Earth
A new study led by University of Ottawa epidemiologist Dr. Ian Colman suggests non-suicidal self-injury--behaviours like cutting oneself without the intent to die--may be contagious among teenagers, who are more likely to harm themselves when they know someone who has.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A class of compounds used for malaria treatment also kill the intestinal parasite Cryptosporidium, a leading cause of diarrheal disease and death in children that has no cure, a multi-institution collaboration of researchers found in a new study.
The compounds, called bicyclic azetidines, specifically target an enzyme responsible for protein production within the parasite, the authors report in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
DALLAS - Oct. 1, 2020 - When newborn babies or children with heart or lung distress are struggling to survive, doctors often turn to a form of life support that uses artificial lungs. This treatment, called Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), has been credited with saving countless lives. But in some cases, it can also lead to long-term brain injury.
Manatees don't live year-round in Texas, but these gentle, slow-moving sea cows are known to occasionally visit, swimming in for a "summer vacation" from Florida and Mexico and returning to warmer waters for the winter.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Repeated catastrophic ice discharges from western North America into the North Pacific contributed to, and perhaps triggered, hemispheric-scale changes in the Earth's climate during the last ice age, new research published online today in Science reveals.
The discovery provides new insight into the impact rapidly melting ice flowing into the North Pacific may have on the climate across the planet, said Maureen Walczak, a paleoclimatologist in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and the study's lead author.
Research by an international team of scientists found that the steady, centuries-long increase in insect invasions globally is likely to continue. Using a new modelling approach to simulate non-native insect species numbers on continents for different taxonomic groups based on observed long-term historic trends, scientists established that biological invasions will increase by 36 percent between 2005 and 2050.
Modeling suggests that Europe is likely to experience the strongest biological invasions, followed by Asia, North America and South America.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego report in a new study a way to improve groundwater monitoring by using a remote sensing technology (known as InSAR), in conjunction with climate and land cover data, to bridge gaps in the understanding of sustainable groundwater in California's San Joaquin Valley.
Experts in Japan have devised a simple way to glean more detailed information out of standard medical imaging scans. A research team made up of atomic physicists and nuclear medicine experts at the University of Tokyo and the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) has designed a timer that can enable positron emission tomography (PET) scanners to detect the oxygen concentration of tissues throughout patients' bodies. This upgrade to PET scanners may lead to a future of better cancer treatment by quickly identifying parts of tumors with more aggressive cell growth.
Professor Andreas Reiner and Stefan Pollok from the junior research group Cellular Neurobiology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) report on this unexpected finding and the underlying mechanisms in the journal PNAS from 30 September 2020.
Wanted: more precise drugs
Strictly speaking, humans cannot digest complex carbohydrates -- that's the job of bacteria in our large intestines. UC Riverside scientists have just discovered a new group of viruses that attack these bacteria.
The viruses, and the way they evade counterattack by their bacterial hosts, are described in a new Cell Reports paper.
A Hokkaido University research group has successfully demonstrated that carbon-carbon (C-C) covalent bonds expand and contract flexibly in response to light and heat. This unexpected flexibility of C-C bonds could confer new properties to organic compounds.
Rigid and robust, C-C covalent bonds are the most basic structure in organic and biological compounds. Understanding their nature is essential to improving our knowledge of chemical phenomena.
Professor Audrey van der Meer at NTNU believes that national guidelines should be put into place to ensure that children receive at least a minimum of handwriting training.
Results from several studies have shown that both children and adults learn more and remember better when writing by hand.
Now another study confirms the same: choosing handwriting over keyboard use yields the best learning and memory.
Van der Meer and her colleagues have investigated this several times, first in 2017 and now in 2020.
Many of our children play a lot of computer games. Some youth play so much and develop such big problems that a new diagnosis called Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) has been proposed.
Symptoms of a gaming disorder include that it has an impact on school, work or friendships, that we continue to play even though we know it creates problems, that we are unable to stop or reduce the activity, we lose interest in other activities and that we lie about how much we play.
Over the last few decades, there has been growing concern about loneliness across all ages, particularly in middle-aged and older adults. Loneliness, defined as feeling isolated or not having an adequate number of meaningful personal connections, is consistently associated with unhealthy aging and has been identified as a major risk factor for overall adverse health outcomes.
Bolometers are devices that measure the power of incident electromagnetic radiation thru the heating of materials, which exhibit a temperature-electric resistance dependence. These instruments are among the most sensitive detectors so far used for infrared radiation detection and are key tools for applications that range from advanced thermal imaging, night vision, infrared spectroscopy to observational astronomy, to name a few.