Despite improvements in their performance over the past decade, electronic health records (EHRs) commonly used in hospitals nationwide fail to detect up to one in three potentially harmful drug interactions and other medication errors, according to scientists at University of Utah Health, Harvard University, and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. In tests using simulated medical records, the...

A team of scientists studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, found that it was especially well-suited to jump from animals to humans by shapeshifting as it gained the ability to infect human cells.

Professor Hannes Lohi's research group at the University of Helsinki has identified a new genomic region and anxiety-related candidate genes associated with fearfulness in dogs. Findings support their hypothesis that fearfulness and anxiety are hereditary traits in dogs, and there may be shared factors underlying anxiety in both humans and dogs.

In New York City, the first confirmed COVID-19 cases arose mostly through untracked transmission of the virus from Europe and other parts of the United States, a new molecular epidemiology study of 84 patients reports.

Glucocorticoids, which are widely used as treatment in intensive care, can nearly quadruple the death rate of patients suffering from acute respiratory distress syndrome. Researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, discovered the reason for the higher mortality. The findings are also important in the fight against COVID-19 disease.

The world has been experiencing an unprecedented economic downturn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant number of economic activities have shut down. With increasing unemployment, economists are devising and proposing economic measures that could help ensure a sustainable increase in consumer spending and circumvent a long-term economic recession. However, whether the proposed economic...

Evidence available to date suggests that minority ethnic groups in England, particularly black and south Asian people, may be at increased risk of testing positive for Covid-19, compared to people from white British backgrounds, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Medicine.

This study reports new genome-wide data for 101 prehistoric individuals from 12 archaeological sites in today's France and Germany, dating from 7000-3000 BCE, and documents levels of admixture between expanding early Neolithic farmers and local hunter-gatherers seen nowhere else in Europe.

How might the novel coronavirus be prevented from entering a host cell in an effort to thwart infection? A team of biomedical scientists has made a discovery that points to a solution. The scientists, led by Maurizio Pellecchia in the UC Riverside School of Medicine, report in the journal Molecules that two proteases -- enzymes that break down proteins -- located on the surface of host cells and...

Toxic versions of the protein tau are believed to cause death of neurons of the brain in Alzheimer's disease. A new study published in Nature Communications shows that the spread of toxic tau in the human brain in elderly individuals may occur via connected neurons. The researchers could see that beta-amyloid facilitates the spread of toxic tau.

Germans have difficulty gauging the negative impact of weather conditions such as ground frost, heat, or UV radiation. This is one of the key results of a representative survey conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, published in Weather, Climate, and Society. The study's authors advocate new impact forecasts that predict not only what the weather will be, but...

This case report describes a 25-year-old female radiographer with no significant medical history who had been working in a COVID-19 ward who presented with a mild dry cough that lasted for one day, followed by persistent severe anosmia (loss of smell) and dysgeusia (an impaired sense of taste).

A large international trial involving UCL and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) has found that pembrolizumab, a form of immunotherapy, more than doubled the 'progression free survival' time of patients with a specific subtype of advanced bowel cancer, when compared with chemotherapy.

Researchers at the University of Colorado College of Nursing and the School of Medicine Department of Anesthesiology at the Anschutz Medical Campus found that the use of nitrous oxide (N2O) as a pain relief option for individuals in labor is safe for newborn children and laboring individual, and converting to a different form of pain relief such as an epidural or opioid is influenced by a woman's...

What is and is not possible for natural evolution may be explained using models and calculations from theoretical physics, say researchers in Japan. To explain this the limits of evolution, researchers simplified the natural world to fit idealized physics models and searched for any mathematical structure within biological complexity.

Potential tissue targets and routes of entry of SARS-CoV-2 into the central nervous system and reported neurological complications of COVID-19 are identified in this narrative review.

Gut bacterial imbalance is linked with many neurological disorders. Now researchers have identified a common thread: changes in gut mucus. It's a new gut-brain connection that opens fresh paths for scientists searching for ways to treat brain disorders by targeting our 'second brain' - the gut.

This week in the journal Frontiers, researchers describe a single function that accurately describes all existing available data on active COVID-19 cases and deaths -- and predicts forthcoming peaks.

In a report in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, researchers describe a rapid, accurate novel assay for nondeletional alpha-thalassemia genotyping based on one-step nested asymmetric PCR melting curve analysis, which may enhance prenatal diagnosis, newborn screening, and large-scale population screening.

A new technique overcomes a serious hurdle in the field of bacterial design and engineering. Researchers develop method to identify proteins that enable highly efficient bacterial design. Approach has potential to boost efforts in bacterial design to tackle infectious diseases, bacterial drug resistance, environmental cleanup and more.

A Georgetown University Medical Center clinical trial investigating the cancer drug nilotinib in people with Alzheimer's disease finds that it is safe and well-tolerated, and researchers say the drug should be tested in a larger study to further determine its safety and efficacy as a potential disease-modifying strategy.

Oesophageal surgery: quality increases with larger case volumes. Greater survival probabilities in hospitals where complex oesophageal surgery is performed more frequently.

Older men may be at greater risk of contracting COVID-19 because they worry less about catching or dying from it, according to a new study by researchers at Georgia State University. This is a concern because older men are already more at risk of severe or fatal COVID-19 infections, and the study participants who were most worried about COVID-19 were also the most likely to have implemented...

A new UC San Francisco study has pinpointed a specific pattern of brain waves that underlies the ability to let go of old, irrelevant learned associations to make way for new updates. The research is the first to directly show that a particular behavior can be dependent on the precise synchronization of high-frequency brain waves in different parts of the brain, and might open a path for...