Eurekalert

Toyohashi University of Technology used a next-generation sequencer to develop a highly efficient method to analyze soil nematodes by using the 18S ribosomal RNA gene regions as DNA barcodes. They successfully used this method to reveal characteristics of nematode communities. The target will be expanded to cover all soil-dwelling organisms in agricultural soils to allow investigations into a soil's environment and bio-diversity. This is expected to contribute to advanced agriculture.

A team of scientists from Osaka University, Osaka Prefecture University, and Nagoya University created three-dimensional maps of the force fields around quantum dots caused by laser light. Using atomic force microscopy with frequency modulation, they were able to achieve spatial resolution of less than one nanometer for the first time. This work may greatly advance the fields of nanotechnology and photocatalysis.

The American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP) has released the updated 2021 AAFP Feline Senior Care Guidelines to be published in the July issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery. This update provides emerging advances in feline medicine with respect to the aging cat. The Task Force of experts provides a thorough current review in feline medicine that emphasizes the individual senior patient.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown in preclinical studies conducted in mice and human cells that a type of immunotherapy based on natural killer cells could be effective against solid tumors, starting with melanoma, a type of skin cancer that can be deadly if not caught early.

"The question has always been how do we predict what's going to happen once an infectious disease emerges," said Kathleen Alexander, the William E. Lavery Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. "By using systems that are tractable, we can begin to learn a lot more about how disease dynamics are shaped by host behavior and environmental drivers, including urbanizing landscapes."

Neoadjuvant immune checkpoint blockade is a promising treatment for melanoma and other cancer types, and has recently been shown to provide a modest survival benefit for patients with recurrent glioblastoma. To improve the treatment efficacy, researchers are looking for vulnerabilities in surgically removed glioblastoma tissues, but this has been difficult due to the vast differences within the tumor and between patients. To address this challenge, ISB researchers and their collaborators developed a new way to study tumors.

Chronic pain, depression, anxiety, and other symptom-based conditions are growing in prevalence. Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Kurt Kroenke, M.D., writes in the Journal of General Internal Medicine how collaborative care can and should play a major role targeting the treatment of symptoms and functional decline, both too frequently marginalized in medically oriented care delivery.

Historically, most large-scale immunogenomic studies - those exploring the association between genes and disease - were conducted with a bias toward individuals of European ancestry. Corey T. Watson, Ph.D., assistant professor in the University of Louisville Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, is leading a call to actively diversify the genetic resources he and fellow immunogenomics researchers use in their work to advance genomic medicine more equitably.

Another missing piece has just been added to our knowledge of cosmic phenomena. The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations have announced the first detection of gravitational waves resulting from the 'mixed' merger between a black hole and a neutron star. The discovery, published on June 29, 2021 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, involves CNRS researchers working within the Virgo scientific collaboration.

Discovered by an international team of astrophysicists including Northwestern University researchers, two events -- detected just 10 days apart -- mark the first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star. The findings will enable researchers to draw the first conclusions about the origins of these rare binary systems and how often they merge.

For the first time, researchers have confirmed the detection of a collision between a black hole and a neutron star. In fact, the scientists detected not one but two such events occurring just 10 days apart in January 2020.

Researchers from the University of Washington provide a first look at the probability of observing common birds as air pollution worsens during wildfire seasons. They found that smoke affected the ability to detect more than a third of the bird species studied in Washington state over a four-year period. Sometimes smoke made it harder to observe birds, while other species were actually easier to detect when smoke was present.

Scientists have for the first time detected black holes eating neutron stars, "like Pac Man", in a discovery documenting the collision of the two most extreme and enigmatic objects in the Universe.

Heart attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to result in heart failure compared with heart attacks one year earlier, according to research presented today at Heart Failure 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). 'Heart attack patients waited an average of 14 hours to get help during the pandemic, with some delaying for nearly two days. That compares to a delay of six hours in the previous year.'

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have identified a protein that could be used to aid in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.

Studies indicate that the optimal and safe number of oocytes needed for achieving an ongoing pregnancy is between six and 15. A retrospective observational study suggests that IVF clinics in the UK may be retrieving "far too many oocytes" and that most of them "may never be used and are probably discarded".

Some neuroscience theories suggest the human brain operates best 'at the edge of chaos'. Now scientists in Australia and Japan have found that keeping a nanowire network at the edge of becoming chaotic is the best state for it to produce useful signals to solve problems.

New biomarkers that predict HIV remission after antiretroviral therapy (ART) interruption are critical for the development of new therapeutic strategies that can achieve infection control without ART, a condition defined as functional cure. Wistar scientists have identified metabolic and glycomic signatures in the blood of a rare population of HIV-infected individuals who can naturally sustain viral suppression after ART cessation, known as post-treatment controllers.

Fertility patients who have a poor response to ovarian stimulation represent a stubborn challenge in IVF. Clinical guidelines indicate that increasing the drug dose for stimulation or applying any of several adjunct therapies are of little benefit. A study assessing two cycles of ovarian stimulation and two egg collections in the same menstrual cycle may yet provide a real advance for predicted poor responders in IVF.

After centuries of human impact on the world's ecosystems, a new study from Flinders University details an example of how a common native bee species has flourished since the very first land clearances by humans on Fiji. In a new paper in Molecular Ecology, research led by Flinders University explores a link between the expansion of Homalictus fijiensis, a common bee, which has increased its spread on the main island Viti Levu alongside advancing land clearance and the introduction of new plants and weeds.