Culture
Running is great exercise but not everyone feels great doing it. In hopes of boosting physical activity - and possibly creating a new mode of transportation - engineers at Stanford University are studying devices that people could strap to their legs to make running easier.
In experiments with motor-powered systems that mimic such devices - called exoskeleton emulators - the researchers investigated two different modes of running assistance: motor-powered assistance and spring-based assistance. The results, published March 25 in Science Robotics, were surprising.
CORVALLIS, Ore. -- An Oregon State University study published last week found that diabetes education programs that are linguistically and culturally tailored to Latinos lead to significantly higher rates of completion among Latino participants -- even higher than rates among non-Latinos enrolled in the English versions of those programs.
While some of our body's cells divide in a matter of hours, the process of making sperm, meiosis, alone takes about 14 days from start to finish. And fully six of those days are spent in the stage known as the pachytene, when pairs of chromosomes from an individual's mother and father align and connect.
ROCHESTER, Minn. - SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to spread, leading to more than 20,000 deaths worldwide in less than four months. Efforts are progressing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, but it's still likely 12 to 18 months away.
From 1946 to 2016, testimony from economists accounted for more than two thirds of all instances of U.S. congressional testimony delivered by social scientists. Thomas Maher of Purdue University, Indiana, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 25, 2020.
Menlo Park, Calif. -- Researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a strange new feature of a protein that's thought to be important in the development of tuberculosis: The protein contains a "huge" interior pocket, the likes of which has never before been seen, that appears capable of passing a wide range of other molecules into the bacterial cell.
A high-salt diet is not only bad for one's blood pressure, but also for the immune system. This is the conclusion of a current study under the leadership of the University Hospital Bonn. Mice fed a high-salt diet were found to suffer from much more severe bacterial infections. Human volunteers who consumed an additional six grams of salt per day also showed pronounced immune deficiencies. This amount corresponds to the salt content of two fast food meals. The results are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Can robots be effective tools in combating the COVID-19 pandemic? A group of leaders in the field of robotics, including Henrik Christensen, director of UC San Diego's Contextual Robotics Institute, say yes, and outline a number of examples in an editorial in the March 25 issue of Science Robotics. They say robots can be used for clinical care such as telemedicine and decontamination; logistics such as delivery and handling of contaminated waste; and reconnaissance such as monitoring compliance with voluntary quarantines.
PITTSBURGH--Robots could perform some of the "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs associated with combating the COVID-19 pandemic, but that would require many new capabilities not currently being funded or developed, an editorial in the journal Science Robotics argues.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Researchers have developed the first computational model of a human cell and simulated its behavior for 15 minutes - the longest time achieved for a biological system of this complexity. In a new study, simulations reveal the effects of spatial organization within cells on some of the genetic processes that control the regulation and development of human traits and some human diseases.
The study, which produced a new computational platform that is available to any researcher, is published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Nationwide survey data on more than 230,000 U.S. adolescents over the period 2005 to 2018 suggest that anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and other "internalizing" problems account for an increasing share of the adolescent mental health burden, according to a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Columbia University.
A transport protein that is used by the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis to import vitamin B12 turns out to be very different from other transport proteins. It contains a huge water-filled cavity, in which hydrophilic substances are transported across the cell membrane. This discovery, which changes our understanding of bacterial physiology, was made by imaging the transport protein using cryo-electron microscopy. The results were published in the journal Nature on 26 March.
What The Study Did: This observational study of 416 patients in Wuhan, China, with confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) reports that cardiac injury is a common condition among hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and it is associated with higher risk of in-hospital mortality.
Authors: Bo Yang, M.D., Ph.D., and He Huang, M.D., Ph.D., of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University in China, are the corresponding authors.
What The Study Did: Researchers examined changes over time in the kinds of mental health problems for which adolescents in the United States received care and where they got that care in this survey study with findings that should be interpreted within the context of several limitations including self-reported information.
Authors: Ramin Mojtabai, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, is the corresponding author.
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology is best known for its potential role in correcting genetic diseases. But it can also be used as a tool to find genes that act as supporting players, making the disease better or worse. Such genes might make good targets for new treatments.