International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Use of menopausal hormone therapy (MHT, also known as hormone replacement therapy, HRT) is not associated with an increased risk of developing dementia, regardless of hormone type, dose, or duration, concludes a large UK study published by  The BMJ  today. Within the subgroup of women with a specific diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease, a slight increasing risk association was found with use of oestrogen-progestogen treatments, but measurable only for long-term usage (5 years or more). The researchers say this study “brings clarity to previously inconsistent findings and should reassure women in need of menopausal hormonal therapy.” MHT is used to relieve menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes, sleep disturbance, mood swings, memory losses and depression. Treatments include tablets containing oestrogen only, or a combination of oestrogen and progestogen, as well as patches, gels and creams. Some menopausal symptoms are similar to early signs of dementia. Laboratory studies...

New study finds significant benefits for both dyslexic and non-dyslexic children A new study has found that a child’s reading speed can be improved by simply increasing the space between letters within a piece of text. The research, led by Dr Steven Stagg of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), examined the benefits of letter spacing and coloured overlays amongst a group of dyslexic and non-dyslexic children.  It is the first study to investigate how these adaptations can help to reduce specific reading errors. Published in the journal  Research in Developmental Disabilities , the study discovered that text with increased space between each letter provided a benefit to both groups of children. On average, the dyslexia group showed a 13% increase in reading speed, while the comparison group of non-dyslexic children showed a 5% increase in reading speed. The study involved 59 children aged between 11-15, 32 of whom had a statement of dyslexia, with 27 non-dyslexic children formi...

Specific genes increase the risk of developing depression, according to a new study led by UCL researchers, which also shows that the genes associated with depression vary depending on ancestry group. The research, published in  JAMA Psychiatry , is the largest study into the genetic risks of depression conducted in non-European populations. Using data from East Asian populations, mostly from China, the researchers identified five new gene variants linked to depression but found that the genes linked to depression are different for European and East Asian groups. For example, people of East Asian descent with higher body mass index are less likely to develop depression, contrary to findings for people of European descent. Previous studies have identified potential genes involved in depression, but most of these studies looked only at white populations. The new study provides a better understanding of the underlying biology of depression by identifying differences in the way gen...

When people stop taking antidepressants after a long period of use, just over half (56%) experience a relapse within a year, compared to 39% of those who stay on medication, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The researchers say their findings, published in  The New England Journal of Medicine , can help doctors and patients to make an informed decision together on whether or not to stop their antidepressants after recovery from a depressive episode. The study is the first publication from a large discontinuation trial of people taking antidepressants for multiple years in primary care. Lead author Dr Gemma Lewis (UCL Psychiatry) said: “Prescriptions of antidepressants have increased dramatically over recent decades as people are now staying on antidepressants for much longer. Until now we didn’t know whether antidepressant treatment was still effective when someone has been taking them for many years. “We have found that remaining on antidepressants long-term does effec...

Describing a previously unknown genetic condition that affects children, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine say they also found a potential method to prevent the gene mutation by administering a drug during pregnancy. The findings publish in the September 30, 2021 issue of  The New England Journal of Medicine . The work involved researchers in Egypt, India, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil and the United States. “Although different doctors were caring for these children, all of the children showed the same symptoms and all had DNA mutations in the same gene,” said senior author Joseph G. Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of neuroscience at the Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine. The research team dubbed the condition “Zaki syndrome” after co-author Maha S. Zaki, MD, PhD, of the National Research Center in Cairo, Egypt, who fi...

Geologists have been baffled by perforations in an Australian quartzite (rock), identical in shape to burrows made in sands by crustaceans; the original sandy sediment is a billion years older than the oldest known animals. An international team of scientists has now resolved the mystery. When animals move, they leave traces, such as dinosaur footprints or the burrows of worms. These reveal how ancient animals moved, how they foraged and how they interacted with one another. Trace fossils are as old as the animal world. Geologists were therefore stunned by the discovery in Western Australia of traces of burrowing animals in ancient quartzite, a rock type that was formed when sandy sediments were subjected to high pressures and temperatures. “Quartzite is as hard as concrete and impossible for burrowing animals to penetrate,” said Bruce Runnegar, UCLA professor emeritus in the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences and co-author of the new research,  published today ...

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, new variants are expected to arise that may have an increased ability to infect their hosts and evade the hosts’ immune systems. The first key step in infection is when the virus’ spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on human cells. Researchers at Penn State have created a novel framework that can predict with reasonable accuracy the amino-acid changes in the virus’ spike protein that may improve its binding to human cells and confer increased infectivity to the virus. The tool could enable the computational surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and provide advance warning of potentially dangerous variants with an even higher binding affinity potential. This can aid in the early implementation of public health measures to prevent the virus’s spread and perhaps even may inform vaccine booster formulations. “Emerging variants could potentially be highly contagious in humans and other animals,” said Suresh Kuchipudi, clinical professor of veterinary and biom...

Earlier this month, President Biden urged other countries to join the U.S. and European Union in a commitment to slashing methane emissions. Two new Stanford-led studies could help pave the way by laying out a blueprint for coordinating research on methane removal technologies, and modeling how the approach could have an outsized effect on reducing future peak temperatures. The analyses, published Sept. 27 in  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A , reveal that removing about three years-worth of human-caused emissions of the potent greenhouse gas would reduce global surface temperatures by approximately 0.21 degrees Celsius while reducing ozone levels enough to prevent roughly 50,000 premature deaths annually. The findings open the door to direct comparisons with carbon dioxide removal – an approach that has received significantly more research and investment – and could help shape national and international climate policy in the future. “The time is ripe to in...

Exoskeleton devices work, researchers say, for a variety of uses such as  speeding up our walking  or  making running easier . Yet they don’t know what exactly makes exoskeletons effective. What is the benefit of customization, for example? And how much does simply getting used to the exoskeleton matter? Researchers in the  Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory  at Stanford University examined these questions and found that training plays a remarkably significant role in how well exoskeletons provide assistance. “People are amazing at learning new tasks,” said Katherine Poggensee, PhD ’21, a former member of the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory. “And so with training alone – just giving people time to learn how to use the device on their own – they can get great benefits from our devices.” To uncover the secrets of exoskeleton success, Poggensee and Steve Collins, associate professor of mechanical engineering and lead of the Biomechatronics Laboratory, moni...

A new UCLA-led study  decisively confirms findings of research published earlier this year, which found that American values, attitudes and activities had changed dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. The earlier study,  published in February, was based on an analysis of online behavior — Google searches and phrases posted on Twitter, blogs and internet forums. The latest research, published in the open-access journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, is based on a survey of 2,092 Americans — about half in California and half in Rhode Island. Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and senior author of both studies, said the results indicate that Americans’ activities, values and relationships have begun to resemble those found in small, isolated villages with low life expectancy — such as an isolated Mayan village in Chiapas, Mexico, that she has studied since 1969. For example, according to the survey, people said that c...

By enhancing soil’s ability to store carbon, the ground we walk on could play an essential role in keeping carbon dioxide out of the air. If we’re going to fight the effects of climate change, we’re going to have to get our hands dirty. ‘With a huge potential to act as a carbon sink, the soil that sits right under our feet could be at the front lines of climate change,’ said Dr Dragutin Protic, CEO of GILab , a company dedicated to developing solutions based on ICT and geoinformatics. A carbon sink is a reservoir capable of accumulating and storing carbon for an indefinite period. In doing so, it lowers the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. According to Dr Protic, who cited some recent scientific research, soil has the potential to remove an estimated 1.09 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. From carbon sink to carbon emitter Even though soil carbon sequestration appears to be a natural, no-regret solution to mitigating climate change, after decades of...

At the 32nd International Symposium on Human Identification (ISHI), being held this week in Orlando, FL,  Parabon NanoLabs will unveil for the first time the predicted faces of three ancient mummies from an ancient Nile community in Egypt known as the Abusir el-Meleq. The mummy samples, estimated to be between 2,023 and 2,797 years old, were processed by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tubingen in Germany (Schuenemann et al. 2017). 1  Enzymatic damage repair was performed on each sample, after which they were sequenced with a capture assay targeting 1.24 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and aligned to the human reference genome. Parabon used the resulting whole-genome sequencing data, which is publicly available in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), and selected three samples with the highest quality data to analyze. The company believes this is the first time comprehensive DNA phenotyping has...

Worms don’t wiggle when they have Alzheimer’s disease. Yet something helped worms with the disease hold onto their wiggle in Professor Jessica Tanis’s lab at the University of Delaware. In solving the mystery, Tanis and her team have yielded new clues into the potential impact of diet on Alzheimer’s, the dreaded degenerative brain disease afflicting more than 6 million Americans. A few years ago, Tanis and her team began investigating factors affecting the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. They were doing genetic research with  C. elegans , a tiny soil-dwelling worm that is the subject of numerous studies. Expression of amyloid beta, a toxic protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, paralyzes worms within 36 hours after they reach adulthood. While the worms in one petri dish in Tanis’s lab were rendered completely immobile, the worms of the same age in the adjacent petri dish still had their wiggle, documented as “body bends,” by the scientists. “It was an observa...

Women who menstruate experienced irregularities in their menstrual cycle because of increased stress during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new Northwestern Medicine study has found. This is the first U.S. study to evaluate the impact of stress on peoples’ periods. The study surveyed more than 200 women and people who menstruate in the United States between July and August 2020 in order to better understand how stress during the COVID-19 pandemic influenced their menstrual cycles. More than half (54%) of the individuals in the study experienced changes in their menstrual cycle following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Individuals who experienced higher levels of stress during the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to experience heavier menstrual bleeding and a longer duration of their period, compared to individuals with moderate stress levels, the study found. The study, “ Impact of Stress on Menstrual Cyclicity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Survey Study , ” was publ...

Clover plants grown in Mars-like soils experience significantly more growth when inoculated with symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria than when left uninoculated. Franklin Harris of Colorado State University, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal  PLOS ONE  on September 29, 2021. As Earth’s population grows, researchers are studying the possibility of farming Martian soils, or “regolith.” However, regolith is lacking in some essential plant nutrients, including certain nitrogen-containing molecules that plants require to live. Therefore, agriculture on Mars will require strategies to increase the amount of these nitrogen compounds in regolith. Harris and colleagues hypothesize that bacteria could play a cost-effective role in making Martian soils more fertile. On Earth, bacteria in soils help convert or “fix” atmospheric nitrogen into the molecules that plants need. Some of these microbes have symbiotic relationships with plants, in which they...

Although plastics are durable and strong, a little sunlight can split them apart into microscopic pieces and spur reactions, producing new molecules that can end up in the environment. But how the polymers and additives in these materials influence this process is a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’  Environmental Science & Technology  show that additives in commercial shopping bags boost sunlight’s ability to convert these solid materials into thousands of dissolved compounds within days. Once plastic pollution gets into the environment, its fate is still largely unknown, especially in aquatic ecosystems. Some of the plastic items, such as polyethylene shopping bags, float in water, which exposes them directly to the sun’s rays. Previous researchers have shown that the pure polymers commonly used to make these items produce water-soluble molecules and gases when placed in ultraviolet light, a component of sunlight. However, plastics in consumer goods aren’t pu...

Since  LIGO’s groundbreaking detection , in 2015, of gravitational waves produced by a pair of colliding black holes, the observatory, together with its European partner facility Virgo, has detected dozens of similar cosmic rumblings that send ripples through space and time. In the future, as more and more upgrades are made to the  National Science Foundation-funded LIGO observatories —one in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana—the facilities are expected to detect increasingly large numbers of these extreme cosmic events. These observations will help solve fundamental mysteries about our universe, such as how black holes form and how the ingredients of our universe are manufactured. One important factor in increasing the sensitivity of the observatories involves the coatings on the glass mirrors that lie at the heart of the instruments. Each 40-kilogram (88-pound) mirror (there are four in each detector at the two LIGO observatories) is coated with ...