(University of Michigan) – Even as the opioid epidemic dominated national attention over the past decade, the rate of overdose deaths among military veterans involving cocaine, methamphetamine, and other stimulants tripled, a new study suggests. More than half of the 3,631 veterans who died from overdoses involving these drugs between 2012 and 2018 had other substances in their systems, the study finds. In this group, most of those other substances were opioids, including synthetic...
Does an infection affect the immunization of subsequent generations? Researchers at Radboud University (Netherlands) have studied this together with the Universities of Bonn, Saarland (Germany), Lausanne (Switzerland), and Athens (Greece). Mouse fathers who had previously overcome an infection with fungi or were stimulated with fungal compounds passed on their improved protection to offspring across several generations. The team showed at the same time an improved immune response being passed on to the descendants. The...
Northwestern Medicine scientists have shown for the first time that coronavirus vaccines and prior coronavirus infections can provide broad immunity against similar coronaviruses, reports Medical Xpress. The findings build a rationale for universal coronavirus vaccines that could prove useful in the face of future epidemics. "Until our study, what hasn't been clear is if you get exposed to one coronavirus, could you have cross-protection across other coronaviruses? And we showed that is the case,"...
Researchers are a step closer to finding an explanation for autoimmune diseases – i.e. diseases in which our own immune system damages the body. With the help of a new technique, researchers from Aarhus University have succeeded in identifying the particles in the blood that determine the development of autoimmune diseases. They have discovered that patients with the autoimmune disease Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (also called SLE or Lupus) form a previously unknown type of...
Research suggests that nostalgia can help people cope with dementia, grief, and even the disorientation experienced by immigrants and refugees. Nostalgia may even help people cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, ScienceNews reports. In a study published in Social, Psychological and Personality Science, researchers found when some lonely, unhappy people reminisced about better, pre-pandemic moments, they felt happier. The results suggest that nostalgia can serve as an antidote to loneliness during the pandemic, the researchers...
A team of physicians at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University has discovered that for patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia who had higher ferritin in their blood upon admission and were treated with a corticosteroid, fewer intubations and deaths resulted. Their findings are reported this month in JAMA Network Open. In this study, the physician team evaluated the blood serum levels of ferritin, an indicator of body iron stores that can rise...
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany and two in France has set a new record for the coldest temperature ever recorded in a lab setting—38 picokelvins, reports Phys.org. In their paper published in the journal Physics, the group describes their work with a time-domain matter-wave lens system. Prior research suggested that the coldest possible temperature is absolute zero—0 Kelvin. The researchers created the coldest environment ever using a quantum gas lens and the famous Bremen...
People with elevated blood pressure that falls within the normal recommended range are at risk of accelerated brain aging, according to new research from the Australian National University (ANU). The research also found optimal blood pressure helps our brains stay at least six months younger than our actual age. The researchers are now calling for national health guidelines to be updated to reflect their important findings. The ANU study, published in Frontiers in Aging...
Desalination is the answer to long-term water security, but it's also expensive and energy-intensive. The good news is that scientists are developing viable solutions. For many years, the most common method of desalination has been reverse osmosis (RO). But RO desalination systems require connection to the electricity grid. Not only is this expensive, it is often inaccessible to isolated regions. This is why sustainable off-grid desalination systems powered by renewable energy are essential. With...
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have identified mixtures of toxic air pollutants that appear to be linked to poor asthma outcomes later in a child's life. The study examined early exposure to dozens of pollutants potentially experienced by 151 children with mild to severe forms of the disease. The researchers used a novel machine learning algorithm to find that 18 individual chemicals may be linked to poor asthma outcomes...
