Below the verdant surface and organic rich soil, life extends kilometers into Earth's deep rocky crust. The continental deep subsurface is likely one of the largest reservoirs of bacteria and archaea on Earth, many forming biofilms - like a microbial coating of the rock surface. This microbial population survives without light or oxygen and with minimal organic carbon sources, and can get energy by eating or respiring minerals. Distributed throughout the deep subsurface, these biofilms could represent 20-80% of the total bacterial and archaeal biomass ...

Early results show that a new combination drug therapy is safe and effective against advanced skin cancer in patients who were not able to have their tumors surgically removed. The drug combination is among the first, researchers say, to demonstrate the potential value of a live common cold virus, a coxsackievirus, to infect and kill cancer cells. The Phase I study, led by a researcher at NYU Langone Health and its Perlmutter Cancer Center, is also among the first to show how such oncolytic viruses can safely boost the action of widely used cancer therapies that help the body's immune defense system detect and kill cancer ...

An international team working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used a unique X-ray instrument to learn new things about lithium-rich battery materials that have been the subject of much study for their potential to extend the range of electric vehicles and the operation of electronic devices. The researchers focused their investigations on a material called lithium manganese oxide (Li2MnO3), the extreme example of so-called "lithium-rich" materials, containing the largest amount of lithium possible within this family of materials. A recently developed tenet of the ...

A dementia diagnosis turns the world upside down, not only for the person affected but also for their relatives, as brain function gradually declines. Those affected lose their ability to plan, remember things or behave appropriately. At the same time, their motor skills also deteriorate. Ultimately, dementia patients are no longer able to handle daily life alone and need comprehensive care. In Switzerland alone, more than 150,000 people share this fate, and each year a further 30,000 new cases are diagnosed. To date, all attempts to find a drug to cure this disease ...

As demonstrated by multiple studies over the years, women who breastfeed have a lower risk for developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes when compared to those who don't or can't. However, the mechanisms by which these risks are reduced for lactating women are still not fully understood. Duke Appiah, Ph.D., an assistant professor of public health at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and director of the university's master's program in public health, said the presence of excess fat, specifically visceral and pericardial fat could help explain this finding. Using that hypothesis, Appiah and a team of researchers recently completed a study titled, "The ...

Dengue risk is exacerbated in highly populated areas of Brazil after extreme drought because of improvised water containers housing mosquitoes, suggests a new study in Lancet Planetary Health. The research was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's (LSHTM) Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health and Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases. Using advanced statistical modelling techniques, the team predicted the timing and intensity of dengue risk in Brazil from extreme weather patterns. The risk of dengue ...

Data collected from 337 cities across 18 countries show that even slight increases in ambient carbon monoxide levels from automobiles and other sources are associated with increased mortality. A scientific team led by Yale School of Public Health Assistant Professor Kai Chen analyzed data, including a total of 40 million deaths from 1979 to 2016, and ran it through a statistical model. The research, published today in The Lancet Planetary Health, also found that even short-term exposure to ambient carbon monoxide (CO) -- at levels below the current air quality guidelines and considered ...

In a study of over 73 million delivery hospitalizations during a 19-year period in the United States, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Irving Medical Center found that failure to rescue from severe maternal morbidity contributes more than a half of the 3-fold difference in maternal mortality between Black women and White women. Failure to rescue refers to death resulting from severe maternal morbidity such as eclampsia, acute heart failure, and sepsis. The findings are published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Despite ...

When most Americans imagine an archaeologist, they picture someone who looks like Indiana Jones. Or, perhaps, Lara Croft, from the Tomb Raider game. White, usually male but occasionally female, digging up the spoils of a vanished culture in colonized lands. Depictions of archaeologists in popular culture mirror reality. Many scholars have noted the experts institutions recognize as authorities to discuss or represent the past are overwhelmingly white and mostly male. Archaeology has also been a tool colonizing countries use to consolidate and justify their domination. As a new open-access paper in American Antiquity points out, the first doctoral degree in archaeology was not granted to a Black woman until 1980. First author Ayana Omilade Flewellen, ...

Cambridge, Mass. - When the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved for emergency use in December 2020, healthcare systems across the Unites States needed to rapidly design and implement their own approaches to distribute COVID-19 vaccines equitably and efficiently. This new role has required Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) to develop new strategies and build large operational teams to organize and successfully vaccinate more than 14,000 patients a week across Eastern Massachusetts. In an Insight article published in JAMA Health Forum, Leonor Fernandez, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Peter Shorett, MPP, Chief Integration Officer at ...

April 8, 2021 - Women undergoing surgery to treat stress urinary incontinence (SUI) are not at increased risk of developing pelvic cancers, according to a large-scale, population-based study in The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "In a very large population with extended follow-up, we found no increase in the risk of any pelvic malignancy in women who underwent stress urinary incontinence surgery," comments lead author Humberto ...

Detecting and analyzing breast cancer goes beyond the initial discovery of the cancer itself. If a patient has a tumor removed and it needs to be analyzed to determine further treatment, it might be OK for the results to take 24 hours. But if the patient is still on the operating table and clinicians are waiting to make sure no cancer cells are present along the edges of the removed tumor, results need to be nearly immediate. A paper titled, "Breast cancer histopathology using infrared spectroscopic imaging: The impact of instrumental configurations," ...

Many Mario Kart enthusiasts are familiar with the rush of racing down Rainbow Road, barely squeaking around a corner, and catching a power-up from one of the floating square icons on the screen--or, less ideally, slipping on a banana peel laid by another racer and flying off the side of the road into oblivion. This heated competition between multiple players, who use a variety of game tokens and tools to speed ahead or thwart their competitors, is part of what makes the classic Nintendo racing game that has been around since the early 1990s so appealing. "It's been fun since I was a kid, it's fun ...

Whatever ultimately caused inhabitants to abandon Cahokia, it was not because they cut down too many trees, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. Archaeologists from Arts & Sciences excavated around earthen mounds and analyzed sediment cores to test a persistent theory about the collapse of Cahokia, the pre-Columbian Native American city in southwestern Illinois that was once home to more than 15,000 people. No one knows for sure why people left Cahokia, though many environmental and social explanations have been proposed. One oft-repeated theory is tied to resource exploitation: specifically, that Native Americans ...

Scientists could be a step closer to finding a way to reduce the impact of traumatic memories, according to a Texas A&M University study published recently in the journal END ...

New Haven, Conn. -- Alzheimer's disease is known for its slow attack on neurons crucial to memory and cognition. But why are these particular neurons in aging brains so susceptible to the disease's ravages, while others remain resilient? A new study led by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine has found that susceptible neurons in the prefrontal cortex develop a "leak" in calcium storage with advancing age, they report April 8 in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia, The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. This disruption of calcium storage in turns ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New insights into the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infections could bring better treatments for COVID-19 cases. An international team of researchers unexpectedly found that a biochemical pathway, known as the immune complement system, is triggered in lung cells by the virus, which might explain why the disease is so difficult to treat. The research is published this week in the journal Science Immunology. The researchers propose that the pairing of antiviral drugs with drugs that inhibit this process may be more effective. Using an in vitro model using human lung ...

MADISON, WI, April 8, 2021 - USDA Forest Service scientists have delivered a new comprehensive assessment of the invasive species that confront America's forests and grasslands, from new arrivals to some that invaded so long ago that people are surprised to learn they are invasive. The assessment, titled "Invasive Species in Forests and Rangelands of the United States: A Comprehensive Science Synthesis for the United States Forest Sector," serves as a one-stop resource for land managers who are looking for information on the invasive species that are already affecting the landscape, the species that may threaten the landscape, and what is known about control ...

Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman once described turbulence as "the most important unsolved problem of classical physics." Understanding turbulence in classical fluids like water and air is difficult partly because of the challenge in identifying the vortices swirling within those fluids. Locating vortex tubes and tracking their motion could greatly simplify the modeling of turbulence. But that challenge is easier in quantum fluids, which exist at low enough temperatures that quantum mechanics -- which deals with physics on the scale of atoms or subatomic particles -- govern their behavior. In a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Florida State University researchers ...

The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish. Michigan State University's Ingo Braasch has helped an international research team show that this connection scheme was already present in ancient fish at least 450 million years ago. That makes it about 100 million years older than previously believed. "It's the first time for me that one of our publications literally changes the textbook that I am teaching with," said Braasch, as assistant professor in the Department of Integrative Biology in the College ...

URBANA, Ill. - When scientists need to understand the effects of new infant formula ingredients on brain development, it's rarely possible for them to carry out initial safety studies with human subjects. After all, few parents are willing to hand over their newborns to test unproven ingredients. Enter the domestic pig. Its brain and gut development are strikingly similar to human infants - much more so than traditional lab animals, rats and mice. And, like infants, young pigs can be scanned using clinically available equipment, including non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. That means researchers can test nutritional interventions in pigs, look at their effects on the developing brain via MRI, and make educated predictions about how those ...

Modern human-like brains evolved comparatively late in the genus Homo and long after the earliest humans first dispersed from Africa, according to a new study. By analyzing the impressions left behind by the ancient brains that once sat inside now fossilized skulls, the authors discovered that the brains of the earliest Homo retained a primitive, great ape-like organization of the frontal lobe. The findings challenge the long-standing assumption that human-like brain organization is a hallmark of early Homo and suggest that the evolutionary history of the human brain is more complex than previously thought. Our modern brains are larger and structurally different than those of our closest living relatives, ...

Researchers present a new, low-temperature method for injection-molding transparent fused silica glass, similar to how many plastic objects are manufactured. According to the authors, the process offers the possibility of producing complex and high-quality glass components using the same fabrication methods that allowed polymers to become one of the most important materials of the 21st century. The optical, thermal, mechanical and chemical properties of silicate glasses make them an ideal non-carbon based, high-performance material with applications ranging from packaging and architecture to high-throughput fiber optic ...

Using a novel genetic editing system termed intMEMOIR, researchers reveal the cell lineage histories of individual cells within their native tissue context, according to a new study. The new approach provides a powerful new tool for recording cell lineage in diverse cellular systems. During multicellular development, a cell's spatial position and lineage play important roles in cell fate determination. The ability to visualize lineage relationships directly within their native tissues can provide valuable insight into the factors that affect development and disease. This promise has spurred the development of several ...

X-ray emissions from the Crab Pulsar are more intense during giant radio pulses (GRPs), researchers report. The new findings provide constraints on the mechanisms underlying GRPs and may provide insights into other transient radio phenomena observed throughout the Universe. Pulsars, or rapidly spinning neutron stars, emit pulses of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetospheres and are observed from Earth as regular sequences of radio pulses. Most radio pulses from these distant objects are of a consistent intensity. Occasionally, however, sporadic and short-lived ...