Culture
It is known that the tumour microenvironment plays an important role in the progression of cancer. But could estrogen present in this microenvironment facilitate the growth of liver metastases in women affected by colon, pancreatic and lung cancers?
A research team at Kobe University has developed a method of artificially controlling the anchorage position of target proteins in engineered baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
If you have a dog, hopefully you're lucky enough to know that they are highly attuned to their owners and can readily understand a wide range of commands and gestures. But are these abilities innate or are they exclusively learned through training?
To find out, a new study in Frontiers in Psychology investigated whether untrained stray dogs could understand human pointing gestures.
Jan. 17, 2020--While deaths steadily declined over a decade in intensive care units at hospitals with few minority patients, in ICUs with large numbers of minority patients, there was less improvement, according to new research published online in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
The disparity was most pronounced among critically ill African American patients.
A positive psychology program created by researchers at Queen Mary University of London focuses on promoting wellbeing in refugee children. It is unusual in that it focuses on promoting positive outcomes, rather than addressing war trauma exposure.
This is the first positive psychology-based intervention to be systematically evaluated for use with refugee children.
"Save the rainforests" is a snappy slogan, but it doesn't tell the full story of how complicated it is to do just that. Before conservationists can even begin restoring habitats and advocating for laws that protect land from poachers and loggers, scientists need to figure out what's living, what's dying, and which patterns explain why. Tackling these questions--in other words, finding out what drives a region's biodiversity--is no small task.
What The Study Did: An observational study of nearly 1,700 young healthy Danish men looked at how fish oil supplements were associated with testicular function as measured by semen quality and reproductive hormone levels. Limitations of this study include a lack of information on the actual concentration of omega-3 fatty acids in the fish oil supplements self-reported by the men. Researchers suggest randomized clinical trials are needed.
Imagine taking a hike through a forest or a stroll through a zoo and not a sound fills the air, other than the occasional chirp from a cricket. No birds singing, no tigers roaring, no monkeys chattering, and no human voices, either. Acoustic communication among vertebrate animals is such a familiar experience that it seems impossible to imagine a world shrouded in silence.
Research conducted at Swansea University and the University of Milan has shown that students who use digital technology excessively are less motivated to engage with their studies, and are more anxious about tests. This effect was made worse by the increased feelings of loneliness that use of digital technology produced.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurobiological disorder characterized by symptoms of hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity. People with the condition are often prescribed a stimulant drug called methylphenidate, which treats these symptoms. However, scientists do not fully understand how the drug works.
New research overturns the belief that people with severe mental illness are incapable of effective communication with their psychiatrist, and are able to work together with them to achieve better outcomes for themselves.
"Interviews are a critical part of assessing people suffering from thought disorder (TD), and deciding what the best therapy is for them," says Professor Cherrie Galletly from the Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide.
Roughness, the presence of irregularities on a surface, is commonly associated to slower motion and stickiness. This is true at different length scales: at human size (1 meter), it takes longer to walk along a path that goes up and down, rather than walking on a flat road. At the size of smaller objects (1/100 - 1/1000 meter), Italians use pasta shapes with a rough surface, e.g. rigatoni, to make better adhesive surfaces for the tomato sauce and cheese. Till now, however, no experiment was able to test if the behavior of molecules really follows the same trend observed at human scale.
Researchers of the ICAI Group -Computational Intelligence and Image Analysis- of the University of Malaga (UMA) have designed an unprecedented method that is capable of improving brain images obtained through magnetic resonance imaging using artificial intelligence.
This new model manages to increase image quality from low resolution to high resolution without distorting the patients' brain structures, using a deep learning artificial neural network -a model that is based on the functioning of the human brain- that "learns" this process.
The human-caused biodiversity decline started much earlier than researchers used to believe. According to a new study published in the scientific journal Ecology Letters the process was not started by our own species but by some of our ancestors.
The work was done by an international team of scientists from Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The researchers point out in the study that the ongoing biological diversity crisis is not a new phenomenon, but represents an acceleration of a process that human ancestors began millions of years ago.
Astrophysics, Galaxies: The most distant dying galaxy discovered so far, more massive than our Milky Way -- with more than a trillion stars -- has revealed that the 'cores' of these systems had formed already 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years earlier than previous measurements revealed. The discovery will add to our knowledge on the formation of the Universe more generally, and may cause the computer models astronomers use, one of the most fundamental tools, to be revised.