New research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association reveals that the frequency and portion size of meals had a greater impact on weight loss or gain than the time frame between the first and last meal. According to senior study author Dr. Wendy L. Bennett from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, despite the popularity of intermittent fasting, there is yet to be a study that determines if limiting the total eating window helps control weight....

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) discovered that intravenous TB vaccination is highly protective against the infection in monkeys, compared to the standard injection directly into the skin, which offers minimal protection. “The effects are amazing,” said senior author JoAnne Flynn, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the Pitt Center for Vaccine Research. “When we compared the lungs of animals given the vaccine intravenously versus the standard route, we saw a 100,000-fold reduction in bacterial burden....

A mathematical model of droplet migration may have important implications for understanding the spread of airborne diseases, such as COVID-19. The World Health Organization has warned that aerosol transmission of COVID-19 is being underestimated. If aerosol spread is confirmed to be significant, as suspected, we will need to reconsider guidelines on social distancing, ventilation systems, and shared spaces. A group of researchers from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh in the U....

Most types of Escherichia coli are harmless, but the ones that aren’t can cause severe life-threatening diarrhea. These problematic bacteria launch infections by inducing intestinal cells to form tiny structures, called pedestals, that anchor the pathogens in place and help the colonies grow. This week in mBio, microbiologists describe an Achilles heel for disabling pedestal formation. Lab experiments on enteropathogenic and enterohemorrhagic E. Coli (EPEC and EHEC) showed that when the pathogens were prevented from injecting a protein called EspG into intestinal hosts, the hosts were slower and less effective in producing pedestals that fixed the bacteria in place....

Scientists reported their findings in the journal Nature. The exoplanet was found using a technique that monitors a star for subtle back-and-forth motion as seen from Earth, which is caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting body. This allowed researchers at Geneva to discover the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star in 1995. The exoplanet was discovered as part of a campaign to monitor ten of the brightest and nearest stars visible from the Southern Hemisphere using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s 3....

We all know that the Earth rotates beneath our feet, but new research from ANU has revealed that the cent re of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet, frequently speeding up and slowing down. Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years....

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have gradually been replacing traditional foods and meals made from fresh and minimally processed ingredients in many countries. These ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations, made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories, are known to be unhealthy. A new research study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, has found that increased consumption of these foods was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019....

A research team from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and Kanazawa University developed an eco-friendly device that uses solar energy to catalyze an electrochemical oxidation reaction with high efficiency. Green energy sources constitute a hot research field globally because of the current environmental crisis and the necessity to avoid non-renewable energy (fossil fuels). Researchers have been seeking ways to harness and harvest solar energy for decades, and photovoltaic devices, which convert light into electricity, are in high demand....

When animals catch COVID-19 from humans, new SARS-CoV-2 variants can arise. To evaluate this phenomenon, an interdisciplinary team at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences systematically analyzed mutation types occurring in the virus after infection of cats, dogs, ferrets, and hamsters. Confirmed COVID-19 cases in a variety of wild, zoo, and household animals demonstrate cross-species transmission, which is a rare occurrence for most viruses. “SARS-CoV-2, in the realm of coronaviruses, has a very broad species range,” said Laura Bashor, one of the first authors and a doctoral student in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology....

As a cognitive neuroscientist, my past research has focused on understanding how normal brain changes related to aging affect people’s ability to think and move – particularly in middle age and beyond. But as more evidence came in showing that COVID-19 could affect the body and brain for months or longer following infection, my research team became interested in exploring how it might also impact the natural process of aging....

But before the lake formed, archaeologists were able to carefully extract and describe much material, including parts of houses, food, and tools — an abundance of evidence that allowed them to identify the transition to agriculture nearly 12,800 years ago. It was one of the most significant events in our Earth’s cultural and environmental history. Abu Hureyra, it turns out, has another story to tell. Found among the cereals and grains and splashed on early building material and animal bones was meltglass, some features of which suggest it was formed at extremely high temperatures — far higher than what humans could achieve at the time — or that could be attributed to fire, lighting or volcanism....

A 2,684-year-old human skull that included an exceptionally well-preserved human brain was discovered in a waterlogged pit in Yorkshire, UK. The brain is the oldest known intact human brain from Europe and Asia, according to the authors of the study. The scientists published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The authors also believe that it is one of the best-preserved ancient brains in the world. The early Iron Age man belonged to a man in his thirties, states lead author Sonia O’Connor....

Not to burst anyone’s water bottle, but healthy people can actually die from drinking too much water. I am an exercise physiologist, and my research focuses on overhydration and how drinking too much water affects the body. Since water – and sodium – balance is essential to life, it is extremely rare for people to die from drinking too much – or too little – fluid. In most cases, your body’s finely tuned molecular processes are unconsciously taking care of you....

Including ice I, 18 crystalline forms of ice were known so far, which differ in the arrangement of their atoms. The different types of ice, known as polymorphs, form depending on pressure and temperature and have very different properties. For example, their melting points differ by several hundred degrees Celsius. “It’s comparable to diamond and graphite, both of which are made of pure carbon,” the chemist explains. Icy variety When conventional ice I is cooled strongly, the hydrogen atoms can arrange themselves periodically in addition to the oxygen atoms if the experiment is conducted correctly....

Expert Says COVID-19 Deaths Closely Match “Normal” Age-Related Risk Pattern Death from COVID-19 equal to 5 weeks extra risk for over 55s and just 2 extra days for school children. Data on deaths from COVID-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today (September 9, 2020). His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between March 7 and June 26, 2020....

Lava Life Designed in the style of vintage travel posters, ExEP’s popular Exoplanet Travel Bureau poster series imagines what it might be like to visit known planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets. Focusing on 55 Cancri e, a planet that may be covered in a lava ocean, the newest poster shows futuristic explorers gliding over the red-hot landscape in a protective bubble. 55 Cancri e is also now part of the Exoplanet Travel Bureau’s 360-degree visualization tool, which enables you to take a virtual tour of what the planet’s surface might look like, based on the limited data available (no photos of the planet exist)....

The scientists also determined that this burst of light was one of the most powerful short-duration gamma-ray bursts ever observed, producing one of the most luminous afterglows ever recorded. The findings were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The brightest and most energetic explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), may produce more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will produce in its entire lifetime. GRB 211106A belongs to a GRB subclass called short-duration gamma-ray bursts....

An extensive search and testing of current drugs and drug-like compounds has revealed compounds previously developed to fight SARS might also work against COVID-19. Using the National Drug Discovery Centre, researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute identified drug-like compounds that could block a key coronavirus protein called PLpro. This protein, found in all coronaviruses, is essential for the virus to hijack and multiply within human cells, and disable their anti-viral defenses....

The galaxy’s whirling arms tell us a story about what’s happening inside this galaxy. Bright blue patches mark sites of active star formation. Studying the structures of other galaxies is a key way to learn about the structure of our own, given that humans can’t leave the Milky Way to look back and see what it looks like from the outside. It helps to compare our observations of our home galaxy with those of nearby galaxies we can see in their entirety....

In the latest episode of Taylor & Francis’ podcast series How Researchers Changed The World out today (Tuesday, October 22, 2019), which marks the end of series one, Divakaran provides a passionate account of how returning from the Indian Army with a severe injury following “a burst of AK47 and a grenade that took a portion of my leg away” — an incident which left him fighting for his life miles from a hospital — meant he questioned the very purpose of defending his country in the first place....