A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
Children who talk on cell phones while crossing streets are at a higher risk for injuries or death in a pedestrian accident, said psychologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in a new Pediatrics journal study. Cell phones are quickly becoming ubiquitous among American schoolchildren, according to the UAB psychologists; "Commercial interests actively market cell phones for children, and marketing research firms estimate that 54 percent of children 8-12 will have cell phones by the end of [this year,] double the 2006 rate." Just as drivers should limit cell phone use while driving, pedestrians, and especially child pedestrians, should avoid using cell phone while crossing streets, they state.
A new study finds swimming, having a private well or septic system, and other factors not involving food consumption were major risk factors for bacterial intestinal infections not occurring in outbreaks. Outbreaks linked to food, such as the current Salmonella outbreak involving peanut butter that has sickened more than 500 people in 43 states, account for only about 10 percent of intestinal infections, which are medically termed as enteric infections, according to a new study in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. The study suggests that methods for controlling bacterial enteric outbreaks may not be completely relevant to controlling the other 90 percent or so that occur sporadically.
It wasn't always the case that people believed in continental drift, German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener's(1) theory that parts of the Earth's crust slowly drift atop a liquid core. He believed 200 million years ago there was once a gigantic supercontinent which he called Pangaea ("All-earth") which slowly moved apart.
Genes that contain instructions for making proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. Yet, for unknown reasons, most of our genome is transcribed into RNA. Investigating all transcripts produced in a yeast cell, researchers in the groups of Lars Steinmetz at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Wolfgang Huber at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK found that most regions of the yeast genome produce several transcripts starting at the same promoter. These transcripts are interleaved and overlapping on the DNA. In contrast to what was previously thought, the vast majority of promoters seem to initiate transcription in both directions.
Dead zones are low-oxygen areas in the ocean where higher life forms such as fish, crabs and clams are not able to live. In shallow coastal regions, for examples, dead zones can be caused by runoff of excess fertilizers from farming.A team of Danish researchers is projecting that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.Whereas some coastal dead zones could be recovered by simply controlling fertilizer usage, expanded low-oxygen areas caused by global warming might remain for many years. The findings are reported in a paper 'Long-term ocean oxygen depletion in response to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels' in Nature Geoscience.
Psoriasis affects some 7.5 million people in the United States, causing sore, itchy patches of red, scaly skin. In many cases psoriasis is not only disfiguring; between 10 and 30 percent of patients develop psoriatic arthritis, a painful inflammation of the joints. Current treatments, including different types of immunosuppressive agents, aren't always effective, and they can cause serious side effects. Psoriasis has a strong genetic component; a child with two affected parents has a 50 percent chance of developing it; siblings have a three- to six-fold risk. But the genes responsible for psoriasis haven't yet been completely understood.
When comparing players in baseball, it's difficult to cross even modern 'eras' because conditioning and strategies have changed. 6'2" shortstops are relatively common now but unheard of even 30 years ago. Likewise, American football has undergone strategic shifts that are easily recognizable, with the West Coast Offense less in vogue but a 3-4 defense coming back into popularity as compared to 20 years ago.
New research by an Arabian prince could see the millions of date stones disposed of in Saudi Arabia each year instead used to decrease air and water pollution. Abdulrahman Bandar Al-Saud, 34, is studying for a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast’s School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.His research is based on the premise that date stones can be used to develop activated carbon with a high adsorption capacity. Activated carbon is a form of the element that has been processed to make it extremely porous with a very large surface area available for adsorption.
European researchers say they have developed the most advanced spontaneous language understanding (SLU) system ever devised for both Polish and Italian languages. That's because it is also the first one, according to the Luna project behind the work.Spontaneous language understanding is far more advanced than the traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems that people may already be familiar with. In traditional IVRs, the user is required to answer questions with specific words or short sentences proposed by the systems.But with SLU, language systems are designed to respond to spontaneous speech: real conversations between people that include the sentence fillers and pause words like ‘um’ and ‘er’.
Did a catastrophic flood of biblical proportions occur, as stated in the story of Noah's Ark? If so, it may have been the shores of the Black Sea that were drowned 9,500 years ago, wiping out early Neolithic settlements around its perimeter.
Imaging systems, artificial intelligence and computer programs for facial recognition could get a boost by work from Dr. Adrian Dyer of Monash University, one of Australia's leading bee experts - he says his latest research shows that honeybees can learn to recognize human faces even when seen from different viewpoints.The findings show that despite the highly constrained neural resources of the insects (their brains are 0.01 per cent the size of the human brain) their ability has evolved so that they're able to process complex visual recognition tasks.
A recent theory of aging says that caloric restriction may do the trick but the research is inconsistent; the mice in the most promising studies were weaned that way, something unlikely to happen in human children. New research says even those studies may not be entirely accurate and that for lean mice – and therefore lean humans, if prior mouse studies were to be taken at face value – caloric restrictions as an anti-aging strategy may be a pointless, frustrating and even dangerous exercise.But for fat mice, dieting makes sense and will extend life, the researchers say. That goes for people as well.
