Culture
A combination of genetic mutations may explain the higher incidence of and poorer outcomes from pediatric leukemia in Hispanic and Latino children, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They said a novel therapeutic drug combination - as well as testing for these mutations - may help address the disparity.
Hormone therapy commonly is given as a targeted treatment for women whose cancer cells carry receptors for estrogen. But the therapy only works for about half of all patients. Until now, there hasn't been a good way to reliably predict who will benefit and who will not.
Temperature rise due to climate change has negatively affected labour productivity in the past decades and will keep damaging it, potentially at a higher extent than what has been estimated in the literature up to now. In South Africa, a future scenario with severe climate change will feature a reduction of per capita GDP of up to 20% by the end of the century, compared to an idealized future without the impacts of a changing climate.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University innovators have created technology aimed at replacing Morse code with colored "digital characters" to modernize optical storage. They are confident the advancement will help with the explosion of remote data storage during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Barker hypothesis (Hales and Barker 1992) (also referred to as "small baby syndrome"), infants with too low body weight have an increased risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic kidney diseases in adulthood. According to this hypothesis, fetal protective mechanisms enable adaptation to unfavorable intrauterine conditions (chronic oxygen or nutrient deficiency) and allow for fetal survival. At the same time, however, they lead to permanent structural and functional strains and changes into adulthood.
Boston, Mass. - COVID-19 has caused more than 2 million deaths worldwide since the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020. Patients with severe COVID-19 frequently experience respiratory distress and require assistance breathing. For patients whose lungs are so injured that even a ventilator is unable to deliver enough oxygen, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) -- which does the work of the lungs by removing carbon dioxide and adding oxygen to blood outside the body -- may improve the odds of survival for certain patients with severe COVID-19.
Over the last three decades, the United States prison population has exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million. More than 1.1 million are African American men - the vast number of whom have returned within one to three years of their release. In fact, according to the World Prison Brief, America boasts the highest recidivism rate at more than 50 percent.
Per capita income, population volume and density, the structure of cities, transport infrastructure or whether districts have their own schools are all factors that can affect the spread of COVID-19. This has been confirmed by a study carried out in 73 districts in Barcelona by researchers from the departments of Geography and Economics of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, the results of which have been published in the Journal of Public Health.
New research from the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation examines whether recreational marijuana legalization in Oregon and marijuana and alcohol retail outlet density levels are associated with co-use and beliefs supportive of use of each among teens.
Using data from 11th graders who participated in the Student Wellness Survey from 2010-2018, researchers assessed past-30-day co-use changes in counties with low, medium, and high densities of licensed marijuana and alcohol outlets.
Findings include:
February 1, 2021 - Researchers have identified another good reason to eat more mushrooms. New research , published in Food Science & Nutrition (January 2021) found that adding a mushroom serving to the diet increased the intake of several micronutrients, including shortfall nutrients such as vitamin D, without any increase in calories, sodium or fat.
When it comes to developing drugs for mental illnesses, three confounding challenges exist:
Men and women experience them differently, with things like depression and anxiety far more common in females.
A drug that works for one person may not work for another, and side effects abound.
New CU Boulder research, published in the journal eLIfe, sheds light on one reason those individual differences may exist. Turns out a key protein in the brain called AKT may function differently in males than females.
Every late winter and early spring, huge dust storms swirled across the bare and frozen landscapes of Europe during the coldest periods of the latest ice age. These paleo-tempests, which are seldom matched in our modern climate frequently covered Western Europe in some of the thickest layers of ice-age dust found anywhere previously on Earth. This is demonstrated by a series of new estimates of the sedimentation and accumulation rates of European loess layers obtained by Senior Research Scientist Denis-Didier Rousseau from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and colleagues.
LA JOLLA--(February 1, 2021) Wolffia, also known as duckweed, is the fastest-growing plant known, but the genetics underlying this strange little plant's success have long been a mystery to scientists. Now, thanks to advances in genome sequencing, researchers are learning what makes this plant unique--and, in the process, discovering some fundamental principles of plant biology and growth.
Humoral and cellular adaptive immunity are two immune mechanisms that act against pathogens. Humoral immunity is mediated by antibodies, while cellular immunity does not involve antibodies and is, instead, facilitated by T cells. Studying how these immune mechanisms mediate SARS-CoV-2 infections could be beneficial in controlling the progression of the disease. However, their roles in viral control or disease pathogenesis is not fully understood and only a few studies have thoroughly monitored COVID-19 patients longitudinally, especially during the acute phase of infection.
Correct, or native, protein folding is essential for correct protein function. Protein misfolding can lead to the formation of amyloid fibrils, and amyloidosis, which is implicated in various human neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's diseases. In this study Yuji Goto and colleagues describe, for the first time, a dynamic link between protein folding and misfolding, and the threshold that must be overcome for the formation of amyloid fibrils.