Culture
HOUSTON - (Jan. 28, 2020) - Who -- or what -- is to blame for the xenophobia, political intolerance and radical political parties spreading through Germany and the rest of Europe? A new study from Rice University and Washington University in St. Louis shows a major factor is people's proximity to former Nazi concentration camps.
Human cells have a defense mechanism that protects them from microbial attacks, a Canadian-led team of international researchers has discovered.
When microbes enter our body, they liberate toxins that can damage cells by poking holes in the external cell layer. To defend themselves from the intrusion, cells scramble their membrane fat (lipid) into a more liquid form that allows them to fix the holes, the research team found.
Those repairs prevent the cells from breaking up and dying.
(Boston)--Researchers have determined that after lungs recover from infection, alveolar macrophages (immune cells that live in the lungs and help protect the lungs against infection) are different in multiple ways and those differences persist indefinitely.
DALLAS - Jan. 27, 2020 - Artificial intelligence can help cancer patients start their radiation therapy sooner - and thereby decrease the odds of the cancer spreading - by instantly translating complex clinical data into an optimal plan of attack.
Patients typically must wait several days to a week to begin therapy while doctors manually develop treatment plans. But new research from UT Southwestern shows how enhanced deep-learning models streamlined this process down to a fraction of a second.
A collaboration between scientists at Rutgers University and Scripps Research led to the discovery of a small molecule that may slow down or stop the progression of Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson's, which affects 1 million people in the United States and over 10 million worldwide according to the Parkinson's Foundation, is a neurodegenerative disorder with no cure. Symptoms develop slowly over time and can be debilitating to patients, who most recognizably develop tremor, slow movements and a shuffling gait.
A team of 245 UCLA undergraduates and 31 high school students has published an encyclopedia of more than 1,000 genes, including 421 genes whose functions were previously unknown. The research was conducted in fruit flies, and the genes the researchers describe in the analysis may be associated with the development of the brain, eye, lymph gland and wings.
What The Study Did: Associations between county-level concentrations of poverty in the United States and suicide rates among children and adolescents (ages 5 to 19) were explored in this observational study.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
Authors: Jennifer A. Hoffman, M.D., of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.5678)
What The Study Did: This research letter reports on diabetes screening in barbershops to identify undiagnosed black men.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
Authors: David C. Lee, M.D., of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.6867)
Bottom Line: Twenty years of survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used to examine the unmet need to see a physician and for services among insured and uninsured adults from 1998 to 2017, a time of change in the U.S. health care system that included passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The proportion of adults who reported being unable to see a physician because of cost increased, with worsening access among insured adults whose numbers increased over time.
Many cells are covered with mysterious large holes, pores that have been associated with the sense of taste as well as Alzheimer's disease, depression, and even asthma. Knowing the structure of these varied holes will help researchers better understand this range of associations and provide a blueprint for developing new therapies.
Methane is present in the natural gas that is very abundant in the earth's crust and has found many uses in modern applications, mainly as a burning fuel. Alternatively, methane can be converted into a useful mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called "synthesis gas," by reaction with carbon dioxide in what is referred to as dry reforming of methane (DRM). This DRM reaction is termed "uphill" because it requires the consumption of external energy; thermal reactors have to be at a high temperature of more than 800 °C for efficient conversion.
A material revolution replacing cement and steel in urban construction by wood can have double benefits for climate stabilization, a new study shows. First, it can avoid greenhouse gas emissions from cement and steel production. Second, it can turn buildings into a carbon sink as they store the CO2 taken up from the air by trees that are harvested and used as engineered timber.
PULLMAN, Wash. - For organic farms, size matters: not so much the size of the farm itself, but the size of the neighboring fields.
A large-scale analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Jan. 27 found that organic agriculture sites had 34% more biodiversity and 50% more profits than conventional agriculture sites, even though the organic sites had 18% lower crop yields.
Tauopathies are a group of neurodegenerative diseases characterized by the accumulation of phospho-tau, in other words tau associated to phosphate groups. Globular Glial Tauopathy, as well as Alzheimer's, are members of this large group. It is characterized by the accumulation of phospho-tau in neurons and by the formation of protein inclusions in glial cells astrocytes or oligodendrocytes. The majority of this kind of tauopathy is spontaneous, but some of them are caused by specific mutations.
January 27, 2020-Rome: In a study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, ISS researchers estimated about 680,000 cases of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), in a total of 12,730,960 migrants, aged between 60 and 89 years, living in the European Union (EU) in 2018.