Culture
Hip fractures in older adults can be extremely serious, and often result in chronic illness, death, and increased health care costs. Experts estimate that some 18 to 33 percent of all older adults who have suffered hip fractures will die within a year, with even higher rates of death among people who have dementia or who live in a nursing home.
For the last quarter century, researchers have been asking whether genetic information might have negative psychosocial effects. Anxiety, depression, disrupted relationships, and heightened stigmatization have all been posited as possible outcomes--but not consistently found. What accounts for the discrepancy?
The towering, hundred-year-old Sitka spruce trees growing in the heart of Vancouver Island's Carmanah Valley appear placid and unchanging.
In reality, each one is packed to the rafters with evolutionary potential.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Numerous studies show that the legacy of hardship can be passed from one generation to the next. The good news is that resilience can cross generations too.
Bottom Line: An observational study of 663 caregivers and the patients with dementia they care for suggests caregiver depression is associated with increased emergency department visits for their patients. A total of 84 caregivers had depression at the study start and it was associated with an increase in rates of emergency department use by patients after accounting for a number of other potential mitigating factors including patient age and the severity of dementia. There were 196 patients with dementia who had at least one emergency department visit in the first six months of the study.
Bottom Line: This research letter reports on the association between the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana and teen marijuana use. Researchers used data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys from 1993 to 2017, when 27 states and Washington, D.C., contributed data to the survey before and after medical marijuana laws were adopted and seven states contributed data before and after recreational marijuana laws were adopted. More than 1.4 million high school students were included in the final study.
What The Study Did: This observational study used data from a survey of behavioral health that included students from 10 Los Angeles-area high schools to examine whether nonmedical prescription opioid use was associated with later risk of heroin use in adolescents.
Author: Adam M. Leventhal, Ph.D., of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.1750)
Scientists have pinpointed the "pace" and "shape" of life as the two key elements in animal life cycles that affect how different species get by in the world. Their findings, which come from a detailed assessment of 121 species ranging from humans to sponges, may have important implications for conservation strategies and for predicting which species will be the winners and losers from the global environment crisis.
Supercomputer simulations of galaxies have shown that Einstein's theory of General Relativity might not be the only way to explain how gravity works or how galaxies form.
Physicists at Durham University, UK, simulated the cosmos using an alternative model for gravity - f(R)-gravity, a so called Chameleon Theory.
The resulting images produced by the simulation show that galaxies like our Milky Way could still form in the universe even with different laws of gravity.
With little cases of ethanol to preserve tissue samples for total genomic DNA analysis, a trio covered much ground in the mountains of Japan and Korea to elucidate the evolution of the scorpionfly. The rugged scientists set out to use molecular phylogenetic analysis to show that the "alpine" type of scorpionfly and "general" type must be different species. After all, the alpine type exhibit shorter wings than the general type, and alpine type females also have very dark and distinct markings on their wings.
However, what they found in the DNA surprised them.
A global survey shows that a family of gut bacteria viruses called crAssphage is found in people - and their sewage - all over the world. Closely related viruses are found in monkeys and apes, so crAssphage has probably been with us for millions of years. These viruses are called phages, and they reproduce in bacterial cells, not in human cells. They make up the majority of gut viruses in healthy people. The work was published July 8 in the journal Nature Microbiology.
A new breakthrough has the potential to improve sensors used to test for diseases and detect doping in sports.
An international research team led by scientists from Lancaster University have created a coating only one molecule thick that modifies the surface of sensor electrodes.
Quantum computing and quantum information processing technology have attracted attention in recently emerging fields. Among many important and fundamental issues in nowadays science, solving Schroedinger Equation (SE) of atoms and molecules is one of the ultimate goals in chemistry, physics and their related fields. SE is "First Principle" of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, whose solutions termed wave functions can afford any information of electrons within atoms and molecules, predicting their physicochemical properties and chemical reactions.
The group of professor Ilari Maasilta at the Nanoscience Center, University of Jyväskylä specializes on studying how different nanostructures can be used to enhance or impede the transport of heat. The group's latest results, published in the journal Physical Review Applied on the 3rd of July, 2019, confirm its earlier observations that by using the wave nature of heat in holey nanostructures heat conduction can be reduced by over hundredfold.
Theranostics is an emerging field of medicine whose name is a combination of "therapeutics" and "diagnostics". The idea behind theranostics is to combine drugs and/or techniques to simultaneously - or sequentially - diagnose and treat medical conditions, and also monitor the response of the patient. This saves time and money, but can also bypass some of the undesirable biological effects that may arise when these strategies are employed separately.