An innovative approach to treating bone tumors - starving cancer cells of the energy they need to grow - could one day provide an alternative to a commonly used chemotherapy drug without the risk of severe side effects, suggests a new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Studying human cancer cells and mice, the researchers said that a two-drug combination targeting a tumor's energy sources could be as effective and less toxic than methotrexate, a long-used chemotherapy drug often given in high doses to treat osteosarcoma, a bone cancer. The study appears Jan. 26 in the journal Cell Reports. Osteosarcoma is ...

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 26, 2021 - The mechanism by which acute viral respiratory infections promote secondary bacterial growth and infection in the airways depends on iron-carrying extracellular sacs secreted by the cells lining the host's airways, report researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in a paper published today in Cell Reports. The sacs, or "vesicles," which carry iron bound to a protein called transferrin, associate with bacterial cells and supply them with essential nutrients, promoting the growth of expansive bacterial communities. The finding gives us a glimpse into how bacteria ...

Although the protein ITIH4 is found in large amounts in the blood, its function has so far been unknown. By combining many different techniques, researchers from Aarhus University have discovered that ITIH4 inhibits proteases in the innate immune system via an unknown mechanism. The research results have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Science Advances. Proteases are enzymes that cleave other proteins. Most often, proteases occur in cascade networks, where a particular event triggers a chain reaction in which several proteases cleave and thereby activate each other. Most well known is probably the coagulation cascade, which causes clotting of our blood when a vessel is punctured. But a similar network of proteases called the complement ...

There are an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 species of micro-organism per gram of soil. Addition of certain microbes can tailor soil characteristics: removing contaminants, improving fertility and even making barren land available for farming. The Microbiology Society's report calls for increased access to research into soil health, promoting outreach activities in agricultural colleges and schools and showcasing work in non-academic outlets. This, say microbiologists, is the best way to collaborate with farmers to improve soil health and agricultural productivity. Tilling and excessive use of fertilisers have major effects on soil health. Microbiology can be used to help understand the impact of intensive farming and design feasible mitigation practices. The report ...

Authors from the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD) presented data showing that the longevity gene mammalian Indy (mINDY) is involved in blood pressure regulation in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) insight. Reduced expression of mINDY, which is known to extend life span in lower organisms and to prevent from diet induced obesity, fatty liver and insulin resistance in mice, has now been shown to lower blood pressure and heart rate in rodents. The authors provided mechanistic insights for the underlying physiological mechanism based on in vivo data in a genetic knock out model as well as microarray and in vitro studies. Furthermore, ...

Children determine emotion by what they hear, rather than what they see, according to new research. The first-of-its-kind study, by Durham University's Department of Psychology, looked at how children pick up on the emotions of a situation. They found that whilst adults prioritised what they see, young children showed an auditory dominance and overwhelmingly prioritised what they could hear. The researchers say their findings could benefit parents currently managing home learning and professional educators by increasing their understanding of how young children pick up on what is going on around them. The research may also provide new avenues to understanding ...

Theories were introduced as far back as the 1960s about the possible existence of superheavy elements. Their most long-lived atomic nuclei could give rise to a so-called "island of stability" far beyond the element uranium. However, a new study, led by nuclear physicists at Lund University, shows that a 50-year-old nuclear physics manifesto must now be revised. The heaviest element found in nature is uranium, with a nucleus containing 92 protons and 146 neutrons. The nuclei of heavier elements become more and more unstable due to the increased number of positively charged protons. They therefore decay faster and faster, usu-ally within a fraction of a second. ...

As the world prepares to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27th, communities and memorials around the world are addressing how to meaningfully commemorate the day while protecting public health and safety. The day marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is ordinarily commemorated with hundreds of individual memorial events across the globe. This year, most of those events will be impossible for any sizable gathering of people due to COVID-19. With the goal of proposing relevant solutions to this challenge, Dr. Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann and research student Tom Divon of the Hebrew ...

ATLANTA - JANUARY 26, 2021 - A new study shows 4 in 10 cancer deaths are attributable to cigarette smoking in parts of the South region and Appalachia. For this study, appearing in Cancer Causes & Control, Farhad Islami, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the American Cancer Society examined the proportion of cancer deaths from 2013 to 2017 attributed to cigarette smoking in 152 metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas (MMSAs). Data show the proportion of cancer deaths attributable to cigarette smoking was greater in men than in women in all evaluated MMSAs. In both sexes combined, the proportion of smoking-related cancer deaths ranged from 8.8% in Logan ...

The battle to stop false news and online misinformation is not going to end any time soon, but a new finding from MIT scholars may help ease the problem. In an experiment, the researchers discovered that fact-checking labels, when attached to online news headlines, actually work better after people read false headlines, compared to when they precede the headline or accompany it. "We found that whether a false claim was corrected before people read it, while they read it, or after they read it influenced the effectiveness of the correction," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results. Specifically, the researchers found, when "true" and "false" labels were shown immediately after participants in the experiment read headlines, ...

A new neural network developed by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland and Kuopio University Hospital enables an easy and accurate assessment of sleep apnoea severity in patients with cerebrovascular disease. The assessment is automated and based on a simple nocturnal pulse oximetry, making it possible to easily screen for sleep apnoea in stroke units. Up to 90% of patients experiencing a stroke have sleep apnoea, according to earlier studies conducted at Kuopio University Hospital. If left untreated, sleep apnoea can reduce the quality of life and rehabilitation of patients with stroke and increase ...

An estimated 48 million cases of foodborne illness are contracted in the United States every year, causing about 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In some instances, the source is well known, such as a batch of tainted ground beef that infected 209 people with E. Coli in 2019. But 80 percent of food poisoning cases are of unknown origin, making it impossible to inform consumers of hazardous food items. David Goldberg, assistant professor of management information systems at San Diego State University, wants to improve the traceability and ...

Overview: Phycocyanobilin (PCB) is a natural blue chromophore found in cyanobacteria. PCB is expected to be applied as food colorants and pharmaceuticals with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. PCB also functions as the chromophore of photoswitches that control biological functions in synthetic biology. PCB is covalently bound to phycocyanin, a component of photosynthetic antenna protein, and its extraction requires specialized expertise, time-consuming procedures, and/or expensive reagents. A research group led by Assistant Professor Yuu Hirose at Toyohashi University of Technology succeeded in developing a highly efficient and rapid extraction method for PCB by treating cyanobacterial cells with alcohol ...

The use of online messaging and social media apps among Singapore residents has spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) study has found. Three in four respondents (75%) said that their use of WhatsApp during the pandemic increased. This was followed by Telegram (60.3%), Facebook (60.2%) and Instagram (59.7%). Accompanying this spike is videoconferencing fatigue, found the NTU Singapore study, which surveyed 1,606 Singapore residents from 17 to 31 December last year. Nearly one in two Singapore residents (44%) said they felt drained from videoconferencing activities, which ...

Utilizing a newly developed state-of-the-art synchrotron technique, a group of scientists led by Dr. Ho-kwang Mao, Director of HPSTAR, conducted the first-ever high-pressure study of the electronic band and gap information of solid hydrogen up to 90 GPa. Their innovative high pressure inelastic X-ray scattering result serves as a test for direct measurement of the process of hydrogen metallization and opens a possibility to resolve the electronic dispersions of dense hydrogen. This work is published in the recent issue of Physical Review Letters. The pressure-induced evolution of hydrogen's electronic band from a wide gap insulator to a closed gap metal, or metallic ...

A group of KAIST researchers and collaborators have engineered a tiny brain implant that can be wirelessly recharged from outside the body to control brain circuits for long periods of time without battery replacement. The device is constructed of ultra-soft and bio-compliant polymers to help provide long-term compatibility with tissue. Geared with micrometer-sized LEDs (equivalent to the size of a grain of salt) mounted on ultrathin probes (the thickness of a human hair), it can wirelessly manipulate target neurons in the deep brain using light. This study, led by Professor Jae-Woong Jeong, is a step forward from the wireless head-mounted ...

The prevalence of inflammatory bowel diseases has significantly increased both in Finland and globally. These disorders cannot be entirely cured. Instead, they are treated with anti-inflammatory drugs and, at times, through surgery. If conventional drug therapies based on anti-inflammatory drugs are ineffective, the diseases can be treated using infliximab, a biological TNF-α blocker that is administered intravenously. Infliximab is an antibody that prevents TNF-α, a pro-inflammatory factor, from binding with inflammatory cells in the intestine. It is effective in reducing inflammation and improving the patient's condition, while also controlling the disease well. Although infliximab therapy is often effective, roughly 30-40% of patients either do not respond ...

An international research team succeeded in gaining new insights into the artificially produced superheavy element flerovium, element 114, at the accelerator facilities of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany. Under the leadership of Lund University in Sweden and with significant participation of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) as well as the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) in Germany and other partners, flerovium was produced and investigated to determine whether it has a closed proton shell. The results suggest that, contrary to expectations, flerovium is not a so-called "magic nucleus". The results were published in ...

Two family members test positive for COVID-19 -- how do we know who infected whom? In a perfect world, network science could provide a probable answer to such questions. It could also tell archaeologists how a shard of Greek pottery came to be found in Egypt, or help evolutionary biologists understand how a long-extinct ancestor metabolized proteins. As the world is, scientists rarely have the historical data they need to see exactly how nodes in a network became connected. But a new paper published in Physical Review Letters offers hope for reconstructing the missing information, using a new method to evaluate the rules that generate network models. "Network models are like impressionistic ...

A new paper from UC Santa Cruz researchers, published in END ...

Overview: Jihui Yuan (Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Toyohashi University of Technology) proposed a numerical bead model to predict the upward-to-downward reflection ratio of glass bead retro-reflective (RR) material purposed for urban heat island (UHI) mitigation and reducing energy consumption. It revealed that the retro-reflectivity of glass bead RR material gradually increases from morning to noon, at which time it begins to gradually decrease. These results will contribute to existing research on the absorption or reflection of solar radiation to improve urban thermal and lighting ...

WASHINGTON--Poor social conditions caused by systemic racism contribute to health disparities in people with diabetes, according to a paper published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Minorities are disproportionately affected by diabetes because of poor social conditions that contribute to negative health outcomes such as poverty, unsafe housing, lack of access to healthy food and safe physical activity, and inadequate employment and educational opportunities. These are known as the social determinants of health and are the result of residential ...

PITTSBURGH, 26 January 2021 - A vaginal ring containing the antiretroviral drug dapivirine and the contraceptive hormone levonorgestrel delivered sustained levels of each drug when used continuously for 90 days - levels likely sufficient to serve its dual purpose for protecting against both HIV and unwanted pregnancy, according to findings of a new study. Results of the Phase I study of the 90-day dual-purpose ring are being presented at the HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) Virtual Conference, or HIVR4P // Virtual, which is taking place over the course of ...

"Shell-crushing" - exactly what it sounds like - is a predatory mode used by numerous marine life from crabs to octopuses to large fishes and mammals when they eat hard-shelled mollusks like clams, oysters and conchs. These predators have to break apart the shell using robust claws or fortified jaws to access the prey's soft tissues. Despite its prevalence in the marine environment, this feeding behavior has remained elusive to study remotely, particularly for larger marine animals that destroy shells almost completely, leaving behind little trace. Moreover, because they are highly mobile, scientists have difficulty in directly observing their foraging habits, which is why the ecology of shell-crushing (durophagy) remains ...

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created a new tungsten-substituted vanadium oxide catalyst for breaking down harmful nitrogen oxides in industrial exhaust. Their new catalyst material works at lower temperatures and does not suffer major drops in performance when processing "wet" exhaust, resolving a major drawback in conventional vanadium oxide catalysts. They found that the unaggregated dispersal of atomic tungsten in the original crystal structure plays a key role in how it functions. Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) is an essential technology for keeping air clean. Industrial exhaust is passed through catalytic units and reacted with ...