Lonely, older adults are nearly twice as likely to use opioids to ease pain and two-and-a-half times more likely to use sedatives and anti-anxiety medications, putting themselves at risk for drug dependency, impaired attention, falls and other accidents, and further cognitive impairment, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

Mice exposed to the opioid oxycodone before birth experience permanent changes in behavior and gene expression. The new research published in eNeuro highlights a need to develop safer types of painkillers for pregnant women.

Two drugs commonly used to treat high blood pressure are equally effective as single-drug therapies, but one is slightly safer, a new study has found.

Canada should anticipate a resurgence of a childhood respiratory virus as COVID-19 physical distancing measures are relaxed, authors warn in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.210919.

A new survey led by The Ohio State University's Office of the Chief Wellness Officer finds students are excited to get back to campus after a long and difficult year. But the trauma of the pandemic is still affecting their mental health. The survey found anxiety, depression and burnout are all on the rise among students, even as they find normalcy again. Those issues have also led to increases in...

The visual cortex stores and remembers individual images, but when they are grouped into a sequence, mice can't recognize that without guidance from the hippocampus, according to a new study by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

What The Study Did: The association between Medicare eligibility at age 65 and changes in racial and ethnic disparities in access to care and self-reported health was evaluated in this study.

A research team in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology(KIST) has announced the development of a thermal-imaging sensor that overcomes the existing problems of price and operating-temperature limitations. The sensor developed in this work can operate at temperatures upto 100 °C without a cooling device and is expected to be more affordable than standard sensors on the market, which...

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital and the University of Queensland have developed a new formulation based on regulatory T-cell exosomes (rEXS) to deliver vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies for choroidal neovascularization therapy.

Even in the absence of bark beetle outbreaks and wildfire, trees in Colorado subalpine forests are dying at increasing rates from warmer and drier summer conditions, found recent University of Colorado Boulder research.

Adolescents who set goals for their future and those with strong parental support are less likely to use e-cigarettes and other tobacco products, according to a new survey of nearly 2,500 high school students. The findings suggests that strategies to prevent youth vaping may be different from what works to dissuade youth from smoking cigarettes.

Improving air quality may improve cognitive function and reduce dementia risk, according to several studies reported today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference® (AAIC®) 2021 in Denver, Colorado, and virtually.

Scientists around the world are collaborating on a project that is changing the way they trace the evolutionary history of flowering plants. By using new technology allowing them to rapidly retrieve and compare DNA sequences from among any of the 300,000 species of flowering plants, scientists are unraveling the 140-million-year history of the largest group of land plants on Earth and providing a...

There is an urgent need to develop and implement effective screening, diagnosis and treatment strategies for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), common liver conditions with a rising burden in the U.S. and globally. This is particularly important for the most at-risk patients, those with diabetes and obesity.

A genetic analysis of fruit in the mandarin family has unraveled a complex journey from the mountainous region of southern China to the markets of Okinawa, says researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.

People who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims containing scientific references than people who do not trust science, a study finds. Reminding people of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, but reminding them of the value of trusting science does not.

New research has identified potential treatment that could improve the human immune system's ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells which regulate the immune system, which in turn can unleash other immune cells to attack tumours in cancer patients.

Survival rates for adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer have varied considerably depending on cancer type. A new study indicates that survival for multiple cancer types in such patients has improved in recent years, but some patients diagnosed with common cancer types still show limited survival improvements. The results are published by Wiley early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed...

Historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups and Indigenous peoples have significant cardiovascular health inequities, and these groups are underrepresented in genetic and genomic research.Almost 80% of participants in genomic research are of European ancestry, yet this group makes up just 16% of the global population.Heart-disease risk calculations and information about how different...

Taken together these Oncotarget findings show that the CTD and OD domains of mtp53 R273H play critical roles in mutant p53 GOF that pertain to processes associated with DNA replication.

This Oncotarget study confirms the upregulation of TERT in primary glioblastomas while all GABP proteins rise with the malignancy of the gliomas.

An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Åarhus in Denmark have discovered that bacteria from the plant microbiota are adapted to their host species. In a newly published study, they show how root-associated bacteria have a competitive advantage when colonizing their native host, which allows them to invade an already...

Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes, a new study published in...

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the safety of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in patients who experienced an allergic reaction to the first dose.

University of Washington scientists have developed a statistical framework that incorporates key COVID-19 data -- such as case counts and deaths due to COVID-19 -- to model the true prevalence of this disease in the United States and individual states. Their approach projects that in the U.S. as many as 60% of COVID-19 cases went undetected as of March 7, 2021, the last date for which the dataset...

A new study reports that among individuals who had an allergic reaction to their first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, all who went on to receive a second dose tolerated it. Even some who experienced anaphylaxis following the first dose tolerated the second dose.

Soft materials, like skin, behave differently than hard materials when punctured. They provide an unstable resistance that is more difficult to describe and hence predict. Researchers at the University of British Columbia have answered the previously unsolved question of how the mechanics of piercing works on soft materials by studying solutions from the natural world, and have created a...

A new study describes a new liquid phase in thin films of a glass-forming molecules. These results demonstrate how these glasses and other similar materials can be fabricated to be denser and more stable, providing a framework for developing new applications and devices through better design.

In an analysis of almost 3 million patients taking a single high blood pressure medication for the first time, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) were as good as angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors at preventing cardiovascular events linked to hypertension, including heart attack, stroke and heart failure.51 possible side effects and safety concerns were examined: The patients taking...

What The Study Did: Survey data were used to investigate the relationship between loneliness and high-risk medication use in adults older than age 65.

A new study led by an Iowa State University scientist sheds light on how organisms have evolved to address imbalances in sex chromosomes. The study looks at a species of softshell turtle, but the results could help to illuminate an important evolutionary process in many species. The research centers on a process known as sex chromosome dosage compensation.

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new technology which allows non-contact manipulation of small objects using sound waves. They used a hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers to generate a 3D acoustic fields which stably trapped and lifted a small polystyrene ball from a reflective surface. Although their technique employs a method similar to...

UC San Diego researchers and their colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York have discovered that spontaneous impulses of dopamine, the neurological messenger known as the brain's "feel good" chemical, occur in the brain of mice. The study found that mice can willfully manipulate these random dopamine pulses for reward.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) Department of Mathematics worked in collaboration with the Hospital de Mataró in developing an artificial intelligence-based model for predicting the risk of death of intensive care unit patients according to their characteristics. The model will improve the quality of care in these types of units.

There are many reasons that an intranasal vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be helpful in the fight against COVID-19 infections, University of Alabama at Birmingham immunologists Fran Lund, Ph.D., and Troy Randall, Ph.D., write in a viewpoint article in the journal Science.

Last year, the American Cancer Society (ACS) issued an updated set of guidelines for cervical cancer screening - emphasizing the shift toward screening with primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing. While the ACS recommendation accounts for a transition period to implement primary HPV screening, additional factors should be considered to operationalize these guidelines, according to a special...

In the first wealth and longevity study to incorporate siblings and twin pair data, researchers from Northwestern University analyzed the midlife net worth of adults (mean age 46.7 years) and their mortality rates 24 years later. They discovered those with greater wealth at midlife tended to live longer.

What The Study Did: Researchers investigated the association between net worth at midlife and subsequent longevity in individuals as well as with siblings and twins.

EPFL researchers have characterized a mechanism that allows bacteria to direct their movement in response to the mechanical properties of the surfaces the microbes move on -- a finding that could help fight certain pathogens.

New research by an Executive PhD Research student at the Business School (formerly Cass) outlines how elderly patients with neurological conditions are significantly more likely to develop delirium shortly after they are hospitalised, and those admitted on Sunday and Tuesday are more likely to develop the disorder.

Researchers at Aalto University have used lignin, a natural polymer abundant in wood and other plant sources, to create a safe, low-cost and high-performing coating for use in construction. As there is a global urge to meet the rising sustainability standards, this new coating has great potential to protect wood, whose use in construction is continually increasing. The new coating is non-toxic,...

Scientists have created plants whose cells and tissues 'blush' with beetroot pigments when they are colonised by fungi that help them take up nutrients from the soil. This is the first time this vital, 400 million year old process has been visualised in real time in full root systems of living plants. Understanding the dynamics of plant colonisation by fungi could help to make food production...

Researchers have discovered a previously unknown repair process in the brain that they hope could be harnessed and enhanced to treat seizure-related brain injuries.

As reported in Advanced Photonics, researchers from Shanghai University and Fudan University developed a general framework and metadevices for achieving dynamic control of THz wavefronts. Instead of locally controlling the individual meta-atoms in a THz metasurface (e.g., via PIN diode, varactor, etc.), they vary the polarization of a light beam with rotating multilayer cascaded metasurfaces.

A collaboration led by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Shanghai Children's Medical Center and others revealed how thiopurines produce mutations that lead to multi-drug resistant leukemia and relapse.

Most children with a mental health disorder are not receiving services to address their needs--according to a new study from researchers at Simon Fraser University's Children's Health Policy Centre. Their research was published this week in the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health.

About six gigatons -- roughly 12 times the mass of all living humans -- of carbon appears to be emitted over land every year, according to data from the Chinese Global Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Scientific Experimental Satellite (TanSat).

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital study highlights the power of comprehensive whole genome, whole exome and RNA sequencing to better understand and treat each patient's cancer.

Scientists revealed strong isotope effects in photodissociation of the water isotopologue (HOD) using the Dalian Coherent Light Source.