Culture
Nara, Japan - Fans of sake, the traditional Japanese alcoholic beverage, may have even more reason to enjoy it now: Japanese scientists have discovered that a mutant strain of sake yeast produces high levels of the amino acid ornithine.
In a study published this month in Metabolic Engineering, researchers from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology and the Nara Prefecture Institute of Industrial Development have revealed that a mutant strain of sake yeast produces 10 times the amount of the amino acid ornithine compared with the parent yeast strain.
Milan, 27 August 2020 - DNA three-dimensional structure is determined by a series of spatial rules based on particular protein sequences and their order. This was the finding of a study recently published in Genome Biology by Luca Nanni, PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, together with Professors Stefano Ceri of the same University and Colin Logie of the University of Nijmegen.
Simple exercises can help to make people more playful and consequently feel more satisfied with their lives. This has been revealed in a new study by psychologists from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in the journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. The researchers had participants in an experiment perform a week of exercises to boost their playfulness. They found that the trait can be stimulated and trained - and that this improves a person's mood.
People with HIV from BAME communities, women and heterosexual men are underrepresented in HIV studies - according to new research from the University of East Anglia and Western Sydney University.
Medication to manage HIV is now very effective at keeping people well. But over half of people living with HIV do not take their medication as prescribed.
We are yet to find solutions that are routinely used by healthcare teams to successfully support people to take their medication as prescribed - despite many studies designed to investigate the problem.
A new meta-analysis of published studies into the drug hydroxychloroquine shows that it does not lower mortality in COVID-19 patients, and using it combined with the antibiotic azithromycin is associated with a 27% increased mortality. The study is published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, the official journal of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID).
Vitamin C could be the key to better muscles in later life - according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
A study published today shows that older people who eat plenty of vitamin C - commonly found in citrus fruits, berries and vegetables - have the best skeletal muscle mass.
This is important because people tend to lose skeletal muscle mass as they get older - leading to sarcopenia (a condition characterised by loss of skeletal muscle mass and function), frailty and reduced quality of life.
The introduction of cigarette-like mentholated 'cigarillos' (mini cigars which are leaf-wrapped) to the UK is helping big tobacco companies to bypass strict public health measures intended to reduce smoking, say researchers.
Writing in the BMJ's Tobacco Control in an article published Thursday 27 August 2020, the team from the University of Bath focus on the introduction and marketing of cigarillo products which mimic cigarette brands, are as dangerous to health, yet are not subject to the same public health measures or taxation.
Intensively tilled soils have lost up to 50% of their original C with the attendant degradation in soil properties and productivity. Restoring the C lost with current conservation practices (i.e., no-till, cover crops) often takes decades. Applying high-C coal combustion residue from sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) processing factories, known as char, may rapidly restore soil C and productivity in degraded croplands.
Until now, these flows of material had been detected only in other wavelength ranges, such as X-rays or the visible, depending on the phase in which the black hole is consuming its surrounding material. This study provides the first evidence that the winds are present throughout the evolution of the eruption, independently of the phase, and this is a step forward in our understanding of the mysterious processes of accretion onto stellar mass black holes.
The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago.
The skeleton of this dinosaur, called Scelidosaurus, was collected more than 160 years ago on west Dorset's Jurassic Coast. The rocks in which it was fossilised are around 193 million years old, close to the dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs.
MSA toolkits first appear some 300 thousand years ago, at the same time as the earliest fossils of Homo sapiens, and are still in use 30 thousand years ago. However, from 67 thousand years ago, changes in stone tool production indicate a marked shift in behaviour; the new toolkits that emerge are labelled LSA and remained in use into the recent past. A growing body of evidence suggests that the transition from MSA to LSA was not a linear process, but occurred at different times in different places.
In a development that may finally offer hope to children with Dravet syndrome and their parents, a promising investigational new therapeutic appears to alter the destructive course of the deadly disease in a mouse model.
BOSTON -Xu Yu, MD, Ragon group leader, recently published a study entitled "Distinct viral reservoirs in individuals with spontaneous control of HIV-1," in Nature. Yu's lab, in collaboration with Ragon group leaders Mathias Lichterfeld, MD, PhD, and Mary Carrington, PhD, and Ragon director, Bruce Walker, MD, sequenced billions of cells from 64 elite controllers, people living with HIV who suppress the virus naturally without the need for medication, and 41 individuals on antiretroviral drugs (ART).
A new study says that many of the ice shelves ringing Antarctica could be vulnerable to quick destruction if rising temperatures drive melt water into the numerous fractures that currently penetrate their surfaces. The shelves help slow interior glaciers' slide toward the ocean, so if they were to fail, sea levels around the world could surge rapidly as a result. The study appears this week in the leading journal Nature.
BOSTON - Inhaled nitric oxide (NO) can be a valuable adjunct respiratory therapy for pregnant women with severe and critical COVID-19, a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found. The delivery of the therapeutic gas to six COVID-19 pregnant patients admitted to MGH, as described in a paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology, resulted in a rapid and sustained improvement in cardiopulmonary function and decreased inflammation.