Global life expectancy increased by 6.2 years since 1990 according to a new study published in The Lancet. Over the past three decades, reductions in death from leading killers fueled this progress, including diarrhea and lower respiratory infections, as well as stroke and ischemic heart disease. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, however, it derailed progress in many locations. This is the first study to compare deaths from COVID-19 to deaths from other causes globally.  Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers found that the super-region of Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania had the largest net ...

After the introduction of the income tax in the United States, there has been a migration of higher income earners toward states with lower or no income tax, a new study reveals. This first-ever systematic analysis of 110 years of state income tax implementation throughout the United States also highlights the consequences of taxpayers fleeing to low or no-tax states. Published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the study is titled “The Introduction of the Income Tax, Fiscal Capacity, and Migration: Evidence from U.S. States” and was coauthored by Ugo Antonio Troiano, economist and associate ...

Mill Valley, CA – April 4, 2024 – SynGAP Research Fund 501(c)(3), the leading patient advocacy group working to improve the lives of SYNGAP1-Related Disorder (SRD) patients, today announced the appointment of Kathryn Helde, PhD, as its Chief Scientific Officer, effective February 1, 2024.   “SRF’s scientific grantmaking, industry partnerships, and repurposing efforts have grown past the point where we need a dedicated CSO,” says Mike Graglia, SRF’s Co-Founder and Managing Director.  “We are fortunate to have a parent in our ranks who is as well trained, talented, and dedicated as Dr. Helde.  As a volunteer for years, ...

Findings from US longitudinal household study add to ongoing US vaccination policy discussions by suggesting that pneumococcal vaccination in older adults is important even in populations where children are vaccinated at high rates. **Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 27-30 April). Please credit the congress if you use this story** New research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2024) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April) finds that pneumonia-causing ...

Ever want to scream during a particularly bad day, but then manage not to? Thank the human brain and how it regulates emotions, which can be critical for navigating everyday life. As we perceive events unfolding around us, the ability to be flexible and reframe a situation impacts not only how we feel, but also our behavior and decision-making. In fact, some of the problems associated with mental health relate to individuals' inability to be flexible, such as when persistent negative thoughts make it hard to perceive a situation differently. To help address such issues, a new Dartmouth-led ...

“Insights & Implications in Gerontology: The Vital Role of Nutrition in Brain Health,” a new publication from the Gerontological Society of America, explores nutritional choices that have been shown to improve cognition and decrease the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults. Consumption of a healthful diet is a behavioral strategy that can help to prevent the development of dementia as people age, the publication says. It also reports on the roles of vitamins and minerals in nutrition and brain function and focuses on how to implement person-centered conversations about the impact of diet and nutrition on overall wellness, including brain ...

Women with serious mental illness (SMI) who are pregnant or planning a pregnancy face gaps in information, support and resources in mental health services, new research suggests. The findings, published April 1 in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs, highlight the need to integrate pregnancy and parenting interventions, education, and other resources for women with SMI into mental health services. Policies that increase mental health provider and clinic capacity to address pregnancy and parenting can dramatically improve care for women living with mental ...

People depend on natural ecosystems of trees, grasses and shrubs to capture carbon from the atmosphere and pull it underground to slow the decline toward climate-change disaster. Ironically, these same protected spaces also tend to be highly photogenic hot-spots for tourism. New research from the Quinney College of Natural Resources and the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism makes a case study of one such place — Yellowstone National Park — to calculate surplus carbon visitors from across the world add to the atmosphere each year as a direct ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A team of researchers is calling for comprehensive changes to U.S. health care and social policies to improve diagnosis and treatment of perinatal mental health conditions and mitigate the dramatic disparities that put women of color at significantly greater risks of morbidity and mortality compared with white women. In a commentary published in the journal Health Affairs, the researchers proposed seven comprehensive changes to health care and economic policies to mitigate the burden of undiagnosed and untreated perinatal mental health challenges that are greatest among racial ...

Neutrons are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, unlike protons and electrons. That means that while the electromagnetic force is responsible for most of the interactions between radiation and materials, neutrons are essentially immune to that force. Instead, neutrons are held together inside an atom’s nucleus solely by something called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. As its name implies, the force is indeed very strong, but only at very close range — it drops off so rapidly as to be negligible beyond 1/10,000 the size of an atom. But now, researchers at MIT have found that neutrons can actually be made to cling ...

Extending postpartum Medicaid eligibility extensions may increase treatment for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs), a leading cause of perinatal illness and mortality, according to a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Brown University researchers. Published in the journal Health Affairs, the study found that retaining Medicaid coverage after birth increased outpatient mental health and medication treatment for PMADs by 20.5 percentage points, compared to birthing people who received commercial coverage. Retaining postpartum Medicaid also appeared to significantly lower patients’ out-of-pocket spending ...

A University of Texas at Arlington chemist has been honored for his significant contributions to separation science. Kevin Schug, the Shimadzu Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry, was named recipient of the 2024 Silver Jubilee Medal by the Chromatography Society, a United Kingdom-based organization with worldwide membership. The Silver Jubilee Medal recognizes up-and-coming researchers who have made major use of separation science in their own field or those who have made important contributions to a particular area of separation science. The award was created in 1982 to celebrate the society’s 25th anniversary. “I know many prominent separation scientists ...

In natural ecosystems, the herd mentality plays a major role – from schools of fish, to beehives to ant colonies. This collective behavior allows the whole to exceed the sum of its parts and better respond to threats and challenges.  This behavior inspired researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, and for more than a year they've been working on creating "smart swarms" of microscopic robots. The researchers engineered social interactions among these tiny machines so that they can act as one coordinated group, performing tasks better than they would if they were moving as individuals ...

MINNEAPOLIS – Earlier menopause combined with higher risk of cardiovascular disease is linked to an increased risk of thinking and memory problems later, according to a new study published in the April 3, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In this study, earlier menopause is defined as occurring before age 49. As a person ages, blood vessels, including those in the brain, can be damaged by controllable cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking. These risk factors not only increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, ...

In the quaint town of Gamboa, nestled near the Panama Canal, a team of scientists embarked on a unique endeavor: attaching red flags onto the legs of crickets and observing how birds respond to them. These eye-catching flags were borrowed from the matador bug (Anisoscelis alipes), an insect renowned for the colorful adornments on its hind legs. This trait has captivated Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Ummat Somjee for several years, particularly given the matador bug’s tendency to wave them. The persisting question: Why does it wave its colorful hind legs? A previous study, also supervised by Dr. Somjee, suggested ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Xylazine is an FDA-approved sedative and pain reliever for use in animals, but it has severe adverse effects when used in humans. It is now illicitly being added to opioids, like fentanyl and heroin, as well as cocaine—leading to a sharp rise in overdose deaths. Now, Scripps Research chemical biologists have developed a vaccine to block the effects of xylazine’s toxicity. The vaccine works by training the immune system to attack the drug, which is described in a new paper published in Chemical Communications on April 1, 2024. “We demonstrated that a vaccine can reverse the symptoms ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The sunflower family tree revealed that flower symmetry evolved multiple times independently, a process called convergent evolution, among the members of this large plant family, according to a new analysis. The research team, led by a Penn State biologist, resolved more of the finer branches of the family tree, providing insight into how the sunflower family — which includes asters, daisies and food crops like lettuce and artichoke — evolved. A paper describing the analysis and findings, which researchers said may help identify useful traits to selectively breed plants with more desirable characteristics, appeared online in the journal ...

On March 27, 2024, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago treated its first patient with ELEVIDYS (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl), the first gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy – a rare, genetic disease characterized by progressive muscle damage and weakness. Lurie Children’s is the first in Illinois to administer this treatment after ELEVIDYS received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in June 2023. Developed by Sarepta Therapeutics, ELEVIDYS is approved for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in ambulatory patients aged 4 through 5 years with ...

Butterflies, bees, ants and flies are the most widely referenced arthropods in a sample of almost 4,000 haiku - which commonly describe their color, flight and ecology ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298865 Article Title: Diversity and complexity of arthropod references in haiku Author Countries: USA Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Might your personality affect how you move? Runners classified as Myers-Briggs "Sensing" types have a more grounded running style in experiments than those classified as "Intuition" types ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0300108 Article Title: Mind to move: Differences in running biomechanics between sensing and intuition shod runners Author Countries: France, Switzerland, Belgium Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

The earliest dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, but so did many of the other animals living alongside them, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kristina Curry Rogers of Macalester College, Minnesota and colleagues. Dinosaurs grew up fast, a feature that likely set them apart from many other animals in their Mesozoic (252 to 66 million years ago) ecosystems. Some researchers have proposed that these elevated growth rates were key to the global success of dinosaurs, but little is known about the growth strategies of the earliest dinosaurs. In this study, Rogers and colleagues performed histological analysis, examining patterns of bone ...

The hours you work earlier in life may be associated with worse health years later, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Wen-Jui Han from New York University, US. Studies have consistently shown that nonstandard work schedules—working outside the traditional nine-to-five workday—can negatively impact physical and mental health as well as social and family life. The current study uses a life-course approach to provide a longer-term perspective on how work schedule ...

A recent study led by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the non-profit conservation organization Re:wild shows that the threat of mining to the great ape population in Africa has been greatly underestimated. Their results have been published in Science Advances. The rising demand for critical minerals, such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements required for the large-scale transition to cleaner energy is causing a surge of mining in Africa, where a large share of those mineral resources is still unexploited. ...

Tourism to Yellowstone National Park produces more than a billion kilos of CO2 emissions annually, with 90% arising through travel to and from the park, especially from visitors arriving by plane. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000391 Article Title: Quantifying and evaluating strategies to decrease carbon dioxide emissions generated from tourism to Yellowstone National Park Author Countries: United States Funding: This work was supported by the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station (Project ...

During the pandemic, University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) researchers, including those from the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), teamed up with the Mary Cariola Center to study ways to prevent COVID infection among children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), a particularly vulnerable population. Together, they found that good airflow and filtration in schools may help these children and their teachers avoid COVID infections. The COVID pandemic was a particularly difficult balancing act for children with IDDs and their ...