Scientists studying monarch butterflies have traditionally focused on two sources for their decline — winter habitat loss in Mexico and fewer milkweed plants in the Midwest. New research conducted by Michigan State University and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, shows that a critical piece of the butterfly’s annual cycle was…
A drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure and angina (chest pain) is associated with an increased risk of out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest, according to results from the European Sudden Cardiac Arrest network (ESCAPE-NET) presented today at EHRA 2019.1 Sudden cardiac arrest causes around half of cardiac deaths in Europe and one in five…
Herpes viruses reactivate in more than half of crew aboard Space Shuttle and International Space Station missions, according to NASA research published in Frontiers in Microbiology. While only a small proportion develop symptoms, virus reactivation rates increase with spaceflight duration and could present a significant health risk on missions to Mars and beyond. NASA’s rapid…
Low-risk patients undergoing a total hip replacement with a posterior approach can skip the standard hip precautions currently recommended for post-surgical recovery, according to a new study conducted at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), in New York City. Eliminating standard precautions in this population did not increase the risk of hip dislocation, according to the…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms such as Deep Learning have become integral parts of our daily lives: they enable digital speech assistants or translation services, improve medical diagnostics and are an indispensable part of future technologies such as autonomous driving. Based on an ever increasing amount of data and powerful novel computer architectures,…
A college campus may not seem like a place that requires extensive lactation support. But while most undergraduates don’t have children, several populations within these higher-education environments — graduate students, faculty, staff, visitors — may need access to breastfeeding and pumping spaces. Diane Spatz of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and the Children’s…
Peroxisomes are cell organelles that carry out a number of functions, including the degradation of cytotoxins. For this purpose, they require enzymes that have to be transported into peroxisomes via complicated machinery. The team from the research group Biochemistry of Intracellular Transport Mechanisms at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) headed by Professor Harald Platta has detected an…
What changes in the brain are caused by Alzheimer’s disease? How do these changes differ from those observed in the normal ageing process? Researchers from the CNRS, the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) and the University of Valencia (Spain) explored these questions by analysing over 4,000 MRI scans of healthy and diseased brains using…
Researchers from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have created a novel way to define individual protein associations in a quick, efficient, and informative way. These findings, published in the March 8, 2019, issue of Nature Communications, show how the topological scoring (TopS) algorithm, created by Stowers researchers, can — by combining data sets —…
“Microbial communities run the world,” says Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “People always laugh when I say that,” she adds. “But it’s true.” Our rich new understanding of microbial communities and their influence on human health or crop productivity has led to the dream of changing…