Many cognitive neurodevelopmental disorders are a result of too many or too few copies of certain genes or chromosomes. To date, no treatment options exist for this class of disorders. MECP2 duplication syndrome (MDS) is one such disorder that primarily affects boys and results from a duplication spanning the methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MECP2) locus located on the X chromosome. A preclinical study published from the laboratory of Dr. Huda Zoghbi, professor at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital, provides experimental evidence that supports the use of antisense oligonucleotides as ...

BOSTON - New treatments for Alzheimer's disease are desperately needed, but numerous clinical trials of investigational drugs have failed to generate promising options. Now a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an artificial intelligence-based method to screen currently available medications as possible treatments for Alzheimer's disease. The method could represent a rapid and inexpensive way to repurpose existing therapies into new treatments for this progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative condition. ...

Hearing the words "new species discovered" may conjure images of deep caves, uncharted rainforests, or hidden oases in the desert. But the reality is that thousands of new species are discovered each year by enterprising scientists all over the world. Many of these new species do come from exotic locations, but more surprisingly, many come from just down the road, including the newest member of the Hokie Nation, the millipede Nannaria hokie. The newest Hokie -- which has about 60 more legs than the HokieBird ­-- was discovered living under rocks by the Duck Pond behind the Grove on Virginia Tech's Blacksburg campus. Since then, the critter has been found at the area commonly referred to as stadium ...

New research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that three new, fast-spreading variants of the virus that cause COVID-19 can evade antibodies that work against the original form of the virus that sparked the pandemic. With few exceptions, whether such antibodies were produced in response to vaccination or natural infection, or were purified antibodies intended for use as drugs, the researchers found more antibody is needed to neutralize the new variants. The findings, from laboratory-based experiments and published March 4 in Nature Medicine, suggest that COVID-19 drugs and vaccines developed thus far may become less effective ...

Texas A&M University College of Medicine ressearchers have recently discovered that cytisine -- a smoking cessation drug commonly used in Europe -- reduces the loss of dopamine neurons in females. These findings provide potential evidence for the use of the drug to treat Parkinson's disease or stop its progression in women. Sara Zarate and Gauri Pandey, graduate students from the lab of Rahul Srinivasan, assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience & Experimental Therapeutics, are co-first authors of the research. Their findings are published in the Journal of Neurochemistry. There ...

Plants, fungi, and bacteria produce natural products that function, among other things, as defenses that are deployed against predators and competitors. In medicine, these compounds are used for antibiotics, cancer drugs, and cholesterol reducers. The team working with associate professor Dr. Robin Teufel and Dr. Britta Frensch of the Institute of Biology II of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg was able, together with researchers from the ETH Zürich in Switzerland, to shed light on the key role of three enzymes that are involved in synthesizing a class of natural products. The researchers are publishing their findings in the latest edition of "Nature Communications." Actinobacteria produce many natural products, such as those that are ...

Many species might be left vulnerable in the face of climate change, unable to adapt their physiologies to respond to rapid global warming. According to a team of international researchers, species evolve heat tolerance more slowly than cold tolerance, and the level of heat they can adapt to has limits. In a study published in the Nature Communications, McGill professor Jennifer Sunday and her co-authors wanted to understand how species' thermal limits have evolved. To examine variation across the tree of life, the researchers developed the largest available database compiling thermal tolerances for all types of organisms (GlobTherm database). The ...

SAN ANTONIO, March 4, 2021 -- People who have had major sinus surgery should consult their ENT doctor before undergoing COVID-19 swab testing, new research indicates. Likewise, those performing swab testing should ask whether the patient has had extensive sinus or skull base surgery, said END ...

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 ...