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Whilst most organisms try to stop their DNA from mutating, scientists from the UK and China have discovered that a common fungus found on bread actively mutates its own DNA as a way of fighting virus-like infections.
All organisms mutate all of the time. You were born with between ten and a hundred new mutations, for example. Many do little harm but, if they hit one of your genes, mutations are much more likely to be harmful than beneficial. If harmful enough they contribute to genetic diseases.
The first nationwide analysis of drinking water quality in United States correctional facilities found average arsenic concentrations in drinking water in Southwestern United States correctional facilities were twice as high as average arsenic concentrations in other Southwest community drinking water systems. More than a quarter of correctional facilities in the Southwest reported average arsenic levels exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 10 μg/L maximum contaminant level.
The work developed in collaboration with researchers from France, Germany and South Korea was recently published in the scientific journal PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
One goal of science is to find physical descriptions of nature by studying how basic system components interact with one another. For complex many-body systems, effective theories are frequently used to this end. They allow describing the interactions without having to observe a system on the smallest of scales. Physicists at Heidelberg University have now developed a new method that makes it possible to identify such theories experimentally with the aid of so-called quantum simulators. The results of the research effort, led by Prof. Dr Markus Oberthaler (experimental physics) and Prof.
Philadelphia, June 22, 2020 - A team of researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has demonstrated how to easily and effectively monitor for seizures in newborn infants, catching more instances than typical methods and improving the quality of care for infants in hospitals that lack the on-site resources to detect these seizures. The findings were published today in the Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Many epidemiologists believe that the initial COVID-19 infection rate was undercounted due to testing issues, asymptomatic and alternatively symptomatic individuals, and a failure to identify early cases.
Now, a new study from Penn State estimates that the number of early COVID-19 cases in the U.S. may have been more than 80 times greater and doubled nearly twice as fast as originally believed.
A surge in flu-like infections in the U.S. in March of 2020 suggests that the likely number of COVID-19 cases was far larger than official estimates, according to a new study of existing surveillance networks for influenza-like infections (ILIs). The findings support a scenario where more than 8.7 million new SARS-CoV-2 infections appeared in the U.S. during March, and estimate that more than 80% of these cases remained unidentified as the outbreak rapidly spread.
Researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Araçatuba, Brazil, have developed a computational tool that acts like a "COVID-19 accelerometer," plotting in real time the rate at which growth is accelerating or decelerating in more than 200 countries and territories.
TAMPA, Fla (June 22, 2020) -- A receptor that plays an essential role in safely clearing chronic unresolved cardiac inflammation may offer new targets for treating an increasing type of heart failure associated with age-related obesity, suggests a preclinical study led by researchers at the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Heart Institute, Morsani College of Medicine.
Patients who received a transplanted liver infected with hepatitis C and were later treated for the infection performed as well in recovery as transplant patients who received an organ free of infection, according to study from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and UC Health recently published in the journal Liver Transplantation.
DALLAS - June 22, 2020 - For decades, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol has been dubbed "good cholesterol" because of its role in moving fats and other cholesterol molecules out of artery walls. People with higher HDL cholesterol levels tend to have lower rates of cardiovascular disease, studies have shown.
Scientists at the Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG and Warwick Medical School, at the University of Warwick, have analysed mortality statistics in the UK during the initial phases of the severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, by analysing the weekly national mortality statistics over the last five years including the subgroup of respiratory mortality rates
One in four adults in the UK are experiencing food insecurity, which is likely to have left them susceptible to hunger and potential malnutrition, during the COVID-19 pandemic. That is the main finding of a survey published today by Feeding Britain and Northumbria University's Healthy Living Lab.
A novel formulation of the prostate cancer drug abiraterone acetate - currently marketed as Zytiga - will dramatically improve the quality of life for people suffering from prostate cancer, as pre-clinical trials by the University of South Australia show the new formulation improves the drug's effectiveness by 40 per cent.
19 June 2020, Singapore - A study conducted by clinicians from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) and researchers at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU), which evaluated and demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of a KKH-developed novel clinical protocol to screen and triage women with threatened miscarriages, has been published in the journal, Scientific Reports.