It has long been known that several chemicals used in plastic toys in different parts of the world can be harmful to human health. However, it is difficult for parents to figure out how to avoid plastic toys containing chemicals that may cause possible health risks to their children. Regulations and labelling schemes are different across regions and countries, and there is no international agreement on which substances should be banned from use in toy materials. For the most part, regulations and international lists of 'chemicals of concern' in toys focus on certain substance groups with known harmful properties, such as phthalates, but do not cover the wider range of chemicals found in plastic toys. Researchers from DTU ...

With the COVID-19 pandemic taking a disproportionate toll on low-income people of color, a research team headed by Marya Gwadz of the Silver School of Social Work at New York University set out to understand the ways the pandemic may put individuals at risk for adverse outcomes, and the ways they successfully adapted to and coped with the emerging pandemic, focused on those from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds who have lived with HIV for a decade or longer. The team's newly published study explores the effects of COVID-19 on engagement in HIV care, HIV medication use and overall wellbeing during the early stages of the ...

About 70% of the world's main crops depend on insect pollination. Climate change is already affecting the abundance and distribution of insects, which could cause geographical mismatches between crops and their pollinators. Crops that rely primarily on wild pollinators (e.g., crops that cannot be effectively pollinated by commercial colonies of honey bees) could be particularly in jeopardy. However, limited information on plant-pollinator associations and pollinator distributions complicate the assessment of climate change impacts on specific crops. To study the potential impacts of climate change on pollination of a specific crop in North America, we use the case of open?field ...

Macrocyclic peptides are promising candidates for pharmaceuticals, but their screening is difficult. Scientists have now developed an easy-to-use, high-throughput screening assay for cyclic peptides with affinity to ubiquitin, a protein that helps to degrade proteins and induce cell death. The results could lead to novel drug candidates against cancer, according to the study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Drugs based on peptides (small proteins) are often too large to pass through cell membranes. To make such peptides more compact and stable--and thus more efficient--researchers are investigating their closed versions, called macrocyclic ...

This new finding may pave the way for fabricating a new class of self-driven devices and materials, such as the ability to control the rhythmic movement of soft robots without relying on electronic circuits, and for the study of microbial physiology. It has been published in the scientific journal Nature. A fast growing and interdisciplinary field, active matter science studies systems consist of units where energy is spent locally to generate mechanical work. Active matter includes all living organisms from cells to animals, biopolymers driven by molecular motors, and synthetic self-propelled materials. Self-organisation (the process of producing ordered structures via interaction between ...

A SARS-CoV-2 tracker uses publicly available sequencing data to show how the virus is changing and spreading over time. The tracker, called CovMT, was developed at KAUST and is expected to help researchers and policymakers understand the evolution of the virus's mutations. This could have implications for vaccine development, patient treatment and the implementation of restrictions. "As new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerge, authorities around the world need to know if these, or similar variants, have entered their countries," says computational biologist, Intikhab Alam, who designed ...

Treating waste brine using a self-cleaning crystallizer that runs on solar power could be an eco-friendly and efficient way to make seawater desalination more sustainable. In desert regions, seawater desalination provides essential freshwater for drinking and agriculture. A major problem is that the process generates vast quantities of concentrated brine that is often released into nearby lakes and rivers or back into the sea, harming vegetation and marine life. "With tightening environmental regulations and increasing public awareness, there is pressure to treat brine with zero liquid discharge," says Chenlin Zhang, a Ph.D. student in KAUST. This means extracting every last drop of water while leaving behind solid mineral crystals that can be salvaged for other uses. Crystallization ...

Monoclonal antibodies are part of the therapeutic arsenal for eliminating cancer cells. Some make use of the immune system to act and belong to a class of treatment called "immunotherapies." But how do these antibodies function within the tumor? And how can we hope to improve their efficacy? Using innovative in vivo imaging approaches, scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Inserm visualized in real time how anti-CD20 antibodies, used to treat B-cell lymphoma, guide the immune system to attack tumor cells. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances on February 19, 2021 Anti-CD20 antibodies are used in clinical practice to treat patients with B-cell lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. The treatment, often used in combination with chemotherapy, has been ...

A mixture of smaller countries led by New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda and Iceland led the world 's Top 10 countries to manage their COVID-19 response well, according to a new study. In the study, published in The BMJ, lead researcher Flinders University's Professor Fran Baum joined experts from around the world to reflect upon the Global Health Security Index (October 2019) predictions for a public health emergency. Along with Australia, Latvia and Sri Lanka among the best responders, the list highlights some of the 10 key causes of why some countries were successful or not in containing COVID-19 pandemic over the past year. The US, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Thailand, Sweden, Denmark, South Korea, Finland (France, Slovenia and Switzerland) ...

People with periodontitis are at higher risk of experiencing major cardiovascular events, according to new research from Forsyth Institute and Harvard University scientists and colleagues. In a longitudinal study published recently in the Journal of Periodontology, Dr. Thomas Van Dyke, Senior Member of Staff at Forsyth, Dr. Ahmed Tawakol of Massachusetts General Hospital, and their collaborators showed that inflammation associated with active gum disease was predictive of arterial inflammation, which can cause heart attacks, strokes, and other dangerous manifestations of cardiovascular disease. For ...

Despite deaths and hospitalisations linked to many new psychoactive substances (NPS), an international wastewater study led by the University of South Australia shows just how prevalent 'party pills' and 'bath salts' are in different parts of the world. In a new paper published in Water Research, the world's most comprehensive wastewater analysis of NPS shows the pattern of designer drug use in the 2019/2020 New Year in 14 sites across Australia, New Zealand, China, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Norway and the United States. UniSA analytical chemist Dr Richard Bade says samples were collected over the New Year in each country and ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University and U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have significantly expanded the understanding of the hop genome, a development with important implications for the brewing industry and scientists who study the potential medical benefits of hops. "This research has the unique ability to impact several different fields," said David Hendrix, an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State. "If you're talking to beer drinkers, they will be excited about the brewing side. If you are talking to the medical field, they are going to be excited about the pharmaceutical potential." The findings are outlined in ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Scientists at Oregon State University and the U.S. Forest Service have demonstrated that DNA extracted from water samples from rivers across Oregon and Northern California can be used to estimate genetic diversity of Pacific salmon and trout. The findings, just published in the journal Molecular Ecology, have important implications for conservation and management of these species, which are threatened by human activities, including those exacerbating climate change. "There has been a dearth of this kind of data across the Northwest," said Kevin Weitemier, a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State and lead author of the paper. "This allows us to get a quick snapshot of multiple populations and species all at once." In addition to demonstrating ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Desert bighorn sheep in the Mojave National Preserve in California and surrounding areas appear to be more resilient than previously thought to a respiratory disease that killed dozens of them and sickened many more in 2013, a new study has found. Clint Epps, a wildlife biologist at Oregon State University, and several co-authors, found that exposure to one of the bacteria associated with the disease is more widespread among bighorn sheep populations in the Mojave, and that its presence dates further back, than scientists thought. But they also found that the overall number of infected bighorn has declined since 2013 in the populations surveyed. Epps and his colleagues, including Nicholas Shirkey, an environmental scientist with ...

Recent spotlights on IC-HCPCFs are due to the recently demonstrated outstanding ultralow-loss performances and their application capabilities. Nevertheless, while their attenuation achieves impressive figures, the challenge of accomplishing a low loss, single-mode (SM), and polarization-maintaining HCPCF perseveres. In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, a team of scientists, led by Professor Fetah Benabid from the University of Limoges, France, and in collaboration of the University of Modena, Italy and the company GLOphotonics, proposed and ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Dogs synchronize their behavior with the children in their family, but not as much as they do with adults, a new study from Oregon State University researchers found. The findings are important because there is a growing body of evidence that dogs can help children in many ways, including with social development, increasing physical activity, managing anxiety or as a source of attachment in the face of changing family structures, the researchers said. Yet, very little research has focused on how dogs perceive and socially engage with children. "The great news is that ...

In the course of a new and groundbreaking study, led by Dr, Natalia Freund and the doctoral candidate Avia Waston at the Sackler Medical Faculty, the research group succeeded in isolating monoclonal antibodies, which hindered the growth of tuberculosis germs in laboratory mice. The antibodies were isolated from a patient who had succumbed to active tuberculosis disease but had since recovered. This is, in fact, the first time in history that researchers have managed to develop a "biological antibiotic" and demonstrate that human monoclonal antibodies can act as a substitute for the traditional chemical antibiotics and protect mice from pathogenic bacterial challenge. The study was carried out in a collaboration with two additional laboratories from the US ...

At the heart of most electronics today are rechargeable lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). But their energy storage capacities are not enough for large-scale energy storage systems (ESSs). Lithium-sulfur batteries (LSBs) could be useful in such a scenario due to their higher theoretical energy storage capacity. They could even replace LIBs in other applications like drones, given their light weight and lower cost. But the same mechanism that is giving them all this power is keeping them becoming a widespread practical reality. Unlike LIBs, the reaction pathway in LSBs leads to an accumulation of solid lithium sulfide (Li2S6) and liquid lithium polysulfide (LiPS), causing a loss of active material from the sulfur cathode (positively charged electrode) and corrosion of the lithium ...

In civil engineering, flexural beams are used to control the effect of vibrations that can cause cracks to appear in surfaces (concrete slabs) and beams. This is particularly important in buildings that require high tensile strength and where the use of machinery can cause a lot of vibrations that can disturb structural integrity. One metric to determine the reliability of beams is the deflection value, which should be appropriately low relative to the structure the beams are used in. Engineering codes such as ACI codes include provisions for such values and there are a number of methods to calculate them. Deflection is altered practically by reinforcing the construction materials with concrete or steel. In this review, engineers ...

Biological systems can harness their living cells for growth and regeneration, but engineering systems cannot. Until now. Qiming Wang and researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering are harnessing living bacteria to create engineering materials that are strong, tolerant, and resilient. The research is published in Advanced Materials. "The materials we are making are living and self-growing," said Wang, the Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in the ...

An international collaboration among researchers from Finland, Sweden, UK and the USA has captured ribosomes translating messenger RNA expressed from the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome. Utilising the latest advances in cryo-electron microscopy, the group discovered a novel mechanism that mitochondrial ribosomes use for the synthesis and delivery of newly made proteins to prevent premature misfolding. Disruptions to protein folding can lead to devastating human diseases. There is a familiar saying, "It's all in the genes". As modern archaeology reveals, the DNA that encodes genes can be found among the remnants of our ancestors and from any organism, small and large, that once roamed the earth. The genetic blueprint alone is ...

According to a research conducted by JCDR, at least 9 out of 10 adults suffer from low health literacy in India. Health literacy is a vital aspect of any nation's growth - be it developed, underdeveloped or a developing nation. A team of researchers lead by Ruban Nersisson, at the School of Electrical Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India, have written a review on Tinnitus, a disorder of the ear characterized by a ringing sound in one or both of the ears. "We intend to spread awareness of a common hearing disorder which ironically is not commonly known to people.", says Nersisson. 'Tinnitus', is a hearing disorder that has been affecting around 7-8% of the human population since ...

They have improved a process for vertically depositing a solution made from an inexpensive perovskite solute onto a moving substrate below. Not only have they discovered the crucial role played by one of the solvents used, but they have also taken a closer look at the aging and storage properties of the solution. Solar cells made of crystalline silicon still account for the lion's share of roof installations and solar farms. But other technologies have long since become established as well - such as those that convert sunlight into electrical energy through use of extremely thin layers of solar-cell material deposited upon a substrate. The perovskite solar cells that Prof. Eva Unger and her team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum ...

The regulation of satiety is an important factor that determines a higher or lower intake of energy and, therefore, has a considerable impact on the development and/or progression of obesity. The team made up of the researchers Lucia Camacho Barcia, Jesús García-Gavilán, Christopher Papandreou, and Mònica Bulló that leads the research group in Nutrition and Metabolic Diseases of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology (Universitat Rovira i Virgili - Tarragona-Spain) have worked  with researchers from Denmark ...

Long-term sleep deprivation is detrimental to health, increasing the risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, such as depression and cardiovascular diseases. And yet, little is known about the molecular biological mechanisms set in motion by sleep deprivation which underlie related adverse health effects. In a recently published study, the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the Finnair airline investigated dynamic changes to DNA methylation in shift workers. DNA methylation denotes epigenetic regulation that modifies gene function and regulates gene activity without changing the sequence of bases in the DNA. Short-term genetic changes caused by DNA methylation are not well known. While ...