Culture
DALLAS, April 29, 2020 -- Using e-cigarettes damages the arteries and blood vessel function much like smoking traditional cigarettes, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association, and funded through the Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science of the American Heart Association, the leading voluntary health organization devoted to a world of longer, healthier lives.
A new article published in Nature Communications applies stable isotope analysis to a collection of fossil human teeth from the islands of Timor and Alor in Wallacea to study the ecological adaptations of the earliest members of our species to reach this isolated part of the world. Because the Wallacean islands are considered extreme, resource poor settings, archaeologists believed that early seafaring populations would have moved rapidly through this region without establishing permanent communities. Nevertheless, this has so far been difficult to test.
Developers may struggle to find enough land to offset the biodiversity impacts of future development, according to a University of Queensland study.
UQ's Dr Laura Sonter said the challenges were evident worldwide and could significantly limit the ability to achieve global conservation goals.
"Most countries now have offsetting policies requiring developers to revegetate or protect areas of habitat and ecosystems, to compensate for biodiversity losses caused by their projects," Dr Sonter said.
An international study led by Melbourne researchers has discovered nine new genes linked to the most severe type of childhood speech disorder, apraxia.
The research analysed the genetic make-up of 34 affected children and young people, and showed that variations in nine genes likely explained apraxia in 11 of them. The genetic variations were caused spontaneously and not inherited from their parents.
Men with a history of obesity in their late teens are, in adult life, more at risk of a blood clot (thrombus) in a leg or lung, according to a study from the University of Gothenburg study shows. The risk rises successively and is highest in those who were severely obese in adolescence.
A research team including research scientist Atsuko Kobayashi from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and research scientist Mizuho Koike from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have found nitrogen-bearing organic material in carbonate minerals in a Martian meteorite. This organic material has most likely been preserved for 4 billion years since Mars' Noachian age.
Last year, the 18th International Congress of Myriapodology brought together 92 of the world's top experts on the curious, yet still largely unknown multi-legged centipedes, millipedes, pauropods, symphylans (collectively referred to as myriapods) and velvet worms (onychophorans).
Results from a first-of-its-kind study of a multicancer blood test in more than 9,900 women with no evidence or history of cancer showed the liquid biopsy test safely detected 26 undiagnosed cancers, enabling potentially curative treatment.
A protein known to expand blood vessels -- key to controlling conditions like high blood pressure -- actually has different functions in males and females, new UC Davis Health research shows.
Conducted using arterial cells from mice, the study is the first to identify sex-based distinctions in how the protein --Kv2.1 -- works.
Kv2.1 is generally known to form calcium channels that dilate blood vessels. In arterial cells from female mice, however, it contracted blood vessels.
When people behave selfishly, they have a reliable ally to keep their self-image well-polished -- their own memory.
When asked to recall how generous they were in the past, selfish people tend to remember being more benevolent than they actually were, according to a series of experiments by Yale psychologists and economists at University of Zurich published April 29 in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers in South Korea have developed ultra-fast transmitting/receiving optical engine that can provide stable and improved data transfer speed for data centers.
In adult tissue, the number of cells in each tissues and organs remains constant, and any new cells produced by cell division need to be compensated by the loss of other cells. In contrast, during postnatal growth, an excess of cell production over cell loss is required to generate the excess of cells that ensure tissue expansion while maintaining tissue function. Very little is known about the mechanisms that ensure the postnatal growth from birth until adulthood.
A new study is among the first to trace the molecular connections between genetics, the gut microbiome and memory in a mouse model bred to resemble the diversity of the human population.
Researchers at the Radboud university medical center seem to have found an essential mechanism in the disease process of COVID-19, which has so far been overlooked. If the insight is correct, it probably has important consequences for the treatment of the disease. In an international collaborative effort it is now being investigated whether the new insights and treatments do indeed have an effect in practice.
For people with allergies, contact with pollen leads to symptoms such as sneezing, rhinitis and watery eyes. This may sound trivial, but is in fact a complex correlation of physiological processes. As these have not yet been fully understood, we do not know exactly yet how allergies develop and how the symptoms are triggered.
Symptoms can be predicted in advance