The inner ear of a 400 million-year-old 'platypus fish' has yielded new insights into early vertebrate evolution, suggesting this ancient creature may be more closely related to modern-day sharks and bony fish than previously thought. A team of scientists from the University of Birmingham in the UK, and institutions in China, Australia and Sweden, used 'virtual anatomy' techniques, including MicroCT scanning (using x-rays to look inside the fossil) and digital reconstruction to examine previously unseen areas within the braincase of these mysterious fossils. They discovered the fish, called ...

BOSTON -- For the first time, scientists have identified the individual neurons critical to human social reasoning, a cognitive process that requires us to acknowledge and predict others' hidden beliefs and thoughts. A team of neuroscientists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had a rare look at how individual neurons represent the beliefs of others by recording neuron activity in patients undergoing neurosurgery to alleviate symptoms of motor disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Their findings are published in Nature. The researchers were studying a very complex social cognitive ...

What The Study Did: This study among patients in Italy suggests that despite virological recovery, a sizable proportion of patients with COVID-19 experienced respiratory, functional or psychological conditions months after hospital discharge. Authors: Mattia Bellan, M.D., Ph.D., of Università del Piemonte Orientale in Novara, Italy, 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.2020.36142) Editor's ...

What The Study Did: In this observational study of about 7,300 adults with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in a New York health system, a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis was associated with an increased risk of death after adjusting for demographic and medical risk factors. Mood and anxiety disorders weren't associated with increased risk of mortality. Authors: Donald C. Goff, M.D., of New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, 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/jamapsychiatry.2020.4442) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see ...

What The Study Did: Researchers evaluated the association between the pandemic and clinical research and development by studying the initiation of oncology clinical trials over time. Authors: Elizabeth B. Lamont, M.D., M.S., M.MSc., of Acorn AI by Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes Company, in Boston, 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.2020.36353) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial ...

New findings on the brain and inner ear cavity of a 400-million-year-old platypus-like fish cast light on the evolution of modern jawed vertebrates, according to a study led by Dr. ZHU Youan and Dr. LU Jing from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study was published in Current Biology on Jan 27. Back in 1960s, Paleontologist Dr. Gavin C. Young found several fossils of a long-beaked fish, a type of placoderm, in the Burrinjuck limestones in Australia. He named the fish Brindabellaspis stensioi, and other people jokingly dubbed it "platypus fish" because of its long ...

Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, schizophrenia and many other neurological and psychiatric conditions have been linked to inflammation in the brain. There's growing evidence that immune cells and molecules play a key role in normal brain development and function as well. But at the core of the burgeoning field of neuroimmunology lies a mystery: How does the immune system even know what's happening in the brain? Generations of students have been taught that the brain is immunoprivileged, meaning the immune system largely steers clear of it. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis believe they have figured out how the immune system keeps tabs on what's going on in the brain. Immune ...

What makes cancer cells different from ordinary cells in our bodies? Can these differences be used to strike at them and paralyze their activity? This basic question has bothered cancer researchers since the mid-19th century. The search for unique characteristics of cancer cells is a building block of modern cancer research. A new study led by researchers from Tel Aviv University shows, for the first time, how an abnormal number of chromosomes (aneuploidy) -- a unique characteristic of cancer cells that researchers have known about for decades -- could become a weak ...

Biologists believe they are one step closer to a long-held goal of making a cheap, widely available plant a source for energy and fuel, meaning one of the next big weapons in the battle against climate change may be able to trace its roots to the side of a Texas highway. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and other institutions have published a complex genome analysis of switchgrass, a promising biofuel crop. The team tied different genes to better performance in varying climates across North America, which now gives scientists a road map for breeding ...

A high proportion of survivors of Ebola experienced a resurgence in antibody levels nearly a year after recovery, a new University of Liverpool study has found. Published today in Nature, the finding hints that hidden reservoirs of virus could exist long after symptoms ease and has implications for monitoring programmes and vaccine strategies. When a person is infected with Ebola virus, their body produces antibodies to fight the disease. Antibody concentrations peak and then decline slowly over time, providing the body with some degree of immune protection ...

Researchers have discovered a novel and druggable insulin inhibitory receptor, named inceptor. The latest study from Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, the Technical University of Munich and the German Center for Diabetes Research is a significant milestone for diabetes research as the scientific community celebrates 100 years of insulin and 50 years of insulin receptor discovery. The blocking of inceptor function leads to an increased sensitisation of the insulin signaling pathway in pancreatic beta cells. This might allow protection and regeneration of beta cells for diabetes remission. Diabetes mellitus is a complex disease characterized by the loss or dysfunction of insulin-producing beta cells in the islets of Langerhans, ...

Linking molecular components through amide bonds is one of the most important reactions in research and the chemical industry. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists have now introduced a new type of reaction for making amide bonds. Called an ASHA ligation, this reaction is fast, efficient, works under mild aqueous conditions, and is broadly applicable. Amide bonds are the bond between a carbonyl carbon (C=O) and an organic nitrogen atom. It is amide bonds that link individual amino acids together into proteins and bind monomers into polyamide plastics like perlon ...

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston have discovered what may be the Achilles' heel of the coronavirus, a finding that may help close the door on COVID-19 and possibly head off future pandemics. The coronavirus is an RNA virus that has, in its enzymatic toolkit, a "proofreading" exoribonuclease, called nsp14-ExoN, which can correct errors in the RNA sequence that occur during replication, when copies of the virus are generated. Using cutting-edge technologies and novel bioinformatics approaches, the researchers discovered that this ExoN also regulates the rate of recombination, the ability of the coronavirus ...

Reaching zero net emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry by 2050 can be accomplished by rebuilding U.S. energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewable energy, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day, according to new research published by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of San Francisco (USF), and the consulting firm Evolved Energy Research. The researchers created a detailed model of the entire U.S. energy and industrial system to produce the first detailed, peer-reviewed study of how to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world must reach zero net CO2 ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Culture, civic-mindedness and privacy concerns influence how willing people are to share personal location information to help stem the transmission of COVID-19 in their communities, a new study finds. Such sharing includes giving public health authorities access to their geographic information via data gathered from phone calls, mobile apps, credit card purchases, wristband trackers or other technologies. Reported in the International Journal of Geo-Information, the study will help public health officials better tailor their COVID-19 mitigation strategies to specific cultural contexts, the ...

Climate change mitigation is about more than just CO2. So-called "short-lived climate-forcing pollutants" such as soot, methane, and tropospheric ozone all have harmful effects. Climate policy should be guided by a clearer understanding of their differentiated impacts. It is common practice in climate policy to bundle the climate warming pollutants together and express their total effects in terms of "CO2 equivalence". This 'equivalence' is based on a comparison of climate effects on a 100-year timescale. This approach is problematic, as IASS scientist Kathleen ...

In a new article published in the scientific journal Communications Chemistry, a research group at Uppsala University show, using computer simulations, that ions do not always behave as expected. In their research on molten salts, they were able to see that, in some cases, the ions in the salt mixture they were studying affect one another so much that they may even move in the "wrong" direction - that is, towards an electrode with the same charge. Research on the next-generation batteries is under way in numerous academic disciplines. Researchers at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University have developed and studied a model for alkali halides, of which ordinary table salt (sodium chloride) is the best-known example. If these ...

Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, the UCL Cancer Institute, and the Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence have identified genetic changes in tumours which could be used to predict if immunotherapy drugs would be effective in individual patients. Immunotherapies have led to huge progress treating certain types of cancer, but only a subset of patients respond, and hence a challenge for doctors and researchers is understanding why they work in some people and not others, and predicting who will respond well to treatment. In their paper, published in Cell today (27 January), the scientists looked for genetic and gene expression changes in tumours in over 1,000 patients being treated with checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy which stops cancer cells ...

Health authorities should develop targeted health messages for vaping product and e-liquid packaging to encourage smokers to switch from cigarettes to e-cigarettes and to prevent non-smokers from taking up vaping, a researcher at the University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand says. Professor Janet Hoek, a Co-Director of the University's ASPIRE 2025 Research Centre has led new research analysing the impact of on-package messaging on e-liquids. The research team found messages presenting electronic nicotine delivery systems as a lower risk alternative to smoking could encourage about a third of smokers to trial them. On the other hand, messages about the ...

As Covid-19 continues to put pressure on healthcare providers around the world, engineers at the University of Bath have published a mathematical model that could help clinicians to safely allow two people to share a single ventilator. Members of Bath's Centre for Therapeutic Innovation and Centre for Power Transmission and Motion Control have published a first-of-its-kind research paper on dual-patient ventilation (DPV), following work which began during the first wave of the virus in March 2020. Professor Richie Gill, Co-Vice Chair of the Centre ...

Scientists have calculated the mass range for Dark Matter - and it's tighter than the science world thought. Their findings - due to be published in Physics Letters B in March - radically narrow the range of potential masses for Dark Matter particles, and help to focus the search for future Dark Matter-hunters. The University of Sussex researchers used the established fact that gravity acts on Dark Matter just as it acts on the visible universe to work out the lower and upper limits of Dark Matter's mass. The results show that Dark Matter cannot be either 'ultra-light' or 'super-heavy', as some have theorised, unless an as-yet undiscovered force also acts upon it. The team used the assumption that the only force acting on Dark Matter is gravity, ...

Although the reputation of Champagne is well established, the history of Champagne wines and vineyards is poorly documented. However, a research team led by scientists from the CNRS and the Université de Montpellier at the Institut des sciences de l'évolution de Montpellier* has just lifted the veil on this history by analysing the archaeological grape seeds from excavations carried out in Troyes and Reims. Dated to between the 1st and 15th centuries AD, the seeds shed light on the evolution of Champagne wine growing, prior to the invention of the famous Champagne, for the first time. According to the researchers, "wild"** ...

Even after accounting for differences in income, education, caregiver support, special education services and parental reports of misbehavior and family conflict, elementary school-age Black children are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended or placed in detention than their white peers, a new study finds. The results were unsettling even to the researchers themselves, who were familiar with previous research into racial disparities in school discipline. Previous studies primarily used school records, but this study was able to use a nationwide self-reported dataset, with data collected as part of a long-term investigation into how the ...

A newly discovered trace fossil of an ancient burrow has been named after University of Alberta paleontologist Murray Gingras. The fossil, discovered by a former graduate student, has an important role to play in gauging how salty ancient bodies of water were, putting together a clearer picture of our planet's past. "One could not find a more passionate and influential teacher of science in the classroom, in the field or at a conference," said Ryan King, lead author of the study and now an adjunct professor at Western Colorado University. "Naming the fossil after Gingras was a straightforward decision since his research focuses ...

Boulder, Colo., USA: Benthic plastic litter is a main source of pollutants in oceans, but how it disperses is largely unknown. This study by Guangfa Zhong and Xiaotong Peng, published today in Geology, presents novel findings on the distribution patterns and dispersion mechanisms of deep-sea plastic waste in a submarined canyon located in the northwestern South China Sea. Evidence collected from a series of manned submersible dives indicate that the plastic litter items transported and deposited in the canyon are most likely controlled by turbidity currents. Here the plastic litter items are highly heterogeneously distributed: Up to 89% of them occur in a few scours of the canyon. The plastic items are mostly accumulated in longitudinal litter piles of 2-61 m long, 0.5-8 m wide, ...