Domestication has a consistent effect on the gut microbiota of animals and is similar to the effects of industrialisation in human populations, with ecological differences such as diet having a strong influence. These findings, published today in eLife, highlight how the flexibility of the gut microbiota can help animals respond to ecological change and could help identify ways of manipulating gut microbial communities in the service of health. Animals typically have complex communities of microbes living in their gut that can strongly influence functions such as immunity and metabolism. These communities ...

A new study co-authored by a Tulane University geoscientist shows that human efforts to tame the Mississippi River may have had an unintended positive effect: more rapid transport of carbon to the ocean. The paper, published in AGU Advances, describes the work of a team of researchers who set out to learn more about the fate of organic carbon that is transported in large quantities by the Mississippi River. Organic carbon is mainly derived from plant remains, soils, and rocks, throughout the drainage basin of the Mississippi River that covers about 40% of the United States. "We estimate that over the past century, the amount of organic carbon lost to the atmosphere during Mississippi River transport to the Gulf of Mexico ...

"Several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada have stated that they will delay second doses of COVID-19 vaccines in response to supply shortages, but also in an attempt to rapidly increase the number of people immunized," explains Chadi Saad-Roy, a graduate student in the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) and Quantitative and Computational Biology in the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton and the lead author of the study. "The original clinical trials of the vaccines, plus subsequent epidemiology, are quite optimistic regarding the efficacy of the first dose. However, ...

Featured on the cover of the Soil Science Society of America Journal, researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the Spanish National Research Council partnered to create a new camera allowing for the imaging of wetland soil activity in real time. This camera gives the classic IRIS (indicator of reduction in soils) technology a big upgrade. IRIS is used universally by researchers and soil assessors to determine if soils are behaving like wetland soils and should therefore be classified as such. However, before this new camera, soil assessors couldn't quantify the rate of iron reduction in saturated wetland soils, and ...

BOSTON - An analysis of sex differences in the genetics of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorders indicates that while there is substantial genetic overlap between males and females, there are noticeable sex-dependent differences in how genes related to the central nervous system, immune system, and blood vessels affect people with these disorders. The findings, from a multinational consortium of psychiatric researchers including investigators and a senior author at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), could spur better treatments for major psychiatric disorders. They are published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The findings were made possible only through the cooperation of more than 100 investigators and research groups, ...

A new technique that can trace which tissues and organs the DNA in our blood comes from has been reported today in the open-access eLife journal. The method, called GETMap, could be used in prenatal screening, to monitor organ transplant rejection, or test for cancers that are concealed in the body. "Analysis of circulating free DNA has been shown to be useful for screening for early asymptomatic cancers," explains first author Wanxia Gai, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. "As cancer-associated DNA changes are present in ...

In a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, published online March 23, 2021, a group of investigators from University of California San Diego School of Medicine and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA report COVID-19 infection rates for a cohort of health care workers previously vaccinated for the novel coronavirus. "Because of the compulsory daily symptom screening of health care personnel, patients, and visitors, and the high testing capacity at both UC San Diego Health and UCLA Health, we were able to identify symptomatic and asymptomatic infections among health care workers at our institutions," said co-author ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: When geobiology graduate student Katie Maloney trekked into the mountains of Canada's remote Yukon territory, she was hoping to find microscopic fossils of early life. Even with detailed field plans, the odds of finding just the right rocks were low. Far from leaving empty-handed, though, she hiked back out with some of the most significant fossils for the time period. Eukaryotic life (cells with a DNA-containing nucleus) evolved over two billion years ago, with photosynthetic algae dominating the playing field for hundreds of millions of years as oxygen accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere. Geobiologists think that algae evolved first in freshwater environments ...

Over the past decades, the increased use of chemicals in many areas led to environmental pollution - of water, soil and also wildlife. In addition to plant protection substances and human and veterinary medical drugs, rodenticides have had toxic effects on wildlife. A new scientific investigation from scientists of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI) and the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt - UBA) demonstrate that these substances are widely found in liver tissues of birds of prey from Germany. Anticoagulant rodenticides, commonly used to kill rodents in agriculture and forestry, were frequently detected, particularly in birds of prey close to or in urban environments. ...

DALLAS - March 23, 2021 - Vaccinating health care workers resulted in an immediate and notable reduction of positive COVID-19 cases among employees, reducing the number of required isolations and quarantines by more than 90 percent, according to data at UT Southwestern Medical Center published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Health care workers were among the first groups to be eligible for vaccination. "Real-world experience with SARS-CoV-2 vaccination at UT Southwestern demonstrated a marked reduction in the incidence of infections among our employees, preserving the workforce when it was most needed," notes Daniel K. Podolsky, M.D., president of UT Southwestern and senior author. During ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - New research from Mildred Warner, professor of city and regional planning at Cornell University, shows that state laws designed to hinder union activity and indulge corporate entities do not enhance economic productivity. "We find that where state policy is captured by corporate interests, this undermines inclusive growth," Warner said. "These interests see union and city power as a threat, which is why there are groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, for example, focused on crafting state laws that erode labor protections and enhance corporate interests." The ...

California's restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in at least one urban area, Los Angeles, the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, chemists. Aerosols -- particles of hydrocarbons referred to as PM2.5 because they are smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter and easily lodge in the lungs -- are proven to cause cardiovascular and respiratory problems. As a result of strict vehicle emissions laws, organic aerosol levels have been significantly reduced throughout the United States, but the drop has been particularly dramatic ...

Understanding the evolution of the polar sea ice is not enough to study the effects of the climate change on marine ecosystems in Antarctic seafloors. It is also necessary to determine the intensity of phytoplankton local production during the Antarctic summer, as stated in a new study by a research team of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, published in the journal Marine Environmental Research. When the sea freezes in Antarctica Extremely low temperatures, strong ocean currents and the broad seasonal coverage of marine ice are factors that determine the features of the Antarctic marine ecosystems. IN particular, the seasonality ...

The rate of sea-level rise in the 20th century along much of the U.S. Atlantic coast was the fastest in 2,000 years, and southern New Jersey had the fastest rates, according to a Rutgers-led study. The global rise in sea-level from melting ice and warming oceans from 1900 to 2000 led to a rate that's more than twice the average for the years 0 to 1800 - the most significant change, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications. The study for the first time looked at the phenomena that contributed to sea-level change over 2,000 years at six sites along the coast (in Connecticut, New York City, New Jersey and North Carolina), using a sea-level budget. A budget enhances ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have designed and demonstrated a new system that allows them to remotely monitor the behavior of freshwater mussels. The system could be used to alert researchers to the presence of toxic substances in aquatic ecosystems. "When mussels feed, they open their shells; but if there's something noxious in the water, they may immediately close their shells, all at once," says Jay Levine, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of epidemiology at NC State. "Folks have been trying to find ways to measure how widely mussels or oysters open their shells off and on since the 1950s, but there have been a wide variety ...

All viruses mutate as they make copies of themselves to spread and thrive. SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes COVID-19, is proving to be no different. There are currently more than 4,000 variants of COVID-19, which has already killed more than 2.7 million people worldwide during the pandemic. The UK variant, also known as B.1.1.7, was first detected in September 2020, and is now causing 98 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom. And it appears to be gaining a firm grip in about 100 other countries it has spread to in the past several months, including France, Denmark, and the United States. The World Health Organization says B.1.1.7 is one of several variants of concern along with others that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil. "The UK, ...

Many organisms use sunlight to fuel cellular functions. But exactly how does this conversion of solar energy into chemical energy unfold? In a recent experiment, an international team of scientists, including two researchers from UWM, sought answers using an advanced imaging technique called time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography to watch a pigment found in some marine bacteria as it was exposed to sunlight outside the cell. For this experiment, the researchers documented, for the first time, the dynamics of the "chloride ion-pumping rhodopsin," an atomic "pump," which is jump-started by sunlight and moves chloride ions unidirectionally into the ...

DALLAS - March 23, 2021 - It's not just your legs and heart that get a workout when you walk briskly; exercise affects your brain as well. A new study by researchers at UT Southwestern shows that when older adults with mild memory loss followed an exercise program for a year, the blood flow to their brains increased. The results were published online today in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. "This is part of a growing body of evidence linking exercise with brain health," says study leader Rong Zhang, Ph.D., professor of neurology at UTSW. "We've shown for the first time in a randomized ...

A study of ancient bones shows that Early Neolithic sheep-breeders were faced with high levels of mortality among young animals in their herds. A statistical model, partly developed at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, allowed the age distribution of the bones to be precisely determined. In the 8th millennium BCE, early sheep-herders were already aware that the conditions under which their animals were housed had an impact on mortality rates among the lambs. This one result of a study researchers led by Nadja Pöllath (a curator at the State Collection for Anthropology and Palaeoanatomy in Munich), LMU zooarchaeologist Joris Peters (who is also the Director of the state collection) ...

The BioRescue consortium develops and applies new technological approaches as a last straw for saving critically endangered species such as the northern white rhinoceros. Advanced Assisted Reproductive Technologies (aART) push the boundaries of what can be done to create new offspring. Consequently, new ethical questions regarding the application of these tools arise and need to be answered, and relevant animal welfare issues to be addressed. In order to ensure that the ethical risk assessment matches the technological breakthrough with aART, the BioRescue ...

Despite guidelines promoting outpatient management of patients with low-risk pulmonary embolism (PE), few patients are currently discharged home from hospital emergency departments in the United States. That is the conclusion of a study titled Outpatient Management of Patients Following Diagnosis of Acute Pulmonary Embolism, published in the March 2021 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). The retrospective cohort study of more than 61,000 patients treated at 740 acute care United States emergency departments during a two-year period sought to determine disposition practices and subsequent health care utilization in patients with acute PE. According to the findings, ...

A study co-authored by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that telehealth consults among privately insured working-age patients accounted for almost 24 percent of outpatient consults with health care providers during the early phase of the pandemic, March to June 2020, up from less than 0.3 percent during the same period in 2019. The dramatic shift occurred as many medical practices halted or curtailed in-person office hours and patients stayed away from doctor's offices out of fear of transmission during the early months of the pandemic. At the same time, insurance companies and the federal government relaxed policies around telehealth to meet demand for remote medical consults ...

Most people relate cholesterol to heart health, but it is also a critical component in the growth and spread of brain cancer. VCU Massey Cancer Center researcher Suyun Huang, Ph.D., recently discovered how cholesterol becomes dysregulated in brain cancer cells and showed that the gene responsible for it could be a target for future drugs. The mean survival of patients with the most common and aggressive type of brain cancer, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), is 14 months. The need to find new, effective treatments is urgent and has driven Huang, a member of the Cancer Biology research program at Massey, to detail ...

Some 40% of critically ill patients who undergo tracheal intubation to support their breathing suffer a life-threatening complication, research from National University of Ireland Galway has revealed. The study, published today in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, involved 2,964 critically ill men and women. It was carried out across 29 countries from 1 October 2018 to 31 July 2019 to determine the risk of adverse events arising from the invasive procedure. John Laffey, Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at NUI Galway and Consultant in ...

HOUSTON - (March 23, 2021) - Fish that dine on corals may pay it forward with poop. It's an unexpected twist on coral reef symbiosis, said Rice University marine biologist Adrienne Correa, whose lab discovered coral predator feces are jam-packed with living symbiotic algae that corals depend on for survival. The discovery confirms that poop from coral-eating fish is an important environmental source of symbiotic dinoflagellate algae on coral reefs. Correa said coral-eating predators are typically thought of as biting and weakening reef structures, thereby generating hiding spaces for other organisms and, ultimately, beach sand. In contrast, grazing fish that crop down bushy algae get the limelight for helping reefs maintain healthy coral ...