The study found that even carriers of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, which is the strongest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, can benefit from a healthy lifestyle. Memory continuously declines as people age, but evidence from existing studies is insufficient to assess the effect of a healthy lifestyle on memory in later life. And given the many possible causes of memory decline, a combination of healthy behaviors might be needed for an optimal effect....

The researchers also found that elderly mice regained youthful strength after their existing muscle stem cells were subjected to the rejuvenating protein treatment and transplanted back into their bodies. The proteins, known as Yamanaka factors, are commonly used to transform an adult cell into what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. Induced pluripotent stem cells can become nearly any type of cell in the body, regardless of the cell from which they originated....

The study discovered that experiencing any stressful life event raises the risk of stroke by 17%, and experiencing two or more such events raises the risk by 31%. The research was led by Dr. Catriona Reddin, at the University of Galway’s College of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences. It looked at levels of stress in more than 26,000 people in Europe, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa....

Studies reveal that social isolation and quarantine throughout the COVID-19 pandemic may have a detrimental impact on people living with pre-existing conditions. Social isolation and quarantine can have a detrimental impact on physical and mental health of people living with pre-existing conditions, according to two studies being presented at the 23rd European Congress of Endocrinology (e-ECE 2021) on Wednesday 26 May at 14:14 CET. The studies bring together research on the impact of social isolation and quarantine for people living with diabetes in the Adjara Region of Georgia, and on patients with hypocortisolism in Italy....

Past pain research typically has focused on the spinal cord or the peripheral areas of the nervous system located outside the spinal cord and brain. However, a research team headed by Volker E. Neugebauer, M.D., Ph.D., at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) School of Medicine recently investigated how some mechanisms in the brain contribute to pain. His study, “Amygdala group II mGluRs Mediate the Inhibitory Effects of Systemic Group II mGluR Activation on Behavior and Spinal Neurons in a Rat Model of Arthritis Pain,” was published recently by the journal Neuropharmacology....

A team led by Antoine Snijders, Jian-Hua Mao, and Bo Hang of Berkeley Lab first reported in 2017 that brief exposure to thirdhand smoke is associated with low body weight and immune changes in juvenile mice. In a follow-up study published recently in Clinical Science, the researchers, and their team have determined that early thirdhand smoke exposure is also associated with increased incidence and severity of lung cancer in mice....

As the nation continues to struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical that we care for the physical and mental health of the most vulnerable, including older Americans. But while most seniors wouldn’t hesitate to see a doctor for physical symptoms, that’s not the case with depression. A new nationwide poll, the GeneSight Mental Health Monitor, shows that nearly two-thirds (61%) of Americans age 65 or older who have concerns about having depression will not seek treatment....

A powerful new analysis has been performed by astrophysicists that places the most precise limits ever on the composition and evolution of the universe. With this analysis, dubbed Pantheon+, cosmologists find themselves at a crossroads. Pantheon+ convincingly finds that the cosmos is made up of about two-thirds dark energy and one-third matter — predominantly in the form of dark matter — and is expanding at an accelerating pace over the last several billion years....

The findings suggest the potential to use this natural process to rejuvenate aging livers and extend the period of disease-free living in humans, known as healthspan. It may also be possible to use this process to regenerate damaged livers, potentially reducing the need for liver transplantation, which is currently the only effective treatment for individuals with severely scarred livers. Previous studies promoted the regrowth of mouse livers by generating stem cells and progenitor cells – the step after a stem cell that can become any type of cell for a specific organ – via an invasive technique that often resulted in scarring and tumor growth....

The new worlds orbit a star named GJ 357, an M-type dwarf about one-third the Sun’s mass and size and about 40% cooler than our star. The system is located 31 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. In February, TESS cameras caught the star dimming slightly every 3.9 days, revealing the presence of a transiting exoplanet — a world beyond our solar system — that passes across the face of its star during every orbit and briefly dims the star’s light....

Since disk compositions evolve over disk lifetimes, astronomers interested in planet composition are working hard to understand the evolution of disk chemistry. They have already determined that water and carbon monoxide gas are depleted in young systems as compared with their abundances in the normal interstellar medium, sometimes by as much as a factor of one hundred. Current thinking argues that this is because the volatiles have frozen onto the surfaces of dust grains that then accumulate toward the cold midplane of the disk where they remain frozen out....

This interplay of motion is the reason why spin-flip processes in molecules typically take quite long. However, computer simulations have shown that this is not the case in some metal complexes. For example, in the examined rhenium complex the spin-flip process already takes place within ten femtoseconds, even though in this short time the nuclei are virtually stationary–even light moves only three-thousandths of a millimeter within this time. This knowledge is particularly useful for the precise control of electron spins, e....

The findings of an international team of scientists including Aditya Parthasarathy and Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute of Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, were recently published in the journal Science. A Sea of Gravitational Waves At the heart of most galaxies—collections of hundreds of billions of stars like our own Milky Way—lies a supermassive black hole. Galaxies are drawn to each other by their immense gravitation, and when they merge their black holes sink to the new center....

What’s more, the view from that Earth-like planet as its giant neighbor moves past would be unlike anything it is possible to view in our own night skies on Earth, according to new research led by Stephen Kane, associate professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California Riverside. The research was carried out against the backdrop of a planetary system called HR 5183, which is about 103 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo....

A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science reveals that this history is significantly more complicated than previously imagined. The findings show that the genomes of the current domesticated varieties include remnants from three extra, as of yet unidentified, ancestors. “Here we show that most of today’s diploid cultivated bananas that descend from the wild banana M. acuminata are hybrids between different subspecies. At least three extra wild ‘mystery ancestors’ must have contributed to this mixed genome thousands of years ago, but haven’t been identified yet,” said Dr....

Proteases are important to the health and viability of cells and viruses, says De-Yu Xie, professor of plant and microbial biology at NC State and the corresponding author of the study. If proteases are inhibited, cells cannot perform many important functions – like replication, for example. “One of our lab’s focuses is to find nutraceuticals in food or medicinal plants that inhibit either how a virus attaches to human cells or the propagation of a virus in human cells,” Xie said....

Topological insulators are materials whose structure forces photons and electrons to move only along the material’s boundary and only in one direction. These particles experience very little resistance and travel freely past obstacles such as impurities, fabrication defects, a change of signal’s trajectory within a circuit, or objects placed intentionally in the particles’ path. That’s because these particles, instead of being reflected by the obstacle, go around it “like river-water flowing past a rock,” says Prof....

This problem comes up a lot when dealing with an endless number of possible candidate molecules. Organic semiconductors enable important future technologies such as portable solar cells or rollable displays. For such applications, improved organic molecules — which make up these materials — need to be discovered. Tasks of this nature are increasingly using methods of machine learning, while training on data from computer simulations or experiments. The number of potentially possible small organic molecules is, however, estimated to be on the order of 1033....

Cancer is the uncontrolled development of body cells that results in the creation of tumors, which is caused by the accumulation of mutations in a cell’s DNA. Tumor cells undergo a sequence of alterations that include interactions between the body’s immune system and the tumor in order to become malignant, metastasizing cancer. Many mechanistic elements of this process, however, remain unknown, making cancer prevention and treatment infamously difficult. However, there is accumulating evidence that inflammation of blood vessel-lining “endothelial” cells is a key process in tumor development to metastasis....

The first of this week’s close-approaching asteroids — discovered by CSS on February 4 — is designated asteroid 2018 CC. Its close approach to Earth came Tuesday (February 6) at 12:10 p.m. PST (3:10 p.m. EST) at a distance of about 114,000 miles (184,000 kilometers). The asteroid is estimated to be between 50 and 100 feet (15 and 30 meters) in size. Of potentially greater interest is asteroid 2018 CB, which will also pass closely by Earth on Friday, February 9, at around 2:30 p....