Shark scientists at Georgia Aquarium, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and Dalhousie University are challenging the status quo in shark and ray mating research in a new study that looks at biological drivers of multiple paternity in these animals. The results were published March 4 in the journal Molecular Ecology. Many species of sharks and rays exhibit multiple paternity, where females give birth to a litter of pups that have different fathers. While widely documented in scientific literature, the drivers of this phenomenon are not well understood. However, previous research has cited male aggression as ...

NEW YORK, NY (March 4, 2021)--Inflammatory heart disease is a rare finding among professional athletes with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19 infection, a large-scale study has found. The study, led by Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in collaboration with the major North American sports leagues and their respective players' associations, was published online today in JAMA Cardiology. Athletes and COVID-19 Studies suggest that approximately 20% of patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 develop some type of heart damage, but the impact of mild or asymptomatic ...

March 4, 2021 -- COVID?19 has altered the labor market for millions of people, including public health graduates, yet an analysis of job postings for Master's level public health graduates showed that job postings remained at the same levels as before the pandemic, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The findings are published in the International Journal of Health Planning and Management. "Due to the crucial role of disease prevention in responding to and recovering from the COVID?19 pandemic, assessing the public health workforce remains critically important," said Heather Krasna, MS, EdM, assistant dean of career services at Columbia Mailman School, and lead author of the study. "Fortunately, the job market for master's ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 4, 2021) - Equitable implementation of COVID?19 vaccine delivery is a national and global priority, with a strong focus on reducing existing disparities and not creating new disparities. But while a framework has been recognized for equitable allocation of COVID?19 vaccine that acknowledges the rights and interests of sexual and gender minorities (SGM), it fails to identify strategies or data to achieve that goal. A new study with support from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) examined the prevalence ...

There is no stronger risk factor for cancer than age. At the time of diagnosis, the median age of patients across all cancers is 66. That moment, however, is the culmination of years of clandestine tumor growth, and the answer to an important question has thus far remained elusive: When does a cancer first arise? At least in some cases, the original cancer-causing mutation could have appeared as long as 40 years ago, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Reconstructing the lineage history of cancer cells in two individuals with a rare blood cancer, the team calculated when the genetic mutation that ...

Efforts to duplicate on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars for unlimited energy must contend with extreme heat-load density that can damage the doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called tokamaks, the most widely used laboratory facilities that house fusion reactions, and shut them down. These loads flow against the walls of what are called divertor plates that extract waste heat from the tokamaks. Far larger forecast But using high-performance computers and artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have predicted a far larger and less damaging heat-load width for the full-power operation of ITER, the international tokamak under construction in France, than previous estimates ...

Humans and animals alike constantly size up one another. In the workplace, a new employee quickly learns which coworkers are the most respected -- and therefore hold more power. Big brothers boss around little brothers. In nature, a dominant male chimpanzee fights off would-be intruders. Even fish and octopi interact within social hierarchies. These pecking orders have been studied within the behavioral ecology world for almost 100 years. How individuals interact can affect access to food and mates -- even survival -- and insights into those behaviors can lead to better management of threatened and endangered populations. But few studies have explored what the animals ...

HOUSTON - (March 4, 2021) - A mutation that replaces a single amino acid in a potent tumor-suppressing protein turns it from saint to sinister. A new study by a coalition of Texas institutions shows why that is more damaging than previously known. The ubiquitous p53 protein in its natural state, sometimes called "the guardian of the genome," is a front-line protector against cancer. But the mutant form appears in 50% or more of human cancers and actively blocks cancer suppressors. Researchers led by Peter Vekilov at the University of Houston (UH) and Anatoly Kolomeisky at Rice University have discovered the same mutant protein can aggregate into clusters. These in turn nucleate the formation of amyloid fibrils, a ...

As you scroll through Amazon looking for the perfect product, or flip through titles on Netflix searching for a movie to fit your mood, auto-generated recommendations can help you find exactly what you're looking for among extensive offerings. These recommender systems are used in retail, entertainment, social networking and more. In a recently published study, two researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas investigated the informative role of these systems and the economic impacts on competing sellers and consumers. "Recommender systems have become ubiquitous in e-commerce platforms and ...

Woolly mammoths may have walked the landscape at the same time as the earliest humans in what is now New England, according to a Dartmouth study published in END ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Using thin films -- no more than a few pieces of notebook paper thick -- of a common explosive chemical, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories studied how small-scale explosions start and grow. Sandia is the only lab in the U.S. that can make such detonatable thin films. These experiments advanced fundamental knowledge of detonations. The data were also used to improve a Sandia-developed computer-modeling program used by universities, private companies and the Department of Defense to simulate how large-scale detonations initiate and propagate. "It's neat, we're really pushing the limits on the ...

When a block of ice the size of Houston, Texas, broke off from East Antarctica's Amery Ice Shelf in 2019, scientists had anticipated the calving event, but not exactly where it would happen. Now, satellite data can help scientists measure the depth and shape of ice shelf fractures to better predict when and where calving events will occur, according to researchers. Ice shelves make up nearly 75% of Antarctica's coastline and buttress -- or hold back -- the larger glaciers on land, said Shujie Wang, assistant professor of geography at Penn State. If the ice shelves were to collapse and Antarctica's glaciers fell ...

Amsterdam, March 4, 2021 - Cervical cancer is a serious global health threat which kills more than 300,000 women every year. It's a disease that disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries in equatorial Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, yet it is a preventable disease and decades of research have produced the tools needed to eliminate it. Recognizing this urgent public health issue, the editorial team of Preventive Medicine, led by Editor-in-Chief Dr. Eduardo Franco, Director, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Chair, Gerald Bronfman Department of Oncology at McGill University, is publishing a special issue titled "From Science to Action to ...

Researchers at the Earlham Institute (EI) have created a new automated workflow using liquid handling robots to identify the genetic basis to prevent plant pathogens, which can be used on a much larger and rapid scale than current methods. The new EI Biofoundry automated workflow gives scientists an enhanced visual check of genetic mutations linked to the control of crop disease, speeding up analysis to a fraction of the time compared to current methods - from months to weeks - accelerating development of novel products for crop protection in the agricultural industry. Biosynthesis is the formation of chemical compounds by a living organism, ...

COSMIC, a multipurpose X-ray instrument at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Advanced Light Source (ALS), has made headway in the scientific community since its launch less than 2 years ago, with groundbreaking contributions in fields ranging from batteries to biominerals. COSMIC is the brightest X-ray beamline at the ALS, a synchrotron that generates intense light - from infrared to X-rays - and delivers it to dozens of beamlines to carry out a range of simultaneous science experiments. COSMIC's name is derived from coherent scattering and microscopy, which are two overarching X-ray techniques it is designed to carry out. Its capabilities include ...

WASHINGTON (March 4, 2021)--Over the next month, 209 U.S. counties in the United States will need to implement crisis workforce strategies to deal with potentially dangerous shortfalls of intensive care unit doctors, according to a new analysis published today. The analysis draws on data from a just launched county-level hospital workforce estimator, one that takes into account the strain on staffing due to the COVID-19 pandemic. "The shortages could occur just as public health officials warn that variants of the coronavirus are spreading in the United States and could trigger a sharp rise in the number of Americans infected," Clese Erikson, the principal investigator on the project and deputy director of the ...

An innovative cell-based treatment for cancer has been found promising for the control of infections caused by fungi. A study published in the journal Cytotherapy reports that the use of CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cells programmed to “recognize” Cryptococcus spp. fungi was effective in combating infection in vitro and in mice. C. gattii and C. neoformans are present in soil with dead organic matter and places contaminated by the droppings of pigeons and other birds. They cause systemic mycoses in the human organism. They can infect the lungs and central nervous ...

With a relatively minor genetic change, a new treatment developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University appears to stop replication of both flu viruses and the virus that causes Covid-19. Best of all, the treatment could be delivered to the lungs via a nebulizer, making it easy for patients to administer themselves at home. The therapy is based on a type of CRISPR, which normally allows researchers to target and edit specific portions of the genetic code, to target RNA molecules. In this case, the team used mRNA technology to code for a protein called Cas13a that destroys parts of the RNA genetic code that viruses use to replicate in cells in the lungs. It was developed by researchers in ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- While women can be drawn into farming for many reasons, researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have found that female-owned farms in the U.S. are more common in areas that are closer to urban markets, that engage in agritourism activity, and that offer greater access to childcare. The number of farms operated by women has risen over the past two decades, said Claudia Schmidt, assistant professor of marketing and local/regional food systems. The U.S. Department of Agriculture changed the way it counts the operators of farms in its most recent Census of Agriculture, allowing for up to four principal operators per farm. This has inflated the number of ...

COVID-19 is only the latest infectious disease to have had an outsized impact on human life. A new study employing ancient human DNA reveals how tuberculosis has affected European populations over the past 2,000 years, specifically the impact that disease has had on the human genome. This work, which publishes March 4 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, has implications for studying not only evolutionary genetics, but also how genetics can influence the immune system. "Present-day humans are the descendants of those who have survived many things--climate changes and big ...

To succeed in mating, many male frogs sit in one place and call to their potential mates. But this raises an important question familiar to anyone trying to listen to someone talking at a busy cocktail party: how does a female hear and then find a choice male of her own species among all the irrelevant background noise, including the sound of other frog species? Now, researchers reporting March 4 in the journal Current Biology have found that they do it thanks to a set of lungs that, when inflated, reduce their eardrum's sensitivity to environmental noise in a specific frequency range, making it easier to zero in on the ...

Brain cells called astrocytes derived from the induced pluripotent stem cells of patients with bipolar disorder offer suboptimal support for neuronal activity. In a paper appearing March 4th in the journal Stem Cell Reports, researchers show that this malfunction can be traced to an inflammation-promoting molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is secreted by astrocytes. The results highlight the potential role of astrocyte-mediated inflammatory signaling in the psychiatric disease, although further investigation is needed. "Our findings suggest that IL-6 may contribute to defects associated with bipolar disorder, opening new avenues for clinical intervention," says co-senior study author Fred Gage ...

New collaborative research from Northwestern University and Lund University may have people heading to their backyard instead of the store at the outset of this year's mosquito season. Often used as an additive for cat toys and treats due to its euphoric and hallucinogenic effects on cats, catnip has also long been known for its powerful repellent action on insects, mosquitoes in particular. Recent research shows catnip compounds to be at least as effective as synthetic insect repellents such as DEET. But until now, the mechanism that triggered insects' aversion to this common member of the mint family was unknown. In a paper ...

Existing gene drive technologies could be combined to help control the invasive grey squirrel population in the UK with little risk to other populations, according to a modelling study published in Scientific Reports. Gene drives introduce genes into a population that have been changed to induce infertility in females, allowing for the control of population size. However, they face technical challenges, such as controlling the spread of altered genes as gene drive individuals mate with wild individuals, and the development of genetic resistance, which may render the gene drive ineffective. To address these challenges, Nicky Faber and colleagues used computer modelling to investigate the effectiveness of a combination of three gene ...

Using theoretical models of bacterial metabolism and reproduction, scientists can predict the type of resistance that bacteria will develop when they are exposed to antibiotics. This has now been shown by an Uppsala University research team, in collaboration with colleagues in Cologne, Germany. The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. In medical and pharmaceutical research, there is keen interest in finding the answer to how fast, and through which mechanisms, bacteria develop antibiotic resistance. Another goal is to understand how this resistance, in turn, affects bacterial growth and pathogenicity. "This kind of knowledge would enable better tracking and slowing ...