Posts in category: Uncategorized

Various long-term effects have been found to occur after infection by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and the reality of these lingering symptoms remains unknown. These unknown factors continue to contribute to a general lack of understanding and social unease.

University of South Australia researchers are calling for exercise to be a mainstay approach for managing depression as a new study shows that physical activity is 1.5 times more effective than counseling or the leading medications.

New research has identified hundreds of proteins that might contribute to the onset of common, chronic metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, and consequently pathways to potential treatments.

Adverse childhood experiences in mothers can affect their children’s mental and physical health, as researchers from Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin now report in the journal The Lancet Public Health. The study found that maltreatment during a mother’s childhood is associated with a higher risk of health problems such as asthma, autism, and depression in the next generation. Early intervention to support affected mothers might help to counter this effect.

A new study has calculated the economic cost of cancers around the world, helping policymakers allocate resources appropriately and enact policies to curb the increase in cancer-related death and disability.

Influenza viruses are becoming increasingly resilient to medicines. For this reason, new active ingredients are needed. Important findings in this regard have been provided by researchers at the University of Münster: for the virus to proliferate, the polymerase of the influenza A virus has to be modified many times through enzymes in the host cells.

Synthetic hydrogels were shown to provide an effective scaffold for neuronal tissue growth in areas of brain damage, providing a possible approach for brain tissue reconstruction.

Platinum-based chemotherapy, which is used to treat advanced colorectal cancer, accumulates in the healthy cells surrounding the cancer cells and, as a result, can reduce tumor sensitivity to treatment. This is demonstrated by a study published in the journal Nature Communications by the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM-Hospital del Mar), in collaboration with the INCLIVA Health Research Institute, the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO), the Vall d’ Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO), the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) Barcelona, the University of Oviedo, and the CIBER of cancer (CIBERONC).

It takes a few moments for the sound of thunder to reach our ears after a flash of lightning. This phenomenon is due to the photoacoustic (PA) effect where materials near the lightning instantly expand as the optical energy of the lightning is absorbed and converted into thermal energy. Using this PA effect, photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) has become a premier preclinical and clinical imaging modality to take images inside the body without using a contrast medium. However, its low-quality images, which can be improved with multiple ultrasound sensors and a multi-channel data acquisition (DAQ) system, result in higher cost and slower imaging speed without such hardware.

When applied to social contact maps, a method recently developed by Gulbenkian scientists has proved useful to study how viruses spread in society and how we can stop them. Public health specialists are already taking advantage of these new findings, published in PLOS Computational Biology, to study the spreading of diseases such as monkeypox and COVID-19.