In recent years, microbiome research has started to shift its focus from the microbes themselves to the molecules they produce. After all, it’s these molecules that directly interact with human cells to influence a person’s health. But trying to identify which molecules are being made by a person’s microbiome is quite challenging. A typical metabolomics study can only characterize about 10% of the molecular data from a human microbiome sample. In a new study published on December 5, 2023 in Nature, microbiome experts at University of California San Diego ...

Most organ transplantations involve supply from older donors to younger recipients. Aging cells can become senescent, a condition in which they stop multiplying and secrete chemicals that negatively affect neighboring cells. Senescent cells accumulate in older donor organs, and have the potential to compromise transplant outcomes. A study led by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, found that in preclinical models, transplanting older organs can trigger ...

Pregnant women are not getting the essential nutrients they and their babies need from modern diets say scientists, who have warned that the situation will likely worsen as more people turn to plant-based foods. A study looking at the health of expecting mothers from high-income countries, including the UK, New Zealand and Singapore, found that 90 per cent were lacking key vitamins necessary for healthy pregnancies and the wellbeing of unborn infants. Scientists from the University of Southampton, working with experts worldwide, surveyed more than 1,700 women and found most were missing essential nutrients found in abundance in meat and dairy products. These included vitamins B12, B6 and ...

Developing treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD) is difficult because complex underlying mechanisms drive different types of cells that may contribute to the disorder. Microglia and astrocytes, resident immune and support cells in the central nervous system, are known to exclusively express several genes linked to risk of AD — particularly AD dementia. However, it was previously unclear exactly how and when these genetic risk factors contributed to other, distinct stages of AD progression, such as the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques and tau tangles. Researchers led by a team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare ...

A paper co-authored by physicist Filip Kondev of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has earned a “Top Cited Paper Award” from IOP Publishing, the publishing arm of the Institute of Physics. The paper, “The NUBASE2020 evaluation of nuclear physics properties,” provides researchers with recommended values of the basic nuclear physics properties for all known atomic nuclei. These data are provided for each nucleus in its ground state, its lowest energy level, and in its excited, isomeric state, a higher energy level that lives longer than what is typical. These data constitute the fundamental ...

Philadelphia, December 5, 2023 – What happens in the brain to cause many neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), remains a mystery. A major limitation for researchers is the lack of biomarkers, or objective biological outputs, for these disorders, and in the case of ASD, for specific subtypes of disease. Now, a new study uses brain imaging and machine learning to identify altered functional brain connectivity (FC) in people with ASD – importantly, taking ...

Tanyu Collecting Instrumentation Data From RAP-Aggregate Base Project On Minnieville Road Burak Tanyu, Professor, Civil, Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering (CEIE); Director of CEIE Laboratories, received $36,674 from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) for: "Collection of Instrumentation Data From the RAP-Aggregate Base Project on Minnieville Road." Mason's Sustainable Geotransportation Infrastructure (SGI) research team has access to an actual roadway site located in Minnieville, Virginia, ...

A new study from researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Francisco estimates 152,753 excess infant deaths were attributable to living in flood-prone areas in Bangladesh over the past 30 years. Additionally, across the study period, children born during rainy months faced higher risk of death than those born in dry months.  The paper was published Dec. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The findings begin to unspool the long term public health impacts of recurring environmental hazards such as flooding, ...

Researchers report December 5 in the journal Neuron that mice display behavior that resembles self-recognition when they see themselves in the mirror. When the researchers marked the foreheads of black-furred mice with a spot of white ink, the mice spent more time grooming their heads in front of the mirror—presumably to try and wash away the ink spot. However, the mice only showed this self-recognition-like behavior if they were already accustomed to mirrors, if they had socialized with other mice who looked like them, and if the ink spot was relatively large. The team identified a subset of neurons in the hippocampus that are involved in developing and storing this visual self-image, ...

The surgery did not improve the children’s neurodevelopmental functioning but was associated with improved quality of life, sleep symptoms, and blood pressure 12-months post-surgery according to a randomized control trial led by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute Between 6% and 17% of children suffer from sleep-disordered breathing, characterized by habitual snoring, increased respiratory effort, and sleep apnea. If left untreated, the disorder may put children at higher risk of neurodevelopmental impairment, reduced quality of life, and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Enlarged tonsils are one of the main risk ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5, 2023 – More than 2.2 billion people currently live in water-stressed countries, and the United Nations estimates that 3.5 million die every year from water-related diseases. Because the areas most in need of improved drinking water are also located in some of the sunniest places in the world, there is strong interest in harnessing sunlight to help obtain clean water. Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China developed a promising new solar-powered atmospheric water harvesting technology that could help provide enough drinking water for people ...

About The Study: Women with a history of bariatric surgery had lower pregnancy weight gain than matched controls with similar early pregnancy characteristics in this study of 12,000 pregnancies. Pregnancy weight gain was lower in those with a shorter surgery-to-conception interval or lower surgery-to-conception weight loss, but did not differ by surgical procedure.  Authors: Huiling Xu, M.D., M.Sc., of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, 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.2023.46228) Editor’s Note: Please see the ...

About The Study: In this study of 2,574 participants with obstructive sleep apnea, compared with participants with objective sleep duration of at least seven hours, those sleeping less than seven hours had higher risks of all-cause mortality independent of apnea-hypopnea index. Further studies would be needed to investigate health benefits of extending sleep length among people with obstructive sleep apnea with short sleep duration.  Authors: Shichao Wei, M.D., of Fujian Medical University in Fuzhou, China, is the corresponding author.  To access ...

Surgery beneficial for some children with mild sleep-disordered breathing NIH-supported study shows better sleep, blood pressure after adenotonsillectomy   Surgical removal of the tonsils and adenoids in children with snoring and mild breathing problems during sleep appears to improve their sleep, quality of life, and blood pressure a year after surgery, a clinical trial supported by the National Institutes of Health has found. The study, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH, is believed to be the first large, randomized trial to address the effects of adenotonsillectomy on children with mild sleep-disordered ...

Neutron stars have fascinated and puzzled scientists since the first detected signature in 1967. Known for their periodic flashes of light and rapid rotation, neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe, with a mass comparable to that of the Sun but compressed into a sphere only about 20 kilometers in diameter. These stellar objects exhibit a peculiar behavior known as a “glitch”, where the star suddenly speeds up its spin. This phenomenon suggests that neutron stars might be partly superfluid. In a superfluid, rotation is characterized by numerous tiny vortices, each carrying ...

They published their work on October. 23 in Energy Material Advances.    "It is imperative to develop energy-saving, safe and sustainable photocatalytic mercury removal technology," said paper author Wu Jiang, professor with College of Energy and Mechanical Engineering of Shanghai University of Electric Power. "Currently, thermocatalytic technologies account for most of the market, but they are constrained in terms of manufacturing costs and sustainability."   Wu ...

Medicare is the single largest provider of health insurance in the United States, serving 63.8 million senior citizens as of 2022. Three-quarters of these recipients are enrolled in optional Medicare Part D plans, which provide outpatient prescription drug coverage to seniors through private insurance companies. In 2022, Medicare paid more than $160 Billion for prescription drugs, making it the single largest payer of pharmaceuticals in the US. While Medicare is meant to keep healthcare affordable for seniors, millions of Americans still face steep costs ...

Tree height is an important indicator of a forest’s maturity and overall health. Forest restoration projects rely on tree height as a predictor and measurement of success, but forecasting a forest’s future tree height based on observations alone is almost impossible. There are too many factors that contribute to the growth and health of trees. Because so many factors can impact how a tree develops, researchers enhanced a predictive model called the Allometric Scaling and Resource Limitations (ASRL) model and then deployed it using ...

The Indian River Lagoon was considered one of the last “unpolluted coastal lagoons” in Florida in the 1970s. Fast forward to today and most of the 156-mile lagoon is now considered impaired because of external sources of nutrients including human waste, fertilizers, stormwater runoff, agriculture, rainfall and sub-marine groundwater discharge. As a result, the lagoon – especially the Northern Indian River Lagoon and Banana River – has experienced various harmful algal blooms, catastrophic seagrass losses, and is the epicenter of Florida ...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) removal in the soil environment is of great significance for repairing the long-term damaged ecosystem. However, the poor mass transfer process and low catalytic activity in most conventional methods lead to limited removal efficiency. A team of scientists has constructed a gradient F-doping hydroxyapatite core-shell structure (HAP@FAP) with the coupling effect of flexoelectricity and piezoelectricity for degradation of PAHs in soil that provide innovative approaches for soil remediation. Their work was published in the journal Industrial Chemistry & Materials in October 2023. The poor mass ...

The Daniels Lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History was recently awarded two grants to help support pollinators in Florida. The Florida Department of Transportation has set aside $155,002 for the team to plant and monitor thousands of milkweeds along roads in North Florida, and Duke Energy Florida will distribute $144,421 over three years to evaluate the establishment of pollinator habitat at its new solar site Alachua County. Pollinators are declining on a global scale, the collateral damage of continued habitat destruction and urbanization, among other stressors. ...

For decades, corn and soy farmers have heavily relied on one herbicide: glyphosate. Crops bred to resist glyphosate have been extremely successful, with over 90% of corn and soy hectares planted with glyphosate-resistant varieties by 2014. But as Christopher Landau and colleagues document, the chemical was not quite the “silver bullet” it was promised to be. With an entire industry using the same chemical—the US and Canada alone apply more than 130 million kg annually—evolutionary selection pressures on weed plants have been intense. Since 1996, there have been 354 confirmed cases of glyphosate ...

In a study on fruit flies, daily low-intensity blue light exposure (BLE), similar to that experienced daily by billions of humans in the form of LED lighting and device screens, changed flies at the sub-cellular level, affecting processes related to aging and circadian rhythms. Xiaoyun Wang and colleagues exposed fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to different durations of daily low-intensity BLE and then analysed the consequences to the cellular makeup of the insects, as compared to flies raised in darkness. The authors paid particular attention to ...

A study links hostility on Wikipedia to lost productivity on the site. Wikipedia, the largest reference work ever created, is written and edited by tens of thousands of volunteers, known as Wikipedians. Despite the fact that anyone can edit any page, studies show that Wikipedia is generally a reliable source of information. Ivan Smirnov and colleagues studied how the volunteer labor that keeps the site working is affected by hostile comments in the “user talk” pages connected to each editor. Toxic comments were identified by a toxicity detection algorithm devised by the Perspective API ...

Hamilton, ON, December 5, 2023 – There is no shortage of advice for women on what to eat, how to train, or what supplements to take during their menstrual cycles, but a new review by an international team of scientists has found little evidence to support such recommendations. In fact, they found sparse research on women and exercise at all, and even less on the effect of their periods on sports performance, physiology, or physical fitness. The authors of the paper, from McMaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University and the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, are calling for much more high quality, standardized research ...