Brain
CHICAGO--January 6, 2020--Despite the prestige of becoming a physician, 80 percent of medical students report a low sense of personal achievement, according to a new study in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.
Researchers surveyed 385 first- through fourth-year medical students to assess their levels of burnout, a psychological syndrome resulting from prolonged exposure to stressful work. Study authors say burnout has three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low sense of personal achievement.
Scientists have shown for the first time that brittle stars use vision to guide them through vibrant coral reefs, thanks to a neat colour-changing trick.
The international team, led by researchers at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, described a new mechanism for vision in the red brittle star Ophiocoma wendtii, a relative to sea stars and sea urchins, which lives in the bright and complex reefs of the Caribbean Sea. Their findings are published in Current Biology today.
Global warming is driving rapid environmental change in the Arctic. "To understand these changes, field measurements that adequately represent environmental variation across the Arctic as a whole are crucial", says PhD student Anna-Maria Virkkala from the University of Helsinki.
A new study by researchers from University of Helsinki and Lund University shows that northern Arctic regions remain under-sampled and provides detailed maps of potential new sampling locations for each environmental science discipline across the Arctic.
Scientists at the Laboratory for Attosecond Physics have developed a unique laser technology for the analysis of the molecular composition of biological samples. It is capable of detecting minimal variations in the chemical make up of organic systems.
Life as we know it requires phosphorus. It's one of the six main chemical elements of life, it forms the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules, acts as the main currency for energy in all cells and anchors the lipids that separate cells from their surrounding environment.
But how did a lifeless environment on the early Earth supply this key ingredient?
"For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life," said first author Jonathan Toner, a University of Washington research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences.
A new study revealed that one dose of the HPV vaccine may prevent infection from the potential cancer-causing virus, according to research published in JAMA Network Open from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 34,800 new cancer diagnoses are linked to human papillomavirus (HPV) annually. The virus is thought to account for more than 90% of all cervical and anal cancers, more than 60% of all penile cancers, and approximately 70% of all oral cancers.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - How much you enjoy the new Star Wars movie will depend a lot on your expectations going in, a new study suggests.
Researchers surveyed 441 people before and after they saw the last episode in the popular franchise, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi, released in 2017. They wanted to see how audiences' expectations affected their actual enjoyment of the movie.
In a sleepy haze, reaching out and grabbing the coffee cup in front of you seems to happen on autopilot. But your caffeine-deprived brain is working hard. It's collecting sensory information and other kinds of feedback - clues about where your arm is in space relative to the mug - and sending it to your motor cortex. Then, the motor cortex plans the upcoming movement and tells your muscles to make it happen.
Teach a chimpanzee to fish for insects to eat, and you feed her for a lifetime. Teach her a better way to use tools in gathering prey, and you may change the course of evolution.
For most wild chimpanzees, tool use is an important part of life -- but learning these skills is no simple feat. Wild chimpanzees transfer tools to each other, and this behavior has previously been shown to serve as a form of teaching.
BOSTON - Immune checkpoint inhibitors are important medications that boost the immune system's response against certain cancers; however, they tend to be ineffective against glioblastoma, the most deadly primary brain tumor in adults. New research in mice led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the University of Florida reveals a promising strategy that makes glioblastoma susceptible to these medications.
HOUSTON -- Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have identified a tenacious subset of immune macrophages that thwart treatment of glioblastoma with anti-PD-1 checkpoint blockade, elevating a new potential target for treating the almost uniformly lethal brain tumor.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Handling very soft, delicate items without damaging them is hard enough with human hands, let alone doing it at the microscopic scale with laboratory instruments. Three new studies show how scientists have honed a technique for handling tiny, soft particles using precisely controlled fluid flows that act as gentle microscopic hands. The technique allows researchers to test the physical limits of these soft particles and the things made from them – ranging from biological tissues to fabric softeners.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- University of Illinois researchers achieved the highest reported rates of inserting genes into human cells with the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system, a necessary step for harnessing CRISPR for clinical gene-therapy applications.
By chemically tweaking the ends of the DNA to be inserted, the new technique is up to five times more efficient than current approaches. The researchers saw improvements at various genetic locations tested in a human kidney cell line, even seeing 65% insertion at one site where the previous high had been 15%.
Tokyo, Japan--Crystallization is the physical phenomenon of the transformation of disordered molecules in a liquid or gas phase into a highly ordered solid crystal through two stages: nucleation and growth. Crystallization is very important in materials and natural sciences because it occurs in a wide range of materials, including metals, organic compounds, and biological molecules, so it is desirable to comprehensively understand this process.
Light propagation is usually reciprocal meaning that the trajectory of light travelling in one direction is identical from that in the opposite direction. Breaking reciprocity can make light propagate only in one direction. Optical components that support such unidirectional flow of light, for example isolators and circulators, are indispensable building blocks in many modern laser and communication systems. They are currently almost exclusively based on the magneto-optic effect, making the devices bulky and difficult for integration.