Latest News Releases 21 September

Scientists working on the PHYTOME project have developed processed red meat that includes added natural substitutes which reduces the carcinogenic compound nitrite added to preserve meats. The range of sausages and hams had a mixture of plants and fruits added to them which included rosemary, green tea, and resveratrol – an extract taken from Japanese Knotweed.

A new report shows that although Hispanic men and women in the continental United States and Hawaii have 25% to 30% lower overall cancer incidence and mortality than non-Hispanic Whites, they continue to have a higher risk of potentially preventable, infection-related cancers, including approximately two-fold higher rates of liver and stomach cancers.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have shown how SARS-CoV-2 viral proteases attack the host cell, and how this can be targeted to stop virus replication in cell culture using existing drugs. The new findings, published today in Nature Communications, offer a powerful resource to understand proteolysis in the context of viral infection, and to inform the development of targeted strategies to inhibit the virus that causes Covid-19.

Researchers have found a way to make what is called reservoir computing work between 33 and a million times faster, with significantly fewer computing resources and less data input needed.

• US states with most authoritarian laws and public attitudes had pre-Covid infectious disease rates four times higher than least authoritarian states. • Cambridge psychologists replicated findings at a national level across 47 countries, and say this may be the “behavioural immune system” in action. • Researchers argue that a desire for “conformity and obedience” as a result of Covid-19 could boost authoritarianism in the wake of the pandemic.

More than 80 cultures still use whistled language to communicate over long distances by simplifying words, syllable by syllable, into whistled melodies. Researchers trying to decode how bottlenose dolphins, highly social mammals with the second largest brain relative to their body size after humans, communicate are leveraging insights from studies looking at how human whistled speech is structured and organized. This model may provide new algorithms for helping understand how dolphins’ whistles encode information.

Children and young people with cancer in the UK face something of a funding lottery for services to preserve their fertility, with specialist treatment centres heavily reliant on charities to stump up the cash needed, particularly in England, finds the first study of its kind, published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. This is despite clear international consensus that these services be provided to those at risk of losing their fertility as a result of cancer treatment, note the researchers, who call for centralised NHS funding to ensure equitable provision.