WASHINGTON — While the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic led many families to eat more meals at home, they had an additional benefit: an increase in the quality of family time during those dinners, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.  The study, published in the journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice, found that families who ate together more often during the pandemic also had more positive interactions, shared news and information, and even embraced technology such as videoconferencing ...

For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals this spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly nicknamed the Dark Wolf Nebula, it was captured in a 283-million-pixel image by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Found in the constellation Scorpius, near the centre of the Milky Way on the sky, the Dark Wolf Nebula is located around 5300 light-years from Earth. This image takes up an area in the sky equivalent to four full Moons, but is actually part of an even ...

A  study published in PeerJ Life and Environment has reshaped our understanding of the evolutionary history of sea stars, particularly the family Asteriidae. The study, titled Phylogenetic and taxonomic revisions of Jurassic sea stars support a delayed evolutionary origin of the Asteriidae, introduces new findings that challenge longstanding assumptions about the evolutionary timeline of these marine invertebrates. Sea stars of the superorder Forcipulatacea, comprising approximately 400 species, are integral ...

Takeout containers get your favorite noodles from the restaurant to your dining table (or couch) without incident, but they are nearly impossible to recycle if they are made from foil-lined plastics. Research published in ACS Omega suggests that replacing the plastic layer with paper could create a more sustainable packaging material. The researchers used mechanical demonstrations and computer simulations to identify paper-aluminum laminate designs that won’t compromise on performance. Protective packaging, like containers made ...

Relief carvings or relief sculptures are cultural heritage objects with figures that protrude from a background such as a wall or slab, creating a sense of depth. Commonly found at historical sites worldwide, these artworks are considered to be of immense historical and cultural value. Unfortunately, many such relief carvings at heritage sites across the world suffer from varying degrees of damage and deterioration over time. While modern 3D scanning and photogrammetry techniques can digitally preserve their current form, they cannot restore the original appearance of these carvings before damage. Additionally, traditional methods for restoring ...

A common yet underdiagnosed sleep disorder contributes to the development of dementia among adults — particularly women, a Michigan Medicine study suggests.  Investigators uncovered this by examining survey and cognitive screening data from more than 18,500 adults to determine the potential effect of known or suspected obstructive sleep apnea on the risk for dementia.  Obstructive sleep apnea is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by episodes disrupted or restricted breathing during sleep.  For all adults age 50 and older, having known obstructive sleep apnea or its symptoms — as people often do not know they have the problem ...

Imagine a sweater that powers electronics to monitor your health or charge your mobile phone while running. This development faces challenges because of the lack of materials that both conduct electricity stably and are well suited for textiles. Now a research group, led by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, presents an ordinary silk thread, coated with a conductive plastic material, that shows promising properties for turning textiles into electricity generators. Thermoelectric textiles convert temperature differences, for example between our bodies and the surrounding ...

A drug commonly used to treat glaucoma has been shown in zebrafish and mice to protect against the build-up in the brain of the protein tau, which causes various forms of dementia and is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers in the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge screened more than 1,400 clinically-approved drug compounds using zebrafish genetically engineered to make them mimic so-called tauopathies. They discovered that drugs known as carbonic anhydrase inhibitors – of which the glaucoma drug methazolamide is one – clear tau build-up and reduce signs of the disease in zebrafish and mice carrying the mutant forms of tau ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A long-standing goal of neuroscience is to understand how molecules and cellular structures on a microscale give rise to communication between brain regions at the macroscale. A study published in Nature Neuroscience now identifies, for the first time, hundreds of brain proteins that explain inter-individual differences in functional connectivity and structural covariation in the human brain. “A central goal of neuroscience is to develop an understanding of the brain that ultimately describes the mechanistic basis of human cognition and behavior,” said Jeremy Herskowitz, Ph.D., associate professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham ...

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 ...