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BOSTON - New treatments for Alzheimer's disease are desperately needed, but numerous clinical trials of investigational drugs have failed to generate promising options. Now a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an artificial intelligence-based method to screen currently available medications as possible treatments for Alzheimer's disease. The method could represent a rapid and inexpensive way to repurpose existing therapies into new treatments for this progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative condition.
There is no stronger risk factor for cancer than age. At the time of diagnosis, the median age of patients across all cancers is 66. That moment, however, is the culmination of years of clandestine tumor growth, and the answer to an important question has thus far remained elusive: When does a cancer first arise?
At least in some cases, the original cancer-causing mutation could have appeared as long as 40 years ago, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
ITHACA, N.Y. - Close friends are important drivers of adolescent behavior, including college attendance, according to Steven Alvarado, assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
A new study reveals that a precarious, unstable initiation by young people to working life is associated with poorer future mental health. The study was conducted by researchers from the Center for Research in Occupational Health (CISAL, a joint group of UPF and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) in Barcelona, Spain. Amaya Ayala-Garcia, Laura Serra and Mònica Ubalde-López are the authors of the study, which has been published in the journal BMJ Open.
A research team of pharmacists at the University of Bonn has discovered two families of active substances that can block the replication of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The drug candidates are able to switch off the the key enzyme of the virus, the so-called main protease. The study is based on laboratory experiments. Extensive clinical trials are still required for their further development as therapeutic drugs. The results have now been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Gas around black holes and interstellar medium distribution are key factors in understanding the growth of supermassive black holes and the evolution of their host galaxies. However, as a crucial parameter, gas density is hard to be determined reliably, because the general method is not applicable to all quasars.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Boron, a metalloid element that sits next to carbon in the periodic table, has many traits that make it potentially useful as a drug component. Nonetheless, only five FDA-approved drugs contain boron, largely because molecules that contain boron are unstable in the presence of molecular oxygen.
MIT chemists have now designed a boron-containing chemical group that is 10,000 times more stable than its predecessors. This could make it possible to incorporate boron into drugs and potentially improve the drugs' ability to bind their targets, the researchers say.
Land stores vast amounts of carbon, but a new study led by Cranfield University's Dr Alice Johnston suggests that how much of this carbon enters the atmosphere as temperatures rise depends on how far that land sits from the equator.
Ecosystems on land are made up of plants, soils, animals, and microbes - all growing, reproducing, dying, and breathing in a common currency; carbon. And how much of that carbon is breathed out (also known as ecosystem respiration) compared to how much is stored (through primary production) has impacts for climate change.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 2.0°C and, ideally, to 1.5°C, over preindustrial levels. However, even before that treaty was signed, scientists had already warned that those "best case" targets were unlikely to be achievable. Consequently, many fire weather studies are built with models that simulate much higher levels of climate warming.
"What scientists have achieved in a year since the discovery of a brand-new virus is truly remarkable," says Emma Hodcroft from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM) of the University of Bern, first author on the piece, "but the tools scientists are using to study how SARS-CoV-2 is transmitting and changing were never designed for the unique pressures - or volumes of data - of this pandemic."
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Depression can be a common problem for teens and adolescents, and while many treatments exist, they don't always work for everyone. A new study found that feeling more informed about their health may help teens take better care of themselves, leading to less depressive symptoms.
The researchers also found that trust played a factor in whether receiving health information improved depression. The more that adolescents trusted their parents or teacher as a credible source of health information, the more likely they were to experience less depression.
A recent analysis of the latest generation of climate models -- known as a CMIP6 -- provides a cautionary tale on interpreting climate simulations as scientists develop more sensitive and sophisticated projections of how the Earth will respond to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
(Boston)--Children in Zambia under age 5 die at a rate that is between nearly six to more than 10 times higher than those in the U.S; it is estimated at 40-75 per 1000, compared to 6.98 per 1000. Identifying why these children are dying is the mission of Rotem Lapidot, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM).
Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease are in the firing line after researchers identified an attractive therapeutic drug target.
An international collaboration, co-led by University of Queensland researchers, has isolated and analysed the structure and function of a protein found in the brain's nerve fibres called SARM1.
Dr Jeff Nanson said the protein was activated when nerve fibres were damaged by injury, disease, or as a side effect of certain drugs.
The first proof of the origin of malignant rhabdoid tumour (MRT), a rare childhood cancer, has been discovered by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands, and their collaborators.