives or storytelling can help counter misinformation and provide a connection between science and the human experience. Dahlstrom says simply presenting the facts, without some connection, may not help people make ...

Bottom Line: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to make a recommendation about screening for vitamin D deficiency in asymptomatic adults. Vitamin D performs an important role in bone metabolism. Requirements may vary by individual and no one blood vitamin D level defines deficiency. The USPSTF routinely makes recommendations about the effectiveness of preventive care services and this recommendation updates and is consistent with its 2014 statement. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2021.3069) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional ...

New research led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has revealed how breast cancer cells that develop during or after pregnancy change their environment to form more aggressive tumours. In experimental models of pregnancy-associated breast cancer, researchers found that cancer cells send signals to the connective tissue around them to trigger uncontrolled inflammation and remodel the tissue, which in turn helps the cancer to spread. "Breast cancers that arise during or shortly after pregnancy are highly aggressive as they often become resistant to standard therapies. With 50% of cases ...

Huntington's disease is a genetic neurodegenerative disorder caused by mutations in the protein huntingtin and characterized by involuntary dance-like movements, severe behavioural changes and cognitive impairment. That neuronal traffic is impaired in this disease has been very well known for several years. But that this deranged trafficking could be ameliorated by increasing huntingtin methylation was not yet known. The findings emerged from an international research work coordinated by the University of Trento and published in Cell Reports. The research teams identified the fundamental role of the protein arginine methyltransferase PRMT6 in ensuring transport along axons, the routes that connect nerve cells to each other, and hence the health of neurons. ...

Researchers from the group of Hans Clevers (Hubrecht Institute) developed the first patient-derived organoid model for cervical cancer. They also modelled the healthy human cervix using organoids. In close collaboration with the UMC Utrecht, Princess Máxima Center for pediatric oncology and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the researchers used the organoid-based platform to study sexually transmitted infections for a herpes virus. The model can potentially also be used to study the human papillomavirus (HPV), which is one of the main causes of cervical cancer. The results were published in Cell Stem Cell on the 13th of April. Cervical cancer is a common gynecological malignancy, often caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). However, good models to study human ...

(Boston)--How could studying gastrointestinal cells help the fight against COVD-19, which is a respiratory disease? According to a team led by Gustavo Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD, at the BU/BMC Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) and Elke Mühlberger, PhD, from the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University, testing how SARS-CoV-2 affects the gut can potentially serve to test novel therapeutics for COVID-19. In order to study SARS-CoV-2, models are needed that can duplicate disease development in humans, identify potential targets and enable drug testing. BU researchers have created human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC)-derived intestinal organoids or 3-D models that can be infected and replicated ...

The (when stretched) two-metre-long DNA molecule in each human cell is continuously being unpacked and packed again to enable the expression of genetic information. When genes must be accessed for transcription, the DNA double helix unwinds and the strands separate from each other so that all the elements needed for gene expression can access the relevant DNA region. This process results in the accumulation of DNA supercoiling that needs to be resolved. A study recently published by Felipe Cortés, Head of the Topology and DNA Breaks Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), and the members of his team, in cooperation with Silvia Jimeno González, Professor ...

Understanding the effects of specific mutations in gene regulatory regions - the sections of DNA and RNA that turn genes on and off - is important to unraveling how the genome works, as well as normal development and disease. But studying a large variety of mutations in these regulatory regions in a systematic way is a monumental task. While progress has been made in cell lines and yeast, few studies in live animals have been done, especially in large populations. Experimental and computational biologists at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) have teamed up to establish an approach to induce thousands of different mutations in up to 1 million ...

Electrochemical processes could be used to convert CO2 into useful starting materials for industry. To optimise the processes, chemists are attempting to calculate in detail the energy costs caused by the various reaction partners and steps. Researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and Sorbonne Université in Paris have discovered how small hydrophobic molecules, such as CO2, contribute to the energy costs of such reactions by analysing how the molecules interact in water at the interface. The team describes the results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS for short, published online on 13 April 2021. To conduct the ...

The time children and adolescents spend on screen time entertainment -computers, mobile phones, television and video games- adversely affects their eating habits. This is the main conclusion drawn from a research carried out by EpiPHAAN (Epidemiology, Physical Activity, Accelerometry and Nutrition) research group of the University of Malaga, which further establishes that parents' education level is also associated with the adherence to the Mediterranean diet. This research was conducted within the PASOS Study -Physical Activity, Sedentarism, lifestyles and Obesity in Spanish youth- of Gasol Foundation, which analyzed more than ...

Cancer patients from the UK were 1.5 times more likely to die following a diagnosis with COVID-19 than cancer patients from European countries. This is the finding of a study of over 1000 patients - 924 from European countries and 468 from the UK - during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team, led by Imperial College London, say the study highlights the need for UK cancer patients to be prioritised for vaccination. The study tracked data between 27 February to 10 September 2020, across 27 centres in six countries: Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany and the UK. The results, published in the European Journal of Cancer, showed that 30 days after a COVID-19 diagnosis, 40.38 per cent of UK cancer patients had died, versus 26.5 per cent of ...