A healthy system of gut bacteria, or microbiota, is crucial to health: Gut bacteria not only aid with digestion, but also play an important role in the body's immune response. Infants, however, are not born with full-fledged gut microbiota, which makes it difficult for them to fight off intestinal infections. Although little is known about how the immune system develops during infancy, new research from the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology sheds significant new light on the subject. A research team from principal investigator ...

DURHAM, N.H.-- In business, as in life, it is important to make a good first impression and according to research at the University of New Hampshire a positive initial trust interaction can be helpful in building a lasting trust relationship. Researchers found that trusting a person early on can have benefits over the life of the relationship, even after a violation of that trust. "It's not just an old adage, first impressions really do matter especially when it comes to trust," said Rachel Campagna, assistant professor of management. "During an initial interaction, one of the most important and immediate factors people consider about another person is trustworthiness. It can impact their willingness to accept risk and vulnerability ...

Although the use of pesticides in agriculture is increasing, some farms have transitioned to organic practices and avoid applying them. But it's uncertain whether chemicals applied to land decades ago can continue to influence the soil's health after switching to organic management. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have identified pesticide residues at 100 Swiss farms, including all the organic fields studied, with beneficial soil microbes' abundance negatively impacted by their occurrence. Fungicides, herbicides and insecticides protect crops by repelling or destroying organisms that harm the plants. In contrast, organic agriculture management strategies avoid adding ...

In earlier days of the COVID-19 pandemic, before diagnostic testing was widely available, it was difficult for public health officials to keep track of the infection's spread, or predict where outbreaks were likely to occur. Attempts to get ahead of the virus are still complicated by the fact that people can be infected and spread the virus even without experiencing any symptoms themselves. When studies emerged showing that a person testing positive for COVID-19 -- whether or not they were symptomatic -- shed the virus in their stool, "the sewer seemed like the 'happening' place to look for it," said Smruthi Karthikeyan, PhD, an environmental engineer and postdoctoral researcher at University of California ...

Healthy human bodies are good at regulating: Our temperatures remain around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter how hot or cold the temperature around us. The sugar levels in our blood remain fairly constant, even when we down a glass of juice. We keep the right amount of calcium in our bones and out of the rest of our bodies. We couldn't survive without that regulation, called homeostasis. And when the systems break down, the results can cause illness or, sometimes, death. In presentations at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting, researchers argued that mathematics can help explain and predict those breakdowns, potentially offering new ways of treating the systems to prevent or fix them when things go wrong. The meeting ...

Imagine seeing the world in muted shades -- gray sky, gray grass. Some people with color blindness see everything this way, though most can't see specific colors. Tinted glasses can help, but they can't be used to correct blurry vision. And dyed contact lenses currently in development for the condition are potentially harmful and unstable. Now, in ACS Nano, researchers report infusing contact lenses with gold nanoparticles to create a safer way to see colors. Some daily activities, such as determining if a banana is ripe, selecting matching clothes or stopping at a red light, can be difficult for those ...

Land stores vast amounts of carbon, but a new study led by Cranfield University's Dr Alice Johnston suggests that how much of this carbon enters the atmosphere as temperatures rise depends on how far that land sits from the equator. Ecosystems on land are made up of plants, soils, animals, and microbes - all growing, reproducing, dying, and breathing in a common currency; carbon. And how much of that carbon is breathed out (also known as ecosystem respiration) compared to how much is stored (through primary production) has impacts for climate change. ...

Using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, researchers at the University of Cologne have developed an 'aging clock' that reads the biological age of an organism directly from its gene expression, the transcriptome. Bioinformatician David Meyer and geneticist Professor Dr Björn Schumacher, director of the Institute for Genome Stability in Aging and Disease at the CECAD Cluster of Excellence in Aging Research and the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC), describe their so-called BiT age (binarized transcriptomic aging clock) in the article 'BiT age: A transcriptome based aging clock near the theoretical limit of accuracy' in Aging Cell. We are all familiar ...

Alexandria, Va., USA -- The clinical picture of COVID-19 in various target organs has been extensively studied and described, but relatively little is known about the characteristics of oral cavity involvement. The study "Frequent and Persistent Salivary Gland Ectasia and Oral Disease After COVID-19" published in the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), investigated the presence and prevalence of oral manifestations in COVID-19 survivors. Researchers at the Università Vita Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Italy, profiled the oral involvement in 122 COVID-19 survivors, hospitalized and followed up at a single referral visit after a median 104 days from ...

Systemic fungal infections are much rarer than other illnesses, but they are potentially deadly, with limited options for treatment. In fact, fungi are becoming increasingly resistant to the few drugs that are available, and infections are growing more common. A cover story in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, details how scientists are working to improve our antifungal arsenal. At present, there are only four types of antifungal drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and some infections are resistant to those drugs, making surgery ...

Fields are covered with dandelions in spring, a very common plant with yellow gold flowers and toothed leaves. When they wither, the flowers turn into fluffy white seed heads that, like tiny parachutes, are scattered around by the wind. Taraxacum officinale, that is its scientific name, inspired legends and poems and has been used for centuries as a natural remedy for many ailments. Now, thanks to a study conducted at the University of Trento, dandelions will inspire new engineered materials. The air trapping capacity of dandelion clocks submerged in water has been measured in the lab for the first time. The discovery paves the way for the development of new and advanced ...

CLEMSON, South Carolina - Clemson University scientists have linked climatic fluctuations over the past one and a quarter-century with flower color changes. Researchers combined descriptions of flower color from museum flower specimens dating back to 1895 with longitudinal- and latitudinal-specific climate data to link changes in temperature and aridity with color change in the human-visible spectrum (white to purple). The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed the change varied across taxa. "Species ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Humans have made a remarkable impact on the planet, from clearing forests for agriculture and urbanization to altering the chemistry of the atmosphere with fossil fuels. Now, a new study in the journal Nature reveals for the first time the extent of human impact on the global water cycle. The study used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2) to assemble the largest ever dataset of seasonal water levels in more than 227,000 lakes, ponds and reservoirs worldwide. The data reveal that even though human-managed reservoirs comprise only a small percentage of all water bodies, they account for 57% of the total seasonal water storage changes globally. "We ...

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Cardiff University say they have found the strongest evidence yet of a "migration gene" in birds. The team identified a single gene associated with migration in peregrine falcons by tracking them via satellite technology and combining this with genome sequencing. They say their findings add further evidence to suggest genetics has a strong role to play in the distance of migration routes. The study, published today in the journal Nature, also looks at the predicted effect of climate change on migration - and how this might interact with evolutionary factors. The researchers tagged 56 Arctic peregrine falcons and tracked their journeys by satellite, following their annual flight distances and directions in detail. They found the studied ...

At the beginning of an immune response, a molecule known to mobilize immune cells into the bloodstream, where they home in on infection sites, rapidly shifts position, a new study shows. Researchers say this indirectly amplifies the attack on foreign microbes or the body's own tissues. Past studies had shown that the immune system regulates the concentration of the molecule, sphingosine 1 phosphate (S1P), in order to draw cells to the right locations. The targeted cells have proteins on their surface that are sensitive to levels of this molecule, enabling them to follow the molecule's "trail," researchers say. S1P concentration gradients, for instance, can guide immune T cells to either stay in lymph nodes, connected glands in which these cells mature, or move into blood ...

New research shows 64 countries cut their fossil CO2 emissions during 2016-2019, but the rate of reduction needs to increase tenfold to meet the Paris Agreement aims to tackle climate change. This first global stocktake by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Stanford University and the Global Carbon Project examined progress in cutting fossil CO2 emissions since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Their results show the clear need for far greater ambition ahead of the important UN climate summit in Glasgow in November (COP26). The annual cuts of 0.16 billion tonnes of CO2 are only 10 ...

SPOKANE, Wash. - The researchers' findings showed that participants who were given A low-cost, easy-to-administer intervention that uses small prizes and other incentives to reward alcohol abstinence can serve as an effective tool to reduce alcohol use among American Indian and Alaska Native communities, new research suggests. Published today in JAMA Psychiatry, the study tested a culturally adapted version of an intervention known as contingency management in American Indian and Alaska Native adults diagnosed with alcohol dependence, a severe form of ...

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was a 34% increase in alcohol withdrawal (AW) rates among hospitalized patients at ChristianaCare, according to a research letter published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study is believed to be the first to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol withdrawal among hospitalized patients. The retrospective study conducted at ChristianaCare, one of the largest health systems in the mid-Atlantic region, found that the rate of alcohol withdrawal in hospitalized patients was consistently higher in 2020 compared to both 2019 and the average of 2019 and 2018. "Our findings are relevant nationally and serve as a clarion call to alert ...

What The Study Did: Whether alcohol withdrawal rates among hospitalized patients with alcohol use disorder increased during the COVID-19 pandemic was examined in this study. Authors: Ram A. Sharma M.D., of Christiana Care in ,Newark, Delaware, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study:  Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.0422) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author ...

What The Study Did: Researchers in this randomized clinical trial examined the effectiveness of incentives offered for laboratory-confirmed abstinence from alcohol among American Indian and Alaska Native adults diagnosed with alcohol dependence. Authors: Michael G. McDonell, Ph.D., of Washington State University in Spokane, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.4768) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding and support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...

What The Study Did: This study combined the results of 27 studies with 10,000 participants to investigate the association between cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes and high blood pressure and cognitive impairment in people with schizophrenia. Authors: Christoph U. Correll, M.D., of the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.0015) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest ...

Water levels in the world's ponds, lakes and human-managed reservoirs rise and fall from season to season. But until now, it has been difficult to parse out exactly how much of that variation is caused by humans as opposed to natural cycles. Analysis of new satellite data published March 3 in Nature shows fully 57 percent of the seasonal variability in Earth's surface water storage now occurs in dammed reservoirs and other water bodies managed by people. "Humans have a dominant effect on Earth's water cycle," said lead author Sarah Cooley, a postdoctoral scholar ...

Researchers from Bremen, together with their colleagues from the Max Planck Genome Center in Cologne and the aquatic research institute Eawag from Switzerland, have discovered a unique bacterium that lives inside a unicellular eukaryote and provides it with energy. Unlike mitochondria, this so-called endosymbiont derives energy from the respiration of nitrate, not oxygen. "Such partnership is completely new," says Jana Milucka, the senior author on the Nature. "A symbiosis that is based on respiration and transfer of energy is to this date unprecedented". In general, among eukaryotes, symbioses ...

An international research group led by the University of Basel has developed a promising strategy for therapeutic cancer vaccines. Using two different viruses as vehicles, they administered specific tumor components in experiments on mice with cancer in order to stimulate their immune system to attack the tumor. The approach is now being tested in clinical studies. Making use of the immune system as an ally in the fight against cancer forms the basis of a wide range of modern cancer therapies. One of these is therapeutic cancer vaccination: following diagnosis, specialists set about determining which components of the tumor could function as an identifying feature for the immune system. The patient is then administered ...

The universe was created by a giant bang; the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, and then it started to expand. The expansion is ongoing: it is still being stretched out in all directions like a balloon being inflated. Physicists agree on this much, but something is wrong. Measuring the expansion rate of the universe in different ways leads to different results. So, is something wrong with the methods of measurement? Or is something going on in the universe that physicists have not yet discovered and therefore have not taken into account? It could very well be the latter, according to several physicists, i.a. Martin S. Sloth, Professor of Cosmology at University of Southern Denmark (SDU). In a new scientific article, he and his SDU ...