Houston – The human body is proficient at making collagen. And human laboratories are getting better at it all the time. In a development that could lead to better drug design and new treatments for disease, Rice University researchers have made a major step toward synthesizing custom collagen. Rice scientists who have learned how to make collagen – the fibrous protein that binds cells together into organs and tissues – are now digging into its molecular structure to see how it forms and interacts with biological systems....

Aardvarks occur across most of sub-Saharan Africa, but very few people have seen one, because they are solitary, mostly active at night, and live in burrows. They use their spade-like claws to build these burrows and to dig up ants and termites on which they feed. However, seeing aardvarks feeding in the day is becoming more common in the drier parts of southern Africa. While catching sight of an aardvark is a delight for many a wildlife enthusiast, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Physiology laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) warn that seeing aardvarks in the daytime does not bode well for this secretive animal....

Relationships are often undermined by everyday frustrations like work stress or financial anxiety, but how do couples handle a challenge as unprecedented as the COVID-19 pandemic? People who blamed their stress on the pandemic more than on their partner were happier in their relationship, a new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science reports. Previous research has shown that romantic partners tend to be more critical toward each other when experiencing common stress, but major events like natural disasters are not always associated with poor relationship functioning....

To participate successfully in life, it is important to be able to read and write. Nevertheless, many children and adults have difficulties in acquiring these skills and the reason is not always obvious. They suffer from dyslexia which can have a variety of symptoms. Thanks to research carried out by Begoña Díaz and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, a major step forward has been made in understanding the cause of dyslexia....

New research from the University of Oxford suggests that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people’s risk of heart disease, finding that vegetarians have up to 32% less risk of developing heart disease than comparable non-vegetarians. Heart disease is the single largest cause of death in developed countries, and is responsible for 65,000 deaths each year in the UK alone. The new findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people’s risk of heart disease....

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a new flexible nano-scaffold for rechargeable lithium ion batteries that could help make cell phone and electric car batteries last longer. The research, published online in Advanced Materials, shows the potential of manufactured sheets of aligned carbon nanotubes coated with silicon, a material with a much higher energy storage capacity than the graphite composites typically used in lithium ion batteries. “Putting silicon into batteries can produce a huge increase in capacity—10 times greater,” said Dr....

Aspirin has anti-inflammatory properties and also thins the blood. For years, doctors have been prescribing low-dose aspirin for some people to reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke. However, there are also possible risks to taking aspirin, including bleeding in the brain, so guidance from a doctor is important. Because aspirin can be beneficial to the heart, researchers have hypothesized, and smaller previous studies have suggested, that it may also be beneficial to the brain, possibly reducing the risk of dementia by reducing inflammation, minimizing small clots, or by preventing the narrowing of blood vessels within the brain....

Pain management is a surprisingly challenging, complex balancing act. Overtreating pain, for example, runs the risk of addicting patients to pain medication. Undertreating pain, on the other hand, may lead to long-term chronic pain and other complications. Today, doctors generally gauge pain levels according to their patients’ own reports of how they’re feeling. But what about patients who can’t communicate how they’re feeling effectively — or at all — such as children, elderly patients with dementia, or those undergoing surgery?...

The fossil, a specimen of Protasterina flexuosa, is a brittle star that is some 450 million years old. Brittle stars, sea stars, and sea urchins all have an internal system of fluid-filled canals connected to an external system of tube feet. This water vascular system is a unique feature that distinguishes these animals, called echinoderms, from all other animals. “This fossil brittle star is remarkable as one of very few to preserve direct evidence of the soft tissues of the canals and tube feet....

Researchers at Curtin revealed how behavioral and ecological factors influence the quality of bee venom, a product widely known for its effective treatment of degenerative and infectious diseases such as Parkinson’s and osteoarthritis. The study, published in PLOS, analyzed – for the first time – protein diversity in bee venom produced by the western honeybee in the marri ecosystem in southern-western Australia. Lead researcher Dr. Daniela Scaccabarozzi, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences and research consultant at ChemCentre, said the research would be of substantial benefit to both human health and the lucrative beekeeping business, where bee venom is being sold for up to $300 per gram....

Antibiotic exposure early in life could alter human brain development in areas responsible for cognitive and emotional functions, according to a Rutgers researcher. The laboratory study, published in the journal iScience, suggests that penicillin changes the microbiome — the trillions of beneficial microorganisms that live in and on our bodies — as well as gene expression, which allows cells to respond to its changing environment, in key areas of the developing brain....

“At the age of between 12 and 15 I was drawing; I was making plans of fusion devices.” David Fischer remembers growing up in Vienna, Austria, imagining how best to cool the furnace used to contain the hot soup of ions known as plasma in a fusion device called a tokamak. With plasma hotter than the core of the sun being generated in a donut-shaped vacuum chamber just a meter away from these magnets, what temperature ranges might be possible with different coolants, he wondered....

Long before the Europeans arrived on Easter Island in 1722, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui showed signs of demographic decline. However, the catalyst has long been debated in the scientific community. Was environmental degradation the cause, or could a political revolution or an epidemic of disease be to blame? A new study by a group of international researchers, including UC Santa Barbara’s Oliver Chadwick, offers a different explanation and helps to clarify the chronological framework....

New research by an international team of scientists from 17 countries including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Keehoon Kim demonstrates that, based on atmospheric pressure waves recorded by global barometers, the Hunga explosion was comparable to the 1883 Krakatoa eruption in size. The research was published earlier this month in the journal Science. The atmospheric wave data shows that the eruption propagated for four passages around the Earth over six days....

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]), suggests a possible association between mild COVID-19 cases and subsequently diagnosing type 2 diabetes. The analysis of health records from 1,171 general and internal medicine practices across Germany conducted by Professor Wolfgang Rathmann and Professor Oliver Kuss from the German Diabetes Center at Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany, and Professor Karel Kostev (IQVIA, Frankfurt, Germany) found that adults who recover from mostly mild COVID-19 appear to have a significantly higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than a matched control group who had other types of respiratory infections, which are also frequently caused by viruses....

Astronomers Aaron Smith and Volker Bromm of The University of Texas at Austin, working with Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have discovered evidence for an unusual kind of black hole born extremely early in the universe. They showed that a recently discovered unusual source of intense radiation is likely powered by a “direct-collapse black hole,” a type of object predicted by theorists more than a decade ago....

For the first time, scientists, starting from a discovery by scientific amateurs, have succeeded in providing evidence for a fully developed shell of a common-envelope-system (CE) – the phase of the common envelope of a binary star system. “Toward the end of their lives, normal stars inflate into red giant stars. Since a very large fraction of stars are in binary stars, this affects the evolution at the end of their lives....

This newborn black hole belched a fleeting yet astonishingly intense flash of gamma rays known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) toward Earth, where it was detected by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory on 19 December 2016. While the gamma rays from the burst disappeared from view a scant seven seconds later, longer wavelengths of light from the explosion — including X-ray, visible light, and radio — continued to shine for weeks....

“Right now, virtually all existing therapies are aimed at reducing the symptoms from the damage that’s already been done to the heart, but no approaches have been able to replace the muscle that’s lost, because once it’s dead, it does not grow back on its own,” said Ilia Shadrin, a biomedical engineering doctoral student at Duke University and first author on the study. “This is a way that we could replace lost muscle with tissue made outside the body....

UCLA biologists have identified a gene that can slow the aging process throughout the entire body when activated remotely in key organ systems. Working with fruit flies, the life scientists activated a gene called AMPK that is a key energy sensor in cells; it gets activated when cellular energy levels are low. Increasing the amount of AMPK in fruit flies’ intestines increased their lifespans by about 30 percent — to roughly eight weeks from the typical six — and the flies stayed healthier longer as well....