Culture
For a caterpillar, a green leaf can make a nice meal. But to the plant itself, it's an attack. And very hungry caterpillars can do a lot of damage as they eat their way through life.
Plants can fight back, unleashing an array of chemical defenses to discourage wayward foragers -- from releasing chemicals that attract caterpillar predators to secreting compounds that make the plant taste so foul that desperate caterpillars resort to cannibalism. But scientists know little about how plants detect these attacks and marshal defenses.
LA JOLLA, CA--As the consumer genetics industry rapidly expands, more and more people are turning to DNA-based services to learn their risk of developing a wide range of diseases.
LA JOLLA, CA--A new study on Alzheimer's disease by Scripps Research scientists has revealed a previously unknown biochemical cascade in the brain that leads to the destruction of synapses, the connections between nerve cells that are responsible for memory and cognition.
Many everyday foods--from yogurt and other fermented foods to fresh fruits and vegetables--contain live microorganisms. And although humans have consumed these safe and potentially beneficial bacteria in their daily diets for millennia, live microbes have received much less attention than other components of the diet. With a rising global awareness of the importance of gut health, many people believe intake of live microbes is health-promoting, but so far it has not been possible for experts to create a guideline on how many we should be consuming on a daily basis.
What The Study Did: State crisis standards of care (CSC) guidelines in the U.S. allocate scarce health care resources among patients, and this study examined the implications of these guidelines for patients with cancer, including allocation methods, cancer-related categorical exclusions and deprioritizations, and provisions for blood products and palliative care.
Authors: Gregory A. Abel, M.D., M.P.H., of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, is the corresponding author.
Children grow taller in rural households where their mothers are supported to grow their own food - according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
The research, which looked at households in low- and middle-income countries, showed growing their own food helped mothers to prevent stunting, wasting and underweight in their children. Their children's food was more varied, meaning they had access to different classes of food nutrients.
Allowing families to choose schools that are more suited to their children may play a key role in improving student mental health, including reducing adolescent suicide rates, suggests new research published in the peer-reviewed journal School Effectiveness and School Improvement.
The study is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between U.S. school choice policies and teen suicide and mental health issues.
Published today in The Lancet Public Health, a study by researchers at King's College London research team detail the modelling behind the ZOE COVID Symptom Study App.
They found that self-reported data from over 2.8 million volunteer users of the app living in England, including more than 120 million daily assessments logged by those users, can be used to provide accurate estimates of COVID-19 prevalence and incidence, and timely identification of regional infection hotspots.
A new study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers of adults hospitalized for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa has strengthened the case for promoting rapid weight gain as part of overall efforts for a comprehensive treatment plan. The study findings, after analyzing data regarding 149 adult inpatients with anorexia nervosa in the Johns Hopkins Eating Disorders Program, stand in contrast to long held beliefs that patients would not tolerate a faster weight gain plan because it would be too traumatic.
A team of Johns Hopkins University researchers has developed a new software that could revolutionize how DNA is sequenced, making it far faster and less expensive to map anything from yeast genomes to cancer genes.
As medical research progresses, traditional treatment protocols are being rapidly exhausted. New approaches to treat diseases that do not respond to conventional drugs are the need of the hour. In search for these approaches, science has turned to a wide range of potential answers, including artificial nucleic acids. Artificial or xeno nucleic acids are similar to naturally occurring nucleic acids (think DNA and RNA) -- but are produced entirely in the laboratory.
New Curtin University research has found southern Australian long-finned pilot whales are able to mimic the calls of its natural predator and food rival - the killer whale, as a possible ploy to outsmart it.
The study is the first published research analysing the calls of long-finned pilot whales in the Southern Hemisphere, which were recorded in the Great Australian Bight, off WA and SA, between 2013 and 2017.
A team of scientists from Hokkaido University has suggested that marimo maintain their characteristic spherical shape due to the rarity of the formation of reproductive cells.
The Bolson tortoise (Bolson Gopherus flavomarginatus) is the largest land reptile in North America. It lives mainly in dry areas, in particular, in the Chihuahua desert in northern Mexico. In recent decades, its numbers have fallen by 50%, driving the International Union for Conservation of Nature to include it on its red list and it has been classified as endangered. Land tortoises are prone to suffering from a wide range of diseases that can deplete their numbers even more, therefore understanding potential pathogenic organisms could help in advancing conservation strategies.
A study by University of Tartu researchers indicates that the sensitivity of tests used to detect viral antibodies in a blood sample may differ significantly. The combination of several tests may give the best result.
At the onset of COVID-19 symptoms, first, the nasopharyngeal swab is taken to verify the presence of the virus. But if the aim is to determine whether an asymptomatic person has been in contact with the virus or, vice versa, to know which acute disease the person recently suffered from, a test detecting antibodies in a blood sample comes helpful.