Brain

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Most stroke victims don't receive treatment fast enough to prevent brain damage. Scientists at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, College of Engineering and College of Medicine have developed technology to "retrain" cells to help repair damaged brain tissue.

For years, in the vastness of our galaxy, astrophysicists have been tracking down pevatrons - natural accelerators of particles with monstrous energies. Thanks to the HAWC Observatory for Cosmic Radiation, another probable trace of their existence has just been found: photons with some of the highest energies. However, what is particularly important is that this time the high-energy photons have not only been recorded, but also their probable place of origin has been determined.

For the first time, scientists have documented biofluorescence in an Arctic fish species. The study, led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History who spent hours in the icy waters off of Greenland where the red-and-green-glowing snailfish was found, is published today in the American Museum Novitates.

Smart glass can change its color quickly through electricity. A new material developed by chemists of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich has now set a speed record for such a change.

Researchers from Skoltech were part of a research consortium studying a case of vertical COVID-19 transmission from mother to her unborn child that resulted in major complications in the pregnancy, premature birth and death of the child. The consortium used a Skoltech-developed proteomics method to verify the diagnosis. The paper was published in the journal Viruses.

Veterans with PTSD who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique showed significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity, according to a new study published today in Journal of Traumatic Stress. Fifty percent of the meditating veterans no longer met criteria for PTSD after three months compared to only 10 percent of controls. The randomized controlled study also showed significant reductions in veterans' symptoms of depression and anxiety, and sleep difficulties.

Hydrogen is a pollution-free energy source when it's extracted from water using sunlight instead of fossil fuels. But current strategies for "splitting" or breaking apart water molecules with catalysts and light require the introduction of chemical additives to expedite the process. Now, researchers reporting in ACS ES&T Engineering have developed a catalyst that destroys medications and other compounds already present in wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, getting rid of a contaminant while producing something useful.

Imagine not a white, but a green Arctic, with woody shrubs as far north as the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean. This is what the northernmost region of North America looked like about 125,000 years ago, during the last interglacial period, finds new research from the University of Colorado Boulder.

From climate change and carbon emissions to biodiversity and global hunger, humanity faces so many challenges that tackling them quickly is a daunting task. One solution that potentially addresses multiple issues could provide the impetus society needs to make significant progress.

Washington, DC-- Algae colonizing dead coral are upending scientists' ability to accurately assess the health of a coral reef community, according to new work from a team of marine science experts led by Carnegie's Manoela Romanó de Orte and Ken Caldeira. Their findings are published in Limnology and Oceanography.

A long noncoding RNA whose function was previously unknown turns out to play a vital role in mobilizing the immune response following a bone marrow transplant or solid organ transplantation.

This RNA molecule, cataloged in scientific databases simply as Linc00402, helps activate immune defenders known as T cells in response to the presence of foreign human cells, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center and Michigan Medicine.

IN BRIEF:

It's a first: approximately 100 scientists in 42 countries joined forces to learn about the incidence of parental burnout.

They found that Western countries are the most affected by parental burnout.

The cause? The often individualistic culture of Western countries. This international study, published in Affective Science, shows how culture, rather than socio-economic factors, plays a predominant role in parental burnout.

The individualism is more pronounced during health crises.

An international team of scholars studied how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Europeans' stress levels and their trust in their national governments and the healthcare systems. They found that respondents were most stressed by the state of the national economy, and only after that, by the risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly being hospitalized. The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science.

Geopolitical boundaries can have a profound effect on the protection of threatened species. A case in point is the native cycads of the United States. A recent review paper written by researchers at the Western Pacific Tropical Research Center at the University of Guam highlights extinction risks of cycad species that occur in U.S. controlled lands and the profound effect geopolitical boundaries has had on the protection of these threatened species. The paper appears in the December 2020 issue of the MDPI journal Diversity.

A study published March 16 in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) confirms that neither vitamin D nor the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil prevent the development of atrial fibrillation (AF), a potentially serious heart rhythm disturbance.