“The GRADE study is the first to compare the efficacy of four drugs commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes when added to metformin in people with short-duration diabetes. It found that liraglutide was superior to glimepiride and sitagliptin in controlling blood sugars,” said Elizabeth Seaquist, MD, Department of Medicine Chair at the U of M Medical School and endocrinologist with M Health Fairview. “This study provides evidence that clinicians can use in developing treatment plans with their patient....

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound’s features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars’ past habitability. Researchers based at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology suggest that the mound, known as Mount Sharp, most likely emerged as strong winds carried dust and sand into the 96-mile-wide crater in which the mound sits....

“We know this treatment has clear benefits in reducing pain and improving the ability to do everyday activities for patients,” said Kaitlin Carrato, M.D., chief resident in interventional radiology at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. “But now that we know it’s particularly helpful for those over 50 years old, it may mean that those with chronic pain conditions, like arthritis, would benefit more from this treatment than patients suffering acute pain, such as an injury....

A new image from ESO’s VISTA telescope captures a celestial landscape of glowing clouds of gas and tendrils of dust surrounding hot young stars. This infrared view reveals the stellar nursery known as NGC 6357 in a surprising new light. It was taken as part of a VISTA survey that is currently scanning the Milky Way in a bid to map our galaxy’s structure and explain how it formed. Located around 8000 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), NGC 6357 — sometimes nicknamed the Lobster Nebula[1] due to its appearance in visible-light images — is a region filled with vast clouds of gas and tendrils of dark dust....

Scientists in Connecticut were conducting experiments testing various methods to grow healthier Fraser trees when they accidentally discovered a new species of Phytophthora. They collected the diseased plants, isolated and grew the pathogen on artificial media, then inoculated it into healthy plants before re-isolating it to prove its pathogenicity. “Once the organism was isolated, the presence of unusually thick spore walls alerted us that this may not be a commonly encountered species,” said Rich Cowles, a scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station involved with this study, “and so comparison of several genes’ sequences with known Phytophthora species was used to discover how our unknown was related to other, previously described species....

High-tech imaging of carp scales by Berkeley Lab scientists reveals remarkable properties that could lead to advanced synthetic materials. Humans have drawn technological inspiration from fish scales going back to ancient times: Romans, Egyptians, and other civilizations would dress their warriors in scale armor, providing both protection and mobility. Now, using advanced X-ray imaging techniques, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have characterized carp scales down to the nanoscale, enabling them to understand how the material is resistant to penetration while retaining flexibility....

Powerful hydrothermal vents mix up material from the moon’s water-filled, porous core with water from the moon’s massive subsurface ocean – and it is released into space, in the form of water vapor and ice grains. A team led by Frank Postberg and Nozair Khawaja of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, continues to examine the makeup of the ejected ice and has recently identified fragments of large, complex organic molecules....

“What’s really exciting is that this is potentially a therapy that can be translated to the clinic quite easily,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, lead author and a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory. “We are excited to continue refining this promising combination therapy for human use.” Affecting 30 million adults, osteoarthritis is the most common joint disorder in the United States and its prevalence is expected to rise in the coming years due to the aging population and increasing rate of obesity....

Over 28 million elective surgeries across the globe could be canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic — leading to patients facing a lengthy wait for their health issues to be resolved, a new study reveals. The CovidSurg Collaborative has projected that, based on a 12-week period of peak disruption to hospital services due to COVID-19, 28.4 million elective surgeries worldwide will be canceled or postponed in 2020. The modeling study, published in the British Journal of Surgery, indicates that each additional week of disruption to hospital services will be associated with a further 2....

The most modern light sources for research are based on particle accelerators. These are large facilities in which electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light, and then emit light pulses of a special character. In storage-ring-based synchrotron radiation sources, the electron bunches travel in the ring for billions of revolutions, then generate a rapid succession of very bright light pulses in the deflecting magnets. In contrast, the electron bunches in free-electron lasers (FELs) are accelerated linearly and then emit a single super-bright flash of laser-like light....

Confidential data—including credit card transactions and sensitive material in governmental institutions and military agencies—can be better protected during information exchanges through public channels. A team, led by Andrea Fratalocchi and Ph.D. student Valerio Mazzone with collaborating researchers in Scotland and a U.S. company, devised irreversibly modifiable silicon chips that emit chaotic light waves. The chips can make data encryption impossible to crack. Typical security protocols combine short public and private keys to encode messages....

Modern concepts of the Universe provide for the existence of wormholes – unusual curvatures in space and time. One can imagine a wormhole as a black hole through which one can see a distant point of the Universe in four dimensions. Astrophysicists are still unable to precisely determine the shape and sizes of black holes, let alone the wormholes that exist only in theories. A RUDN physicist demonstrated that the shape of a wormhole still can be calculated based on observable physical characteristics....

“Surprisingly, when individuals act out of purely selfish reasons, this can lead to a fair situation within the group,” says physics professor Clemens Bechinger. This was demonstrated in a recent study by his team at the Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior (CASCB) at the University of Konstanz, which is part of the Cluster of Excellence. The researchers used computer simulations to explore how herd animals can reduce their predation risk....

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), made the discovery while using the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at the DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) in Virginia. Their findings were published recently in the journal Nature. Understanding these collisions is critical for understanding data from a broad variety of basic particle physics experiments. It will also aid scientists in better understanding the structure of neutron stars, which are collapsed cores of enormous stars and among the densest forms of matter in the universe....

The method involves growing semiconductor nanowires on graphene. To achieve this, researchers “bomb” the graphene surface with gallium atoms and arsenic molecules, thereby creating a network of minute nanowires. The result is a one-micrometer-thick hybrid material that acts as a semiconductor. By comparison, the silicon semiconductors in use today are several hundred times thicker. The semiconductors’ ability to conduct electricity may be affected by temperature, light, or the addition of other atoms....

The preprints selected for review in Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open-access overlay journal published by the MIT Press, cover a wide range of subjects, with peer reviewers finding a study that higher levels of cytokines IL-6 and IL-10 are associated with increased severity of COVID-19 is particularly noteworthy and could be useful in clinical care. And in the first published scholarly peer reviews of pre-print research from Li-Meng Yan, Shu Kang, Jie Guan, and Shanchang Hu–the so-called “Yan Report”–that claims to show that unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome suggest sophisticated laboratory modification rather than natural evolution, reviewers Robert Gallo, Takahiko Koyama, Adam Lauring, and Marvin Reitz rate the study as misleading and write that the “manuscript does not demonstrate sufficient scientific evidence to support its claims....

Active monitoring of prostate cancer has the same high survival rates after 15 years as radiotherapy or surgery, reports the largest study of its kind. The latest findings from the ProtecT trial, led by the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, were presented on March 11 at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Milan and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The trial was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)....

Harbingers of new technology In 2019, an international research team headed by materials chemist Anna Isaeva, at that time a junior professor at ct.qmat – Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter, caused a stir by fabricating the world’s first antiferromagnetic topological insulator – manganese bismuth telluride (MnBi2Te4). This remarkable material has its own internal magnetic field, paving the way for new kinds of electronic components that can store information magnetically and transport it on the surface without any resistance....

In rare cases, adults who have recovered from COVID-19 may develop multisystem inflammatory syndrome, and clinicians should consider this possibility in adults with specific symptoms, as physicians describe in a case published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). A 60-year-old man, who had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 four weeks before, visited the hospital for a range of symptoms, including prolonged shortness of breath, high fever, swelling, and severe fatigue. Testing found an enlarged heart and lung swelling as well as other issues....

“But so far the hen-and-egg problem could not be disentangled, namely whether nature actually caused the effects in the brain or whether the particular individuals chose to live in rural or urban regions,” says Sonja Sudimac, a predoctoral fellow in the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience and lead author of the study. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers from the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience monitored the brain activity of 63 healthy volunteers before and after a one-hour walk through Grunewald forest or a busy Berlin shopping street to establish a causal connection....