Brain

COLUMBIA, Mo. - As a former school nurse in the Columbia Public Schools, Gretchen Carlisle would often interact with students with disabilities who took various medications or had seizures throughout the day. At some schools, the special education teacher would bring in dogs, guinea pigs and fish as a reward for good behavior, and Carlisle noticed what a calming presence the pets seemed to be for the students with disabilities.

A team of HIV researchers, cellular biologists, and biophysicists who banded together to support COVID-19 science determined the atomic structure of a coronavirus protein thought to help the pathogen evade and dampen response from human immune cells. The structural map - which is now published in the journal PNAS, but has been open-access for the scientific community since August - has laid the groundwork for new antiviral treatments tailored specifically to SARS-CoV-2, and enabled further investigations into how the newly emerged virus ravages the human body.

Women who use marijuana could have a more difficult time conceiving a child than women who do not use marijuana, suggests a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Marijuana use among the women's partners--which could have influenced conception rates--was not studied. The researchers were led by Sunni L. Mumford, Ph.D., of the Epidemiology Branch in NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The study appears in Human Reproduction.

COVID-19 infections are once again rising at an alarming rate in San Francisco's Latinx community, predominantly among low-income essential workers, according to results of a massive community-based testing blitz conducted before and after the Thanksgiving holiday by Unidos En Salud -- a volunteer-led partnership between the Latino Task Force for COVID-19 (LTF), UC San Francisco , the

Recent years have provided substantial research displaying the effect of genetic mu-tations on the development of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. Based on those studies, researchers have focused attention on the commonalities be-hind those mutations and how they impact on the functioning of the brain.

A shapeshifting immune system protein called XCL1 evolved from a single-shape ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago. Now, researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) discovered the molecular basis for how this happened. In the process they uncovered principles that scientists can use to design purpose-built nanoscale transformers for use as biosensors, components of molecular machines, and even therapeutics. The findings were published today in Science.

The cover for issue 45 of Oncotarget features Figure 3, "Representative images of whole tumor volume segmentation of the co-registered T1 post-contrast sequence and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map, yielding the corresponding ADC histogram distribution utilized for data analysis," recently published in "Diffusion-weighted MR imaging histogram analysis in HIV positive and negative patients with primary central nervous system lymphoma as a predictor of outcome and tumor proliferation" by Khan, et al.

Reza Shahbazian-Yassar, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Shahbazian-Yassar and colleagues facilitated the development of a cutting edge "Swiss Army knife" catalyst made up of 10 different elements - each of which on its own has the ability to reduce the combustion temperature of methane - plus oxygen. This unique catalyst can bring the combustion temperature of methane down by about half - from above 1400 degrees Kelvin down to 600 to 700 degrees Kelvin.

Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have uncovered new evidence of the potential health risks of chemicals in tobacco and marijuana smoke.

Around 1085 AD, along the southern rim of Northern Arizona's elevated Colorado Plateau, a volcano erupted, forever changing ancient Puebloan fortunes and all nearby life. Among the 600 or so volcanoes that dot the landscape of the San Francisco volcanic fields, this one blew. It was the very first (and last) eruption for what came to be known as Sunset Crater, aptly named for its multi-hued, 1,000-foot-tall cinder cone.

Pleiotropy analysis, which provides insight on how individual genes result in multiple characteristics, has become increasingly valuable as medicine continues to lean into mining genetics to inform disease treatments. Privacy stipulations, though, make it difficult to perform comprehensive pleiotropy analysis because individual patient data often can't be easily and regularly shared between sites. However, a statistical method called Sum-Share, developed at Penn Medicine, can pull summary information from many different sites to generate significant insights.

Researchers have for the first time identified the way viruses like the poliovirus and the common cold virus 'package up' their genetic code, allowing them to infect cells.

The findings, published today (Friday, 8 January) in the journal PLOS Pathogens by a team from the Universities of Leeds and York, open up the possibility that drugs or anti-viral agents can be developed that would stop such infections.

Please note that, due to production issues, publication of the PLOS Medicine paper cited in this release has been delayed. It will be included in this release when a new publication date is confirmed.

The fatal threat from diarrhoea and pneumonia to young children in the world's poorer countries can be drastically reduced by using traditional performing arts to encourage mothers to provide youngsters with safe food and water, a new study reveals.

Sleep is ubiquitous in animals and humans and vital for healthy functioning. Thus, sleep after training improves performance on various tasks in comparison to equal periods of active wakefulness. However, it has been unclear so far whether this is due to an active refinement of neural connections or merely due to the absence of novel input during sleep. Now researchers at the Medical Center - University of Freiburg have succeeded in showing that sleep is more than rest for improving performance.

TORONTO, January 7, 2021- What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health.