Mammals and cold-blooded alligators share a common four-chamber heart structure - unique among reptiles - but that's where the similarities end. Unlike humans and other mammals, whose hearts can fibrillate under stress, alligators have built-in antiarrhythmic protection. The findings from new research were reported Jan. 27 in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology. "Alligator hearts don't fibrillate - no matter what we do. They're very resilient," said Flavio Fenton, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, researcher ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Throughout her career, Lori Popejoy provided hands-on clinical care in a variety of health care settings, from hospitals and nursing homes to community centers and home health care agencies. She became interested in the area of care coordination, as patients who are not properly cared for after being discharged from the hospital often end up being readmitted in a sicker, more vulnerable state of health. Now an associate professor in the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing, Popejoy and her research team conducted a study to determine the most effective way patients ...

Metabolic diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, have risen to epidemic proportions in the U.S. and occur in about 30 percent of the population. Skeletal muscle plays a prominent role in controlling the body's glucose levels, which is important for the development of metabolic diseases like diabetes. In a recent study, published in END ...

Investigators at the University of Chicago Medicine have found that women are less likely to be represented as chairs and reviewers on study sections for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), based on data from one review cycle in 2019. The results, published on Feb. 15 in JAMA Network Open, have implications for the distribution of federal scientific funding. The NIH is the top source of federal funding for biomedical research in the U.S., providing critical support and guidance on the nation's research programs. The study sought to understand the gender distribution ...

New research from North Carolina State University has found that Campylobacter bacteria persist throughout poultry production - from farm to grocery shelves - and that two of the most common strains are exchanging genetic material, which could result in more antibiotic-resistant and infectious Campylobacter strains. Campylobacter is a well-known group of foodborne bacteria, spread primarily through consumption of contaminated food products. In humans it causes symptoms commonly associated with food poisoning, such as diarrhea, fever and cramps. However, Campylobacter infections also constitute one of the leading precursors ...

Surface rupturing during earthquakes is a significant risk to any structure that is built across a fault zone that may be active, in addition to any risk from ground shaking. Surface rupture can affect large areas of land, and it can damage all structures in the vicinity of the fracture. Although current seismic codes restrict the construction in the vicinity of active tectonic faults, finding the exact location of fault outcrop is often difficult. In many regions around the world, engineering structures such as earth dams, buildings, pipelines, landfills, bridges, roads and railroads have been built in areas very close to active fault segments. Strike-slip fault rupture occurs when the rock masses slip past each other ...

Cancer cells and immune cells share something in common: They both love sugar. Sugar is an important nutrient. All cells use sugar as a vital source of energy and building blocks. For immune cells, gobbling up sugar is a good thing, since it means getting enough nutrients to grow and divide for stronger immune responses. But cancer cells use sugar for more nefarious ends. So, what happens when tumor cells and immune cells battle for access to the same supply of sugar? That's the central question that Memorial Sloan Kettering researchers Taha Merghoub, Jedd Wolchok, and Roberta Zappasodi explore in a new study published February 15 in the journal Nature. Using mouse models and data ...

Ithaca, NY--The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we know it all around the world. It's changed human behavior, and that has major consequences for data-gathering citizen-science projects such as eBird, run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This worldwide database now contains more than a billion observations and is a mainstay of many scientific studies of bird populations. Newly published research in the journal Biological Conservation finds that when human behaviors change, so do the data. "We examined eBird data submitted during April 2020 and compared them to data from April of prior years," explains lead ...

Researchers from the UCLA School of Dentistry have identified the role a critical enzyme plays in skeletal aging and bone loss, putting them one step closer to understanding the complex biological mechanisms that lead to osteoporosis, the bone disease that afflicts some 200 million people worldwide. The findings from their study in mice, END ...

New Edith Cowan University (ECU) research has found that exercise not only has physical benefits for men with prostate cancer, it also helps reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. Up to one in four men experience anxiety either before or after prostate cancer treatment and up to one in five report depression, although few men access the support they need. The study, published in the Nature journal Prostate Cancer and Prostatic Diseases, is the first randomised controlled trial to examine the long-term effects of different exercise on psychological distress in men with prostate cancer undergoing androgen deprivation therapy (ADT). Researchers randomly selected 135 prostate cancer patients aged ...

WASHINGTON, February 16, 2021 -- Research into 3D bioprinting has grown rapidly in recent years as scientists seek to re-create the structure and function of complex biological systems from human tissues to entire organs. The most popular 3D printing approach uses a solution of biological material or bioink that is loaded into a syringe pump extruder and deposited in a layer-by-layer fashion to build the 3D object. Gravity, however, can distort the soft and liquid bioinks used in this method. In APL Bioengineering, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University provide perspective on the Freefrom Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels ...

What The Study Did: The observational study examined associations between maternal cardiovascular health during pregnancy (as measured by body mass index, blood pressure, total cholesterol level, glucose level and smoking) with the later cardiovascular health of their offspring at ages 10 to 14 years old (as measured by body mass index, blood pressure, total cholesterol level and glucose level). Authors: Amanda M. Perak, M.D., M.S., of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, 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/jama.2021.0247) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support ...

Spending on low-value health care among fee-for-service Medicare recipients dropped only marginally from 2014 to 2018, despite both a national campaign to better educate clinicians and increasing use of payment revisions that discourage wasteful care, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Three items accounted for two-thirds of the low-value care. Among these, prescribing opioids for acute back pain increased despite a growing national awareness of the harms caused by the drugs and the role of such prescribing in fueling the nation's opioid ...

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the association between the presence of an armed guard on scene and the severity of shootings at schools kindergarten through high school. Authors: Jillian Peterson, Ph.D., of Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, 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.2020.37394) Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media advisory: The full study is linked to this ...

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the strength of the evidence from published meta-analyses of observational studies that looked at the association between diet and the risk of colorectal cancer. Authors: Nathorn Chaiyakunapruk, Pharm.D., Ph.D., of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, 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.2020.37341) Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support. INFORMATION: Media ...

WASHINGTON, February 16, 2021 -- The widespread use of high-speed and high-energy weapons in modern warfare has led to an increasing incidence of explosive injuries. For such wounds as well as those incurred in disasters and accidents, severe hemorrhage is the leading cause of death. In APL Bioengineering, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the Southern University of Science and Technology in China examine the advances in hydrogel dressings in recent years, which are good at promoting wound healing and can better meet the demands of different situations. "With the rapid developments of material science, there are numerous highly ...

CHICAGO --- A mother's heart health while she is pregnant may have a significant impact on her child's cardiovascular health in early adolescence (ages 10 to 14), according to a new study from Northwestern Medicine and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. The study will be published Feb. 16 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). It is the first study to examine the implications of a mother's cardiovascular health during pregnancy for offspring health in the longer term. The findings are troubling, as they build upon previous Northwestern Medicine and Lurie Children's Hospital research that found ...

Researchers have discovered that the use of Cytoglobin (CYGB) as an intravenous drug could delay liver fibrosis progression in mice. CYGB, discovered in 2001 by Professor Norifumi Kawada, is present in hepatic stellate cells, the cells that produce fibrotic molecules such as collagens when the liver has acute or chronic inflammation induced by different etiologies. The enhancement of CYGB on these cells or the injection of recombinant CYGB has the effect of suppressing liver damage and cirrhosis. These findings published in the February 2021 issue of the journal Hepatology. Anti-fibrotic therapy remains an unmet medical need in human chronic liver diseases. A research team led by Professor Norifumi Kawada, Osaka City University ...

Dry and cloudless weather was mainly responsible for the unusually high solar irradiance in western Europe during the spring of 2020, not the reduction in aerosol emissions due to the first lockdown. This was the result of an international meteorological study, in which scientists from the University of Cologne participated. The results have been published in the current issue of Nature Communications Earth & Environment. A large part of western Europe experienced exceptionally sunny and dry weather from March 23 to the end of May 2020. New sunshine extremes were reported in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, coupled with exceptionally deep blue skies. At the same time, these countries had gone into lockdown in response ...

Historically, most electric transmission system operators have used heuristics (rules based on experience) to hold sufficient reserves to guard against unforeseen large outages and maintain system reliability. However, the expansion of competitive wholesale electricity markets has led to efforts to translate reserve heuristics into competitively procured services. A common approach constructs an administrative demand curve for valuing and procuring least cost reserve supply offers. The technical term for this is the operating reserve demand curve (ORDC). A new paper quantifies how better accounting for the temperature-dependent probability of large generator contingencies with time-varying dynamic ORDC construction improves reserve procurement. The paper, "Dynamic Operating Reserve Procurement ...

Between January 2012 and March 2018, there were an average of 1,000 failures each year at large North American gas power plants due to unscheduled fuel shortages and fuel conservation interruptions. This is a problem as the power grid depends on reliable natural gas delivery from these power plants in order to function. More than a third of all U.S. electricity is generated from natural gas. New research now indicates that these fuel shortages are not due to failures of pipelines and that in certain areas of the country a change in how gas is purchased ...

DALLAS - Feb. 16, 2021 - A study that identifies how a coronavirus protein called Nsp1 blocks the activity of genes that promote viral replication provides hope for new COVID-19 treatments. Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have worked endlessly to understand SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Even with the arrival of vaccines, the virus is still spreading and there is a need to develop alternative therapies. Scientists hope to achieve this by studying how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells and propagates itself while avoiding the body's natural immune system. Now researchers at UT Southwestern have added another piece to this puzzle with their END ...

TUCSON, Ariz. -- The ongoing pandemic has had a significant and alarming trend of increased alcohol use and abuse - especially among younger adults, males and those who have lost their jobs - according to a new study by University of Arizona Health Sciences researchers. Research led by William "Scott" Killgore, PhD, professor of psychiatry in the UArizona College of Medicine - Tucson and director of the Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, found that hazardous alcohol use and likely dependence increased every month for those under lockdowns compared to those not under restrictions. "Being under lockdown during a worldwide pandemic has been hard on everyone, and many people are relying on greater quantities of alcohol to ease their distress," said Dr. ...

Shoe shops sell a variety of shoe sizes to accommodate a variety of foot sizes -- but what if both the shoe and foot size depended on how it was measured? Recent developments in quantum theory suggest that the available values of a physical quantity, such as a foot size, can depend on the type of measurement used to determine them. If feet were governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, foot size would depend on the markings on a foot measure to find the best fit -- at the time of measurement -- and even if the markings were changed, the measurement could still be precise. In quantum mechanics, the "size" of a physical ...

Because cancers in children are rare, many details about their biology remain unknown. In the field of cancer genetics, there's a limited understanding of how inherited genetic changes may contribute to the formation and growth of tumors. Making connections between particular gene mutations and disease requires a lot of data, which until recently has been largely unavailable for pediatric cancers. Now, tests like MSK-IMPACTTM can screen tumors for mutations in more than 500 genes as well as analyze patients' normal (germline) cells. In the largest study of its kind so far, researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering's pediatric program, MSK Kids, are reporting germline genomic sequencing details for 751 pediatric patients treated for solid tumors. The paper, ...