Progressive vision loss, and eventually blindness, are the hallmarks of juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (JNCL) or CLN3-Batten disease. New research shows how the mutation associated with the disease could potentially lead to degeneration of light sensing photoreceptor cells in the retina, and subsequent vision loss. "The prominence and early onset of retinal degeneration in JNCL makes it likely that cellular processes that are compromised in JNCL are critical for health and function of the retina," said Ruchira Signh, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Ophthalmology and Center for Visual Science and lead author of the study which appears in the journal Communications Biology. "It is important to understand how vision loss is triggered in this disease, ...

Washington, D.C.. -- The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp decline in living standards and rising food insecurity in developing countries across the globe, according to a new study by an international team of economists. The study, published Feb. 5 in the journal Science Advances, provides an in-depth view of the health crisis's initial socioeconomic effects in low- and middle-income countries, using detailed micro data collected from tens of thousands of households across nine countries. The phone surveys were conducted from April through July 2020 of nationally and sub-nationally representative samples in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Across the board, study ...

The largest single cell study to date of the childhood cancer, neuroblastoma, has answered important questions about the genesis of the disease. The researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) and the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology, discovered that all neuroblastomas arise from a single type of embryonic cell called sympathoblasts. The study, published today (5 February 2021) in Science Advances, sought to understand why neuroblastomas range in severity, with some easy to treat and others having relatively low five-year survival rates. The fact that all neuroblastomas arise from sympathoblasts makes them an attractive ...

Berkeley -- The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year led to a devastating loss of jobs and income across the global south, threatening hundreds of millions of people with hunger and lost savings and raising an array of risks for children, according to new research co-authored at the University of California, Berkeley. The research, to be published Friday Feb. 5, 2021, in the journal Science Advances, found "staggering" income losses after the pandemic emerged last year, with a median 70% of households across nine countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America reporting financial losses. By April last year, roughly 50% ...

Scientists led by Eliza Harris and Michael Bahn from the Institute of Ecology at the University of Innsbruck have succeeded in studying emissions of the greenhouse gas N2O under the influence of environmental impacts in an unprecedented level of detail. The study, which has now been published in Science Advances, is thus also a starting point for the creation of models that could predict future trends in the greenhouse gas emission dynamics of ecosystems under global climate change. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas whose atmospheric growth rate has accelerated over the past decade. The largest share of anthropogenic N2O emissions results from the fertilization of soils with nitrogen, which is converted into N2O via various abiotic ...

Genes that determine the shape of a person's facial profile have been discovered by a UCL-led research team. The researchers identified 32 gene regions that influenced facial features such as nose, lip, jaw, and brow shape, nine of which were entirely new discoveries while the others validated genes with prior limited evidence. The analysis of data from more than 6,000 volunteers across Latin America was published today in Science Advances. The international research team, led from UCL, Aix-Marseille University and The Open University, found that one of the genes appears ...

US counties with more social capital have fewer COVID-19 infections and deaths - perhaps because these communities have greater concern for the health of others. INFORMATION: Article Title: "How social capital helps communities weather the COVID-19 pandemic" Funding: This research was supported by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [CIHR, FRN-170368; PI: Cary Wu]. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0245135 ...

New research from Simon Fraser University shows that women's voices continue to be underrepresented in the media, despite having prominent female leaders across Canada and internationally. Researchers in SFU's Discourse Processing Lab found that men outnumber women quoted in Canadian news media about three to one. The findings from the team's Gender Gap Tracker study were published this week in the journal PLOS ONE. The research team collected data from seven major Canadian media outlets from October 2018 to September 2020. Over the two-year period, 29 per cent of people ...

The development of scanning probe microscopes in the early 1980s brought a breakthrough in imaging, throwing open a window into the world at the nanoscale. The key idea is to scan an extremely sharp tip over a substrate and to record at each location the strength of the interaction between tip and surface. In scanning force microscopy, this interaction is -- as the name implies -- the force between tip and structures on the surface. This force is typically determined by measuring how the dynamics of a vibrating tip changes as it scans over objects deposited on a substrate. A common analogy is tapping a finger across a table and sensing objects placed ...

A new study by Indiana University found women, younger individuals, those with lower levels of formal education, and people of color are being hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, found that Black adults were three times as likely as whites to report food insecurity, being laid off, or being unemployed during the pandemic. Additionally, residents without a college degree were twice as likely to report food insecurity (compared to those with some college) while those not completing high school are four times as likely to report it, compared ...

Cases of symptomatic COVID-19 were extremely low among children and staff at a network of YMCA summer camps held last year in North Carolina that took precautions like masking and physical distancing, with close to zero transmissions occurring at the camps, according to researchers at Duke Health, Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian. In the camps' 2020 sessions, there were 19 cases of COVID-19 among 5,344 staff and 1,486 youth, only two of which were linked to possible on-site transmission at a group of YMCA of the Triangle camps, at a time ...

The modern world is powered by electrical circuitry on a "chip"--the semiconductor chip underpinning computers, cell phones, the internet, and other applications. In the year 2025, humans are expected to be creating 175 zettabytes (175trillion gigabytes) of new data. How can we ensure the security of sensitive data at such a high volume? And how can we address grand-challenge-like problems, from privacy and security to climate change, leveraging this data, especially given the limited capability of current computers? A promising alternative is emerging quantum communication and computation technologies. For this to happen, however, it will require the widespread ...

Enterocytes, which line the epithelium of the small intestine, are the sites of absorption and metabolism of most orally consumed medications. For this reason, studies on the absorption of novel oral drugs rely on in vitro or animal models to accurately recreate the environment of the small intestine. Currently, scientists widely use the human colon cancer cell line Caco-2 as a model of the intestinal epithelium. However, this has its drawbacks: Caco-2 cells have been derived from the colon; therefore, they more closely resemble the colon than the small intestine. For example, these cells do not express cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4), a protein critical for drug metabolism that is abundantly expressed in the small intestine. Moreover, Caco-2 ...

Fresno, CA - A recent human study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that consuming grapes protected against ultraviolet (UV) skin damage.1 Study subjects showed increased resistance to sunburn and a reduction in markers of UV damage at the cellular level. 2 Natural components found in grapes known as polyphenols are thought to be responsible for these beneficial effects. The study, conducted at the University of Alabama, Birmingham and led by principal investigator Craig Elmets, M.D., investigated the impact of consuming whole grape powder - equivalent to 2.25 cups of grapes ...

DALLAS - Feb. 5, 2021 - The COVID-19 pandemic is having a detrimental impact on substance use, mental health, and weight-related health behaviors among people with obesity, according to a new study by researchers at UT Southwestern and the END ...

Health care and education systems are two main pillars of a community's stability. How well and how quickly a community recovers following a natural disaster depends on the resilience of these essential social services. New research from the Colorado State University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, published in Nature Scientific Reports, has found hospitals and schools are interdependent, suggesting their collective recovery must be considered in order to restore a community in the wake of disaster. Because hospitals and schools are so integral to a community's well-being, Associate Professor Hussam Mahmoud and Ph.D. graduate student Emad Hassan wanted to determine the correlation between them to understand their overall influence on community ...

UCLA materials scientists and colleagues have discovered that perovskites, a class of promising materials that could be used for low-cost, high-performance solar cells and LEDs, have a previously unutilized molecular component that can further tune the electronic property of perovskites. Named after Russian mineralogist Lev Perovski, perovskite materials have a crystal-lattice structure of inorganic molecules like that of ceramics, along with organic molecules that are interlaced throughout. Up to now, these organic molecules appeared to only serve a structural function and could not directly contribute to perovskites' electronic performance. Led by UCLA, a new study shows that when the organic molecules ...

Gene expression is a highly regulated process, which involves several steps. These include transcription of DNA instructions into RNA, removal of non-coding segments from the RNA message, and its subsequent translation into proteins. All these steps involve specific molecular machineries responsible for conducting each process with high accuracy. The Galej group, based at EMBL Grenoble, studies the structure and function of the RNA-protein complexes that are involved in the regulation of gene expression. During transcription, genetic information contained in the DNA is used to create a precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) thanks to the action of an enzyme, RNA Polymerase II. To maintain only the necessary coding segments ...

All life on earth evolved multiple layers and networks of ensuring survival upon catastrophic events. Even cells have their emergency plan: the heat shock response. Triggered by multiple stress stimuli such as heat, toxins, or radiation, this cellular safety program tries to prevent permanent damage to the organism. The response resembles an overall adopted "lockdown" strategy witnessed during the global corona virus pandemic. During a lockdown, only essential activities are permitted and resources were diverted towards measures ensuring minimizing the impact of a pandemic. Under normal conditions, RNA polymerase II rushes down the DNA. At the correct places, the DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which is then translated into proteins. In a crisis, ...

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists. Writing in Nature, a team led by Cambridge researchers report how they were able to observe SARS-CoV-2 mutating in the case of an immunocompromised patient treated with convalescent plasma. In particular, they saw the emergence of a key mutation also seen in the new variant that led to the UK being forced once again into strict lockdown, though there is no suggestion that the variant originated from this patient. Using a synthetic version of the virus Spike protein created in the ...

Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute have found important structural similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and a pangolin coronavirus, suggesting that a pangolin coronavirus could infect humans. While SARS-CoV-2 is thought to have evolved from a bat coronavirus, its exact evolutionary path is still a mystery. Uncovering its history is challenging as there are likely many undiscovered bat coronaviruses and, due to differences between bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2, it is thought that the virus may have passed to humans via at least one other species. In their study, published in Nature Communications, the scientists compared the structures of the spike proteins found on ...

A banking crisis is often seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The expectation of bank failure makes it happen. Picture people lining up to withdraw their money during the Great Depression or customers making a run on Britain's Northern Rock bank in 2007. But a new paper co-authored by an MIT professor suggests we have been missing the bigger picture about banking crises. Yes, there are sometimes panics about banks that create self-reinforcing problems. But many banking crises are quieter: Even without customers panicking, banks can suffer losses serious enough to create subsequent economy-wide downturns. "Panics are not needed for banking crises to have severe economic consequences," says Emil Verner, the MIT professor who helped lead the study. "But ...

Plastics made from crops such as maize or sugarcane instead of fossil fuels are generally considered sustainable. One reason is that plants bind CO2, which compensates for the carbon released into the atmosphere when plastics are disposed. However, there is a catch: With increasing demand for raw materials for bioplastic production, the areas under cultivation may not be sufficient. As a result, natural vegetation is often converted to agricultural land and forests are cut down. This in turn releases large amounts of CO2. The assumption that more bioplastics does not necessarily lead to more climate protection has now been confirmed by researchers at the University of Bonn ...

A study from the Center for Phage Technology, part of Texas A&M's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Texas A&M AgriLife Research, shows how the "hidden" genes in bacteriophages -- types of viruses that infect and destroy bacteria -- may be key to the development of a new class of antibiotics for human health. The study has been published in Nature Communications and Current Science Daily, as well as featured in a recent Nature Research Microbiology Community blog post. The need for new antibiotics Antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose ...

Primeval forests are of great importance for biodiversity and global carbon and water cycling. The three-dimensional structure of forests plays an important role here because it influences processes of gas and energy exchange with the atmosphere, whilst also providing habitats for numerous species. An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the variety of different complex structures that can be found in the world's forests, as well as the factors that explain this diversity. The results have been published in Nature Communications. The researchers investigated the structure of primeval ...