The composition of microbiota found in the gut influences how susceptible mice are to respiratory virus infections and the severity of these infections, according to researchers from the Center for Translational Antiviral Research in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.  The findings, published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, report that segmented filamentous bacteria, a bacterial species found in the intestines, protected mice ...

About The Study: This study found that the use of a smartphone-based mall walking program combined with physical shopping mall facilities and lottery-based digital incentive coupons may motivate people to increase their daily number of walking steps. Authors: Masamichi Hanazato, Ph.D., of Chiba University in Chiba-shi, Chiba, Japan, 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.2023.53957) Editor’s ...

About The Study: This randomized clinical trial of 1,735 patients undergoing primary bariatric surgery found that both laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy and laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass were performed with a low perioperative risk without clinically significant differences between groups. Authors: Suzanne Hedberg, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden 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.2023.53141) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including ...

When it comes to having surgery, older adults don’t just base their decision on how much pain they’ll feel and how quickly they’ll recover, a new study finds. Many also have serious concerns about how much they’ll have to pay out of their own pockets, how much work they’ll miss, and whether they’ll catch COVID-19 in the hospital or surgery center. And a majority of those who called themselves very concerned about these issues ended up not having an operation that they had considered having, the study finds. The percentage who didn’t go through with surgery was much lower among those who said they’d been very concerned about pain or the ...

JMIR Publications is pleased to announce a new theme issue titled “Perioperative Blood Management” in JMIR Perioperative Medicine. The premier, peer-reviewed journal is indexed in PubMed and focuses on how technology and data science can improve care delivery and surgical patient outcomes. The new theme issue aims to explore the latest advancements, challenges, and patient-centered innovative approaches in optimizing blood-related practices before, during, and after surgical procedures. JMIR Perioperative Medicine welcomes contributions from global researchers, clinicians, and experts in ...

A new way of creating color uses the scattering of light of specific wavelengths around tiny, almost perfectly round silicon crystals. This Kobe University development enables non-fading structural colors that do not depend on the viewing angle and can be printed. The material has a low environmental and biological impact and can be applied extremely thinly, promising significant weight improvements over conventional paints. An object has color when light of a specific wavelength is reflected. With traditional pigments, this happens by molecules absorbing other colors from white light, but over time this interaction makes the molecules degrade and the color fades. ...

Teams led by professors Jinyang Liang and Fiorenzo Vetrone from the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) have developed a new system for imaging nanoparticles. It consists of a high-precision, short-wave infrared imaging technique capable of capturing the photoluminescence lifetimes of rare-earth doped nanoparticles in the micro- to millisecond range. This groundbreaking discovery, which was published in the journal Advanced Science, paves the way for promising applications, particularly in the biomedical and information security fields. Rare-earth ...

Plastic drinking straws that get into marine ecosystems make beaches unsightly and pose problems for turtles and seabirds. So, people increasingly favor alternatives marketed as biodegradable or compostable. But do marine microorganisms break apart those straws? Researchers conducted experiments with seawater and report in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering that some commercial bioplastic or paper straws might disintegrate within eight to 20 months in coastal ocean systems and switching to ...

Washington, D.C.—Tomato juice can kill Salmonella Typhi and other bacteria that can harm people's digestive and urinary tract health, according to research published this week in Microbiology Spectrum, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Salmonella Typhi is a deadly human-specific pathogen that causes typhoid fever. “Our main goal in this study was to find out if tomato and tomato juice can kill enteric pathogens, including Salmonella Typhi, and if so, what qualities they ...

The 37th International Geological Congress (IGC 2024) in August 2024, Busan, Korea, will highlight a growing concern amid urgent threats posed by accelerated climate and environmental changes. This will prompt collaborative efforts towards ensuring the sustainability of our planet. Abnormally high temperatures across the globe during the past year were expected to make 2023 the hottest year in Earth's history. This realization underscores the concept of climate change, which was once confined to academic desks but has since permeated into our daily existence. Geologists now assert that the rapid climate and environmental changes necessitate ...

Excessive administration of analgesic drugs frequently results in medical accidents. To prevent the occurrence of these accidents, a drug infusion pump featuring a technology for safely detecting medication administration has been developed for the first time in the world. The research team led by Senior Researcher Dong-kyu Lee of the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (President Seog-hyun Ryu, hereinafter referred to as KIMM), an institute under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and ICT, has succeeded in developing the technology for customized sensor modules capable of measuring the extremely low flow rate of analgesic drug infusion pumps as well as the existence ...

There’s always some truth in fiction, and now is about the time to get a step ahead of sci-fi dystopias and determine what the risk in machine sentience can be for humans.   Although people have long pondered the future of intelligent machinery, such questions have become all the more pressing with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learningT. These machines resemble human interactions: they can help problem solve, create content, and even carry on conversations. For fans ...

Our built environment is aging and failing faster than we can maintain it. Recent building collapses and structural failures of roads and bridges are indicators of a problem that’s likely to get worse, according to experts, because it’s just not possible to inspect every crack, creak and crumble to parse dangerous signs of failure from normal wear and tear. In hopes of playing catch-up, researchers in Drexel University’s College of Engineering are trying to give robotic assistants the tools to help inspectors with the job. Augmenting visual ...

The prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is disproportionately high among rural, racially/ethnically diverse older residents. In fact, they face up to an 80 percent greater risk of cognitive impairment in older age, and 2.5 times potentially preventable ADRD-related hospitalizations compared to urban dwellers. It is estimated that early and accurate diagnosis in the mild cognitive impairment stage could save up to $7 trillion in patients’ health and long-term care costs by 2050. To address these health disparities in rural underserved populations, researchers from Florida ...

The digital age has profoundly changed how we communicate as humans. Today, we can regularly interact with people we are unrelated to and unacquainted with in real time across the world. Because of this, individuals can now engage in prosocial behaviors, including cooperating, sympathizing, helping and donating, with complete strangers, but the motivating factors behind these behaviors are poorly understood. Analysis of data generated from a fundraising website suggests that positive emotions elicit higher total donation amounts while negative emotions result in higher individual donation amounts.   Fundraising ...

A lot of factors go into an individual’s comfort, and it’s more than just how one feels about the temperature   The thermal environment refers to the physical surroundings as it pertains to the heat exchange of an individual and its environment. Naturally, the thermal environment also relates to comfort, or more specifically, thermal comfort. This type of comfort is an important metric to measure an individual’s feelings as it relates to their environment and can be directly associated with health, efficiency, comfort, and energy consumption. ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A neighborhood alcohol control project in Sacramento that reduced cases of child abuse and neglect soon after implementation still had a positive impact seven years later, a new study found.   Results showed that, in one of the neighborhoods where the program was put into place, total entries into foster care were reduced by 11.8% and alcohol-related foster care entries were reduced by 11.2% a full seven years after implementation.   These new results were not as strong as those found right after the project was implemented, and there are other caveats to the success of the program. But the results are still very encouraging, said Bridget Freisthler, ...

An observational study found links between prenatal substance exposure and mental health in children 10–12, but also found that controlling for environment and genetics eliminated many associations. Qiang Luo and colleagues analyzed longitudinal data from almost 10,000 participants in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort, looking for associations of maternal self-report of prenatal exposure to caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana with mental health outcomes from age 10 to 12. Although the authors found many associations between prenatal exposure to the ...

A new study in mice shows that replacement of a dysfunctional gene could prolong survival in some people with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a rare inherited disorder in which the muscular walls of the heart progressively weaken and put patients at risk of dangerous irregular heartbeats. The investigational treatment targets the loss of function of a gene implicated in many cases of ARVC, plakophilin-2 (PKP2). The PKP2 gene provides instructions for making a protein that holds heart tissues together. When the gene — one of several thought to contribute to the disease —is defective ...

In humans, oral health influences general health and well-being in many ways. Other than reducing the need for oral rehabilitation later in life, maintaining good oral health reduces the risk of several systemic diseases. Therefore, investing time and effort into improving oral health can be highly beneficial for older adults. However, whether the health benefits of improved oral health extend to psychological domains remains unclear. Positive psychological well-being is known to positively affect the survival rates of both healthy and unhealthy populations. Thus, to increase life expectancy, it is important to identify the factors associated with ...

What does an asparagus have in common with a vanilla orchid? Not much, if you are just looking at the two plants’ appearances. However, when you look inside - their leaves are more similar than you would think – as revealed by the composition of their cell walls. By studying plant cell walls – which are to plants what skeletons are to humans – we can reveal the composition of how leaves and stems of plants are actually constructed. This is exactly what a team of University of Copenhagen researchers has done, in a large comprehensive study. In doing so, they have created something truly novel: a large "reference catalogue" ...

 Using a virus-like delivery particle made from DNA, researchers from MIT and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard have created a vaccine that can induce a strong antibody response against SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine, which has been tested in mice, consists of a DNA scaffold that carries many copies of a viral antigen. This type of vaccine, known as a particulate vaccine, mimics the structure of a virus. Most previous work on particulate vaccines has relied on protein scaffolds, but the proteins used in those vaccines tend to generate an unnecessary immune response that can distract the immune system from the target. In the mouse study, the researchers found that the ...

A new research study examined the results from data generated by citizen scientists using a simple web-based motor test. The big data approach provides researchers with a unique way to explore how people correct for motor control errors. The resulting insights may one day pave the way for personalized physical therapy or tailor an athlete’s training routine. The results are available in the January 30th issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour. “This exploratory approach does not replace lab based studies, but complements ...

New research into the marine phosphorus cycle is deepening our understanding of the impact of human activities on ecosystems in coastal seas.   The research, co-led by the University of East Anglia, in partnership with the Sino-UK Joint Research Centre at the Ocean University of China, looked at the impact of aerosols and river run-off on microalgae in the coastal waters of China.  It identified an ‘Anthropogenic Nitrogen Pump’ which changes the phosphorus cycle and therefore likely coastal biodiversity and associated ecosystem services.  In a balanced ecosystem, microalgae, also known as phytoplankton, provide food for a wide ...

Life has a challenging tempo. Sometimes, it moves faster or slower than we’d like. Nevertheless, we adapt. We pick up the rhythm of conversations. We keep pace with the crowd walking a city sidewalk.  “There are many instances where we have to do the same action but at different tempos. So the question is, how does the brain do it," says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Arkarup Banerjee.  Now, Banerjee and collaborators have uncovered a new clue that suggests the brain bends our processing of time to suit our ...