Pioneering research into how our bodies manufacture the cells that make blood has moved us closer to regrowing tissues and organs. The findings also may let doctors grow the cells for transplantation into people to battle cancer, blood disorders and autoimmune diseases. Researcher Karen K. Hirschi, PhD, of the Department of Cell Biology and the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has developed a simple and efficient way to generate "hemogenic endothelial cells." These cells are the first step in the production line of blood cells, and Hirschi's new findings provide a blueprint for creating them outside the body. "By studying how hemogenic endothelial cells develop normally, we gain insights needed ...

Ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) are incredibly strong materials used in jet engines, gas turbines, and cutting tools for nickel superalloys. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) is hard and chemically inert, and tungsten carbide (WC) is used as a superhard material, but past efforts to create an Al2O3-WC CMC yielded unsatisfactory results. Recently, a study by Japanese scientists, published in Scientific Reports, shows that adding zirconium atoms results in improved Al2O3-WC CMCs. Given the potential utility of Al2O3-WC CMCs as superhard materials, researchers around the world have tested several formulations to identify one with a high bending strength, which is a measure of the physical stress a material can be subjected to before it becomes permanently bent or broken. Previously, ...

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers discovered that light pollution leads to more than just wasted energy and washed-out starlight--it can increase the likelihood of a preterm birth by almost 13%. Laura Argys, professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver, collaborated with scientists at Lehigh University and Lafayette College to produce this study. Skyglow, the brightness of the night sky apart from discrete light sources such as the moon and visible stars, is one of the most pervasive forms of light pollution. When you have increased artificial brightness at night, coming from sources like streetlamps, outdoor advertising, and buildings, it reduces your ability to see the dark ...

Aging and lifestyle-related metabolic imbalances, such as hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, and oxidative-stress, cause the accumulation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), including pentosidine (PEN, crosslinked type) and carboxymethyl-lysine (CML, non-crosslinked type). Osteoporosis is a widespread metabolic skeletal disease characterized by diminished bone mineral density (BMD) or bone strength, which increases the risk of fractures. To date, the association of PEN and CML with osteoporotic fracture has been reported, and the accumulation of AGEs in bone ...

When it comes to drones, the Singapore public is not as keen for them to be used to provide services around their living spaces, finds a study by researchers at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore). However, they are more accepting of drones being used in areas like recreational spots or industrial areas. There is growing global interest in the use of drones to provide a range of applications - from building inspection to last mile commercial delivery - that promise productivity gains and cost reductions. In Singapore, the use of drones is picking up, with the government adopting them for various projects in the Smart Nation drive, where technology ...

Cambridge, Massachusetts - They may be the youngest astronomers to make a discovery yet. This week, 16-year-old Kartik Pinglé and 18-year-old Jasmine Wright have co-authored a peer-reviewed END ...

Across many animal species there is great evolutionary pressure on males, who often engage in combat for the rights to copulation. This phenomenon, called sexual selection, often ends up favoring males with larger weapons, such as horns or pincers. Interestingly, scientists have noted that males endowed with smaller weapons adopt alternative reproductive tactics in some species. For example, instead of fighting other more powerful males, they may try to sneak around or disperse in search of a lonely female. Variability in sexual behavior according to a male's weapon size has been widely studied. However, it's worth noting that bigger is not always better. Though larger weapons usually help in fights for reproductive rights, they can also be ...

Blood is vital to life, and a healthy body replenishes worn-out blood cells with new ones throughout one's lifetime. If something goes wrong with this process, serious illness will result. Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have now discovered a mechanism controlling the replenishment of blood cells, which could have relevance for new treatments for blood cancers and other blood-related diseases. The international research team, helmed by Dr Akihiko Numata while he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Professor Daniel Tenen of the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore and Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine ...

Countries around the world are seeing a surge in the number of computer science students. Enrolment in related university programs in the U.S. and Canada tripled between 2006-2016 and Europe too has seen rising numbers. At the same time, the age to start coding is becoming younger and younger because governments in many different countries are pushing K-12 computer science education. Despite the increasing popularity of computer programming, little is known about how our brains adapt to this relatively new activity. A new study by researchers in Japan has examined the brain activity ...

A cross-institutional research group has revealed for the first time in the world that infants with symptomatic congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection who were treated with a combination of immunoglobulin fetal therapy and neonatal therapy with antiviral drugs were less likely to experience the severe aftereffects associated with the infection than those who only received the neonatal therapy. It is hoped that the number of children suffering severe aftereffects resulting from congenital CMV infection will decrease in the future. The research group included the following members: Doctor YAMADA Hideto ...

Tokyo, Japan -- In the marchland of Japan's Oze National Park, keeping track of the deer population has been a difficult and time-consuming task for the park rangers. Now their lives could get much easier, thanks to a novel technique for tracking deer movements using unmanned listening devices developed by researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, a part of The University of Tokyo. Monitoring deer numbers is important in Oze and other national parks in Japan because deer are not native to the ecosystem and can have damaging effects on it. Current methods of monitoring deer populations range from traditional techniques such as counting droppings to photographing deer at night using automated cameras or from above during the day using unmanned aerial vehicles ...

Air pollution is a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and a major contributor to the global burden of disease. Long-term exposure to air pollution has also been linked to an increased risk of death from COVID-19. This dangerous "triple threat" of air pollution, COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease should be taken seriously, warn major health authorities. Four leading cardiovascular organizations - the World Heart Federation (WHF), American College of Cardiology (ACC), American Heart Association (AHA) and European Society of Cardiology (ESC) - today released a joint statement urging the medical community and health authorities to mitigate the impact of air pollution on people's ...

A Quebec research team has discovered two early plasma markers to detect Alzheimer's disease five years before its onset. The results of this recent study led by the doctoral student Mohamed Raâfet Ben Khedher and postdoctoral student Mohamed Haddad, directed by Professor Charles Ramassamy of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions (TRCI). The diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is usually based on a series of psychometric ...

Support for policies prohibiting smoking and the use of tobacco products on Oregon State University's Corvallis campus grew substantially over a five-year span, especially among tobacco users, a recent OSU study found. The study, published earlier this month in the journal Preventive Medicine, is unique in its analysis of support for smoke- and tobacco-free campus policies over a long period of time. Most other studies of attitudes toward smoking policies only assess a single point in time. "Tobacco-free policies are one of the most effective things we can do to reduce the burden of tobacco use, and they are highly supported ...

Navigating, exploring and thinking about space are part of daily life, whether it's carving a path through a crowd, hiking a backcountry trail or maneuvering into a parking spot. For most of human history, the driving force for day-to-day wayfinding and movement across the landscape was a need for food. And unlike other primates, our species has consistently divided this labor along gender lines. In new research published in Nature Human Behaviour, scientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the increasingly gendered division of labor in human societies during the past 2.5 million years dramatically shaped how our species uses space, and possibly ...

A research team from HSE University and SkolTech, together with experts from the Smorodintsev Research Institute of Influenza in St. Petersburg and the RAS Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP), discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus independently entered Russia at least 67 times, mostly at the end of February and beginning of March 2020. The vast majority of introductions came from European countries. No cases of introduction from China were registered, which is likely due to the timely closure of borders with the country. Currently, nine local virus lineages are circulating in Russia, which are not present elsewhere in the world. Given that Russia was actively 'importing' the virus from abroad, the researchers have not detected any cases of 'exporting' ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- In a new study published in Circulation, Mayo Clinic researchers provide the first preclinical, proof-of-concept study for hybrid gene therapy in long QT syndrome, a potentially lethal heart rhythm condition. Researchers demonstrated its potential therapeutic efficacy in two in vitro model systems using beating heart cells reengineered from the blood samples of patients with 1 long QT syndrome. They targeted the whole KCNQ1 gene rather than specific LQT1-causative mutations, making this study applicable to all patients with long QT ...

When you think of fungi, what comes to mind may be a crucial ingredient in a recipe or their amazing ability to break down dead organic matter into vital nutrients. But new research by Shuhai Xiao, a professor of geosciences with the Virginia Tech College of Science, and Tian Gan, a visiting Ph.D. student in the Xiao lab, highlights yet another important role that fungi have played throughout the Earth's history: helping the planet recover from an ice age. A team of scientists from Virginia Tech, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guizhou Education University, and University of Cincinnati has discovered the remains of a fungi-like microfossil that ...

A tick saliva study reveals immune responses that could lead to better protection for cattle. Scientists from Hokkaido University, Japan and Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, have revealed that substances in tick saliva activates immune response-suppressing proteins in cattle that facilitates the transmission of tick-borne diseases. The finding was published in the journal Scientific Reports and could help in the development of alternative control strategies. The Asian blue tick, Rhipicephalus microplus, feeds on cattle, causing skin lesions, ...

There's a better end for used food than taking up space in landfills and contributing to global warming. UC Riverside scientists have discovered fermented food waste can boost bacteria that increase crop growth, making plants more resistant to pathogens and reducing carbon emissions from farming. "Beneficial microbes increased dramatically when we added fermented food waste to plant growing systems," said UCR microbiologist Deborah Pagliaccia, who led the research. "When there are enough of these good bacteria, they produce antimicrobial compounds and metabolites that help plants grow better and faster." Since the plants in this experiment were grown in a greenhouse, the benefits of the waste ...

Earth is warming rapidly, but there is too little observational data in some regions such as the Arctic or high-altitude areas like the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau to adequately and consistently assess temperature variations across the globe. To better understand how temperatures have increased, an international team led by researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University in China has released a newly merged global surface temperature dataset, including reconstructed land and marine measurements from the 1850s to 2018. The study provides evidence that there was a consistent increased warming trend compared with previous estimations, which closely matches the available observational data and updated simulations covering the past two decades. The approach ...

A new paper in the Review of Economic Studies, published by Oxford University Press, finds that a generous parental leave policy nurses enjoyed in Denmark caused nursing shortages, which resulted in a decline in the quality of hospital and nursing home care. The study estimates a large increase in nursing home mortality. Beginning in 1994 a parental-leave program in Denmark offered any parent the opportunity to take up to a full year off work, paid, for every child under the age of nine. The researchers find that many nurses in Denmark took advantage of this program. Nurses, however, could not be replaced on net despite the Danish government's efforts to expand education and immigration ...

If you look deep into the eyes of a fish, it will tell you its life story. Scientists from the University of California, Davis, demonstrate that they can use stable isotopic analysis of the eye lenses of freshwater fish -- including threatened and endangered salmon -- to reveal a fish's life history and what it ate along the way. They conducted their study, published today in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, through field-based experiments in California's Central Valley. The study carries implications for managing floodplains, fish and natural resources; prioritizing habitat restoration efforts; and understanding how landscape disturbances impact fish. The technique had previously been used in marine environments, ...

Worldwide, over one billion people live with a disability. Historically, they have been discriminated against and stigmatized by society. To improve their rights, they should be included in political decision-making, yet there is a lack of political representatives who are known to have a disability. This under-representation may be due to several factors, including how voters perceive a political candidate with a disability. However, a new study published in Frontiers in Political Science, found for the first time that voters do not apply negative stereotypes when evaluating candidates with a disability. Rather, voters tend to perceive candidates with a disability as capable, ...

Prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with prices in the U.S. averaging 2.56 times those seen in 32 other nations, according to a new RAND Corporation report. The gap between prices in the U.S. and other countries is even larger for brand-named drugs, with U.S. prices averaging 3.44 times those in comparison nations. The RAND study found that prices for unbranded generic drugs -- which account for 84% of drugs sold in the U.S. by volume but only 12% of U.S. spending -- are slightly lower in the U.S. than in most other nations. "Brand-name drugs are the primary driver of the higher prescription drug prices in the U.S.," said Andrew Mulcahy, lead author of the study and a senior health policy researcher at RAND, a ...