Earth
Over the last 20 years, three families have been unknowingly linked to one another by an unknown illness. Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and other organizations have now identified the cause of the illness, a new disease called CRIA syndrome. The results of their work were published in the journal Nature.
Discovering a new disease
A physically active lifestyle and a diet rich in vegetables and fruits have a central role in promoting health by preventing non-communicable diseases. A recent study carried out at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland examined the associations between diverse subgroups of leisure-time physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption from childhood to middle age.
Men and women from a South Asian background are more likely to develop a physical disability and struggle with day-to-day physical activities throughout adulthood compared with their White British counterparts, new research published in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences reports.
Most people associate the idea of creatures trapped in amber with insects or spiders, which are preserved lifelike in fossil tree resin. An international research team of palaeontologists and biologists from the Universities of Göttingen and Helsinki, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York has now discovered the oldest slime mould identified to date. The fossil is about 100 million years old and is exquisitely preserved in amber from Myanmar. The results have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
When you see someone being unfair, disloyal or uncaring toward others, do you feel a sense of moral outrage in the form of a twisting stomach, pounding heart or flushing face? And is it possible that your body's response depends on your political affiliation?
Researchers with the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) set out to examine how and where emotions associated with violations of moral concerns are experienced in the body, and whether political orientation plays a role.
A team headed by Professor Frank Stienkemeier at Freiburg's Institute of Physics and Dr. Marcel Mudrich, professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, has observed the ultrafast reaction of nanodroplets of helium after excitation with extreme ultraviolet radiation (XUV) using a free-electron laser in real time. The researchers have published their findings in the latest issue of Nature Communications.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 8, 2020) -- New research shows that the microorganisms in our gut could help protect brain cells from damage caused by inflammation after a stroke.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Kentucky's College of Medicine and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reveals that supplementing the body's short chain fatty acids could improve stroke recovery.
Exposure to asbestos is the major risk factor for malignant mesothelioma, a type of aggressive cancer that mostly affects the pleura - the tissue that lines the lungs - and the peritoneum - the tissue that lines the abdomen. This has been known for decades, yet the molecular characterisation of mesothelioma is barely known and treatment options are scarce.
ARLINGTON, Va., January 8, 2020 -- Numerous studies have shown that monitoring physical activity promotes better health - from reducing body mass index to watching for signs of hypertension, for example. A new study suggests step counters could play yet another role: predicting outcomes for people undergoing chemoradiation therapy for lung cancer.
A preliminary study by researchers at Uppsala University has found that when young, healthy men were deprived of just one night of sleep, they had higher levels of tau - a biomarker for Alzheimer's disease - in their blood than when they had a full, uninterrupted night of rest. The study is published in the medical journal Neurology.
All living organisms respond and adapt to changes in their environment. These responses are sometimes so significant that they cause alterations in the internal metabolic cycles of the organism--a process called "metabolic switching." For example, rice blast fungus--a pathogenic fungal species that causes the "rice blast" infection in rice crops--switches to the "glyoxylate cycle" when the nutrient source starts to deplete. Another response to environmental change is called "cell differentiation", where cells switch to another type altogether.
On February 28, 2007, harsh winds blew 10 train cars off a track running near China's Hami basin, killing three passengers and seriously injuring two others. Hurricane-force gusts of 75 mph or more scour this basin every 15-20 days or so, on average, and can reach maximum speeds of more than 120 mph. A study published last week in Nature Communications has documented a new feedback loop that may have helped to make this basin in the Gobi Desert one of the windiest places in China.
The red, tube-shaped flowers of the firecracker bush (Bouvardia ternifolia), native to Mexico and the American Southwest, attract hummingbirds. The bush also provides the chemical bouvardin, which the lab of University of Colorado Cancer Center and CU Boulder researcher, Tin Tin Su, PhD, and others have shown to slow a cancer's ability to make proteins that tell cancer cells to grow and spread.
Plastic, glass and gels, also known as bulk amorphous materials, are everyday objects to all of us. But for researchers, these materials have long been scientific enigmas - specifically when it comes to their atomic makeup, which lacks the strict ordered structure of crystals found in most solids such as metals, diamonds and salts.
January 6, 2020 - Scientists use basic units of quantum information, called qubits, to share information across quantum devices. Qubits store information by simultaneously inhabiting two quantum-mechanical states. Now, scientist Elben et al. have established a new protocol to crosscheck if two quantum computers are producing equal results. The researchers tested their protocol on experimental data from a previous experiment involving highly entangled 10-qubit quantum states.