Culture
Imagine using stem cells from your bone marrow to grow a piece of bone tissue in the lab, after which medical doctors explore which drugs have the desired effect on your bones. In this way, a tailor-made treatment plan would be made for everyone, with the best approach being clear in advance. Personalized medicine at its best.
Washington, March 9, 2021--A comprehensive meta-analysis of prior research has found, overall, that children ages 1 to 8 were less likely to understand picture books when they read the digital, versus print, version. However, when digital picture books contain the right enhancements that reinforce the story content, they outperform their print counterparts. The results were published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.
PHILADELPHIA-- Head injury in the United States is common, with over 23 million adults age 40 or older reporting a history of head injury with loss of consciousness. Many head injuries can be caused by a host of different situations - from car and motorcycle accidents to sports injuries. What's more, it has become increasingly recognized that the effects from head injuries are long-lasting.
Smart speakers, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, have proven adept at monitoring certain health care issues at home. For example, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that these devices can detect cardiac arrests or monitor babies breathing.
But what about tracking something even smaller: the minute motion of individual heartbeats in a person sitting in front of a smart speaker?
Charcot-Marie Tooth disease is the most common hereditary neurological disease in the world. It affects the peripheral nerves and causes progressive paralysis of the legs and hands. No treatment is currently available to fight this disease, which is due to the overexpression of a specific protein. Scientists from the CNRS, INSERM, the AP-HP and the Paris-Saclay and Paris universities have developed a therapy based on degrading the coding RNA for this protein in mice. Their work is patented and was published on 9 March 2021 in Communications Biology.
About 11% of women who carry to term will experience prelabor rupture of membrane--a condition where the amniotic sac breaks open early, but labor doesn't begin.
Typically, when a woman's water breaks but labor doesn't start, labor is induced. But a new University of Michigan study found that expectant management--waiting a period of time after the water breaks for labor to begin spontaneously--did not significantly increase risk to the fetus or the mother in healthy pregnancies.
Luxembourg, 9 March 2021 - Today, Alzheimer Europe launches a new report, "Legal capacity and decision making: The ethical implications of lack of legal capacity on the lives of people with dementia", which looks at the intersection between legal rights and ethical considerations in relation to legal capacity and decision making.
The working group responsible for the report was set up by Alzheimer Europe in 2020 and was composed of experts in dementia, law, ethics, policy, research, psychology and the experience of having dementia and supporting people with dementia.
Anxiety levels in the United States are rising sharply and have especially intensified in younger populations. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect 31.9 percent of children ages 13 to 18 years old. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, children and adolescents have experienced unprecedented interruptions to their daily lives and it is expected that these disruptions may precipitate mental illness, including anxiety, depression, and/or stress related symptoms.
A critical ingredient for auroras exists much higher in space than previously thought, according to new research in the journal Scientific Reports. The dazzling light displays in the polar night skies require an electric accelerator to propel charged particles down through the atmosphere. Scientists at Nagoya University and colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and the US have found that it exists beyond 30,000 kilometres above the Earth's surface - offering insight not just about Earth, but other planets as well.
In the spring of 2020, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic appeared to coincide with the tree pollen season in the northern hemisphere. These observations prompted an international team of researchers to conduct an extensive investigation: The scientists wanted to know whether there is a demonstrable link between airborne pollen concentrations and SARS-CoV-2 infection rates.
Pollen is a significant environmental factor influencing infection rates
Women are largely being excluded from decisions about conservation and natural resources, with potentially detrimental effects on conservation efforts globally, according to research.
A University of Queensland and Nature Conservancy study reviewed a swathe of published conservation science, investigating the cause and impact of gender imbalance in the field.
UQ PhD candidate and Nature Conservancy Director of Conservation in Melanesia Robyn James said it was no secret that females were underrepresented in conservation science.
One of the world's rarest tree species has been transformed into a sophisticated model that University of Queensland researchers say is the future of plant research.
"Macadamia jansenii is a critically endangered species of macadamia which was only described as a new species in 1991," said Robert Henry, Professor of Innovation at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation (QAAFI).
"It grows near Miriam Vale in Queensland and there are only around 100 known trees in existence."
In a perfect world, what you see is what you get. If this were the case, the job of artificial intelligence systems would be refreshingly straightforward.
Take collision avoidance systems in self-driving cars. If visual input to on-board cameras could be trusted entirely, an AI system could directly map that input to an appropriate action -- steer right, steer left, or continue straight -- to avoid hitting a pedestrian that its cameras see in the road.
Rome, Italy, March 8, 2021 - Allelica, a leading genomics software company specialising in developing polygenic risk scores (PRS) for personalised medicine, today announced publication of a study in Circulation (Vol. 143, Issue 10) showing that the effect of LDL cholesterol on a person's risk of having a heart attack depends on their genes.
With the help of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date. The source is a "radio-loud" quasar -- a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths -- that is so far away its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.