PHILADELPHIA--Scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered the molecular causes of a congenital form of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), an often-fatal heart disorder. This inherited form of DCM -- which affects at least several thousand people in the United States at any one time and often causes sudden death or progressive heart failure -- is one of multiple congenital disorders known to be caused by inherited mutations in a gene called LMNA. The LMNA gene is active in most cell types, and researchers have ...

What The Study Did: Researchers used near real-time social media data to capture the public's changing COVID-19-related attitudes when former President Trump was infected. Authors: Sean D. Young, Ph.D., of the University of California, Irvine, 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.2021.0101) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional ...

What The Study Did: Researchers looked at changes in the rate of deaths associated with the use of illicit (such as cocaine) and medical  stimulants in the United States from 2010 to 2017. Authors: Joshua C. Black, Ph.D., of Rocky Mountain Poison & Drug Safety in Denver, 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/jamainternmed.2020.7850) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...

What The Study Did: This report summarizes frequency and patterns of concussions and repetitive head impacts over the course of several seasons among college football players who wore sensors in their helmets. Authors: Michael McCrea, Ph.D., of the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, 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/jamaneurol.2020.5193) Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest ...

For the first time, scientists have calculated the global impact of human activity on animal movement, revealing widespread impacts that threaten species survival and biodiversity. While it has been shown that activities such as logging and urbanisation can have big impacts on wildlife, the study by scientists at the University of Sydney and Deakin University in Australia shows that episodic events such as hunting, military activity and recreation can trigger even bigger changes in animal behaviour. "It is vital we understand the scale of impact that humans have on other animal species," said lead author Dr Tim Doherty, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Sydney. "The consequences of changed animal movement can be profound and lead to reduced ...

When two sheets of graphene are stacked atop each other at just the right angle, the layered structure morphs into an unconventional superconductor, allowing electric currents to pass through without resistance or wasted energy. This "magic-angle" transformation in bilayer graphene was observed for the first time in 2018 in the group of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. Since then, scientists have searched for other materials that can be similarly twisted into superconductivity, in the emerging field of "twistronics." For the most part, no other twisted material has exhibited superconductivity other than the original twisted bilayer ...

An intelligent material that learns by physically changing itself, similar to how the human brain works, could be the foundation of a completely new generation of computers. Radboud physicists working toward this so-called "quantum brain" have made an important step. They have demonstrated that they can pattern and interconnect a network of single atoms, and mimic the autonomous behaviour of neurons and synapses in a brain. They report their discovery in Nature Nanotechnology on 1 February. Considering the growing global demand for computing capacity, more and more data centres are necessary, all of which leave an ever-expanding energy footprint. 'It is clear that ...

The Milky Way is surrounded by dozens of dwarf galaxies that are thought to be relics of the very first galaxies in the universe. Among the most primitive of these galactic fossils is Tucana II -- an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that is about 50 kiloparsecs, or 163,000 light years, from Earth. Now MIT astrophysicists have detected stars at the edge of Tucana II, in a configuration that is surprisingly far from its center but nevertheless caught up in the tiny galaxy's gravitational pull. This is the first evidence that Tucana II hosts an extended dark matter halo ...

Millions of patients suffering from neurological and mental disorders such as depression, addiction, and chronic pain are treatment-resistant. In fact, about 30% of all major depression patients do not respond at all to any medication or psychotherapy. Simply put, many traditional forms of treatment for these disorders may have reached their limit. Where do we go from here? Research to be published in Nature Biomedical Engineering led by Maryam Shanechi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair in electrical and computer engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, ...

King Richard III's involvement in one of the most notorious and emotive mysteries in English history may be a step closer to being confirmed following a new study by Professor Tim Thornton of the University of Huddersfield. Richard has long been held responsible of the murder of his nephews King Edward V and his brother, Richard, duke of York - dubbed 'the Princes in the Tower' - in a dispute about succession to the throne. The pair were held in the Tower of London, but disappeared from public view in 1483 with Richard taking the blame following his death two years later. It has become of the most enduring unsolved mysteries of all, stoked by references in Shakespeare's play about the ...

Skoltech researchers helped their colleagues from Japan, Germany, the United States, and China study the crystal structure and optical properties of a new class of two-dimensional compounds, which can be used as effective visible-light-responsive photocatalysts for energy and chemical conversion. They used the Advanced Imaging Core Facility equipment for imaging and structural analysis. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. One potential use of photocatalysts, so-called water splitting can help substitute climate-warming fossil fuels with more environmentally friendly hydrogen. For this process to work on ...

It has sometimes been suggested that humans use a tiny fraction of their brains. But, is this statement true? The authors of a study published on 20 January in the journal Nature Communications answer this question using neural records of mice subjected to visual stimuli. This paper demonstrates, in the visual system of mice, the presence of a type of coordination of neural activity called differential correlations. A study by Rubén Moreno-Bote, a researcher at the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) and Serra Hunter research professor with the UPF Department of Information and Communication Technologies ...

Scientists have revealed new insights into the behaviour of black holes with research that demonstrates how a phenomenon called backreaction can be simulated. The team from the University of Nottingham have used their simulation of a black hole, involving a specially designed water tank, for this latest research published in Physical Review Letters. This study is the first to demonstrate that the evolution of black holes resulting from the fields surrounding them can be simulated in a laboratory experiment. The researchers used a water tank simulator consisting of a draining vortex, like the one that forms when you pull the plug in the bath. This mimics a black hole since a wave which comes too ...

Protein alteration in the family of lamins causes several diseases, known as laminopathies, such as progeria or precocious ageing. A study in which UB researchers have taken part states that alterations in the levels of one of these proteins, lamin B1, contribute to the degeneration of different brain neuronal populations in Huntington's disease. Caused by a mutation in the huntingtin gen, this pathology features involuntary movements, cognitive deficit and psychiatric disorders, and has no cure yet. According to the study, published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, these results open new therapeutic pathways for the treatment of this disease, since research shows pharmacological normalization of levels of lamin ...

As COVID-19 spread across the world, so did conspiracy theories and false information about the virus. This proliferation of misinformation--labeled an "infodemic" by the World Health Organization (WHO)--makes it difficult to identify trustworthy sources and can threaten public health by undermining confidence in science, governments, and public health recommendations. The consequences of misinformation can be tragic: hundreds died and thousands were poisoned in Iran after consuming toxic methanol alcohol, falsely believing it could cure COVID-19. In a new article in the Journal of Public ...

The COVID-19 pandemic is straining health systems across the country, especially intensive care units. New research from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine shows that people treated in the ICU for COVID-19 are twice as likely to die when the ICU capacity is strained by the number of COVID-19 patients. "These results demonstrate that patients with COVID-19 are more likely to die if they are admitted to an ICU during times with peak COVID-19 caseload," said Dawn Bravata, M.D., first author of the study. "We know that strain on hospital ...

Amsterdam, December 29, 2020 - This new pioneering study by Prof. Ricardo Maccioni and coworkers of the International Center for Biomedicine, "New Frontiers in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer´s disease" was published in the special issue of Latin American investigators of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease(JAD). This supports a growing body of research on the Alzheimer's prevention value of an integrated approach using daily exercise, nutraceuticals, oriental practices such as QiGong along with meditation, and social life. These elements of a healthy style of life are supplemented with the use of reliable biomarkers for early detection of this disease that allows the detection of Alzheimer up to 20 years before ...

Chronic stress could be the prevailing condition of our time. In the short term, our jaws or stomachs may clench; in the long term, stress can lead to metabolic disease and speed up diseases of aging, as well as leading to more serious psychological disorders. The physical manifestations of stress originate in the brain, and they move along a so-called "stress axis" that ends in the adrenal glands. These glands then produce the hormone cortisol. When the stress axis is continually activated, changes occur in the cells and organs along the way, and the continual production of cortisol then substantially contribute the symptoms of chronic stress. The stress response axis starts with the hypothalamus in the brain, ...

Scientists say stable seafood consumption amongst the world's poorer coastal communities is linked to how local habitat characteristics influence fishing at different times of the year. In the coastal communities of low-income countries, the seafood people catch themselves is often a main food source. In a new study, scientists focused on an often-overlooked type of fishing called gleaning: collecting molluscs, crabs, octopus and reef fish by hand close to shore. "We surveyed 131 households in eight coastal communities on a small island off Timor-Leste," said study lead author Ruby Grantham from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. Grantham said even though gleaning is important for food security ...

(Boston)--There have been great advances in treating melanoma over the past five years, however, even with these treatments many patients quickly develop drug resistance and die from their disease. A new study from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has discovered that a drug (YK-4-279) that was previously created to target one specific type of protein has much broader use against a family of proteins that act to promote melanoma. "We find that this drug inhibited melanoma from becoming more aggressive in human cells and in experimental models. We also found a specific pathway that this drug acts through to be anti-cancer: inhibiting proteins that drive genes that promote cancer cell growth and metastasis," ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Antarctic ice is melting, contributing massive amounts of water to the world's seas and causing them to rise - but that melt is not as linear and consistent as scientists previously thought, a new analysis of 20 years' worth of satellite data indicates. The analysis, built on gravitational field data from a NASA satellite system, shows that Antarctica's ice melts at different rates each year, meaning the models scientists use to predict coming sea level rise might also need adjusting. "The ice sheet is not changing with a constant rate - it's more complicated than a linear change," said Lei Wang, assistant professor ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas have developed and demonstrated a new approach for designing photonic devices. The advance allows them to control the direction and polarization of light from thin-film LEDs, paving the way for a new generation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. "This is a fundamentally new device architecture for photonic devices," says Franky So, corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "And we've demonstrated that, using our approach, directional and polarized emissions from an organic LED or a perovskite LED without external optical elements can be realized." So is the ...

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and their collaborators found that inhaling unfragmented hyaluronan improves lung function in patients suffering from severe exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Hyaluronan, a sugar secreted by living tissue that acts as a scaffold for cells, is also used in cosmetics as a skin moisturizer and as a nasal spray to moisturize lung airways. Utilized as a treatment, hyaluronan shortened the amount of time COPD patients in intensive care needed breathing support, decreased their number of days in the hospital, and saved money by reducing their hospital stay. The study, published online in Respiratory Research, is a good example of how examining the impacts of environmental pollution on the lungs can ...

Self-control significantly affects well-being and objective success in life. Although many agree that a high degree of self-control is beneficial, helping people develop more self-control is a tricky challenge. Self-control training, like training in any domain, is affected by the basic question of whether a person is motivated to improve self-control. Recent work has found that people differ as to how strongly they desire better self-control, and reveals some of the factors affecting this desire. Desire for self-control (DSC) reflects a wish to have an improved self-control ability. This desire is influenced by societal or cultural ...

HOUSTON - (Feb. 1, 2021) - When aboveground storage tanks fail during a storm and their toxic contents spread, the threat to human health can and probably will flow downwind of the immediate area. Rice University engineers have developed a model to quantify what could happen when a hurricane or other natural disaster causes such damage based on data gathered from the Houston Ship Channel, the largest petrochemical complex in the United States, during and after two hurricanes, Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017. Pollutants like toxic organic chemicals evaporate ...