Culture
Whenever an organism develops and forms organs, a tumour creates metastases or the immune system becomes active in inflammation, cells migrate within the body. As they do, they interact with surrounding tissues which influence their function. The migrating cells react to biochemical signals, as well as to biophysical properties of their environment, for example whether a tissue is soft or stiff. Gaining detailed knowledge about such processes provides scientists with a basis for understanding medical conditions and developing treatment approaches.
Impaired intelligence, movement disorders and developmental delays are typical for a group of rare diseases that belong to GPI anchor deficiencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics used genetic engineering methods to create a mouse that mimics these patients very well. Studies in this animal model suggest that in GPI anchor deficiencies, a gene mutation impairs the transmission of stimuli at the synapses in the brain. This may explain the impairments associated with the disease.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- In almost all successful advertising campaigns, an appeal to emotion sparks a call-to-action that motivates viewers to become consumers. But according to research from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign expert who studies consumer information-processing and memory, emotionally arousing advertisements may not always help improve consumers' immediate memory.
If you've ever been in an operating room where tools are used to simultaneously cut and cauterize human flesh, you know what surgical smoke is. The heat generated by these surgical tools produces vapors made up of aerosolized chemicals and substances that can be hazardous to health.
Two new papers led by researchers in the University of Illinois Chicago College of Nursing suggest that policies and laws mandating the evacuation of surgical smoke from operating rooms are the best way to reduce the negative health impacts on perioperative staff as well as surgical patients.
A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf's atmosphere from within.
COVID-19 outcomes for patients on immunosuppressive drugs on par with non- immunosuppressed patients
People taking immunosuppressive drugs to prevent organ transplant rejection or to treat inflammatory or autoimmune diseases do not fare worse than others on average when they are hospitalized with COVID-19, according to a study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
New research indicates adolescent offspring of the menacing sabre-toothed predator, Smilodon fatalis, were more momma's cubs than independent warriors.
Wearing cooling vests during a COVID-19 shift ensures that nurses experience less heat during their work. During their shifts, nurses wear protective clothing for three hours in a row, during which the temperature can rise to as much as 36 degrees. The cooling vests offer such effective cooling that they are now part of the standard work clothing for nurses in the COVID nursing departments at Radboud university medical center.
Sweden kept preschools, primary and lower secondary schools open during the spring of 2020. So far, little research has been done on the risk of children being seriously affected by COVID-19 when the schools were open. A study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has now shown that one child in 130,000 was treated in an intensive care unit on account of COVID-19 during March-June. The study has been published in New England Journal of Medicine.
Men and women aged over 50 can reap similar relative benefits from resistance training, a new study led by UNSW Sydney shows.
While men are likely to gain more absolute muscle size, the gains relative to body size are on par to women's.
The findings, recently published in Sports Medicine, consolidated the results of 30 different resistance training studies involving over 1400 participants. This paper specifically compared the results of men and women aged 50 and over.
Social media misinformation can negatively influence people's attitudes about vaccine safety and effectiveness, but credible organizations -- such as research universities and health institutions -- can play a pivotal role in debunking myths with simple tags that link to factual information, University of California, Davis, researchers, suggest in a new study.
An international team of researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology has demonstrated the world's fastest and most powerful optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence (AI), which operates faster than 10 trillion operations per second (TeraOPs/s) and is capable of processing ultra-large scale data.
Published in the prestigious journal Nature, this breakthrough represents an enormous leap forward for neural networks and neuromorphic processing in general.
WASHINGTON--Black and Hispanic people with COVID-19 and diabetes are more likely than Caucasians to die or have serious complications, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
New research by scientists at the University of Bristol explains how a 'stop-start' pattern of evolution, governed by environmental change, could explain why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs.
Crocodiles today look very similar to ones from the Jurassic period some 200 million years ago. There are also very few species alive today - just 25. Other animals such as lizards and birds have achieved a diversity of many thousands of species in the same amount of time or less.
With an estimated lifespan between 25 to 40 years, the queen conch (Strombus gigas) is a prized delicacy long harvested for food and is revered for its beautiful shell. Second only to the spiny lobster, it is one of the most important benthic fisheries in the Caribbean region. Unfortunately, the species faces a challenge of survival: how to endure and thrive, as populations are in a steady state of decline from overfishing, habitat degradation and hurricane damage. In some places, the conch populations have dwindled so low that the remaining conch cannot find breeding partners.