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Cerebral aneurysms appear in approximately 5% to 8% of the general population. When they result in a blood vessel rupture, the ensuing blood leakage within the brain can lead to severe stroke or fatal consequences. Over one-quarter of patients who experience a hemorrhagic stroke die before reaching a hospital or healthcare facility. Predicting the rupture of aneurysms is crucial for medical prevention and treatment. In the journal Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum, and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, developed a patient-specific mathematical model to examine what aneurysm parameters influence rupture risk prior to surgery....

Strong evidence that prompt anti-clotting therapy may prevent deaths in hospital patients. Patients given preventive blood thinning drugs (prophylactic anticoagulants) within 24 hours of admission to hospital with COVID-19 are less likely to die compared with those who do not receive them, finds a study published by The BMJ today (February 11, 2021). Clinical trials are now underway to see if prophylactic anticoagulants could be an effective treatment for COVID-19....

An INRS team is investigating the relationship between body mass and the risk of developing cancer. Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer among Canadian men and the third leading cause of cancer death. Abdominal obesity appears to be associated with a greater risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer. This link was demonstrated in a study led by Professor Marie-Élise Parent of Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) and published in the journal Cancer Causes & Control....

Much of what is known about ancient ocean ecosystems is derived from rock and fossil records, which are generally limited to shallow-water deposits and provide only a small glimpse into the ocean-wide history of marine species. Here, using a different dataset — small fossils in global deep-sea sediment cores — Elizabeth Sibert and Leah Rubin provide a new view into changes in the abundance and diversity of one of the ocean’s greatest predators....

Hops are a key ingredient in beer production, providing aroma and bittering characteristics. Before 2007, hop production in the U.S. was limited to only three Pacific Northwest states–Oregon, Washington, and Idaho–according to Claudia Schmidt, assistant professor of agricultural economics in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Citing a report released this year by the Hop Growers of America, she said that 29 states are now engaging in hop production. “Our study is the first to systematically show that the number of hop farms in a state is related to the number of craft breweries,” said Schmidt....

A new study found that regular aspirin use is significantly associated with an increased incidence of neovascular AMD, a leading cause of blindness in older people. Researchers at the Center for Vision Research from the Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research (WMI), a close affiliate of the University of Sydney, have found that regular aspirin consumption is associated with an increased risk of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD) — a leading cause of blindness in older people....

Air conditioning and other space cooling methods account for about 10% of all electricity consumption in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed a material that cools the wearer without using any electricity. The fabric transfers heat, allows moisture to evaporate from the skin and repels water. Cooling off a person’s body is much more efficient than cooling an entire room or building....

Obesity is a chronic and relapsing condition, but physicians often lack guidance on which information is helpful for patients who would like to lose weight. As a result, the information patients receive can be hard to use and implement. Bad experiences are regularly reported by patients, who often see these conversations about weight as difficult. The researchers analyzed 159 audio recordings of consultations between general practitioners and patients living with obesity collected from the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2014....

Ample evidence of ancient rivers, streams, and lakes make it clear that Mars was at some point warm enough for liquid water to flow on its surface. While that may conjure up images of a tropical Martian paradise, new research will be published in Nature Geoscience throws a bit of cold water on that notion. The study, by scientists from Brown University and Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, suggests that warmth and water flow on ancient Mars were probably episodic, related to brief periods of volcanic activity that spewed tons of greenhouse-inducing sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere....

Hydrogels are three-dimensional polymer networks that reversibly transition from solution to gel in response to physical or chemical stimuli, such as temperature or acidity. These polymer matrices can encapsulate cargo, such as small molecules, or provide structural scaffolding for tissue engineering applications. Montclare is the lead author of a new paper in the journal Biomacromolecules, which details the creation of a hydrogel comprised of a single protein domain that exhibits many of the same properties as synthetic hydrogels....

Since 1995 the first extrasolar planet was discovered almost 4,000 planets have been found around the nearest stars. This allows us to study a large variety of configurations for these planetary systems. The evolution of the planets orbiting other stars can be affected, mainly, by two phenomena: the evaporation of the upper layers of the planet due to the effect of the X-rays and ultraviolet emitted by the central star, and by the impacts of other celestial bodies of the size of a planet....

The study was led by Dr. Ben Maoz of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Prof. Uri Ashery of the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and Sagol School of Neuroscience, and Prof. Roded Sharan of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science – all Tel Aviv University researchers. Also participating in the study were Dr. Rossana Rauti, Dr. Yael Bardoogo, and doctoral student Meishar Shahoah of Tel Aviv University and Prof....

The backbone is the Swiss Army Knife of mammal locomotion. It can function in all sorts of ways that allows living mammals to have remarkable diversity in their movements. They can run, swim, climb and fly all due, in part, to the extensive reorganization of their vertebral column, which occurred over roughly 320 million years of evolution. Open any anatomy textbook and you’ll find the long-standing hypothesis that the evolution of the mammal backbone, which is uniquely capable of sagittal (up and down) movements, evolved from a backbone that functioned similar to that of living reptiles, which move laterally (side-to-side)....

Researchers have solved the missing piece of a 350-year-old puzzle of how the pointed body parts of many animals grow to form their shape — including teeth, horns, claws, beaks, animal shells, and even the thorns and prickles of plants. An interdisciplinary team at Monash University discovered a new universal rule of biological growth that explains surprising similarities in the shapes of sharp structures across the tree of life, including teeth, horns, claws, beaks, animal shells, and even the thorns and prickles of plants....

The retina is located at the back of the eye and is a complex tissue composed of multiple layers. It functions by receiving light and transforming it into a signal that can be understood by the brain. Each layer of the retina is comprised of various cell types, each playing a distinctive role in the conversion of light. For this study published in the journal PLOS Genetics, the researchers focused on photoreceptor cells (PRCs), which are light-detecting cells found in the retina....

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft has been witnessing growing activity from comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as the comet approaches perihelion (its closest point to the sun during its orbit). On July 29, while the spacecraft orbited at a distance of 116 miles (186 kilometers) from the comet, it observed the most dramatic outburst to date. Early science results collected during the outburst came from several instruments aboard Rosetta, including the Double Focusing Mass Spectrometer (DFMS), which uses NASA-built electronics....

Starting Tuesday, August 27, K-12 students in U.S. public, private and home schools can enter the Mars 2020 Name the Rover essay contest. One grand prize winner will name the rover and be invited to see the spacecraft launch in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Mars 2020 Rover is preparing to launch to the Red Planet in July 2020, but it doesn’t have a name yet....

Genetic testing of saliva samples identifies the SARS-CoV-2 virus more quickly than testing of nasal swabs. The research is published today (March 21, 2022) in Microbiology Spectrum, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. “That is important because people can spread COVID-19 before they know that they have it,” said coauthor Donald K. Milton, M.D., DrPH, a professor of occupational and environmental health at the Institute for Applied Environmental Health, University of Maryland School of Public Health, College Park....

An ultimate goal in the field of carbon nanotube research is to synthesize single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with controlled chiralities. Twenty years after the discovery of SWNTs, scientists from Aalto University in Finland, A.M. Prokhorov General Physics Institute RAS in Russia and the Center for Electron Nanoscopy of Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have managed to control chirality in carbon nanotubes during their chemical vapor deposition synthesis. Carbon nanotube structure is defined by a pair of integers known as chiral indices (n,m), in other words, chirality....

For decades, researchers have tried to adapt widely used optical technologies — including lasers, transmitters, and receivers — to microchip-based devices. “The field of integrated photonics offers potential breakthroughs for applications ranging from energy-efficient communications to precision sensing and quantum information,” explained Peter Rakich, an associate professor of applied physics at Yale, who led the research team. “It’s very exciting because we’re already seeing these technologies used in practical commercial systems....