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 ...

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 ...