Children with a common but regularly undiagnosed disorder affecting their language and communication are likely to be finding the transition back to school post-lockdown harder than most, according to a team of psychologists. Two children in every class of 30 are estimated to have Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (around 8%), yet public awareness, diagnosis and referral to speech and language therapists all remain low in the UK. DLD is a condition where children have problems acquiring their own language for no obvious reasons. Unlike temporary language delay (which reflects the natural variation of age at which children learn to speak and communicate), DLD is a lifelong condition with significant impacts for individuals in childhood and in later life, in particular their ...

Lakes store huge amounts of methane. In a new study, environmental scientists at the University of Basel offer suggestions for how it can be extracted and used as an energy source in the form of methanol. Discussion about the current climate crisis usually focuses on carbon dioxide (CO2). The greenhouse gas methane is less well known, but although it is much rarer in the atmosphere, its global warming potential is 80 to 100 times greater per unit. More than half the methane caused by human activities comes from oil production and agricultural fertilizers. But the gas is also created by the natural decomposition of biomass by ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin believe they have pinpointed our most distant animal relative in the tree of life and, in doing so, have resolved an ongoing debate. Their work finds strong evidence that sponges - not more complex comb jellies - were our most distant relatives. Sponges are structurally simple, lacking complex traits such as a nervous system, muscles, and a though-gut. Logically, you would expect these complex traits to have emerged only once during animal evolution - after our lineage diverged from that of sponges - and then be retained in newly evolved creatures thereafter. However, a debate has been raging ever since phylogenomic studies found evidence that our most distant ...

Superalloys that withstand extremely high temperatures could soon be tuned even more finely for specific properties such as mechanical strength, as a result of new findings published today. A phenomenon related to the invar effect - which enables magnetic materials such as nickel-iron (Ni-Fe) alloys to keep from expanding with increasing temperature - was reported to have been discovered in paramagnetic, or weakly magnetized, high-temperature alloys. Levente Vitos, Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says the breakthrough research, which includes a general theory explaining the new invar effect, promises to advance the design of high-temperature alloys with exceptional mechanical stability. The article was published in the Proceedings ...

The higher the number of plant and bird species in a region, the healthier the people who live there. This was found by a new study published in Landscape and Urban Planning and led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F) and the Christian Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel. The researchers found that, in particular, mental health and higher species diversity are positively related, whereas a similar relationship between plant or bird species and physical health could not be proven. The study led by researchers from iDiv, SBiK-F and CAU provides ...

University of Rochester researchers who demonstrated superconducting materials at room temperatures last fall, now report a new technique in the quest to also create the materials at lower pressures. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the lab of Ranga Dias, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and of physics and astronomy, describes separating hydrogen atoms from yttrium with a thin film of palladium. "This is a completely new technique that nobody has used before for high pressure superhydride synthesis," Dias says. Hydrogen rich materials are critical in the ...

As with any complex machine, sometimes a simple crossed wire or short circuit can cause problems with how it functions. The same goes for our brains, and even when the short circuit is uncovered, sometimes experts don't have a quick fix. A new study reveals that an evidence-based treatment may "fix" this human short circuit and, with the help of brain imaging, might predict treatment outcomes for adolescents with anxiety disorders. University of Cincinnati researchers say this could determine medication effectiveness more quickly to help patients. Study results showed that brain imaging was able to predict -- after just two weeks of treatment ...

A targeted opioid that only treats diseased tissues and spares healthy tissues relieves pain from inflammatory bowel disease without causing side effects, according to new research published in the journal Gut. The study, led by researchers at New York University College of Dentistry and Queen's University in Ontario, was conducted in mice with colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease marked by inflammation of the large intestine. Opioids, which are used to treat chronic pain in people with inflammatory bowel disease, relieve pain by targeting opioid receptors, including the mu opioid receptor. When opioids activate the mu opioid receptor in healthy ...

A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the CIBER Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN) has designed and tested, at a preclinical level, a new biomaterial for the treatment and recovery of muscle injuries. It is a boron-loaded alginate hydrogel, which would be administered with a subcutaneous injection. According to the tests carried out so far -in animal models-, it is capable of regenerating damaged muscle very rapidly -specifically, in half the time it takes for it to regenerate naturally. The scientific advance could also be applied to the prevention and treatment of muscle atrophy associated with aging. The results of the work of these Spanish researchers have been published in the journal Materials Science & Engineering C. The ...

Research led by Michigan Medicine's Scleroderma Program and published in Arthritis & Rheumatology found that tocilizumab, a FDA-approved anti-inflammatory drug used to combat rheumatoid arthritis, can prevent lung disease in patients with systemic sclerosis if detected early enough in the disease course. Systemic sclerosis is an autoimmune disease and the most serious form of scleroderma, the tightening and thickening of the skin. It can affect internal organs and lung disease is its leading cause of death, according to study author Dinesh Khanna, M.B.B.S., M.Sc., director of Michigan Medicine's Scleroderma Program. "Some people have minimal lung disease; some people have life-threatening ...

A team of neurobiologists at the Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université) has just shown that within a population of rats it can predict which will become cocaine addicts. One of the criteria for addiction in rats is the compulsive search for a drug despite its negative consequences. Scientists observed abnormal activity in a specific region of the brain, the subthalamic nucleus, only in future addicted individuals, and did so before they were exposed to 'punishment' associated with the seeking for the drug. These results, which have just been published online by PNAS, also indicate that it is possible to reduce this compulsive cocaine-seeking behaviour in rats by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus, confirming its interest ...

Local alternative seafood networks (ASNs) in the United States and Canada, often considered niche segments, experienced unprecedented growth in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic while the broader seafood system faltered, highlighting the need for greater functional diversity in supply chains, according to a new international study led by the University of Maine. The spike in demand reflected a temporary relocalization phenomenon that can occur during periods of systemic shock -- an inverse yet complementary relationship between global and local seafood systems that contributes to the resilience of regional food systems, according to the research team, which published its findings in Frontiers in Sustainable ...

WASHINGTON (March 31, 2021)-- New research published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives from Environmental Defense Fund and the George Washington University shows air pollution takes an enormous toll on health in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the impacts vary dramatically within neighborhoods. The magnitude of the health burden from pollution demonstrates the need for urgent action to cut air pollution and protect health, particularly in areas facing the highest impacts. The analysis estimated that exposure to particle pollution (soot) resulted in more than 3,000 deaths and 5,500 new childhood asthma cases every year in the ...

WASHINGTON, March 31, 2021 -- As environmental and energy crises become increasingly more common occurrences around the world, a thermal energy harvester capable of converting abundant thermal energy -- such as solar radiation, waste heat, combustion of biomass, or geothermal energy -- into mechanical energy appears to be a promising energy strategy to mitigate many crises. The majority of thermal power generation technologies involve solid moving parts, which can reduce their reliability and lead to frequent maintenance. This inspired researchers in China to develop a thermal power nanogenerator without solid moving parts. In Applied Physics Letters, from ...

"SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV are highly similar genetically, generate a homologous repertoire of viral proteins, and use the same receptor to infect human cells. However, despite these similarities, there are also important differences between the two viruses", says Ronald Dijkman from the Institute for Infectious Diseases (IFIK) at the University of Bern. For example, SARS-CoV infection is characterized by severe disease and inflammation in the lower respiratory tract and infected individuals are only contagious after the onset of symptoms, making it easier to identify and interrupt infection chains. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 preferentially replicates in the upper airways (nasal cavity, pharynx, trachea) and can be efficiently transmitted ...

Companies could be hiring that bad boss on purpose. According to new research in the Journal of Business Ethics, the "dark" personality traits - questionable ethical standards, narcissistic tendencies - that make a boss bad also make that person much more likely to go along with manipulating earnings and may be the reason they got the job in the first place. Co-authors Nick Seybert (University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business), Ling Harris (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Scott Jackson (University of South Carolina) and Joel Owens (Portland State University) studied the process of hiring executive ...

ATLANTA -- Assisted living communities can improve the quality of life for residents with dementia by approaching them as individuals and attempting to include all residents in activities, according to a study led by a Georgia State University gerontology researcher. The typical "activity programming" at many assisted living residences can leave people with dementia on the sidelines, according to the study, "Meaningful Engagement Among Assisted Living Residents With Dementia: Successful Approaches," published in the Journal of Applied Gerontology. The study found that the keys to improving ...

ANN ARBOR--By April last year, up to 28 free-standing alternate care sites ranging in size from 50 to 3,000 beds were underway or finished in the U.S.--the Michigan Medicine Field Hospital among them. This 500-bed alternate care site was planned and construction underway from March through May to meet the estimated surge in COVID-19 patients, expected to overrun hospitals nationwide and in Michigan. Sue Anne Bell, assistant professor of nursing and a disaster expert, was one of the field hospital's five-member leadership team. Bell and her ...

But the study also shows for the first time that performance may be improved by using super recognisers - people who are very skilled at recognising faces. It also reveals that masks do make recognising someone's emotions more difficult. There are many questions surrounding face masks and the impact that masks will have on face identification. Can we recognise the faces of people who we know well if they are wearing a mask? And, relevant to policing and security scenarios or a supermarket ID check, can an unfamiliar face be recognized across images if it is masked? And how do masks impact our ability to recognize a person's emotions? Dr Noyes is Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and conducted the study, published by the Royal ...

Research conducted in U.S. national parks has focused largely on five iconic parks, with more than a third of academic papers focused on Yellowstone National Park, researchers from North Carolina State University found in a new analysis. They also found that the number of publications per year increased during the 1990s and 2000s, but has dropped since 2013. The findings, published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, were drawn from an analysis of nearly 7,000 published, peer-reviewed studies conducted at U.S. designated national parks since 1970. "Looking at the data was a surprise and perhaps a wake-up call," said the study's lead author Jelena Vukomanovic, assistant professor of ...

Forty million people living in the Kanto region of Japan, which includes Tokyo, may be able to blame a meandering ocean current for increasing hot and humid summers, according to an analysis conducted by an international team of researchers. The Kuroshio Current flows north, bringing warm water from the tropics to Japan's southern coast. Since 2017, however, it has meandered off its traditional path, turning south before continuing north again. Now, scientists have found that the "large meander" is responsible for the uptick in humidity and temperature. The researchers, from Tohoku University in Japan and the University of Hawaii in the United States, published ...

Osaka, Japan - Streptococcus pyogenes is one of the most important bacterial causes of human skin infections. If S. pyogenes invades deep into the tissue, it can cause life-threatening illnesses, such as sepsis and toxic shock. With its limited supply of carbohydrates, the skin is generally an effective barrier against infection and not a good surface for the survival of S. pyogenes. To survive successfully and invade deep into the tissue, bacteria must be able to find a source of nutrients and also evade the skin's immune defenses. Now, an international ...

Scientists from Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with Russian colleagues and researchers from Technical University of Denmark the first time have experimentally proved the existence of a two-dimensional (2D) curved flux of plasmonic quasiparticles, a plasmonic hook. A flat 2D hook is smaller than a 3D hook and possesses new properties, due to them, the researchers consider it as the most promising transmitter in high-speed microoptical circuits. The research findings are published in Applied Physics Letters (IF: 3,597; Q1) academic journal. Electrons transmit information in existing calculation devices. The scientists suppose if electrons are replaced ...

New research shows how drinking sugary beverages early in life may lead to impaired memory in adulthood. The study, published today in Translational Psychiatry, also is the first to show how a specific change to the gut microbiome -- the bacteria and other microorganisms growing in the stomach and intestines -- can alter the function of a particular region of the brain. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sugar-sweetened beverages are a leading source of added sugars in Americans' diets. Nearly two-thirds of young people in the United States consume at least one sugary drink each day. Neuroscientist Scott Kanoski, associate professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, has studied the link between ...

LA JOLLA, CA--The faster-spreading B.1.1.7 variant of SARS-CoV-2 first detected in the United Kingdom, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is quickly on its way to becoming the dominant variant of the virus in the United States, according to a study from scientists at Scripps Research and the COVID-19 test maker Helix. The findings, which appear today in Cell, suggest that future COVID-19 case numbers and mortality rates in the United States will be higher than would have been otherwise. The analysis suggests that the variant, which has been detectable in an increasing proportion of SARS-CoV-2 samples, is 40-50 percent more transmissible than SARS-CoV-2 lineages that were previously dominant. Other studies have found ...