Culture
Beneficial strains of bacteria residing in our guts, genital tracts, and skin have been shown to play a role in human health, and now, researchers publishing May 26 in the journal Cell Reports suggest that some of these "good" bacteria also have a niche in our noses. They found that people with chronic nasal and sinus inflammation had fewer lactobacilli in their upper respiratory tract than healthy controls and were able to identify a specific strain of the bacteria that has evolved to better survive the oxygen-rich environment of the nose.
What The Study Did: The fit and filtration efficiency of disposable N95 masks after sterilization by cobalt-60 gamma irradiation are examined in this quality improvement study.
Authors: Avilash Cramer, M.S., of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology in Charlestown, Massachusetts, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.9961)
Bottom Line: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has concluded that current evidence is insufficient to make a recommendation regarding primary care-based behavioral counseling interventions to prevent illicit drug use (including nonmedical use of prescription drugs) in children, adolescents and young adults. The USPSTF routinely makes recommendations about the effectiveness of preventive care services and this recommendation is consistent with its 2014 statement, although it now includes young adults ages 18-25.
What The Study Did: This randomized clinical trial evaluated the effect of a workplace wellness program that included health screenings, wellness activities and financial incentives on employee health, health beliefs and medical use after 12 and 24 months among 4,800 employees at a large U.S. university.
Authors: David Molitor, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the corresponding author.
The UK has the highest level of obesity in Europe, in fact it's estimated half the population could be obese by 2050. Obesity is a significant risk factor for increased morbidity and mortality
Fasting, has been a trend in recent years to maintain a healthy weight, the body responds to fasting using autophagy, a cellular self-recycling process
The proteins required for autophagy to work during fasting have been identified by researchers from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick
WASHINGTON, May 26, 2020 -- Affecting up to 4% of patients older than 65 years, atrial fibrillation ranks among the most common heart conditions. Described by health professionals as an "irregularly irregular" heart rhythm, episodes of atrial fibrillation continue to prove difficult to predict.
Early Muslim communities in Africa ate a cosmopolitan diet as the region became a trading centre for luxury goods, the discovery of thousands of ancient animal bones has shown.
Halal butchery practices became common when Islam spread through Ethiopia as vibrant communities developed because of the import and export of products around the Red Sea, and to Egypt, India, and the Arabian Peninsula, archaeologists have found.
This release has been removed by request of the submitting institution. Please contact Valérie Geneux for more information: valerie.geneux@epfl.ch
Smart devices that measure electrical signals from your skin have the potential to tell you about your stress levels, help your sports performances and allow you to track your emotions.
Many businesses turned to remote workers to continue their operations after states issued stay-at-home orders to reduce COVID-19 infections, a trend that is likely to accelerate long after the coronavirus is controlled.
To help companies ease the transition online, USC researchers studied the challenges to increasing the use of crowdwork -- a manifestation of the gig economy in which companies offer ad-hoc, mundane tasks to prospects via a website. The move minimizes disruptions that organizations would experience as a result of COVID-19 or other crises.
What is important when you choose a home? Space, security, light - or a combination of these? Like humans, animals make choices about where to live that have important implications for their livelihoods. But unlike humans, animals do not easily reveal the basis of their choice.
The transmission of cultures from generation-to-generation is only found in a few species besides humans. Chimpanzees are one such species and exhibit a large diversity of cultural and tool use behaviours. Although these behaviours have been well documented at a handful of long term research sites, the true cultural repertoire of chimpanzees across populations is still poorly understood.
You may like them or not, but almost everyone knows them: brown algae such as Fucus vesiculosus, commonly known as bladderwrack, grow along the entire German coast. Giant kelp like Macrocystis or Sargassum grow closely together along the coasts but can also form floating aggregates that can cover the Atlantic from west to east. Some ecologists see this this very productive ecosystem as a marine counterpart to rainforests on land. In these algal forests, large amounts of carbon dioxide are stored, making them an important part of the global carbon cycle.
Besides being a major threat to biodiversity, the wildlife trade can be a cause of global public health issues and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage around the world from disease outbreaks, as might be the case for COVID-19. Despite its major ecological and socio-economic importance, no comprehensive analysis has been made of the global patterns of the wildlife trade.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a new sequencing method that makes it possible to map how DNA is spatially organised in the cell nucleus - revealing which genomic regions are at higher risk of mutation and DNA damage. The technique is described in an article published in the scientific journal Nature Biotechnology.
Most cells in the human body contain approximately two metres of DNA. This long stretch of DNA is divided in 46 large pieces - the chromosomes - which occupy discrete regions of the cell nucleus known as chromosome territories.