Eurekalert

A scientific team has shown that the release of neurotransmitters in the brain is impaired in patients with schizophrenia who have a rare, single-gene mutation known to predispose people to a range of neurodevelopmental disorders.

An international grassroots-funded multicenter clinical trial found that giving a full dose of heparin early to moderately ill hospitalized COVID-19 patients reduced the odds of all-cause death by 78 percent.

Solving structures of potential therapeutics using X-ray diffraction (XRD) is usually a pivotal step in drug development. But XRD generally requires large, well-ordered crystals. Advancements in automated data collection and processing have increased interest in electron diffraction as an XRD alternative. Electron diffraction uses a beam of electrons rather than X-rays to obtain structures. Here researchers present a new drug development pipeline using electron diffraction for use when XRD may not be an option.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix defines a mechanistic role for an understudied bacteria family in gynecologic disease.

Astronomers see many periodic emissions from space, typically caused by rotation of stars and often very regular. UC Berkeley astrophysicists noticed a unique periodicity in the soft gamma ray emissions from a magnetar located in our galaxy. The soft gamma repeater SGR1935+2154 appears to emit bursts only within regularly spaced windows, and is inactive in between. Based on their analysis, they predicted a resumption of bursts last month; so far, a dozen have been detected.

To understand how the University of Washington's transition to online-only classes affected college students' mental health in the spring of 2020, UW researchers surveyed 147 UW undergraduates over the 2020 spring quarter.

The study was conducted in the city of São Paulo, with over 2,000 participants who were active or retired staff of the University of São Paulo and enrolled in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brazil). The researchers say the city has one of the highest prevalence rates of psychiatric disorders in the world.

Cancer survivors ages 18 to 64 faced fewer financial barriers to health care after the Affordable Care Act was implemented than they did before the landmark law took effect, University of Michigan researchers found.In fact, they believe the ACA helped the financial burden (problems related to the cost of medical care) for younger cancer survivors fall to its lowest estimated levels in 20 years.

In a new study of adults from the general population who were infected with COVID-19 in 2020, more than a quarter report not having fully recovered after six to eight months. Those findings are described this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Milo Puhan and colleagues at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Males with COVID-19 had significantly higher rates of hospitalization and of transfer to the intensive care unit (ICU) according to a new study. A higher percentage of males died of COVID-19 compared to females

A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new research pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. It also suggests humans may share the same neural bias.

An international team of researchers recently developed and experimentally demonstrated a spectral-volumetric (SV) CUP system that can simultaneously capture 5D information with a single snapshot measurement.

Compared with heterosexual smokers, menthol cigarette smoking is higher among lesbian, gay and bisexual cigarette smokers, according to a Rutgers-led study, especially among bisexual and lesbian/gay female cigarette smokers.

Children exposed to elevated levels of air pollution may be more likely to have poor inhibitory control during late childhood and poor academic skills in early adolescence, including spelling, reading comprehension, and math skills. Difficulty with inhibition in late childhood was found to be a precursor to later air pollution-related academic problems. Interventions that target inhibitory control might improve outcomes.

Infant boys with a higher composition of a particular gut microbiota show enhanced neurodevelopment, according to a new University of Alberta-led study.

Humans have known for over two thousand years that shipworms, a worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats, docks, dikes and piers. Yet new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst published in Frontiers in Microbiology reveals that we still don't know the most basic thing about them: how they eat.

Farmers markets and roadside stands are more successful in communities with more nonprofits, social enterprises and creative industries, according to a new Cornell University study.

An estimated 43 percent of variability in U.S. COVID-19 mortality is linked with county-level socioeconomic indicators and health vulnerabilities, with the strongest association seen in the proportions of people living with chronic kidney disease and living in nursing homes. The study by Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health researchers suggests that allocating vaccines based on these factors could help minimize severe outcomes, particularly deaths. Results are published in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine.

COVID-19 vaccination strategies in the United States are informed by individual characteristics such as age and occupation. A study published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Sasikiran Kandula and Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University, New York, United States suggests that including socioeconomic indicators as prioritization criteria for vaccination may help minimize severe outcomes, particularly deaths.

Neural plasticity depends on a reliable delivery team of Kinesin protein KIF5C to carry goods like RNA from cell body to synapse, a new study finds.