BOSTON - Investments in infrastructure to promote bicycling and walking could save as many as 770 lives and $7.6 billion each year across 12 northeastern states and the District of Columbia under the proposed Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), according to a new Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study. Published in the Journal of Urban Health, the analysis shows that the monetary benefit of lives saved from increased walking and cycling far exceed the estimated annual investment for such infrastructure, without ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Malaria is an ancient scourge, but it's still leaving its mark on the human genome. And now, researchers have uncovered recent traces of adaptation to malaria in the DNA of people from Cabo Verde, an island nation off the African coast. An archipelago of ten islands in the Atlantic Ocean some 385 miles offshore from Senegal, Cabo Verde was uninhabited until the mid-1400s, when it was colonized by Portuguese sailors who brought enslaved Africans with them and forced them to work the land. The Africans who were forcibly brought to Cabo Verde carried ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC - Many molecules in our bodies help our immune system keep us healthy without overreacting so much that our immune cells cause problems, such as autoimmune diseases. One molecule, called AIM2, is part of our innate immunity - a defense system established since birth - to fight pathogens and keep us healthy. But little was known about AIM2's contribution to T cell adaptive immunity - defenses developed in response to particular pathogens and health problems we develop over the course of our lives. Now, UNC School of Medicine scientists led by Jenny Ting, PhD, the William Kenan Distinguished Professor of Genetics, and Yisong Wan, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology, discovered that AIM2 is important for the proper function of regulatory ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- When their manhood is threatened, some men respond aggressively, but not all. New research from Duke University suggests who may be most triggered by such threats - younger men whose sense of masculinity depends heavily on other people's opinions. "Our results suggest that the more social pressure a man feels to be masculine, the more aggressive he may be," said Adam Stanaland, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and public policy at Duke and the study's lead author. "When those men feel they are not living up to strict gender norms, they may feel the need to act aggressively to prove their manhood -- to 'be a man'." The pair of studies considered 195 undergraduate students and a random pool of 391 men ages 18 to 56. Study participants were asked a series ...

Tiny molecular forces at the surface of water droplets can play a big role in laser output emissions. As the most fundamental matrix of life, water drives numerous essential biological activities, through interactions with biomolecules and organisms. Studying the mechanical effects of water-involved interactions contributes to the understanding of biochemical processes. According to Yu-Cheng Chen, professor of electronic engineering at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), "As water interacts with a surface, the hydrophobicity at the bio-interface mainly determines the mechanical equilibrium ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- At some point between 300 million and 1 billion years ago, a large cosmic object smashed into the planet Venus, leaving a crater more than 170 miles in diameter. A team of Brown University researchers has used that ancient impact scar to explore the possibility that Venus once had Earth-like plate tectonics. For a study published in Nature Astronomy, the researchers used computer models to recreate the impact that carved out Mead crater, Venus's largest impact basin. Mead is surrounded by two clifflike faults -- rocky ripples frozen in time after the basin-forming impact. The models showed that for those rings to be where they ...

BOSTON-Boston Medical Center has released a study that shows post overdose outreach programs in Massachusetts have expanded across the state, as 44 percent of municipalities reported having such programs available - a majority established since 2015 - to reduce risks for those who survive an overdose. The results are published online in the February 2021 issue of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. These post-overdose outreach programs leverage collaborations between public health overdose prevention practitioners and public safety organizations (police, fire, EMS) to engage overdose survivors and/or their social networks (family, friends, and acquaintances) at their home one to three days after an overdose. ...

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a rapid chemical analysis tool. A powerful laser pulse is focused on a sample to create a microplasma. The elemental or molecular emission spectra from that microplasma can be used to determine the elemental composition of the sample. Compared with more traditional technology, like atomic absorption spectroscopy and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), LIBS has some unique advantages: no sample pretreatment, simultaneous multi-element detection, and real-time noncontact measurements. These advantages make it suitable for practical analysis of solids, gases, and liquids. Traditional LIBS and extensions Traditional ...

The study of warm dense matter helps us understand what is going on inside giant planets, brown dwarfs, and neutron stars. However, this state of matter, which exhibits properties of both solids and plasmas, does not occur naturally on Earth. It can be produced artificially in the lab using large X-ray experiments, albeit only at a small scale and for short periods of time. Theoretical and numerical models are essential to evaluate these experiments, which are impossible to interpret without formulas, algorithms, and simulations. Scientists at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now developed a method to evaluate such ...

With a powerful enough light, you can see things that people once thought would be impossible. Large-scale light source facilities generate that powerful light, and scientists use it to create more durable materials, build more efficient batteries and computers, and learn more about the natural world. When it comes to building these massive facilities, space is money. If you can get higher-energy beams of light out of smaller devices, you can save millions on construction costs. Add to that the chance to significantly improve the capabilities of existing light sources, and you have the motivation behind a project that has brought scientists at three U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories together. This team has just achieved an important milestone ...

Attempts to identify the genetic causes of neuropsychiatric diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through large-scale genome-wide analyses have yielded thousands of potential links. The challenge is further complicated by the wide range of symptoms exhibited by those who have PTSD. For instance, does extreme arousal, anger, or irritation experienced by some have the same genetic basis as the tendency to re-experience traumatic events, another symptom of the disorder? A new study led by researchers at Yale and the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) provides answers to some of these questions and uncovers intriguing genetic similarities between PTSD and other mental health disorders such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. ...

Washington, DC - January 28, 2021 - Self swabs and caregiver swabs are effective at detecting multiple pathogens and are just as accurate as those taken by healthcare workers, according to a team of Australian researchers. The research appears in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. "Across the range of pathogens and swab types, there was high agreement between results from self- or caregiver swabs and those performed by a healthcare worker, even when different sites were swabbed (e.g. nasopharyngeal vs. nasal)," said principal investigator Joshua Osowicki, BMedSci, MBBS, FRACP, a Pediatric Infectious Diseases physician in the Murdoch Children's Research Institute's ...

Despite long-standing ideas about the importance of thumb evolution in tool use and development, questions remain about exactly when human-like manual dexterity and efficient thumb use arose--and which hominin species was the first to have this ability. Now, researchers who've analyzed the biomechanics and efficiency of the thumb across different fossil human species using virtual muscle modeling have new insight into when these abilities first arose and what they've meant for the development of more complex human culture. The findings, appearing January 28 in the journal Current Biology, suggest that a fundamental aspect of human thumb opposition first appeared approximately 2 million years ago and was not found ...

What makes one person drive above the speed limit while another navigates steadily in the right lane? What motivates someone to leave a job with a steady paycheck to launch their own business while the other sticks to one employer for an entire career? "People have different tendencies to engage in behavior that risks their health or that involve uncertainties about the future," says Gideon Nave, an assistant professor of marketing in Penn's Wharton School. Yet explaining the origin of those tendencies, both in the genome and in the brain, has been challenging for researchers, partly because previous studies on ...

ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- It was an unexpected discovery that started with an analysis of more than 1,000 genes. The question: why game-changing cancer immunotherapy treatments work for only a fraction of patients. The analysis shone a light on one that popped up repeatedly in patients and mouse models that did not respond to immune checkpoint therapy: stanniocalcin-1, a glycoprotein whose role in both tumors and immunology is largely unknown. By following the trail from this surprising thread, a University of Michigan Rogel Cancer team uncovered how stanniocalcin-1, or STC1, works inside the cell to block a cellular "eat-me" signal that typically triggers the immune system to produce T cells to fight the tumor. The findings, published in ...

Scientists at the National Eye Institute (NEI) have developed a promising gene therapy strategy for a rare disease that causes severe vision loss in childhood. A form of Leber congenital amaurosis, the disease is caused by autosomal-dominant mutations in the CRX gene, which are challenging to treat with gene therapy. The scientists tested their approach using lab-made retinal tissues built from patient cells, called retinal organoids. This approach, which involved adding copies of the normal gene under its native control mechanism, partially restored CRX function. The study report appears today in Stem ...

In early October 2019, when an unknown caller rang EPFL professor Johan Gaume's cell phone, he could hardly have imagined that he was about to confront one of the greatest mysteries in Soviet history. At the other end of the line, a journalist from The New York Times asked for his expert insight into a tragedy that had occurred 60 years earlier in Russia's northern Ural Mountains - one that has since come to be known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Gaume, head of EPFL's Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory (SLAB) and visiting fellow at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, had never heard ...

Researchers at the University of Basel and Ruhr University Bochum have developed a source of single photons that can produce billions of these quantum particles per second. With its record-breaking efficiency, the photon source represents a new and powerful building-block for quantum technologies. Quantum cryptography promises absolutely secure communications. A key component here are strings of single photons. Information can be stored in the quantum states of these light particles and transmitted over long distances. In the future, remote quantum processors will communicate with each other via single photons. And perhaps the processor itself will use photons as quantum bits for computing. A basic prerequisite for such applications, however, is an efficient source ...

Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed three-dimensional information from the research could help improve the reliability and performance of the batteries, which use solid materials to replace the flammable liquid electrolytes in existing lithium-ion batteries. The operando synchrotron X-ray computed microtomography imaging revealed how the dynamic changes of electrode materials at lithium/solid-electrolyte interfaces determine the behavior of solid-state batteries. The researchers found that battery operation caused voids to form ...

Science is society's best method for understanding the world, yet many people in the field are unhappy with the way it works. Rules and procedures meant to promote innovative research can have perverse side-effects that harm both science and scientists. One of these - the 'priority rule' - rewards scientists who make discoveries with prestige, prizes and better career opportunities, depriving the runners-up of similar perks. Researchers at University of Technology Eindhoven (TU/e) and the Arizona State University in the US have developed a new model to better understand this rule, and see if current reforms to improve the system actually make sense. Their study was published in Nature Human Behaviour. "Over the past decade, there have been growing concerns that something ...

What The Study Did: This study finds that being a health care worker isn't associated with poorer outcomes among patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Authors: Nauzer Forbes, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Calgary in Canada, 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.2020.35699) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, ...

Risky behaviors such as smoking, alcohol and drug use, speeding, or frequently changing sexual partners result in enormous health and economic consequences and lead to associated costs of an estimated 600 billion dollars a year in the US alone. In order to define measures that could reduce these costs, a better understanding of the basis and mechanisms of risk-taking is needed. Functional and anatomical differences UZH neuro-economists Goekhan Aydogan, Todd Hare and Christian Ruff, together with an international research team looked at the genetic characteristics that correlate with risk-taking behavior. Using a representative sample of 25,000 people, the researchers examined the relationship ...

BOSTON - A nationwide panel of experts has developed the first mammography guidelines for older survivors of breast cancer, providing a framework for discussions between survivors and their physicians on the pros and cons of screening in survivors' later years. The guidelines, published online today in a paper in JAMA Oncology, recommend discontinuing routine mammograms for survivors with a life expectancy under five years; considering stopping screening for those with a 5-10-year life expectancy; and continuing mammography for those whose life expectancy is greater than 10 years. The guidelines will be complemented by printed materials to help survivors gauge their risk of cancer recurring in the breast and weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks of mammography with ...

Science is society's best method for understanding the world. Yet many scientists are unhappy with the way it works, and there are growing concerns that there is something "broken" in current scientific practice. Many of the rules and procedures that are meant to promote innovative research are little more than historical precedents with little reason to suppose they encourage efficient or reliable discoveries. Worse, they can have perverse side-effects that harm both science and scientists. A well-known example is the general preference for positive over negative results, which creates a "publication bias" that gives the false ...

CLEVELAND - Cleveland Clinic researchers have described for the first time how Zika virus (ZIKV) causes one of the most common birth defects associated with prenatal infection, called brain calcification, according to new study findings published in Nature Microbiology. The findings may reveal novel strategies to prevent prenatal ZIKV brain calcification and offer important insights into how calcifications form in other congenital infections. "Brain calcification has been linked to several developmental defects in infants, including motor disorders, cognitive disability, eye abnormalities, hearing deficits and seizures, so it's important to better understand the mechanisms of how they develop," said Jae Jung, ...