Culture
Oakland, Calif. -- Researchers have developed a new analytical tool that identifies people at risk of contracting HIV so they may be referred for preventive medication. A study describing the tool was published July 5, 2019, in The Lancet HIV by investigators at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco, the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School.
Boredom is a common human experience. But how people cope with or handle being bored is important for mental health.
"Everybody experiences boredom," said Sammy Perone, Washington State University assistant professor in the Department of Human Development. "But some people experience it a lot, which is unhealthy. So, we wanted to look at how to deal with it effectively."
The brains of people who are prone to boredom react differently, compared to those who don't, Perone and his colleagues found in a new paper recently published in the journal Psychophysiology.
By combining two well-established antibiotics for the first time, a scientific team led by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center has delivered a "double whammy" against the pervasive Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a potentially deadly form of bacteria that is a major source of hospital-based infections.
Irvine, Calif., July 8, 2019 -- University of California, Irvine researchers have developed and tested on mice a therapeutic treatment that uses engineered stem cells to target and kill cancer bone metastases while preserving the bone.
DUARTE, Calif. — A special blood test may one day predict if a newly diagnosed breast cancer patient will likely relapse years later, a City of Hope study suggests.
The risk of developing Alzheimer's disease increases with age. Susanne Wegmann of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Berlin and colleagues have uncovered a possible cause for this connection: Certain molecules involved in the disease, termed tau-proteins, spread more easily in the aging brain. This has been determined in laboratory experiments. The current study was carried out in close collaboration with researchers in the US at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
WASHINGTON (July 8, 2019) -- Collagen powder is just as effective in managing skin biopsy wounds as primary closure with non-absorbable sutures, according to a first-of-its-kind study published in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology by a team of physician researchers at the George Washington University.
A new paper to be published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History integrates 20 years of research by a diverse scientific team and describes the ancient Trans-Saharan Seaway of Africa that existed 50 to 100 million years ago in the region of the current Sahara Desert.
LOWELL, Mass. - Eggshells can enhance the growth of new, strong bones needed in medical procedures, a team of UMass Lowell researchers has discovered.
The technique developed by UMass Lowell could one day be applied to repair bones in patients with injuries due to aging, accidents, cancer and other diseases or in military combat, according to Assistant Prof. Gulden Camci-Unal, who is leading the study.
A sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball garnered YouTube fame and headlines a decade ago for his uncanny ability to dance to the beat of the Backstreet Boys. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on July 8 are back with new evidence that Snowball isn't limited in his dance moves. Despite a lack of dance training, new videos show that Snowball responds to music with diverse and spontaneous movements using various parts of his body.
ITHACA, N.Y. - A new Cornell University-led study describes the first successful rearing of engineered tobacco plants in order to produce medical and industrial proteins outdoors in the field, a necessity for economic viability, so they can be grown at large scales.
The market for such biologically derived proteins is forecast to reach $300 billion in the near future. Industrial enzymes and other proteins are currently made in large, expensive fermenting reactors, but making them in plants grown outdoors could reduce production costs by three times.
Many familiar grains today, like quinoa, amaranth, and the millets, hemp, and buckwheat, all have traits that indicate that they coevolved to be dispersed by large grazing mammals. During the Pleistocene, massive herds directed the ecology across much of the globe and caused evolutionary changes in plants. Studies of the ecology and growing habits of certain ancient crop relatives indicate that megafaunal herds were necessary for the dispersal of their seeds prior to human intervention.
The positive-phase of Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can indeed cause Eurasian summer nonuniform warming, according to Prof. Shuanglin Li, Dean of Atmospheric Science at the University of Geosciences (Wuhan) and Executive Vice-Director at the Climate Change Research Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and one of the authors of a recently published study.
2019 A team of scientists led by Dr Enrique Lara Pezzi at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) has identified the RNA-binding protein SRSF3 as an essential factor for proper heart contraction and survival. In a study published in Circulation Research, the researchers found that loss of cardiac expression of SRSF3 leads to a critical reduction in the expression of genes involved in contraction. Knowledge of the mechanism of action of SRSF3 in the heart could open the way to the design of new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of heart disease.
A survey of more than 3,400 university students in the USA has found that one in five respondents reported problematic smartphone use. Female students were more likely be affected and problematic smartphone use was associated with lower grade averages, mental health problems and higher numbers of sexual partners.