PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [February 16, 2021] -- New research in the February 2021 issue of JNCCN--Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network examined body mass index (BMI) data for people with HER2-positive early breast cancer, and found a 5% weight loss in patients over two years in was associated with worse outcomes. Weight gain over the same time period did not affect survival rates. "The finding that weight loss, and not weight gain, was associated with worse outcomes is unexpected," said lead researcher Samuel Martel, MD, Universitè de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, who worked with researchers in Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as well as the ...

Images provide information - what we can observe with our own eyes enables us to understand. Constantly expanding the field of perception into dimensions that are initially hidden from the naked eye, drives science forward. Today, increasingly powerful microscopes let us see into the cells and tissues of living organisms, into the world of microorganisms as well as into inanimate nature. But even the best microscopes have their limits. "To be able to observe structures and processes down to the nanoscale level and below, we need new methods and technologies," says Dr Silvio Fuchs from the Institute of Optics and Quantum Electronics at the University of Jena. This applies in particular to technological ...

A recent qualitative study sheds light on how people cope with health and financial challenges, highlighting the important role that communication plays in these coping strategies. "This is one of the first studies to look at how people respond to the combination of financial uncertainties and health uncertainties," says Lynsey Romo, first author of the study and an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University. "And it drives home that uncertainty about money and uncertainty about health go hand in hand. Financial limitations created significant health challenges - such as an inability to afford prescription medications. And health problems created significant expenses leading to serious financial challenges. "The study also highlights that these ...

A comprehensive database of Estonian soils and a map application has been completed in cooperation with researchers of the University of Tartu and the Estonian University of Life Sciences. The database makes Estonian soil information easily accessible and can be used from local farm-scale to national-level big data statistical analysis and machine-learning models. "Soil data is possibly the most undervalued and yet complicated type of environmental data there is. The diversity of organic, chemical, living and dead materials that make up a handful of dirt is astounding," said Alexander Kmoch, ...

BINGHAMTON, NY -- Rich nations should not engage in "vaccine nationalism" and keep the COVID-19 vaccine to themselves when poorer nations need them, according to Nicole Hassoun, professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Hassoun's paper, "Against Vaccine Nationalism," was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. While rich countries like the US and UK are starting to vaccinate their populations against COVID-19, poor countries may lack access to a vaccine for years. Canada, for instance, has already secured enough to vaccinate its entire population nine times over, and the US, European Union, UK, Australia, and Japan can vaccinate their populations between 2-8x. "Vaccine nationalism ...

Globalization, digitalization, sustainabilization - three major waves of transformation are unfolding around the world. The social upheaval caused by these transformation processes has given rise to populist movements that endanger social harmony and threaten democratic values. What rules and institutions can promote stability in the face of such systemic risks? A new study published by the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) offers some surprising answers. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated for the first time how a systemic risk can sweep across our globalized world. It began with the little-noticed outbreak of an unknown ...

The lithium-ion battery powers everything from mobile phones to laptops to electric vehicles. Scientists worldwide are always on the hunt for new and improved components to build better batteries for these and other applications. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory report a new electrode design for the lithium-ion battery using the low-cost materials lead as well as carbon. Contributors to this pivotal discovery also include scientists from Northwestern University, Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). "Our new anode could offer a new revenue stream for the large industry currently engaged in lead-acid battery ...

By Maria Fernanda Ziegler | Agência FAPESP – The use of cover crops between cotton harvests protects the soil, conserves water, and reduces the risk of erosion. Researchers at the University of Western São Paulo (UNOESTE) and São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil found that application of potassium (K) to a grass cover crop grown before cotton in sandy soil lowered production cost and resulted in cotton with a higher market value. “The dynamics of early application of potassium to grass planted as a cover crop before cotton ...

Crocodiles are resilient animals from a lineage that has survived for over 200 million years. Skilled swimmers, crocodiles can travel long distances and live in freshwater to marine environments. But they can't roam far overland. American crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus) are found in the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of the Neotropics but they arrived in the Pacific before Panama existed, according to researchers from McGill University. Over 3 million years ago, the formation of the Isthmus of Panama altered global ocean circulation, connecting North and South America and establishing the Caribbean Sea. This resulted in widespread mixing of species ...

Scientists at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and SunYat-Sen University in China have set the stage for the development of highly sensitive antibody tests for infection with all known human coronaviruses, including new variants of SARS-CoV-2. These tests should also allow differentiation of immune responses due to infection and vaccination. The research is published in Communications Biology, a Nature journal. The HCoV-Peptide array developed by CII scientists consists of 3 million immune markers on a glass chip, ...

INDIANAPOLIS--Researchers from Indiana University have identified key genetic changes in the interstitial kidney tissue of people with diabetes, a discovery that signifies the potential for a revolutionary new genetic approach to the treatment of kidney disease. They will contribute their findings to the Kidney Precision Medicine Project's (KPMP) "cell atlas," a set of maps used to classify and locate different cell types and structures within the kidney. They shared their groundbreaking findings in a study published on February 10, 2021, in Science Advances. In the study, researchers investigated the kidney tissue of healthy people and people with diabetes using a technique called "regional transcriptomics." This technique involves a rapid ...

The COVID-19 infection rate among pregnant women was estimated to be 70% higher than in similarly aged adults in Washington state, according to a new study published today in American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Other key findings include: The study also showed that the number of COVID-19 infections in pregnant patients from nearly all communities of color in Washington was high. There was a twofold to fourfold higher prevalence of pregnant patients with COVID-19 infections from communities of color than expected based on the race-ethnicity distribution of pregnant women in Washington in 2018. A high number of pregnant women with COVID-19 received ...

Leukemia is caused by leukemic stem cells which are resistant to most known therapies. Relapses are also due to this resistance. Leukemic stem cells arise from normal blood-forming (hematopoietic) stem cells. Because they are closely related, leukemic and hematopoietic stem cells share many of the same signaling pathways. If the proliferation of leukemic stem cells is to be stopped, it is crucial to find signaling pathways that are active only in the leukemic stem cell, but not the normal one. With this goal in mind, Prof. Adrian Ochsenbein and his team are conducting research at the Department ...

Our universe is dominated by a mysterious matter known as dark matter. Its name comes from the fact that dark matter does not absorb, reflect or emit electromagnetic radiation, making it difficult to detect. Now, a team of researchers has investigated the strength of dark matter scattered across the smallest galaxies in the universe using stellar kinematics. "We discovered that the strength of dark matter is quite small, suggesting that dark matter does not easily scatter together," said professor Kohei Hayashi, lead author of the study. Much is unknown about dark matter, but theoretical and experimental research, from particle physics to astronomy, are elucidating more ...

Researchers from the Oil and Gas Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and their Skoltech colleagues have surveyed the newest known 30-meter deep gas blowout crater on the Yamal Peninsula, which formed in the summer of 2020. The paper was published in the journal Geosciences. Giant craters in the Russian Arctic, thought to be the remnants of powerful gas blowouts, first attracted worldwide attention in 2014, when the 20 to 40-meter wide Yamal Crater was found quite close to the Bovanenkovo gas field. The prevailing hypothesis is that these craters are formed after gas is accumulated in cavities in the upper layers of permafrost, and ...

In recent time, HBO's highly acclaimed and award-winning miniseries Chernobyl highlighted the horror of nuclear power plant accident, which happened in Ukraine in 1986. It is not a fictional series just on TV. As we had seen such a catastrophic nuclear power plant accident in 2011 again caused by natural disaster, Tsunami, in Japan. Both historical nuclear power plant accidents released tons of radioactive cesium to the environment. Consequently, the radioactive cesium found their way to the surrounding land, river, into the plants and animal feed, and eventually to our food cycle and ecosystem. The more detrimental part is their half-life, ...

Both Earth and Mars currently have oxidising atmospheres, which is why iron-rich materials in daily life develop rust (a common name for iron oxide) during the oxidation reaction of iron and oxygen. The Earth has had an oxidising atmosphere for approximately two and a half billion years, but before that, the atmosphere of this planet was reducing - there was no rust. The transition from a reduced planet to an oxidised planet is referred to as the Great Oxidation Event or GOE. This transition was a central part of our planet's evolution, and fundamentally linked to the evolution of life here - specifically ...

Osaka, Japan - All chemistry students are taught about the periodic table, an organization of the elements that helps you identify and predict trends in their properties. For example, science fiction writers sometimes describe life based on the element silicon because it is in the same column in the periodic table as carbon. However, there are deviations from expected periodic trends. For example, lead and tin are in the same column in the periodic table and thus should have similar properties. However, whilst lead-acid batteries are common in cars, tin-acid batteries don't work. Nowadays ...

ST. LOUIS, MO, February 16, 2021 - Delivering the benefits of agricultural biotechnology to smallholder farmers requires that resources be directed toward staple food crops. To achieve effect at scale, beneficial traits must be integrated into multiple, elite farmer-preferred varieties with relevance across geographical regions. For the first time, an international team of scientists, led by Narayanan Narayanan, Ph.D., senior research scientist, and Nigel Taylor, Ph.D., associate member and Dorothy J. King Distinguished Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and their collaborators in Nigeria, led ...

For the first time, a research team led by Lund University in Sweden has mapped out exactly what happens when spruce bark beetles use their sense of smell to find trees and partners to reproduce with. The hope is that the results will lead to better pest control and protection of the forest in the future. The Eurasian spruce bark beetle uses its sense of smell to locate trees and partners. The odours are captured via odorant receptors (proteins) in their antennae. Researchers have long understood the connection, but so far they have not known exactly which receptors bind to what pheromones. ...

Scientists have discovered an essential protein in cholera-causing bacteria that allows them to adapt to changes in temperature, according to a study published today in eLife. The protein, BipA, is conserved across bacterial species, which suggests it could hold the key to how other types of bacteria change their biology and growth to survive at suboptimal temperatures. Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae) is the bacteria responsible for the severe diarrhoeal disease cholera. As with other species, V. cholerae forms biofilms - communities of bacteria enclosed in a structure made up of sugars and proteins - to protect against predators and stress conditions. V. cholerae forms these biofilms both in their aquatic environment and in the human intestine. There is evidence to suggest that biofilm ...

An international team of researchers has solved a puzzling phenomenon whereby strangely beautiful, vortex-like structures appear between materials deposited onto engineering components used in multiple settings - from space shuttles to household items and everyday transport vehicles. The discovery may ultimately improve the efficiency of the "Cold Spray" (CS) deposition process from which these structures are formed - a not-insignificant consideration from a financial perspective, or from a functional one given that some of the materials created by CS are pushed to the limit in outer space. The discovery is featured on the front cover of international journal, Materials & Design. Cold Spray (CS) and deposition efficiency (DE) CS enables the formation of coatings, ...

Why do genes need to be silenced? The "genes" in question are in fact transposons, selfish genetic elements that seek to self-multiply at the host's expense and that need to be controlled. Julius Brennecke's group at IMBA focuses on lifting the mysteries of a specific type of transposon silencing, namely the piRNA pathway in animal gonads. Understanding this ancient silencing system promises to reveal general mechanistic principles of gene expression and chromatin biology. Gene silencing: either before they "speak", or right as they attempt to Heterochromatin, a tightly packed form of DNA, plays an essential role in transposon ...

Many steep valleys in the European Alps show the relicts of large rockslides, during which several hundreds of million cubic metres of rocks get instable, collapse and impact everything on their path. "For most of these, we still do not know how they are caused, because these rockslides occurred long before the start of written history in the region about 1000 years ago," says Patrick Oswald, PhD student at the Department of Geology of the University of Innsbruck and lead author of the study. "Curiously, many of these ancient rockslides occurred together in clusters, meaning they are found in small regions and have a rather comparable age". This enigmatic pattern has puzzled researchers over the last decades and fuelled some intense debates. Some experts ...

"Thin films are solid state substances that can be only several atomic layers thick. Usually, their properties are considerably different from the properties of the original substances on the macroscale. The areas of their application keep expanding and include nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, spintronics, electro-, and photocatalysis, as well as such important fields of economics as space technologies and instrument building. Micromodule devices for space crafts and medical technologies are also promising areas in which thin films can be used," said Vyacheslav Fominski, a project supervisor representing MEPhI. To reduce friction and solve many ...