Eurekalert

A 'slow-motion' earthquake lasting 32 years - the slowest ever recorded - eventually led to the catastrophic 1861 Sumatra earthquake, researchers at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have found.

New research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden suggests a link between psychosis and a genetic change that affects the brain's immune system. The study published in Molecular Psychiatry may impact the development of modern medicines for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

Researchers report a theoretical way of mimicking thermal objects or making objects invisible to thermal measurements. And it doesn't require a Romulan cloaking device or Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

A new study lead by Dr Kimberley Chapelle of the American Museum of Natural History and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand suggests that growth of the dinosaur Massospondylus carinatus varied season-to-season, more like a tree than a puppy or a baby human. Massospondylus was a medium sized dinosaur, up to 500kg in body weight, that lived in the Early Jurassic. The study suggests that Massospondylus' growth directly responded to its environmental conditions.

A study across 55 hospitals in Queensland, Australia suggests that a recent state policy to introduce a minimum ratio of one nurse to four patients for day shifts has successfully improved patient care, with a 7% drop in the chance of death and readmission, and 3% reduction in length of stay for every one less patient a nurse has on their workload.

Like an airplane's black box, a woman's placenta can show if something went wrong during pregnancy. A new Northwestern Medicine study of 84 vaccinated patients and 116 control patients found the COVID-19 vaccine did not damage the placenta during pregnancy.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay shed light on the origins of Mimivirus and other giant viruses, helping us better understand a group of unique biological forms that shaped life on earth. In their latest study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, the researchers show that giant viruses may have come from a complex single-cell ancestor, keeping DNA replication machinery but shedding genes that code for other vital processes like metabolism.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world's smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm3. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope. In order to achieve this, the team used ultrasound to both power and communicate with the device wirelessly.

Pregnant women who develop severe COVID-19 infections that require hospitalization for pneumonia and other complications may not be more likely to die from these infections than non-pregnant women. In fact, they may have significantly lower death rates than their non-pregnant counterparts.

A team of researchers at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco (UCSF) has adapted CRISPR-Cas9 for use in monocytes and shown the potential utility of the technology for understanding how the human immune system fights viruses and microbes. Their results were published online today in the journal Cell Reports.

Although new family medicine graduates intend to provide a broader scope of practice than their senior counterparts, individual family physicians' scope of practice has been decreasing, with fewer family physicians providing basic primary care services, such pediatric and prenatal care. Russell et al conducted a study to explore family medicine graduates' attitudes and perspectives on modifiable and non-modifiable factors that influenced their scope of practice and career choices.

In order to make meaningful gains in cardiovascular disease care, primary care medical practices should adopt a set of care improvements specific to their practice size and type, according to a new study from the national primary care quality improvement initiative EvidenceNOW. High blood pressure and smoking are among the biggest risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease. Primary care physicians help patients manage high blood pressure and provide smoking cessation interventions.

Recently, the Oxford University and Pfizer and BioNTech made SARS-CoV-2 vaccines through targeting the spike protein gene. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the health authorities of the United Kingdom approved and started vaccination using the Pfizer and BioNTech mRNA vaccine. Also, The FDA of USA approved the treatment of COVID-19 using two monoclonal antibodies produced by Regeneron pharmaceuticals to target the spike protein.

A review article by Brazilian researchers shows that alterations in the defense cell metabolism may explain why many patients who survive sepsis die within a year or suffer from long-term complications.

Geoscientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and Istanbul Technical University have discovered a new process in plate tectonics which shows that tremendous damage occurs to areas of Earth's crust long before it should be geologically altered by known plate-boundary processes, highlighting the need to amend current understandings of the planet's tectonic cycle.

Simon Fraser University researchers have designed a remarkably fast engine that taps into a new kind of fuel -- information.The development of this engine, which converts the random jiggling of a microscopic particle into stored energy, is outlined in research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and could lead to significant advances in the speed and cost of computers and bio-nanotechnologies.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - An acute loss of smell is one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19, but for two decades it has been linked to other maladies among them Parkinson's disease and dementia. Now, a poor sense of smell may signify a higher risk of pneumonia in older adults, says a team of Michigan State University researchers.

Perovskite solar cells are among the most promising and cheapest photovoltaic technologies, but widespread application has been hampered by issues linked to long-term stability and processability. In a new paper, researchers including Prof. Michele Parrinello of Università della Svizzera italiana and ETHZ, and Paramvir Ahlawat, a PhD student of EPFL's Ursula Reothlisberger, address this problem with a combined experimental and simulation study that could improve the design of industrial-scale processing techniques for two leading perovskites.

Individuals with diabetes are at greater risk of developing oral health issues, like gum disease, yet care for these linked health issues are usually disconnected, split between primary care and dental care. A research team from the University of Amsterdam developed an intervention that provided primary care-based oral health information and dental referrals for patients with diabetes.

Skoltech scientists have created a new monitoring system for agricultural applications that performs real-time image segmentation on board the drone to identify hogweed. The new approach holds great promise for farming: it could be used to monitor other crops, identify various vegetative indicators, assess plant health, and detect plant detect plant diseases by applying multispectral imagery.