Below please find a summary of a new article that is published in Annals of Internal Medicine today. The summary is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. Physicians must advocate for common sense gun laws for good of public health #thisisourlane FREE content: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-1505 A pointed editorial by Douglas DeLong, MD, Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine at Bassett Healthcare in Cooperstown, NY, suggests that it's time for physicians to move past talking and start taking ...

The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state's inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout. A larger power grid has perks, but also has perils that researchers at Northwestern University are hoping to address to expedite integration and improvements to the system. An obvious challenge in larger grids is that failures can propagate further -- in the case of Texas, across state lines. Another is that all power generators ...

Telehealth has become a critical way for doctors to still provide health care while minimizing in-person contact during COVID-19. But with phone or Zoom appointments, it's harder for doctors to get important vital signs from a patient, such as their pulse or respiration rate, in real time. A University of Washington-led team has developed a method that uses the camera on a person's smartphone or computer to take their pulse and respiration signal from a real-time video of their face. The researchers presented this state-of-the-art system in December at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference. Now the team is proposing a better system to measure these physiological signals. This system is less likely to be tripped up by different ...

SEATTLE (April 1, 2021) - An international consortium of geneticists, biologists, clinicians, mathematicians, and other scientists is determined to take the study of the human genome to the next level - creating a comprehensive atlas of genetic variants to advance the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. "This Herculean undertaking is unprecedented," said Dr. Matthew Hurles, a geneticist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England. "Indeed, the scientific community has an increasingly comprehensive catalog of functional DNA elements in the human genome, but that catalog remains incomplete. We have collectively characterized the functional impact of less than 1% of genetic variation in the 1 to 2 percent of our DNA." Hurles and Dr. Doug Fowler, a member of the ...

Exposure to antibiotics in utero and infancy can lead to an irreversible loss of regulatory T-cells in the colon-a valuable component of the immune system's response toward allergens in later life - after only six months, a Rutgers researcher found. The study was published in the journal mBio. It is already known that the use of antibiotics early in life disrupts the intestinal microbiota - the trillions of beneficial microorganisms that live in and on our bodies - that play a crucial role in the healthy maturation of the immune system and the prevention of ...

Video games offer students obvious respite from the stresses of studies and, now, a study from a University of Ottawa medical student has found they could benefit surgical skills training. Arnav Gupta carries a heavy course load as a third-year student in the Faculty of Medicine, so winding down with a game of Legend of Zelda always provides relief from the rigorous of study. But Zelda may be helping improve his surgical education, too, as Gupta and a team of researchers from the University of Toronto found in a paper they recently published in the medical journal ...

East Hanover, NJ. April 1, 2021. A team of New Jersey researchers has shown that changes in perceptual certainty and response bias, two central metrics of signal detection theory (SDT), correlate with changes in cognitive fatigue. They also show that SDT measures change as a function of changes in brain activation. This finding was reported in Frontiers in Psychology on January 15, 2021, in the open access article "Using Signal Detection Theory to Better Understand Cognitive Fatigue" (doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.579188). The authors are Glenn Wylie, DPhil, Brian Yao, PhD, and John DeLuca, PhD, of Kessler Foundation, and Joshua Sandry, PhD, of Montclair State ...

Researchers have developed a new mechanical model that simulates how whiskers bend within a follicle in response to an external force, paving the way toward better understanding of how whiskers contribute to mammals' sense of touch. Yifu Luo and Mitra Hartmann of Northwestern University and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. With the exception of some primates, most mammals use whiskers to explore their environment through the sense of touch. Whiskers have no sensors along their length, but when an external force bends ...

A new, detailed model of the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein reveals previously unknown vulnerabilities that could inform development of vaccines. Mateusz Sikora of the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. A key feature of SARS-CoV-2 is its spike protein, which extends from its surface and enables it to target and infect human cells. Extensive research has resulted in detailed static models of the spike protein, but these models do not capture the flexibility of the spike protein itself nor the movements of protective glycans--chains ...

Six genetic variants add up to determine the risk of several blood cancers in pre-disposed dog breeds, according to a study by Benoît Hédan at the University of Rennes and colleagues, publishing April 8th in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics. The results confirm a known tumour-suppressor gene as a risk factor for histiocytic sarcoma -- a rare and aggressive blood cancer that affects both dogs and humans -- as well as identifying four new genetic loci associated with the disease. The researchers sequenced genomic DNA extracted from blood samples from Bernese mountain dogs, Rottweilers, flat-coated retrievers, and golden retrievers, including ...

Memory loss is common after general anesthesia, particularly for events occurring immediately before surgery--a phenomenon called retrograde amnesia. But a new study publishing on April 1st 2021 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, led by Simon Wiegert at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, shows that changes in the hippocampus--the part of the brain used to make new memories--differ depending on which general anesthetic is used. Consequently, their effects on memory formation also differ. Understanding how different anesthetics affect the brain, particularly the hippocampus, is therefore important for both clinicians with human patients and experimental scientists who work with animals. Wiegert and his team recorded brain activity from the hippocampus ...

Achuta Kadambi, an assistant professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, published a column in the journal Science about how medical devices can be fundamentally biased -- not just in dataset representation as has been widely reported, but from a deeper root: the laws of physics. Kadambi described how the inherent physics behind medical devices could vary across race and gender. He cited several examples of potential physics-based bias. For example, recent research has shown that a pulse oximeter -- a medical device typically placed on a fingertip that uses infrared and light beams to measure oxygen saturation of the blood and the pulse rate -- is more likely to miss low levels in people with darker skin. What motivated Kadambi to write this piece stemmed from ...

A group of scientists from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, has shown that for plants and insects the applied pesticide toxicity in agriculture has substantially increased between 2004 and 2016. In a paper published in the current issue of Science, the authors show that this pattern is even relevant in genetically modified (GM) crops that were originally designed to reduce pesticide impacts on the environment. "We have taken a large body of pesticide use data from the US and have expressed changes of amounts applied in agriculture over time as changes in total applied pesticide toxicity," says lead author Ralf Schulz, professor for environmental sciences in Landau. "This provides a new view on the potential ...

We know your cat's whiskers are handsome -- but you can't even see the cool part. The base of the whisker, which is responsible for sending touch signals to the brain, is hidden inside the follicle, a deep pocket that embeds the whisker within the skin. Because this section of the whisker is obscured, understanding precisely how whiskers communicate touch to the brain has been a longstanding mystery. In a new study, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Northwestern University has developed the first mechanical simulation of the whisker inside the follicle. By combining their new model with new anatomical observations, the researchers discovered that when whiskers touch an object, they ...

For the first time, researchers have discovered a way to obtain polarity and photovoltaic behavior from certain nonphotovoltaic, atomically flat (2D) materials. The key lies in the special way in which the materials are arranged. The resulting effect is different from, and potentially superior to, the photovoltaic effect commonly found in solar cells. Solar power is considered a key technology in the move away from fossil fuels. Researchers continually innovate more efficient means to generate solar energy. And many of these innovations come from the world of materials research. ...

Despite a reduction in the total amounts of pesticides used, the toxicity of commonly used pesticides to nontarget species, partially aquatic invertebrates and pollinators, has increased considerably in recent decades, according to a new study analyzing 25 years of pesticide use. This has been driven by the widespread use of highly toxic pyrethroid and neonicotinoid pesticides. The findings challenge claims suggesting that the overall environmental impacts of pesticide use have declined. The impacts of applied pesticides on humans and the environment are often based on comparisons of use rates (e.g., kilograms per hectare) or the total amounts used (e.g., kilograms per year). However, from an environmental perspective, these weight-based ...

Technology can be biased, and its design can disadvantage certain demographic groups. While efforts to address bias and promote fairness in technologies are rapidly growing in a variety of technical disciplines, Achuta Kadambi argues that similar growth is not occurring fast enough for medical engineering. "Although computer science companies terminate lucrative but biased facial recognition systems, biased medical devices continue to be sold as commercial products," writes Kadambi in a Perspective. Bias in medical devices results in undesirable performance variation across demographic groups and can greatly influence health inequality. For example, optical biosensors that use light to monitor vital signs like blood oxygenation ...

In an analysis of thousands of fossil pollen and leaves spanning the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary, researchers found that the cataclysmic asteroid impact that resulted in the destruction of nearly 75% of all terrestrial life on Earth drastically restructured tropical forests, setting the stage for the evolution of what has become one of the planet's most diverse ecosystems - the neotropical rainforest. While the end-Cretaceous impact nearly 66 million years ago was catastrophic for terrestrial ecosystems worldwide, its long-term effects on tropical forests have remained a mystery. This is largely due to the lack of palaeobotanical exploration in the region, which has only just begun to provide ...

An increase of dopamine in the brain's striatum triggers auditory hallucination-like experiences in mice, revealing a possible causal role for dopamine-dependent neurological circuits in symptoms of psychosis. These findings from a new study could inform novel targeted approaches to treating those with psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia. Auditory and visual hallucinations - perceptions of hearing or seeing something without observing external sensory stimuli - are central symptoms of psychotic disorders and are thought by some to be caused by excessive dopamine ...

A single "super photon" made up of many thousands of individual light particles: About ten years ago, researchers at the University of Bonn produced such an extreme aggregate state for the first time and presented a completely new light source. The state is called optical Bose-Einstein condensate and has captivated many physicists ever since, because this exotic world of light particles is home to its very own physical phenomena. Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Martin Weitz, who discovered the super photon, and theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Johann Kroha have returned from their latest "expedition" into the quantum world with a very special observation. They report of a new, previously ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) -- Despite the fact that our planet is mostly ocean and human maritime activity is more intense than it has ever been, we know remarkably little about the state of the ocean's biodiversity -- the variety and balance of species that support healthy and productive ecosystems. And it's no surprise -- marine biodiversity is complex, human impacts are uneven, and species respond differently to different stressors. "It is really hard to know how a species is doing by just looking out from your local coast, or dipping underwater on SCUBA," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa ...

The humble lab mouse has provided invaluable clues to understanding diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes to COVID-19. But when it comes to psychiatric conditions, the lab mouse has been sidelined, its rodent mind considered too different from that of humans to provide much insight into mental illness. A new study, however, shows there are important links between human and mouse minds in how they function -- and malfunction. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis devised a rigorous approach to study how hallucinations are produced in the brain, providing a promising entry point to the development of much-needed new therapies for schizophrenia. The study, published April 2 in ...

Tropical rainforests today are biodiversity hotspots and play an important role in the world's climate systems. A new study published today in Science sheds light on the origins of modern rainforests and may help scientists understand how rainforests will respond to a rapidly changing climate in the future. The study led by researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) shows that the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs 66 million years ago also caused 45% of plants in what is now Colombia to go extinct, and it made way for the reign of flowering plants in modern tropical rainforests. "We wondered how tropical rainforests changed after a drastic ecological perturbation such as the Chicxulub impact, so we looked for tropical plant fossils," said Mónica ...

LA JOLLA--(April 1, 2021) Neurons lack the ability to replicate their DNA, so they're constantly working to repair damage to their genome. Now, a new study by Salk scientists finds that these repairs are not random, but instead focus on protecting certain genetic "hot spots" that appear to play a critical role in neural identity and function. The findings, published in the April 2, 2021, issue of Science, give novel insights into the genetic structures involved in aging and neurodegeneration, and could point to the development of potential new therapies for diseases such Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other age-related dementia disorders. "This research shows for the first time that ...

On the afternoon of April 13, 2018, a large wave of water surged across Lake Michigan and flooded the shores of the picturesque beach town of Ludington, Michigan, damaging homes and boat docks, and flooding intake pipes. Thanks to a local citizen's photos and other data, NOAA scientists reconstructed the event in models and determined this was the first ever documented meteotsunami in the Great Lakes caused by an atmospheric inertia-gravity wave. An atmospheric inertia-gravity wave is a wave of air that can run from 6 to 60 miles long that is created when a mass of stable air is displaced by an air mass with significantly ...