Ageing and age-related brain disease do not affect women and men in the same way. The adult brain constantly generates new brain cells called neurons from stem cells, a process called neurogenesis. This process is important for learning and cognitive function which declines as the brain ages. Neurogenesis has been extensively studied in animals, but most studies have looked at male animals, raising the question of whether age-related decline in neurogenesis affects both sexes in the same way. To address this, researchers Sally Temple, PhD (sallytemple@neuralsci.org), Kristen Zuloga, PhD (zuloagk@amc.edu) and colleagues at the NY Neural Stem ...

Mutations in the DNA of the cell's energy 'factories' increases the chances of survival for people with bowel cancer, according to a study published today (Thursday) in Nature Metabolism. Scientists funded by Cancer Research UK have found that patients with colorectal cancer, a common form of bowel cancer, had a 57 to 93% decreased risk of death from their cancer, depending on the presence and type of mitochondrial DNA mutations in their tumours. The researchers hope that in the future, doctors could use this information to identify patients with more aggressive forms of bowel ...

What The Study Did: This analysis evaluated in-hospital mortality rates for patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection over time and factors associated with changes were examined Authors: Lyn Finelli, Dr.P.H., M.S., of Merck Research Labs in North Wales, Pennsylvania, 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.2021.6556) 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 ...

Gorillas usually stand bipedally and rapidly beat their chests with cupped hands in rapid succession. Chest beating is a unique sound because is it not a vocalization, like frogs croaking, but rather it is a form of gestural communication that can be both heard and seen. The emanating drumming sound can be heard over one kilometre away. The presumed function of gorilla chest beats is to attract females and intimidate rival males. Researchers recorded chest beats and used a technique called photogrammetry to non-invasively measured body size of adult male wild mountain gorillas monitored by the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. They found that larger males emitted chest beats with lower peak frequencies than smaller ones. In other words, ...

The U.S. military veteran population is known to have abnormally high rates of suicide, so health officials have been concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic might elevate risk of psychiatric disorders, particularly among those suffering from post-traumatic stress and related disorders. A recent national study of more than 3,000 veterans participating in the National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study did find that 12.8% reported post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms related to COVID-19 and 8% said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic. However, the same survey, published April 8 in JAMA Network Open, revealed another, startling finding. A full 43.3% ...

What The Study Did: This survey study uses self-reported data from a national study of veterans to assess the association of symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder with posttraumatic psychological growth (these are positive psychological changes such as an appreciation of life and personal growth) among U.S. veterans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors: Robert H. Pietrzak, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System in West Haven, 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.2021.4972) Editor's ...

It may be possible in the future to use information technology where electron spin is used to store, process and transfer information in quantum computers. It has long been the goal of scientists to be able to use spin-based quantum information technology at room temperature. A team of researchers from Sweden, Finland and Japan have now constructed a semiconductor component in which information can be efficiently exchanged between electron spin and light at room temperature and above. The new method is described in an article published in Nature Photonics. ...

The millions of people who have chronic sinusitis deal not only with stuffy noses and headaches, they also commonly struggle to focus, and experience depression and other symptoms that implicate the brain's involvement in their illness. New research links sinus inflammation with alterations in brain activity, specifically with the neural networks that modulate cognition, introspection and response to external stimuli. The paper was published today in JAMA Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery. "This is the first study that links chronic sinus inflammation with a neurobiological ...

Expressive language sampling (ELS) is a useful tool for measuring communication development in youth with Down syndrome, a END ...

Cyberbullying already accounts for one in four cases of bullying and, according to the latest UNICEF report issued on the occasion of 'Safer Internet Day', it affects at least two students per class in Spanish schools. In this regard, the Laboratory of Studies on Coexistence and Violence Prevention at the University of Cordoba, under the direction of professors Rosario Ortega-Ruiz and Eva M. Romera, has just published a study examining family communication and its impact on cyber-gossip and the excessive use of social media-two of the main factors with the greatest influence on cyber-bullying. Their results point in the same direction: an atmosphere of trust in the family is an antidote to this type of behaviour, reducing the risk of schoolchildren engaging inproblematic ...

Calibration and validation (CAL/VAL) is a key technology for quantitative application of space-borne remote sensing data. However, the complex space environment can cause many uncertainties and degrade the calibration accuracy. In-flight calibration is always needed. The thermal emission of the Moon is stable over hundreds of years because there is no atmosphere and no significant physical or chemical change on its surface. The deep space view of the Microwave Humidity Sounder onboard NOAA-18 has viewed the Moon many times every year. Under solar illumination, the lunar surface shows stable and periodical variation in microwave brightness temperature (TB). The Moon is a potential calibration source for thermal calibration The ...

A decade ago, the discovery of quasiparticles called magnetic skyrmions provided important new clues into how microscopic spin textures will enable spintronics, a new class of electronics that use the orientation of an electron's spin rather than its charge to encode data. But although scientists have made big advances in this very young field, they still don't fully understand how to design spintronics materials that would allow for ultrasmall, ultrafast, low-power devices. Skyrmions may seem promising, but scientists have long treated skyrmions as merely 2D objects. Recent studies, however, have suggested that 2D skyrmions could actually be the genesis of a 3D spin pattern called hopfions. ...

In all adult vertebrates, neural stem cells can be recruited to produce new neurons in the brain. However, little is known about these so-called "activation" processes. Scientists at the Institut Pasteur, CNRS, and Tel Aviv University working in collaboration with the École Polytechnique and INRAE have successfully performed 3D visualization and spatial and temporal distribution analysis of neural stem cell activation in the adult brain of a zebrafish vertebrate model. Their findings demonstrate for the first time that activation events for these cells are coordinated ...

Powerful algorithms used by Netflix, Amazon and Facebook can 'predict' the biological language of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, scientists have found. Big data produced during decades of research was fed into a computer language model to see if artificial intelligence can make more advanced discoveries than humans. Academics based at St John's College, University of Cambridge, found the machine-learning technology could decipher the 'biological language' of cancer, Alzheimer's, and other neurodegenerative diseases. Their ground-breaking study has been published in the scientific journal PNAS today (April 8 2021) and could be used in the future to 'correct the grammatical mistakes inside cells that cause disease'. Professor Tuomas Knowles, lead ...

The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infections in preschool and school children is an important benchmark for deciding whether to open kindergartens and schools. The screening study "Fr1da" led by Anette-Gabriele Ziegler tests children in Bavaria for an early stage of type 1 diabetes. These tests include the collection of blood samples. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers had decided to use the valuable study infrastructure of the Fr1da study to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections, too. For this, they developed a SARS-CoV-2 antibody test with particularly high accuracy. During the first ...

The rainfall over the Yangtze River Valley (YRV) in June 2020 broke the record since 1979 (Figure 1). As of June 28, the People's Daily Online reported that there were more than 12 million people affected by flood disasters related to this torrential rain, with deaths or disappearances of 78 persons and a direct economic loss of more than 25 billion CNY. Recently, scientists from South China Sea Institute of Oceanology (SCSIO), Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the cause of the record-breaking rainfall over the YRV. According to their study published in Science China Earth Sciences on March 19, 2021, all three oceans of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) demonstrate an mRNA delivery system that effectively produces BDNF protein in rat brain to protect neurons from ischemia Tokyo - A lack of oxygen to brain tissue--known as ischemia--leads to the death of neurons, which results in stroke. Despite considerable research, there are currently no treatments that successfully prevent neuronal death. Now, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) researchers have reported a way of delivering mRNA to produce a therapeutic protein that protects neurons. Their findings, demonstrated in rats, ...

Cycling at moderate intensity during dialysis could drastically improve the heart health of patients with kidney failure and result in significant savings for the NHS, according to new research by the University of Leicester supported by the charity Kidney Research UK and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre. Patients in the CYCLE-HD study were offered 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise on a specially adapted bicycle during their regular dialysis sessions. Dialysis can lead to long-term scarring of the heart, which can accumulate over time and lead to heart failure. The study set out to examine ...

Ensuring sustainability of crop and timber production would mitigate the greatest drivers of terrestrial wildlife decline, responsible for 40% of the overall extinction risk of amphibians, birds and mammals, according to a paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. These results were generated using a new metric which, for the first time, allows business, governments and civil society to assess their potential contributions to stemming global species loss, and can be used to calculate national, regional, sector-based, or institution-specific targets. The work was led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Post-2020 Taskforce, hosted by Newcastle ...

New Curtin University-led research has found climate change will have a substantial impact on global food production and health if no action is taken by consumers, food industries, government, and international bodies. Published in one of the highest-ranking public health journals, the Annual Review of Public Health, the researchers completed a comprehensive 12-month review of published literature on climate change, healthy diet and actions needed to improve nutrition and health around the world. Lead researcher John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor Colin Binns, from the Curtin School of Population Health at Curtin University, said climate change has had a detrimental impact on health and food production for the past 50 years and far more needs to be ...

A Curtin University study has found the introduced European honeybee could lead to native bee population decline or extinction when colonies compete for the same nectar and pollen sources in urban gardens and areas of bush. Published in the 'Biological Journal of the Linnean Society', the research found competition between the native bees and the introduced European honeybee could be particularly intense in residential gardens dominated by non-native flowers, and occurred when the bees shared the same flower preferences. Under these conditions, it would appear that European honeybees, being very abundant, and effective foragers, with the ...

How can large amounts of data be transferred or processed as quickly as possible? One key to this could be graphene. The ultra-thin material is only one atomic layer thick, and the electrons it contains have very special properties due to quantum effects. It could therefore be very well suited for use in high-performance electronic components. Up to this point, however, there has been a lack of knowledge about how to suitably control certain properties of graphene. A new study by a team of scientists from Bielefeld and Berlin, together with researchers from other research institutes in Germany and Spain, is changing this. The team's findings have been published in the journal Science Advances. Consisting of carbon atoms, graphene is a material just one atom ...

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread in France, a thorough characterization of hospital care needs and of the trajectories of hospital patients, as well as how they have changed over time, is essential to support planning. This led scientists from the Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases Unit at the Institut Pasteur and the University of Cambridge to develop a probabilistic model that can be used to analyze detailed patient trajectories based on 198,846 hospitalizations in France during the first nine months of the pandemic (from March to No-vember 2020). These findings were published in The Lancet Regional Health Europe on March 20, 2021. This ...

Leesburg, VA, April 8, 2021--According to an open-access article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), IV contrast-enhanced 2-millisievert CT (2-mSv CT) is comparable to conventional-dose CT (CDCT) for the diagnosis of right colonic diverticulitis. "By mitigating concern of missed diagnosis of right colonic diverticulitis, our results further support the use of low-dose CT for suspected appendicitis," wrote first author Hae Young Kim from the department of radiology at Korea's Seoul National University Bundang Hospital. "To our knowledge," Kim et al. maintained, "this is the first study to formally measure the diagnostic performance of CT for right colonic diverticulitis." Kim and colleagues' large pragmatic randomized controlled trial data included 3,074 patients ...

Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University have created a decision support system (DSS) for dispatching personnel of electric power systems (EPS). The system allows dispatchers to quickly test their actions on the management of the EPS, to control and evaluate their consequences using a digital simulator in a regime faster than real time. The article devoted to the research work is published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (Q1, IF 6.074) academic journal, one of the most peer-reviewed journals in energy, energy technology, electrical engineering and electronics ...