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Nervous system may play role in severe allergic reactions
Peanuts have a dark side. In some people, they can cause a dangerous and sometimes deadly allergic reaction marked by a sharp drop in body temperature and blood pressure, as well as difficulty breathing. This anaphylactic shock has typically been blamed on the immune system going into overdrive. But a new study in mice pegs an additional culprit: the nervous system . The findings, reported today in Science Immunology , “are line with what people thought but no one was actually able to demonstrate,” says Sebastien Talbot, a neuroimmunologist at Queen’s University who was not involved in the s...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Unearthed genetic sequences from China market may point to animal origin of COVID-19
A scientific sleuth in France has identified previously undisclosed genetic data from a food market in Wuhan, China, that she and colleagues say support the theory that coronavirus-infected animals there triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. Several of the researchers presented their findings on Tuesday to the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), an expert group convened last year by the World Health Organization. “The data does point even further to a market origin,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research who attended the meeting and is one of the scienti...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 17, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Removing race from genetics, rising U.S. death rates, and a very long neck
METEOROLOGY Intensity scale for atmospheric rivers reveals global hot spots Atmospheric rivers like those pummeling the West Coast now have a five-level intensity scale, which has enabled researchers to chart the global prevalence of these sinuous bands of storms . The scale, first developed in 2019 for the U.S. West Coast, classifies the events based on how long they last and how much moisture they transport from the tropics to higher latitudes, much as the hurricane scale ranks storms by their wind speeds. In a new study using 40 years of observations, scientists found the most extreme r...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 16, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Straight from the heart: Mysterious lipids may predict cardiac problems better than cholesterol
Stephanie Blendermann, 65, had good reason to worry about heart disease. Three of her sisters died in their 40s or early 50s from heart attacks, and her father needed surgery to bypass clogged arteries. She also suffered from an autoimmune disorder that results in chronic inflammation and boosts the odds of developing cardiovascular illnesses. “I have an interesting medical chart,” says Blendermann, a real estate agent in Prior Lake, Minnesota. Yet Blendermann’s routine lab results weren’t alarming. At checkups, her low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol hovered around the 100 milligrams-per...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 16, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Geneticists should rethink how they use race and ethnicity, panel urges
The once widely held notion that humans fall into discrete races has led to geneticists drawing erroneous conclusions about the role of genes in shaping health and traits, and in some cases, to harmful discrimination against some groups. An expert committee is now urging an overhaul of this practice. Most notably, the committee’s report calls for researchers to scrap the term “race” itself in most studies, use caution with other labels such as ethnicity and geography, and determine ancestry by quantifying how closely a group’s members are related to reference genomes drawn from certain populations. “We’re...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 14, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Do COVID-19 vaccine mandates still make sense?
Visitors to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., receive a clear reminder that, 3 years after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 10 March 2020, it’s far from over. Before entering, they must show a guard proof that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19. Such demands were common around the world a year ago, with wide support from infectious disease scientists and public health researchers. But by now, almost everyone has had natural infections with SARS-CoV-2 or been vaccinated against the coronavirus—sometimes both—and it’s become clear that vaccine-induc...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 14, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Gene-editing summit touts sickle cell success, while questions on embryo editing linger
After decades of living with often excruciating pain, Victoria Gray had to get used to a new sensation in recent years: waking up without it. “It may sound crazy, but I had to pinch myself to see was I still able to feel pain,” she says. Gray, a 37-year-old mother of four from Forest, Mississippi, who was born with sickle cell disease, arguably became the star of last week’s International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London when she spoke about her transformation. In 2019, she was the first person to undergo an experimental therapy in which blood stem cells were taken from her, altered ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 13, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Monkey rock bashing resembles tools made by early human ancestors
Hefting a potato-size rock, wild long-tailed macaques ( Macaca fascicularis ) in Thailand smash oil palm nuts on stone anvils. As they pound away, sharp flakes sometimes fly off from their hammer stones— flakes that are “almost indistinguishable” from stone tools made by early human relatives more than 3 million years ago , according to a controversial new study . Indeed, the researchers argue, the monkeys’ flakes are so similar to our ancestors’ tools that many archaeologists would classify them as early stone tools without a second thought. The study , publish...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 10, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Hubble interlopers, an ocean-drilling gap, and a near-sighted astronomer
ASTRONOMY Satellite swarms spoil Hubble’s view Images from the iconic Hubble Space Telescope are increasingly marred by the tracks of passing satellites in higher orbits , a threat that could balloon as companies vie to build “megaconstellations” for global internet services. The rocket company SpaceX has launched more than 3500 of its Starlink satellites out of a planned 12,000; Amazon and the Chinese government have similar plans. Ground-based observatories are already seeing images spoiled, so researchers wanted to know how badly Hubble was affected. They enlisted members of the p...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 9, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Suffering in silence: Caring for research animals can take a severe mental toll
Conner Sessions’s decision to combine his love of science and animals nearly destroyed him. Growing up in rural Washington state, he spent his early life surrounded by cows, horses, cats, and dogs. He cared about all of them and considered a career in veterinary medicine. But after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, in 2016, he saw a job ad that changed his mind. The school needed an animal technician, someone to clean and feed mice, pigs, dogs, and other creatures used in biomedical research. “I wanted to get involved with science, and working w...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 9, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Science takes back seat to politics in first House hearing on origin of COVID-19 pandemic
Some scientists and legislators might have hoped this morning’s U.S. congressional hearing on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic would move beyond partisan politics and seriously investigate what has become a deeply divisive debate . But members of the House of Representatives’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic mostly hammered home long-standing Republican or Democratic talking points, shedding no new light on the central question: Did SARS-CoV-2 naturally jump from animals to humans or did the virus somehow leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China? “It was very disappointing, and almost...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

China battles alien marsh grass at unprecedented scale
A long its 18,000 kilometers of coastline, China has been taken over by a green invader. Smooth cordgrass ( Spartina alterniflora ) grows tall and thick across tidal mudflats, depriving endangered migratory birds of habitat, clogging shipping channels, and ruining clam farms. Now, China aims to beat back 90% of the weed by 2025. “This is a mammoth undertaking,” says Steven Pennings, a coastal ecologist at the University of Houston. “It’s audacious.” The nationwide effort, launched last month , “is by far the largest action plan for wetland invasive species control in China and even in ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

In Zimbabwe, drought is driving a hydropower crisis —and a search for alternatives
MUTARE, ZIMBABWE— Normally, the Murahwa Green Market here in this small city near the border with Mozambique bustles with welders, carpenters, and mechanics selling their services. But the market has been deathly quiet in recent weeks, as a prolonged drought has plunged Zimbabwe into a severe energy crisis. Water levels behind Zimbabwe’s main hydropower dam, which produces nearly 70% of the nation’s electricity, have dropped too low to reliably generate power, forcing utility managers to impose rolling blackouts that last for up to 20 hours per day. “We are forced to work at night when electricity is ava...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Why does the flu make you feel so crummy? Neurons in throat may be to blame
When you come down with the flu, your body lets you know. You lose your appetite, you feel sluggish, and your mood takes a hit. The infection itself doesn’t cause these symptoms—your brain does. Now, scientists may have figured out a key part of how this happens. Studying mice with influenza, they found a cluster of nerve cells in the back of the throat that detects a virus’ presence and sends signals to the brain, triggering symptoms that respond to the infection. The study is among the first to pin this response on a specific population of nerve cells, says Anoj Ilanges, a biologist at the Howard Hughes...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘Revolutionary’ blue crystal resurrects hope of room temperature superconductivity
Has the quest for room temperature superconductivity finally succeeded? Researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R), who previously were forced to retract a controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, are back with an even more spectacular claim. This week in Nature they report a new material that superconducts at room temperature —and not much more than ambient pressures. “If this is correct, it’s completely revolutionary,” says James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the work. A room temperature superconduc...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - March 8, 2023 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research