A number of brain areas change their activity before we execute a planned voluntary movement. A new study by Umeå University identifies a novel function of this preparatory neural activity, highlighting another mechanism the nervous system can use to achieve its goals. Voluntary movements are prepared before they are executed. For example, such 'preparation' occurs in the period between seeing a coffee cup and starting to reach for it. Neurons in many areas of the brain change their activity during movement preparation in ways that reflect different aspects of ...

Eminent scientists warn that key ecosystems around Australia and Antarctica are collapsing, and propose a three-step framework to combat irreversible global damage. Their report, authored by 38 Australian, UK and US scientists from universities and government agencies, is published today in the international journal Global Change Biology. Researchers say I heralds a stark warning for ecosystem collapse worldwide, if action if not taken urgently. Lead author, Dr Dana Bergstrom from the Australian Antarctic Division, said that the project emerged from a conference inspired by her ecological research in polar environments. "I was seeing unbelievably rapid, widespread dieback in the alpine tundra of World Heritage-listed Macquarie Island and started wondering if this ...

Converting both nitrogen (N2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) into value-added urea molecules via C-N coupling reaction is a promising method to solve the problem of excessive CO2 emissions. Compared with huge energy consumption industrial processes, the electrochemical urea synthesis provides an appealing route under mild conditions. However, it still faces challenges of low catalytic activity and selectivity. A research team led by Prof. ZHANG Guangjin from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences fabricated Bi-BiVO4 Mott-Schottky heterostructure catalysts for efficient urea synthesis at ambient conditions. This work was published in Angewandte Chemie International ...

The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) successfully developed all-round gripper* technology, enabling robots to hold objects of various shapes and stiffnesses. With the new technology, a single gripper can be used to handle different objects such as screwdrivers, bulbs, and coffee pots, and even food with delicate surfaces such as tofu, strawberries, and raw chicken. It is expected to expand applications in contact-free services such as household chores, cooking, serving, packaging, and manufacturing. *Gripper: A device that enables robots to hold and handle objects, ...

Memphis, Tenn. (February 25, 2021) - Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease has been shown to reduce cost and improve patient outcomes, but current diagnostic approaches can be invasive and costly. A recent study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, has found a novel way to identify a high potential for developing Alzheimer's disease before symptoms occur. Ray Romano, PhD, RN, completed the research as part of his PhD in the Nursing Science Program at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Graduate Health Sciences. Dr. Romano conducted the research through the joint laboratory of Associate ...

DETROIT (February 25, 2021) - Researchers at Henry Ford Health System, as part of a national asthma collaborative, have identified a gene variant associated with childhood asthma that underscores the importance of including diverse patient populations in research studies. The study is published in the print version of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. For 14 years researchers have known that a casual variant for early onset asthma resides on chromosome 17, which holds one of the most highly replicated and significant genetic associations with asthma. Henry Ford researchers acknowledged they would not have identified it in this study ...

ROCKVILLE, MD - Scientists are still a long way from being able to treat Alzheimer's Disease, in part because the protein aggregates that can become brain plaques, a hallmark of the disease, are hard to study. The plaques are caused by the amyloid beta protein, which gets misshapen and tangled in the brain. To study these protein aggregates in tissue samples, researchers often have to use techniques that can further disrupt them, making it difficult to figure out what's going on. But new research by Vrinda Sant, a graduate student, and Madhura Som, a recent PhD graduate, in the lab of Ratnesh Lal at the University of California, San Diego, provides a new technique for studying amyloid beta and could be useful in future Alzheimer's treatments. Sant and her colleagues will present their research ...

Our use of social media, specifically our efforts to maximize "likes," follows a pattern of "reward learning," concludes a new study by an international team of scientists. Its findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, reveal parallels with the behavior of animals, such as rats, in seeking food rewards. "These results establish that social media engagement follows basic, cross-species principles of reward learning," explains David Amodio, a professor at New York University and the University of Amsterdam and one of the paper's authors. "These findings may help us understand why social media comes to dominate daily life for many people and provide clues, borrowed from research on reward learning and addiction, to how troubling online engagement may ...

Chemical engineering researchers have developed a new catalyst that significantly increases yield in styrene manufacturing, while simultaneously reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. "Styrene is a synthetic chemical that is used to make a variety of plastics, resins and other materials," says Fanxing Li, corresponding author of the work and Alcoa Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. "Because it is in such widespread use, we are pleased that we could develop a technology that is cost effective and will reduce the environmental impact of styrene manufacturing." Industry estimates ...

The koala retrovirus (KoRV) is a virus which, like other retroviruses such as HIV, inserts itself into the DNA of an infected cell. At some point in the past 50,000 years, KoRV has infected the egg or sperm cells of koalas, leading to offspring that carry the retrovirus in every cell in their body. The entire koala population of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia now carry copies of KoRV in their genome. All animals, including humans, have gone through similar "germ line" infections by retroviruses at some point in their evolutionary history and contain many ancient retroviruses in their genomes. These retroviruses have, over millions of years, mutated into degraded, inactive forms that are no longer harmful to the host. Since in most animal ...

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. - February 26, 2021 - A team of researchers from the University of Rhode Island's END ...

When a muscle grows, because its owner is still growing too or has started exercising regularly, some of the stem cells in this muscle develop into new muscle cells. The same thing happens when an injured muscle starts to heal. At the same time, however, the muscle stem cells must produce further stem cells - i.e., renew themselves - as their supply would otherwise be depleted very quickly. This requires that the cells involved in muscle growth communicate with each other. Muscle growth is regulated by the Notch signaling pathway Two years ago, a team of researchers led by Professor Carmen Birchmeier, head of the Developmental Biology/Signal Transduction ...

A new study shows that a widespread decline in abundance of emergent insects - whose immature stages develop in lakes and streams while the adults live on land - can help to explain the alarming decline in abundance and diversity of aerial insectivorous birds (i.e. preying on flying insects) across the USA. In turn, the decline in emergent insects appears to be driven by human disturbance and pollution of water bodies, especially in streams. This study, published in END ...

Who would have thought that a small basic compound like vitamin B6 in the banana or fish you had this morning may be key to your body's robust response against COVID-19? Studies have so far explored the benefits of vitamins D and C and minerals like zinc and magnesium in fortifying immune response against COVID-19. But research on vitamin B6 has been mostly missing. Food scientist END ...

HDL cholesterol (high-density lipoprotein cholesterol) or good cholesterol is associated with a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease as it transports cholesterol deposited in the arteries to the liver to be eliminated. This contrasts with the so-called bad cholesterol, LDL (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol), which causes cholesterol to accumulate in the arteries and increases cardiovascular risk. Although drugs that lower bad cholesterol reduce cardiovascular risk, those that raise good cholesterol have not proven effective in reducing the risk of heart disease. This paradox has called into question the ...

Whilst the nation has taken to washing its hands regularly since the start of the pandemic, other individual behaviours, such as cleaning and disinfecting surfaces or social distancing within the home, have proved harder to stick, say the researchers behind the behaviour change website 'Germ Defence'. In their new study, published today (Friday 26 February 2021) in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, psychologists from the universities of Bath, Bristol and Southampton, warn of the continuing risks of household transmission of COVID-19 and the ongoing importance of breaking chains of transmission now and in the future. Their research analysed user data of the ...

Treating critically ill COVID-19 patients with drugs typically used for rheumatoid arthritis may significantly improve survival, a landmark study has found. The findings, which were announced in January and have now been peer-reviewed and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, come from the REMAP-CAP trial, which evaluates the effect of treatments on a combination of survival and length of time patients need support in an intensive care unit (ICU). Initial findings reported in November showed that tocilizumab, a drug used to treat arthritis, was likely to improve outcomes among critically ill COVID-19 ...

Clinical research requires that data be mined for insights. Machine learning, which develops algorithms to find patterns, has difficulty doing this with data related to health records because this type of information is neither static nor regularly collected. A new study developed a transparent and reproducible machine learning tool to facilitate analysis of health information. The tool can be used in clinical forecasting, which can predict trends as well as outcomes in individual patients. The study, by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), appears in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. "Temporal Learning Lite, or TL-Lite, is a visualization and forecasting tool to ...

Physicists from Russia, Chile, Brazil, Spain, and the UK, have studied how the magnetic properties change in 3D nanowires, promising materials for various magnetic applications, depending on the shape of their cross-section. Particularly, they more deeply probed into the Walker breakdown phenomenon, on the understanding of which the success of the implementation of the future electronics devices depends. The research outcome appears in Scientific Reports. The cross-sectional geometry of a three-dimensional nanowire affects the domain wall dynamics and therefore is crucial for their control. In turn, managing the DW dynamics under various external conditions is necessary in order to realize the future electronics and computing devices, operating on new physical principles. ...

Born in food web ecology, the concept of trophic levels -- the hierarchy of who eats who in the natural world -- is an elegant way to understand how biomass and energy move through a natural system. It's only natural that the idea found its way into the realm of aquaculture, where marine and freshwater farmers try to maximize their product with efficient inputs. "It's often used as a measure of how sustainable it is to harvest or consume that species," said Rich Cottrell(link is external), a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS). As plants (level 1) become food to plant eaters (level 2), who in turn are consumed by carnivores (level 3) and so on, the amount of energy ...

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a cardiovascular disease characterized by thickening of the left ventricle, otherwise known as the main squeezing chamber of the heart. HCM is best known for causing sudden death in athletes but can occur in persons of any age, often without symptoms. While frequently discussed in the context of genetics, most patients with HCM do not have a known genetic variant. Investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital uncovered a means to study the complexity of this disease beyond the identification of individual genes. This new approach offers a path toward treating HCM using individualized medicine. ...

While protons populate the nucleus of every atom in the universe, sometimes they can be squeezed into a smaller size and slip out of the nucleus for a romp on their own. Observing these squeezed protons may offer unique insights into the particles that build our universe. Now, researchers hunting for these squeezed protons at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have come up empty handed, suggesting there's more to the phenomenon than first thought. The result was recently published in Physical Review Letters. "We were looking to squeeze the proton such that its quarks are in a small-size configuration. And that's a pretty tough ...

A University of Oklahoma-led study published in 2020 revealed that both area and plant growth of paddy rice is significantly related to the spatial-temporal dynamics of atmospheric methane concentration in monsoon Asia, where 87% of the world's paddy rice fields are situated. Now, the same international research team has released a follow-up discussion paper in the journal Nature Communications. In this paper, the team identifies the limits and insufficiency of the major greenhouse emission database (EDGAR) in estimating paddy rice methane emissions. "Methane emission from paddy ...

EL PASO, Texas - A study by physiology researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso found that El Paso's stay-at-home ordinance due to the COVID-19 pandemic had positive effects on the health and well-being of the region's residents. Despite a shutdown of gyms and movement restrictions on non-essential activities, residents increased their fitness activity and closely monitored their food and nutrition intake, said Cory M. Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of kinesiology in UTEP's College of Health Sciences and the study's principal investigator. More than 1,300 El Paso and ...

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) co-authored a study, published today in the journal Science, that details the sequencing of 64 full human genomes. This reference data includes individuals from around the world and better captures the genetic diversity of the human species. Among other applications, the work will enable population-specific studies on genetic predispositions to human diseases as well as the discovery of more complex forms of genetic variation. Twenty years ago this month, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium announced the first draft of the human genome reference sequence. The Human Genome Project, as it was called, required 11 years of work and involved more than 1000 ...