“Let’s say you have numbness in your fingers. That might actually be due to problems in your neck, elbow or wrist, and the best way to figure it out is with an MRI or ultrasound,” said lead author Dr. Swati Deshmukh, assistant professor of radiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine radiologist. “We offer advanced imaging that shows even really, really small nerves, which helps us localize where the problem is, assess the severity and suggest what might be causing it....

Now, a new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) created by researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), overcomes that major hurdle by 3D printing vascular channels into living matrices composed of stem-cell-derived organ building blocks (OBBs), yielding viable, organ-specific tissues with high cell density and function. The research is reported in Science Advances. “This is an entirely new paradigm for tissue fabrication,” said co-first author Mark Skylar-Scott, Ph....

A new study calculates the waste generated by N95 usage and suggests possible ways to reduce it. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began last year, face masks and other personal protective equipment have become essential for health care workers. Disposable N95 masks have been in especially high demand to help prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. All of those masks carry both financial and environmental costs. The COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to generate up to 7,200 tons of medical waste every day, much of which is disposable masks....

About the size of a school bus, the Hubble Space Telescope has an 8-foot (2.4-meter) primary mirror. The largest optical telescope ever launched into space, where it could observe the universe free from the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble had a lot riding on it. But after the first images were obtained and carefully analyzed following the telescope’s deployment on April 25, 1990, it was clear that something was wrong: The images were blurry....

New light is being shed on a little-known role of Y chromosome genes, specific to males, that could explain why men suffer differently than women from various diseases, including COVID-19. The findings were published this month in Scientific Reports by Université de Montréal professor Christian Deschepper, director of the Experimental Cardiovascular Biology research unit of the Montreal Clinical Research Institute. “Our discovery provides a better understanding of how male genes on the Y chromosome allow male cells to function differently from female cells,” said Deschepper, the study’s lead author, who is also an associate professor at McGill University....

High blood pressure appears to accelerate cognitive decline among middle-aged and older adults, but treating high blood pressure may slow this down, according to a preliminary study presented by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public at the American Heart Association’s Hypertension 2019 Scientific Sessions. “The findings are important because high blood pressure and cognitive decline are two of the most common conditions associated with aging, and more people are living longer, worldwide,” said L....

Chemical signals Weiming Li, a professor with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife within the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, studies sea lamprey chemical mating signals called pheromones. “Sea lampreys have had half-a-billion years to refine their chemistry,” Li said. “If we can find a way to disrupt their chemical signals, it might be more efficient in controlling their population.” So far, Li and his team have discovered three pheromones....

Most electric cars, from the Tesla Model S to the Nissan Leaf, run on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries – a pricey technology that accounts for more than half of the vehicle’s total cost. One promising alternative is the lithium-sulfur battery, which can theoretically store five times more energy at a much lower cost. But lithium-sulfur technology has a major drawback: After a few dozen cycles of charging and discharging, the battery stops working....

Now, a researcher at the University of Missouri has found that four antiviral drugs, including remdesivir, a drug originally developed to treat Ebola, are effective in inhibiting the replication of the coronavirus causing COVID-19. Kamlendra Singh, an associate professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine, and his team used computer-aided drug design to examine the effectiveness of remdesivir, 5-fluorouracil, ribavirin and favipiravir in treating COVID-19. Singh found that all four drugs were effective in inhibiting, or blocking, the coronavirus’ RNA proteins from making genomic copies of the virus....

“We’ve discovered a new mechanism at work at the nanoscale that allows us to make metals that are much stronger than anything ever made before—while not losing any electrical conductivity,” says Frederic Sansoz, a materials scientist and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Vermont who co-led the new discovery. This fundamental breakthrough promises a new category of materials that can overcome a traditional trade-off in industrial and commercial materials between strength and ability to carry electrical current....

An in-depth analysis of the skull biomechanics of a giant extinct kangaroo indicates that the animal had a capacity for high-performance crushing of foods, suggesting feeding behaviors more similar to a giant panda than the modern-day kangaroo. The new findings, published in PLOS ONE, support the hypothesis that some short-faced kangaroos were capable of persisting on tough, poor-quality vegetation, when more desirable foods were scarce because of droughts or glacial periods....

The surprising findings, published in Nature Photonics on November 11, 2019, are the result of a collaborative project, led by Dr. Felix Deschler and Dr. Sam Stranks. The most commonly used material for producing solar panels is crystalline silicon, but achieving efficient energy conversion requires an expensive and time-consuming production process. The silicon material needs to have a highly ordered wafer structure and is very sensitive to any impurities, such as dust, so has to be made in a cleanroom....

Photonic crystals have a regular pattern of nano pores etched in silicon. They are typically designed to work as a mirror for a certain color range of light. Inside the crystal, light of those colors is ‘forbidden.’ Even if you’d be able to place an atom inside the crystal, that typically emits one color, it will stop emitting light. The so-called Bragg length is the maximum distance light is allowed to travel, according to a well-known physics law....

The graphic shows X-rays that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected from the dwarf galaxy Mrk 462. This X-ray emission (inset) is important because it reveals the presence of a growing supermassive black hole within this relatively small galaxy. The mass contained in this black hole — about 200,000 times the mass of the Sun — provides information to astronomers about how some of the earliest black holes in the Universe may have formed and grown billions of years ago....

Recently, several cases of “e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury” (EVALI) have been described. However, this patient presented with a new type of vaping-related injury that is similar to “popcorn lung,” a condition seen in workers exposed to the chemical flavoring diacetyl, an ingredient used in microwave popcorn. If inhaled, the chemical causes bronchiolitis, which is characterized by the small airways of the lungs becoming inflamed and obstructed. A team of authors from Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, and University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, who were all involved in the care of the patient, report on the case of life-threatening bronchiolitis....

A second, related study lends further credence to the idea that viral load, or the amount of virus particles a person carries, drives contagion. It found that only one in five university students who tested positive while living in a residence hall infected their roommate. And their viral load was nearly seven times higher than those who didn’t spread the virus. “The takeaway from these studies is that most people with COVID don’t get other people sick, but a few people get a lot of people sick,” said Sara Sawyer, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and senior author of the first study....

Porphyrins, a unique class of intensely colored pigments — also known as the “pigments of life” — provide the key to this ground-breaking innovation. The word porphyrin is derived from the Greek word porphura, meaning purple, and the first chapter detailing the medical-chemical history of porphyrins goes back to the days of Herodotus (circa 484 to 425 BC). This tale has been progressing ever since and is at the heart of Professor Mathias O....

The battery has four times the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries and is much cheaper to produce. The team used sodium-sulfur, a type of molten salt that can be extracted from seawater, to create the battery, making it a more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries. Although sodium-sulfur (Na-S) batteries have existed for more than half a century, they have been an inferior alternative and their widespread use has been limited by low energy capacity and short life cycles....

An international team of researchers from Tel Aviv University, the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Harvard University has discovered that waves of migration from Anatolia and the Zagros mountains (today’s Turkey and Iran) to the Levant helped develop the Chalcolithic culture that existed in Israel’s Upper Galilee region some 6,500 years ago. The study is one of the largest ancient DNA studies ever conducted in Israel and for the first time sheds light on the origins of the Chalcolithic culture in the Levant, approximately 6,000-7,000 years ago....

1. Helps Fight Stress and Fatigue For occasional stress and fatigue, rhodiola may help. Rhodiola is an adaptogen, which is a type of herb that helps the body maintain homeostasis in the face of stress. In fact, it can improve the body’s resilience to stress, increase physical performance and endurance, and boost mental clarity.[1] 2. May Improve Symptoms of Anxiety In a small study, 10 participants with generalized anxiety disorder were given 340 mg of rhodiola every day....