Smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have proven adept at monitoring certain health care issues at home. For example, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that these devices can detect cardiac arrests or monitor babies breathing. But what about tracking something even smaller: the minute motion of individual heartbeats in a person sitting in front of a smart speaker? UW researchers have developed a new skill for a smart speaker that for the first time monitors both regular and irregular heartbeats without physical contact. The system sends inaudible sounds from the speaker out into ...

Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a "wearable microgrid" that harvests and stores energy from the human body to power small electronics. It consists of three main parts: sweat-powered biofuel cells, motion-powered devices called triboelectric generators, and energy-storing supercapacitors. All parts are flexible, washable and can be screen printed onto clothing. The technology, reported in a paper published Mar. 9 in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from community microgrids. "We're applying the concept of the microgrid to create wearable systems that are powered sustainably, reliably and independently," said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student ...

Charcot-Marie Tooth disease is the most common hereditary neurological disease in the world. It affects the peripheral nerves and causes progressive paralysis of the legs and hands. No treatment is currently available to fight this disease, which is due to the overexpression of a specific protein. Scientists from the CNRS, INSERM, the AP-HP and the Paris-Saclay and Paris universities have developed a therapy based on degrading the coding RNA for this protein in mice. Their work is patented and was published on 9 March 2021 in Communications Biology. In molecular biology, transcription is when a DNA molecule is copied to make an RNA molecule. This RNA molecule is then "translated" into a protein, which can perform different functions within the body's cells. When a specific protein called ...

Modern hospitals and antibiotic treatment alone did not create all the antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria we see today. Instead, selection pressures from before widespread use of antibiotics influenced some of them to develop, new research has discovered. By using analytical and sequencing technology that has only been developed in recent years, scientists from Wellcome Sanger Institute, University of Oslo and University of Cambridge have created an evolutionary timeline of the bacterium, Enterococcus faecalis, which is a common bacterium that can cause antibiotic resistant infections in hospitals. The results, published today (9th March 2021) in Nature Communications ...

An increase in overall hospitalizations was reported for older adults in the week following exposure to a tropical cyclone, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University's Earth Institute and colleagues at Colorado State University and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers used data over 16 years on 70 million Medicare hospitalizations and a comprehensive database of county-level local winds associated with tropical cyclones to examine how tropical cyclone wind exposures ...

Luxembourg, 9 March 2021 - Today, Alzheimer Europe launches a new report, "Legal capacity and decision making: The ethical implications of lack of legal capacity on the lives of people with dementia", which looks at the intersection between legal rights and ethical considerations in relation to legal capacity and decision making. The working group responsible for the report was set up by Alzheimer Europe in 2020 and was composed of experts in dementia, law, ethics, policy, research, psychology and the experience of having dementia and supporting people with ...

MUNICH -- Around the world each year, extreme precipitation events cause catastrophic flooding that results in tragic loss of life and costly damage to infrastructure and property. However, a variety of different weather systems can cause these extreme events, so a detailed understanding of the atmospheric processes that lead to their formation is crucial. Now, for the first time, a global analysis reveals that two intertwined atmospheric processes drive the formation of many large-scale extreme precipitation events around the world, particularly in dry subtropical regions where they can inflict catastrophic flooding, as occurred in March 2015 in the Atacama Desert. Previous research on extreme precipitation events ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A six-week training program designed to strengthen resilience against emotional distress in military veterans was associated with positive changes in brain function and increased confidence in their ability to regulate emotions, researchers report. Published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the new proof-of-concept study tested two approaches for building emotional resilience in 19 veterans. The first involved weekly, 90-minute group therapy sessions focused on sharing and skills-building in 10 participants. The second trained nine veterans in the use of specific emotion-regulation strategies that previous ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (MARCH 9, 2021). In 2014, the Journal of Neurosurgery published a paper by a group of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who developed a prognostic scoring system for use in patients who present to the emergency department with a gunshot wound to the head (GSWH).[1] Today, we publish two papers by a group of researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that extend our understanding of the Baylor GSWH scoring system and its application, externally validating it in a different group of patients presenting during a more recent time period in which ...

People living with a patient undergoing an intensive weight loss treatment also benefit from this therapy. This has been demonstrated by a team of researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM-Hospital del Mar) along with doctors from Hospital del Mar and the CIBER on the Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBERObn), in collaboration with IDIAPJGol, the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV), IDIBELL, IDIBAPS and the Sant Joan de Reus University Hospital. The study has been published in the journal International Journal of Obesity. The study analysed data ...

About 11% of women who carry to term will experience prelabor rupture of membrane--a condition where the amniotic sac breaks open early, but labor doesn't begin. Typically, when a woman's water breaks but labor doesn't start, labor is induced. But a new University of Michigan study found that expectant management--waiting a period of time after the water breaks for labor to begin spontaneously--did not significantly increase risk to the fetus or the mother in healthy pregnancies. Therefore, both induction and expectant management should be considered, and the decision should be made in the context of the mother's wishes and health, said study ...

People who frequently try to impress or persuade others with misleading exaggerations and distortions are themselves more likely to be fooled by impressive-sounding misinformation, new research from the University of Waterloo shows. The researchers found that people who frequently engage in "persuasive bullshitting" were actually quite poor at identifying it. Specifically, they had trouble distinguishing intentionally profound or scientifically accurate fact from impressive but meaningless fiction. Importantly, these frequent BSers are also much more likely to fall for fake news headlines. "It probably seems intuitive to believe that you can't bullshit ...

The rapid spread of SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) has not only left societies with a high number of excess deaths and a wide range of health consequences, but also taken a heavy toll on wider global economies - impacting other sectors outside health. Future analysis must take into account societal impacts of a wide range of responses to COVID-19, if policymakers are to take better decisions about resource allocation, intervention implementation and boosting economic and social recovery. In practice, many health economic evaluations tend to adopt a narrow study perspective predominantly estimating the economic impact around healthcare costs. They fail ...

Digital COVID-19 'symptom checkers' may stop some patients from getting prompt treatment for serious illness, suggests an international case simulation study, published in the online journal BMJ Health & Care Informatics. Both the US and UK symptom checkers consistently failed to identify the symptoms of severe COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia, and sepsis, frequently advising these cases to stay home, the findings indicate. The availability and use of symptom checkers is on the rise, and they are currently being used at a national level to pick up COVID-19 infection. Identifying which patients with COVID-19 require treatment is difficult, because the infection can mimic common conditions ...

PHILADELPHIA--Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health issues have been on the rise across the nation, but many struggle to access the care they need. Collaborative care--a proven approach for improving psychiatric care--combats this issue by integrating mental health professionals into the primary care setting. Penn Medicine's collaborative care program, Penn Integrated Care (PIC), utilizes a centralized resource center to facilitate intake, triage, and referral management for all patients with mental health needs. A new study, published today in the Annals of Family Medicine, suggests ...

Juvenile white-tailed deer that strike out to find new home ranges -- despite facing more risks -- survive at about the same rate as those that stay home, according to a team of researchers who conducted the first mortality study of male and female dispersal where deer were exposed to threats such as hunting throughout their entire range. Dispersal occurs when a juvenile leaves the area where it was born and moves to a new location where the young animal establishes its adult home range, explained Duane Diefenbach, Penn State adjunct professor of wildlife ecology. The instinctual dispersal of young deer from the area where they were born to a new home range protects the species' gene pool from inbreeding with close relatives. Diefenbach's ...

Researchers have identified a critical mechanism that allows deadly bacteria to gain resistance to antibiotics. The findings offer a potential new drug target in the search for effective new antibiotics as we face the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and infections caused by bacterial pathogens. The study investigated quinolone antibiotics which are used to treat a range of bacterial infections, including TB (tuberculosis). Quinolones work by inhibiting bacterial enzymes, gyrase and topoisomerase IV, thereby preventing DNA replication and RNA synthesis essential to growth. They are ...

Spectacular fossil plants preserved within a volcanic ash fall in China have shed light on an evolutionary race 300 million years ago, which was eventually won by the seed-bearing plants that dominate so much of the Earth today. New research into fossils found at the 'Pompeii of prehistoric plants', in Wuda, Inner Mongolia, reveals that the plants, called Noeggerathiales, were highly-evolved members of the lineage from which came seed plants. Noeggerathiales were important peat-forming plants that lived around 325 to 251 million years ago. Understanding their relationships to other plant groups ...

TROY, N.Y. -- Using a nanopore, researchers have demonstrated the potential to reduce the time required for sequencing a glycosaminoglycan -- a class of long chain-linked sugar molecules as important to our biology as DNA -- from years to minutes. As published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, a team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that machine-learning and image recognition software could be used to quickly and accurately identify sugar chains -- specifically, four synthetic heparan sulfates -- based on the electrical signals generated as they passed through a tiny hole in a crystal wafer. "Glycosaminoglycans are a complex repertoire of sequences, ...

An international team of scientists have explained how legume trees are key in liberating minerals locked in iron minerals and the benefits are passed on to nearby trees The research shows that the trees are able to alter their soils microbiome in a way that increases access to nutrients and supports growth The findings provide new insight into the role of these trees in safeguarding the function of tropical forests and sustainable reforestation Researchers have found that nitrogen-fixing legume trees can support themselves and surrounding trees not only with increased access to nitrogen, but with other key nutrients through enhanced mineral weathering. The team, led by the University ...

In the United States, one in 10 babies are born too soon, resulting in complications that can affect their locomotor development and influence such simple tasks as balance, walking and standing later in life. A new peer-reviewed study by Children's National Hospital, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), explores exactly what neural circuitry of the cerebellum is affected due to complications that occur around the time of birth causing these learning deficits, and finds a specific type of neurons -- Purkinje cells -- to play a central role. Up until now, there has been a sparsity of techniques available to measure neuronal ...

American adults without a college degree have experienced greater reductions in life expectancy when compared to their more-educated counterparts, USC and Princeton researchers have found. The study reveals that after nearly a century of declining mortality up to the late 1990s, the progress continued into the 21st century for more-educated Americans but stalled for the population as a whole and reversed for the two-thirds of Americans who do not have a college degree. The study appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The ...

Malaria is the deadliest pathogen in human history. Nearly half the people on Earth are at risk of contracting the disease from the parasites that cause it. But humans aren't the only ones who can get these parasites--different forms are found in other animals, including birds. By studying the DNA of those strains, scientists can get a better picture of how malarial parasites live, which may give clues on how to stop the disease. In a new paper in PNAS, researchers analyzed blood samples of more than 1,000 species of birds from the Andes looking for malaria; they found that the strains of malaria present in a local area don't always neatly align with the types of birds living there. "Traditionally, we thought that there's ...

(Boston)--Despite the positive advances that anti-human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) therapy, commonly called anti-retroviral therapy (ART) or highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), has had on the life expectancy of HIV-positive people, finding a cure for HIV or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) has remained elusive. "One of the major challenges in curing HIV is that there is a persistent latent reservoir of virus that is not targeted by current antiretroviral treatments and is hidden from immune cells. When treatment is interrupted, this reservoir of the virus allows the HIV ...

Here is a link to a free Altmetric Report on this Research Output Aging-US published "Hyperbaric oxygen therapy increases telomere length and decreases immunosenescence in isolated blood cells: a prospective trial" which reported that the aim of the current study was to evaluate whether hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) affects telomere length (TL) and senescent cell concentrations in a normal, non-pathological, aging adult population. Thirty-five healthy independently living adults, aged 64 and older, were enrolled to receive 60 daily HBOT exposures. Whole blood samples were collected at baseline, at the 30th and 60th session, and 1-2 weeks following the last HBOT session. Telomeres length of T helper, T cytotoxic, natural killer and ...