They say a picture is worth a thousand words.   A new method, developed by University of Michigan researchers, creates images that are worth many gigabytes of data, which could revolutionize the way biologists study gene expression. Seq-Scope, developed by Jun Hee Lee, Ph.D., Hyun Min Kang, Ph.D., and their colleagues, was first described in Cell in 2021 as the first method to analyze gene expression at sub micrometer-scale spatial resolution.   To compare, a single human hair ranges from 20 to 200 micrometers in width.  The team has since improved Seq-Scope, making it more versatile, ...

Researchers at the Complexity Science Hub and Santa Fe Institute have developed a model to calculate how quickly or slowly an organism should ideally learn in its surroundings. An organism’s ideal learning rate depends on the pace of environmental change and its life cycle, they say. Every day, we wake to a world that is different, and we adjust to it. Businesses face new challenges and competitors and adapt or go bust. In biology, this is a question of survival: every organism, from bacteria to blue whales, faces the challenge of adapting to environments that ...

Toronto, ON, – New research from the University of Toronto found that childhood neglect, even in the absence of childhood sexual abuse and physical abuse, is linked with a wide range of mental and physical health problems in adulthood. “While a large body of research has established the detrimental impact of childhood physical and sexual abuse on adult health outcomes, much less is known about whether neglect, in the absence of abuse, has similar negative outcomes,” said first author, Linxiao Zhang, a PhD student at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW) at the University of Toronto.  “Our research underlines the importance of health professionals ...

In perhaps the first long-term study of CO2 fluxes in northern forests growing on permafrost, an Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team has found that climate change increased not only the sources of carbon, but also the CO2 sinks. The 20-year observation from 2003-2022 in the interior of Alaska showed that while CO2 sinks turned into sources during the first decade, the second decade showed a nearly 20% increase in CO2 sinks. Graduate School of Agriculture Associate Professor Masahito Ueyama and colleagues found that warming led to wetness, which in turn aided the growth of black spruce trees. During photosynthesis, the growing trees were using the increasing ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new ultrafast laser platform that generates ultra-broadband ultraviolet (UV) frequency combs with an unprecedented one million comb lines, providing exceptional spectral resolution. The new approach, which also produces extremely accurate and stable frequencies, could enhance high-resolution atomic and molecular spectroscopy. Optical frequency combs — which emit thousands of regularly spaced spectral lines — have transformed fields like metrology, spectroscopy and precision timekeeping via optical atomic clocks, earning the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. The ...

Compared with just before the Covid-19 pandemic, people are spending nearly an hour less a day doing activities outside the home, behaviour that researchers say is a lasting consequence of the pandemic. A new study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Planning Association reveals an overall drop since 2019 of about 51 minutes in the daily time spent on out-of-home activities, plus an almost 12-minute reduction in time spent on daily travel such as driving or taking public transportation. The analysis, based on a survey of 34,000 Americans, ...

Study Shows Broader Screening Methods Help Prevent Spread of Dangerous Fungal Pathogen in Hospitals Screening high-risk patients for Candida auris allows for early detection and implementation of infection control measures to prevent hospital outbreaks   Arlington, Va. — October 31, 2024 — A new study published today in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) describes the outcome of a shift in hospital screening protocols for Candida auris, a dangerous and often drug-resistant fungal pathogen that spreads easily in hospital environments. A comparison of screening results and patient outcomes before ...

How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? We tested a model of depression care in Malawi, a low-income country in sub-Saharan Africa, that builds off the infrastructure of the country’s HIV delivery system. The intervention involved clinical officers who delivered medications for depression, and it involved lay personnel, people living in the community, to deliver psychotherapy. Unlike past research, we did not limit our evaluation to improvements in depression; we also looked at improvements in other chronic health conditions that participants had, and we measured effects on household members. What knowledge gap does your study help to ...

Treating people in low-income countries for major depressive disorder can also help improve their physical health and household members’ wellbeing, demonstrating that mental health treatments can be cost effective, according to a new RAND study.   Researchers examined a program in the sub-Saharan nation of Malawi that builds off the infrastructure of the country’s HIV care system and trains local people in rural communities to help treat people who suffer from depression.   The study found participants had significant improvements in their depression symptoms, ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that it is adhering to standard protocol in pursuing its transgender health guideline, but the process has been criticised for lacking transparency and an association with WPATH - an organisation that supports the “gender affirming” approach, including hormones and surgery, for all ages - and is under fire for meddling with its own guideline development. In The BMJ today, freelance journalist Jennifer Block investigates these concerns and the questions they raise about how evidence based the panel’s recommendations would be. Earlier ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Artificial intelligence (AI) may one day play a larger role in medicine than the online symptom checkers available today. But these “AI doctors” may need to get more personal than human doctors to increase patient satisfaction, according to a study led by researchers at Penn State. They found that the more social information an AI doctor recalls about patients, the higher the patients’ satisfaction, but only if they were offered privacy control. The research team published their findings in the journal Communication Research. “We tend to think of AI doctors as machines ...

What: Young people with severe obesity who underwent weight-loss surgery at age 19 or younger continued to see sustained weight loss and resolution of common obesity-related comorbidities 10 years later, according to results from a large clinical study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Study participants with an average age of 17 underwent gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy weight-loss surgery. After 10 years, participants sustained an average of 20% reduction in body mass index (BMI), 55% reduction of type 2 diabetes, 57% reduction of hypertension, and 54% reduction of abnormal cholesterol. Both gastric ...

Ten years after undergoing bariatric surgery as teens, over half of study participants demonstrated not only sustained weight loss, but also resolution of obesity-related conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, according to the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Our study presents impressive outcomes of the longest follow-up of weight loss surgery during adolescence, which validates bariatric surgery as a safe and effective long-term obesity management strategy,” said lead author Justin Ryder, PhD, Vice Chair of Research for the Department ...

Chronic, low-level lead poisoning is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adults and cognitive deficits in children, even at levels previously thought to be safe, according to a new paper by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Harvard Medical School, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Low-level lead poisoning is a risk factor for preterm Birth, cognitive deficits and attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder, (ADHD), as well as increased blood pressure and reduced heart rate variability. The findings ...

Biologgers allow us to see with unprecedented precision how animals move and behave in the wild. But that's only part of the picture, according to a UC Santa Cruz ecologist renowned for using biologging data to tell the deeper story about the lives of marine mammals in a changing world. In a new opinion piece published on October 30 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers present a framework intended to underscore the value of biologging data for testing important questions about the natural world. They urge that now is the time to build upon "discovery-based science," where observations are presented ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Doctors at Mayo Clinic used a new catheter-based approach to draw out resistant pockets of infection that settle in the heart, known as right-sided infective endocarditis, without surgery. Unless treated quickly, the walled-off infections can grow, severely damaging heart valves and potentially affecting other organs as well. In a recent study, over 90% of the participants had their infection cleared, and they had lower in-hospital mortality compared to those whose infections remained. The research is part of a Mayo Clinic-led study ...

 Rapid side-to-side eye movements can help stabilize posture, avoid falls and maintain balance for people with Parkinson’s disease, just as they can for healthy people. This seemingly counterintuitive conclusion was reached by researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil and the University of Lille in France in a study supported by FAPESP. An article on the study is published in the journal Biomechanics. Ten individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s and 11 neurologically healthy individuals participated in the study. All participants were over 60 and were submitted to tests that ...

PHILADELPHIA (October 30, 2024) – A new study – published in Nursing Research – has found that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted patient safety indicators in U.S. hospitals. The study, from Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR), examined data from the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators to assess trends in nursing-sensitive quality indicators  from 2019 to 2022. The prevention of these very distressing, uncomfortable conditions is considered to be under the nurse’s purview and directly influenced by nursing care. The investigation found that rates of falls, bloodstream infections from ...

MINNEAPOLIS – The amount of money people pay out-of-pocket for branded drugs to treat neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease continues to rise, especially for MS drugs, according to a study published in the October 30, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that average out-of-pocket costs for drugs for MS increased by 217% over a nine-year period. Costs have dropped for medications where generic versions have been introduced. “In some ...

Large herbivores like bison or elk have continuously lived in the Yellowstone National Park region for about 2,300 years according to a new analysis of chemicals preserved in lake sediments. John Wendt of Oklahoma State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on October 30, 2024. The near-extinction of bison in North America in the 19th and 20th centuries was a major ecological catastrophe and little is known about where and how these animals lived before European colonization. In the new study, researchers attempted to determine the dominant large herbivores that lived in the northern Yellowstone National Park ...

Antarctic penguin colonies can be identified and tracked from tourists' photos, using a computer model to reconstruct the 3D scene ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0311038 Article Title: Penguin colony georegistration using camera pose estimation and phototourism Author Countries: U.S.A. Funding: This work was supported in part by the NASA Biodiversity Program (Award 317 80NSSC21K1027), and NSF Grant IIS-2212046. The funders had no say in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

For patients with alcohol use disorder, exercise not only reduces alcohol dependence, but also improves mental and physical health, per systematic review ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0311166 Article Title: Effectiveness of exercise intervention in improving physical and mental status of patients with alcohol use disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis Author Countries: China Funding: This study was funded by a grant from the National ...

Editor's Note: Please do not include the image originally uploaded with this release in any of your coverage as the licensing information has now changed. Please contact onepress@plos.org for any questions. Updated: October 30, 2024 A new study of human skeletal remains from the wreck of the 16th century English warship Mary Rose suggests that whether a person is right- versus left-handed may influence how their clavicle bone chemistry changes as they age. Dr. Sheona Shankland of Lancaster University, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on October 30, 2024. The ...

Someday, people might finally say goodbye to defrosting the freezer or scraping frost off slippery surfaces. Northwestern University engineers have developed a new strategy that prevents frost formation before it begins.  In a new study, the researchers discovered that tweaking the texture of any surface and adding a thin layer of graphene oxide prevents 100% of frost from forming on surfaces for one week or potentially even longer. This is 1,000 times longer than current, state-of-the-art anti-frosting surfaces. As an added bonus, ...

The development of primate brains is shaped by various inputs. However, these inputs differ between independent breeders, such as great apes, and cooperative breeders, such as the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) and humans. In these species, group members other than the parents contribute substantially to raising the infants from birth onwards.   A group of international researchers led by Paola Cerrito from the University of Zurich’s Department of Evolutionary Anthropology studied how such social interactions map onto brain development in common marmosets. The study provides new insights into the relationship between the timing of brain development ...