Coronary artery disease and major depression may be genetically linked via inflammatory pathways to an increased risk for cardiomyopathy, a degenerative heart muscle disease, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital have found.   Their report, published April 5 in the journal Nature Mental Health, suggests that drugs prescribed for coronary artery disease and depression, when used in combination, potentially may reduce inflammation and prevent the development of cardiomyopathy.   “This work suggests that chronic low-level inflammation may be a significant contributor to both depression ...

URBANA, Ill. – Carbon monoxide emissions from industrial production have serious consequences for human health and are a strong indicator of overall air pollution levels. Many countries aim to reduce their emissions, but they cannot control air flows originating in other regions. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at global flows of air pollution and how they relate to economic activity in the global supply chain. “Our study is unique in combining atmospheric transport of air pollution with supply chain analysis as it tells us where the pollution is coming ...

Holographic displays offer a promising avenue for achieving lifelike 3D reproductions with continuous depth sensation, holding potential applications in fields such as entertainment, medical imaging, and virtual reality. However, the conventional methods for generating computer-generated holograms (CGHs) rely on repetitive computations, leading to increased computational complexity and impracticality for real-time applications. To tackle this issue, researchers from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (China) have introduced a novel method for CGH generation that significantly reduces computational overhead while ...

A recent analysis shows that renewable energy could be a viable alternative to diesel fuel for science at the South Pole. The analysis deeply explores the feasibility of replacing part of the energy production at the South Pole with renewable sources. For almost as long as humans have spent time in Antarctica, the continent has been a home for science. One of the research outposts located there is the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The science done there includes studies of climate change and cosmology. Currently, ...

Cathie Biga, MSN, FACC, today became president of the American College of Cardiology and made history as the organization’s first non-physician president. She will serve a one-year term representing over 56,000 cardiovascular care team members around the world and leading the cardiovascular organization in its mission to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health for all. “I’m excited to bring my own set of leadership skills and perspectives to the ACC as we kick off the first year of our new Strategic Plan and celebrate the College’s 75th ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 8 April 2024     Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet      @Annalsofim     Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, ...

  The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) selected Texas Innovates, a non-profit organization focused on hydrogen and carbon innovation and expansion in the greater Houston and Gulf Coast region, as one of 23 phase 1 winners of the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) Round 3 competition. Notably, Texas Innovates is the only Texas entity to advance to phase 2 of the competition. “We have been working towards this day since we identified the need for energy hardware incubation in 2017 and were a finalist in 2019 for C40 Cities global competition to make Houston’s Velasco Incinerator ...

A Pulse of Innovation: AI at the Service of Heart Research  Columbia biomedical engineers use AI to build a transformative new tool to study and diagnose heart function Understanding heart function and disease, as well as testing new drugs for heart conditions, has long been a complex and time-consuming task. A promising way to study disease and test new drugs is to use cellular and engineered tissue models in a dish, but existing methods to study heart cell contraction and calcium handling require a good deal of manual work, are prone to errors, and need expensive specialized equipment. There clearly is a critical medical ...

Despite having an overall survival rate of 94%, B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), the most common childhood cancer, can prove challenging to treat, with survival among relapsed or resistant cases falling between 30-50%. Recent work by St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists discovered which tumor cells resist treatment and why. This enabled the rational design of a combination therapy that better controlled high-risk subtypes of B-ALL in mouse models. The findings were published today in Cancer Cell.  “We found a new explanation of B-ALL ...

Key takeways UCLA psychologists asked experiment participants to choose to receive $40 in seven days or $60 in 30 days, for example, under a variety of time constraints. The experiment showed that people tend to make more impulsive decisions if they think about time delays first, and more patient decisions if they think about the greater reward associated with waiting longer. The findings could be applied where people are being encouraged to make life choices that will benefit them in the long run, such as eating healthier, exercising or saving for retirement, by emphasizing the future large rewards and deemphasizing ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL APRIL 8, 2024 AT 3:00 PM U.S. ET/ 12:00 PM PT Over the past four years, many of us have become accustomed to a swab up the nose to test for COVID-19, using at-home rapid antigen tests or the more accurate clinic-provided PCR tests with a longer processing time. Now a new diagnostic tool developed by UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Holger Schmidt and his collaborators can test for SARS-CoV-2 and Zika virus with the same or better accuracy as high-precision PCR tests in a matter of hours. In a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schmidt ...

Pregnancy may carry a cost, reports a new study from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. The research, carried out among 1735 young people in the Philippines, shows that women who reported having been pregnant looked biologically older than women who had never been pregnant, and women who had been pregnant more often looked biologically older than those who reported fewer pregnancies. Notably, the number of pregnancies fathered was not associated with biological aging among same-aged cohort ...

    University of Michigan researchers have discovered that a worm commonly used in the study of biology uses a set of proteins unlike those seen in other studied organisms to protect the ends of its DNA.   In mammals, shelterin is a complex of proteins that "shelters" the ends of our chromosomes from unraveling or fusing together. Keeping chromosomes from fusing together is an important job: chromosomes carry our body's DNA. If chromosome ends fuse, or if they fuse with other chromosomes, ...

One of the most abundant and deadliest organisms on earth is a virus called a bacteriophage (phage). These predators have lethal precision against their targets – not humans, but bacteria. Different phages have evolved to target different bacteria and play a critical role in microbial ecology. Recently, ADA Forsyth scientists exploring the complex interactions of microbes in the oral microbiome discovered a third player influencing the phage-bacterial arms race – ultrasmall bacterial parasites, called Saccharibacteria or TM7. In the study, which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

Some deeper areas of the Great Barrier Reef are insulated from harmful heatwaves – but that protection will be lost if global warming continues, according to new research. High surface temperatures have caused mass “bleaching” of the Great Barrier Reef in five of the last eight years, with the latest happening now. Climate change projections for coral reefs are usually based on sea surface temperatures, but this overlooks the fact that deeper water does not necessarily experience the same warming as that at the surface. The new study – ...

Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy have developed a new method to predict the financial impacts climate change will have on agriculture, which can help support food security and financial stability for countries increasingly prone to climate catastrophes.  The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses climate and agricultural data from Brazil. It finds that climate change has a cascading effect on farming, leading to increased loan defaults for ...

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. EAST LANSING, Mich. – The prevalence of early knee osteoarthritis (OA) symptoms faced by patients after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction is staggering — but not much is being done to address it according to new research published by scholars from Michigan State University’s Department of Kinesiology. The study – published by the Journal of Athletic ...

Conspiracy theorists get a bad rap in popular culture, yet research has shown that most Americans believe conspiracy theories of some sort. Why then, if most of us believe conspiracies, do we generally think of conspiracy theorists as loony?   New research from the University of Illinois Chicago found that it’s because people are quite bad at identifying what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory when it’s something they believe. The finding held true whether people self-identified as being liberal ...

By Beth Miller Pulse oximeters send light through a clip attached to a finger to measure oxygen levels in the blood noninvasively. Although the technology has been used for decades — and was heavily used during the COVID-19 pandemic — there is increasing evidence that it has a major flaw: it may provide inaccurate readings in individuals with more melanin pigment in their skin. The problem is so pervasive that the U.S. Food & Drug Administration recently met to find new ways to better evaluate the accuracy and performance of the devices in patients with more pigmented skin. Christine O’Brien, assistant professor of biomedical ...

Children’s literature became a distinct category during the Progressive Era in the United States, largely through the work of professional “book women” like children’s librarians, publishers, and teachers. In a chapter in a new book, researchers examine one of the first attempts to formalize a selection of existing literature into a canon of children’s books, the 1882 pamphlet Books for the Young by Caroline M. Hewins. They also analyze the books selected by Hewins, with a focus on books designated for boys only and for girls only. The ...

Another decline in net farm income is projected for the Show-Me State, according to the Spring 2024 Missouri Farm Income Outlook released by the University of Missouri’s Rural and Farm Finance Policy Analysis Center (RaFF). The report offers a state-level glimpse at projected farm financial indicators, including farm receipts, production expenses and other components that affect net farm income. Projections from the report suggest that declining market receipts and lower crop prices play a role in the estimated $0.8 billion decrease in net farm income for 2024. “Although decreased production expenses offer some relief, reduced livestock inventories ...

Our muscles are nature’s perfect actuators — devices that turn energy into motion. For their size, muscle fibers are more powerful and precise than most synthetic actuators. They can even heal from damage and grow stronger with exercise.  For these reasons, engineers are exploring ways to power robots with natural muscles. They’ve demonstrated a handful of “biohybrid” robots that use muscle-based actuators to power artificial skeletons that walk, swim, pump, and grip. But for every bot, there’s a very different build, and no general blueprint for how to get the most out of muscles ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Couples feel more understood and cared for when their partners show positive support skills – and it’s evidenced by levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the body – according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.  A team of Binghamton University researchers including Professor of Psychology Richard Mattson conducted a study of 191 heterosexual married couples to find out if better communication skills while giving and receiving social support led to lower cortisol levels ...

For heart attack patients, treating only the coronary artery that caused the infarction works just as well as preventive balloon dilation of the other coronary arteries, according to a new large study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and others. The results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Heart attack is a common disease with risks of serious complications. It has long been unclear what the best strategy is for treating narrowings in coronary arteries separate from the specific vessel that caused the infarction. A new large Swedish study has investigated ...

A new study introduces the Hybrid Global Annual 1-km International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Land Cover Maps for the period 2000-2020. This innovative dataset, free to access, marks a significant step forward in global land cover mapping, addressing longstanding issues of disagreement and incompatible classification systems among existing land cover products. Global land cover data, essential for environmental research, are plagued by inconsistencies across different datasets, complicating global change studies. The diversity in classification systems and methodologies challenges the creation of a unified, accurate land ...