Abusive alcohol drinking considerably impacts human health. Alcoholism, better defined as Alcohol Use Disorders (AUD), includes a group of pathological entities related to alcohol-induced damage. Individuals with AUD exhibit compulsive alcohol drinking and negative emotional states when alcohol drinking ceases. In the most severe AUD forms, the individuals lose control over consumption despite a decided will to stop. Some controversial issues have arisen as to whether the definition of AUD can help to delimit and characterize clinical entities related to abusive alcohol ingestion. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that approximately 3,3 million people (5,9% of global ...

New findings from a Michigan Medicine study reveal that antibody testing is predictive of prior COVID-19 infection, and rapid screening methods - even from finger pricks - are effective testing tools. Researchers analyzed antibody tests conducted on more than 500 subjects in patient care settings. They found that people who had COVID, including those with mild symptoms, produced antibodies. "For a long time, people were very worried that people with mild COVID did not make immune responses," says Charles Schuler, M.D., a clinical assistant professor of allergy and immunology at Michigan Medicine. "This should give people confidence that the tests that are available to them aren't just random number generators. They're actually giving them ...

New "sweat stickers" may streamline the early diagnosis of cystic fibrosis by enabling scientists to easily gather and analyze sweat from the skin of infants and children. The stickers matched the performance of previous, more cumbersome devices when tested with 51 subjects, suggesting the stickers could address design obstacles that have held back the diagnosis and treatment of cystic fibrosis in pediatric patients. Diagnosing cystic fibrosis in infancy or childhood is critical to achieve good outcomes, as current treatments must be given early to extend lifespans and alter the course of the disease. Many current diagnostics work by detecting levels of chloride in sweat, which are elevated in cystic fibrosis patients. However, these tests must often be repeated and use unwieldy wrist-wrapped ...

For many parents, the COVID-19 pandemic has made life's everyday juggling act--managing work, school, extracurricular, and household responsibilities--much, much harder. And according to a new study led by Penn sociologists, those extra burdens have fallen disproportionately on mothers. The research, shared in the April issue of the journal Gender and Society, investigated how shifts in work and school that arose due to the pandemic triggered changes in the division of labor in families. Using data on two-parent households from a nationwide survey conducted in April 2020, the researchers found that ...

Scientists from the Skoltech Center for Energy Science and Technology (CEST) have developed a method for modeling the behavior of 2D materials under pressure. The research will help create pressure sensors based on silicene or other 2D materials. The paper was published in the ACS Nano journal. Silicene, which is regarded as the silicon analog of graphene, is a two-dimensional allotrope of silicon. In its normal state, bulk silicon is a semiconductor with a diamond crystal type structure. As it thins down to one or several layers, its properties change dramatically. However, it has not yet been possible to study the change in the electronic properties of 2D materials at high pressure. Scientists from Russia, Italy, the United ...

In a longitudinal study published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Dental Association, researchers analyzed untreated decay in a cohort of nearly 7,000 children enrolled in the ForsythKids preventive dentistry program. Over the course of six years, the percentage of children with untreated cavities in the program decreased from 39 to 19 percent, suggesting that school-based prevention programs are effective in combating childhood dental disease. Tooth decay is the most common chronic early childhood disease in the United States. More than half of children aged 6-8 years old have had a cavity, and kids from low-income families ...

High cholesterol is the most commonly understood cause of atherosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries that raises the risk of heart attack and stroke. But now, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a gene that likely plays a causal role in coronary artery disease independent of cholesterol levels. The gene also likely has roles in related cardiovascular diseases, including high blood pressure and diabetes. The study appears March 24 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Studying mice and genetic data from people, the researchers found ...

LA JOLLA--(March 31, 2021) Clinicians using a new viral screening test can not only diagnose COVID-19 in a matter of minutes with a portable, pocket-sized machine, but can also simultaneously test for other viruses--like influenza--that might be mistaken for the coronavirus. At the same time, they can sequence the virus, providing valuable information on the spread of COVID-19 mutations and variants. The new test, dubbed NIRVANA, was described online today by a multi-institution team of scientists in the journal Med. "This is a virus detection and surveillance method that doesn't require an expensive infrastructure like other approaches," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, co-corresponding author and a professor in Salk's Gene Expression ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 31, 2021) - A new study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry finds that patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) as well as other psychiatric comorbidities, such as autism spectrum or tic disorders, may respond well to Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). DBS is a minimally invasive neurosurgical procedure that uses coordinates to target certain areas of the brain, implanting electrodes that can help regulate abnormal brain activity. DBS procedures are rare for OCD in the United States; only a couple hundred patients have received this treatment for OCD management since its FDA approval ...

An aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma has no cure. Patients survive an average of 15 months after diagnosis, with fewer than 10% of patients surviving longer than five years. While researchers are investigating potential new therapies via ongoing clinical trials, a new study from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that a minor adjustment to the current standard treatment -- giving chemotherapy in the morning rather than the evening -- could add a few months to patients' survival. The study appears online in the journal Neuro-Oncology Advances. Average overall survival ...

AURORA, Colo. (March 30, 2021 - Researchers at the University of Colorado College of Nursing have found that nearly one-quarter of graduate nursing students have reported elevated levels of stress, anxiety and depression, compounded in the past year by the COVID-19 pandemic. Study findings, published recently in END ...

A new invention that uses sunlight to drive water purification could help solve the problem of providing clean water off the grid. The device resembles a large sponge that soaks up water but leaves contaminants - like lead, oil and pathogens - behind. To collect the purified water from the sponge, one simply places it in sunlight. The researchers described the device in a paper published this week in the journal Advanced Materials. The inspiration for the device came from the pufferfish, a species that takes in water to swell its body when threatened, and then releases water when danger passes, said the device's co-inventor END ...

When it comes to powering mobile robots, batteries present a problematic paradox: the more energy they contain, the more they weigh, and thus the more energy the robot needs to move. Energy harvesters, like solar panels, might work for some applications, but they don't deliver power quickly or consistently enough for sustained travel. James Pikul, assistant professor in Penn Engineering's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, is developing robot-powering technology that has the best of both worlds. His environmentally controlled voltage source, or ECVS, works like a battery, in that the energy is produced by repeatedly breaking ...

In looking at the broader impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and wellbeing, public health experts are examining screening rates for cancer. A new study looking at U.S. mammography screening rates during the first five months of the pandemic found both a strong rebound in breast cancer screening rates and a concerning cumulative deficit in mammograms due to missed appointments, as well as uncovering disparities when looking at screening according to race. The study was released this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Conducted by investigators from the Breast Cancer Surveillance Coalition (BCSC), a federally-funded, national network of breast imaging registries, the study sought to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 ...

Denver, CO, March 31, 2020 - Children with Down syndrome are 20-times more likely to develop acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and 150-times more likely to develop acute myeloid leukemia (AML) compared to their typical peers. According to a new study by researchers at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, the reason could be that children with Down syndrome are more likely to present with clonal hematopoiesis (CH), a process in which a blood stem cell acquires a genetic mutation that promotes replication. The findings, published online by Blood Advances, add to a growing body of evidence, much of which has been established ...

Washington, DC-- Diamonds that formed deep in the Earth's mantle contain evidence of chemical reactions that occurred on the seafloor. Probing these gems can help geoscientists understand how material is exchanged between the planet's surface and its depths. New work published in Science Advances confirms that serpentinite--a rock that forms from peridotite, the main rock type in Earth's mantle, when water penetrates cracks in the ocean floor--can carry surface water as far as 700 kilometers deep by plate tectonic processes. "Nearly all tectonic plates that make up the seafloor eventually bend and slide down into ...

PITTSBURGH --31 March 2021 - A detailed examination of more than 10,000 medical records at maternity clinics and hospitals in urban Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe has yielded important insight about pregnancy and neonatal outcomes in these communities as well as the frequency with which different complications occur. The findings, which were published in PLOS ONE, include data not often available or reported in much of eastern and southern Africa. The medical chart review was undertaken by researchers from the National Institutes of Health-funded Microbicide Trials Network ...

A new study has found the first evidence of sophisticated breathing organs in 450-million-year-old sea creatures. Contrary to previous thought, trilobites were leg breathers, with structures resembling gills hanging off their thighs. Trilobites were a group of marine animals with half-moon-like heads that resembled horseshoe crabs, and they were wildly successful in terms of evolution. Though they are now extinct, they survived for more than 250 million years -- longer than the dinosaurs. Thanks to new technologies and an extremely rare set of fossils, scientists from UC Riverside can now show that trilobites breathed oxygen and explain how ...

March 31, 2021 - The United States is facing a persistent and worsening shortage of physicians specializing in preventive medicine, reports a study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "The number of preventive medicine physicians is not likely to match population needs in the United States in the near term and beyond," according to the new research by Thomas Ricketts, Ph.D., MPH, and colleagues of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study appears ...

DETROIT (March 31, 2021) - In a study that looked at racial differences in outcomes of COVID-19 patients admitted to the intensive care unit, researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that patients of color had a lower 28-day mortality than white patients. Race, however, was not a factor in overall hospital mortality, length of stay in the ICU or in the rate of patients placed on mechanical ventilation, researchers said. The findings, published in Critical Care Medicine, are believed to be one of the first in the United States to study racial differences and outcomes specific to patients hospitalized ...

An enormous telescope complex in Tibet has captured the first evidence of ultrahigh-energy gamma rays spread across the Milky Way. The findings offer proof that undetected starry accelerators churn out cosmic rays, which have floated around our galaxy for millions of years. The research is to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters on Monday, April 5. "We found 23 ultrahigh-energy cosmic gamma rays along the Milky Way," said Kazumasa Kawata, a coauthor from the University of Tokyo. "The highest energy among them amounts to a world record: nearly one petaelectron volt." That's three ...

DURHAM, N.H.-- As the Biden administration announces a plan to expand the development of offshore wind energy development (OWD) along the East Coast, research from the University of New Hampshire shows significant support from an unlikely group, coastal recreation visitors. From boat enthusiasts to anglers, researchers found surprisingly widespread support with close to 77% of coastal recreation visitors supporting potential OWD along the N.H. Seacoast. "This study takes a closer look at the lingering assumption that offshore wind in the United States might hurt coastal recreation ...

The first imaging of substantial freshwater plumes west of Hawai'i Island may help water planners to optimize sustainable yields and aquifer storage calculations. University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers demonstrated a new method to detect freshwater plumes between the seafloor and ocean surface in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The research, supported by the Hawai'i EPSCoR 'Ike Wai project, is the first to demonstrate that surface-towed marine controlled-source electromagnetic (CSEM) imaging can be used to map oceanic freshwater plumes in high-resolution. It is an extension of the groundbreaking discovery of freshwater beneath the seafloor in 2020. Both are important findings in a world facing climate change, where ...

LOWELL, Mass. - Researchers studying mercury gas in the atmosphere with the aim of reducing the pollutant worldwide have determined a vast amount of the toxic element is absorbed by plants, leading it to deposit into soils. Hundreds of tons of mercury each year are emitted into the atmosphere as a gas by burning coal, mining and other industrial and natural processes. These emissions are absorbed by plants in a process similar to how they take up carbon dioxide. When the plants shed leaves or die, the mercury is transferred to soils where large amounts also make their way into watersheds, threatening wildlife and people who eat contaminated fish. Exposure to high levels of mercury over long ...

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (March 31, 2021) - Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation found that female putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) use males as "hired guns" to defend from predators such as leopards. Publishing their results in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the team discovered that female monkeys use alarm calls to recruit males to defend them from predators. The researchers conducted the study among 19 different groups of wild putty-nosed monkeys, a type of forest guenon, in Mbeli Bai, a study area within the forests in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Northern Republic of Congo. The results promote the idea that females' general alarm requires males to assess the nature ...