Culture
Salt intake in China is confirmed to be among the highest in the world, with adults over the past four decades consistently consuming on average above 10g of salt a day, which is more than twice the recommended limit, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London.
A programme of therapy and coping strategies for people who care for family members with dementia successfully improves the carers' mental health for at least a six-year follow-up, finds a UCL study.
Carers who took part in the programme were five times less likely to have clinically significant depression than carers who were not offered the therapy, according to the findings published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
The intervention has also been shown to be cost-effective in a prior study.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
have made the first-ever observations of a circumplanetary disk, the planet-girding belt of dust and gas that astronomers strongly theorize controls the formation of planets and gives rise to an entire system of moons, like those found around Jupiter.
Most mammalian new mums are fiercely protective of their precious offspring; even 5-8 m long southern right whale calves are vulnerable to attack by voracious killer whales. Mia Nielsen from Aarhus University, Denmark, explains that whale mothers and calves often try to hide from predators by gravitating to cloudy water. But the loss of visual contact could force mothers and their young to call to each other more, increasing the risk of attracting the wrong attention.
The keeping of livestock began in the Ancient Near East and underpinned the emergence of complex economies and then cities. Subsequently, it is there that the world's first empires rose and fell. Now, ancient DNA has revealed how the prehistory of the region's largest domestic animal, the cow, chimes with these events.
An international team of geneticists, led by those from Trinity College Dublin, have deciphered early bovine prehistory by sequencing 67 ancient genomes from both wild and domestic cattle sampled from across eight millennia.
Sequencing a genome is getting cheaper, but making sense of the resulting data remains hard. Researchers have now found a new way to extract useful information out of sequenced DNA.
By cataloging subtle evolutionary signatures shared between pairs of genes in bacteria, the team was able to discover hundreds of previously unknown protein interactions. This method is now being applied to the human genome, and could produce new insights into how human proteins interact.
The relapse of brain tumors after therapy is driven by cancer stem cells that were not affected by the treatment. In mouse models of glioblastoma, scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) were now looking for molecular markers that specifically characterize brain tumor stem cells. They identified an enzyme that is responsible for the threatening stem cell properties of glioblastoma and at the same time represents a possible "Achilles heel" where cancer stem cells could be vulnerable.
CRISPR-based tools have revolutionized our ability to target disease-linked genetic mutations. CRISPR technology comprises a growing family of tools that can manipulate genes and their expression, including by targeting DNA with the enzymes Cas9 and Cas12 and targeting RNA with the enzyme Cas13. This collection offers different strategies for tackling mutations. Targeting disease-linked mutations in RNA, which is relatively short-lived, would avoid making permanent changes to the genome.
A new type of therapeutic food, specifically designed to repair the gut microbiomes of malnourished children, is superior to standard therapy in an initial clinical trial conducted in Bangladesh.
A team of paleontologists led by Prof. Jingmai O'Connor from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with researchers from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature, have discovered a new specimen of the volant dromaeosaurid Microraptor zhaoianus with the remains of a nearly complete lizard preserved in its stomach. Their findings were published in Current Biology.
Three papers in this issue demonstrate new fiber-based designs within the world of artificial muscles, showing how these twisted and coiled designs can be controlled via heat, electricity and chemistry. The resulting artificial muscle material could find uses in miniaturized medical devices, microrobots, and "smart" textiles that respond to environmental changes, among other applications.
A new genome-wide analysis by Marta Pereira Verdugo and colleagues uncovers the complex origins of domestic cattle (Bos taurus), demonstrating why it has been difficult to untangle these origins from studies of modern breeds. Cattle were first domesticated around 10,500 years ago from the extinct Eurasian auroch, Bos primigenius, in northern Mesopotamia. By comparing the auroch genome to the genomes of 67 ancient Bos taurus specimens from archaeological sites in the Near East, Verdugo et al.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have uncovered striking similarities in how two distantly related plants defend themselves against pathogens despite splitting from their common ancestor more than 400 million years ago.
What The Study Did: Photographs of 24 men before and after facial cosmetic surgery were part of this survey study to examine whether surgery was associated with perceived changes in attractiveness, masculinity and a variety of personality traits.
The study was carried out in the Dulbecco Telethon Laboratory of Prions & Amyloids at CIBIO, lead by Emiliano Biasini, University of Trento and involved the team led by Prof. Pietro Faccioli, a physicist from the same university and affiliated to the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.