New research finds advanced shoe technology reduces top race times for elite athletes

Nagoya University researchers and colleagues in Japan have uncovered a molecular pathway that enhances chemotherapy resistance in some pancreatic cancer patients. Targeting an RNA to interrupt its activity could improve patient response to therapy and increase their overall survival. "Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive human malignancies, with an overall median survival that is less than five months," says cancer biologist Yutaka Kondo of Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine. "This poor prognosis is partially due to a lack of potent therapeutic ...

Robotics field aims at mimicking what natural biological entities have achieved throughout millennia of evolution - actions like moving, adapting to the environment, or sensing. Beyond traditional rigid robots, the field of soft robotics has recently emerged using compliant, flexible materials capable to adapt to their environment more efficiently than rigid ones. With this goal in mind, scientists have been working for years in the so-called biohybrid robots or biobots, generally composed of muscle tissue, either cardiac or skeletal, and an artificial scaffold, achieving crawling, ...

Vigorous and rapid air exchanges might not always be a good thing when it comes to addressing levels of coronavirus particles in a multiroom building, according to a new modeling study. The study suggests that, in a multiroom building, rapid air exchanges can spread the virus rapidly from the source room into other rooms at high concentrations. Particle levels spike in adjacent rooms within 30 minutes and can remain elevated for up to approximately 90 minutes. The findings, published online in final form April 15 in the journal Building and Environment, come from a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The team includes building and HVAC experts ...

Diseases continue to be a major threat to coral reef health. For example, a relatively recent outbreak termed stony coral tissue loss disease is an apparently infectious waterborne disease known to affect at least 20 stony coral species. First discovered in 2014 in Miami-Dade County, the disease has since spread throughout the majority of the Florida's Coral Reef and into multiple countries and territories in the Caribbean. Some reefs of the northern section of Florida's Coral Reef are experiencing as much as a 60 percent loss of living coral tissue area. A new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A team from Regenstrief Institute leveraged OpenMRS, a global open-source electronic medical record (EMR), to create an emergency EMR for Indianapolis first responders preparing for a possible influx of COVID-19 patients. This process was completed in a week to allow Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services (IEMS) to register patients, collect basic clinical information, and send these encounters to Indiana's health information exchange, a crucial element to help the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. IEMS asked Regenstrief research scientists for help ...

Invasive Group B Streptococcus (GBS) disease, notably meningitis, during the first days and months of a baby's life can have persistent effects for children and hence their families, according to new research. Published in the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, the study is the first evidence of long-term effects including after GBS sepsis (infection in the bloodstream). This large study analysed outcomes for nearly 25,000 children born in Denmark and The Netherlands, between 1997 and 2017. Results show that children who had invasive GBS infection are twice as likely to have neurodevelopmental impairments (NDI) and ...

BOSTON - A unique antibody drug conjugate (ADC), which delivers a high dose of a cancer-killing drug to tumor cells through a targeted antibody, has been found in a global phase 3 clinical study to nearly double the survival time of patients with refractory metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The study of the ADC drug sacituzumab govitecan (SG), for which Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) was a lead clinical research site after serving as the lead site for the pivotal phase 1/2 trial, reported superior outcomes compared to single-agent chemotherapy, the standard for treating metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. The phase 3 results of the study, known as ASCENT, were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Favorable results with SG versus chemotherapy were observed ...

A new study has found up to half of all children with language difficulties and mental and physical health problems have been exposed to intimate partner violence, prompting calls for health and social care services to provide more effective identification and early intervention. The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in The BMJ, showed children exposed to intimate partner violence from infancy were twice as likely to have a psychiatric diagnosis, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and impaired language skills at age 10. They were also more likely to have asthma and sleep problems. The study also found that ...

MINNEAPOLIS - Intracerebral hemorrhage is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding within the brain tissue. Survivors are at high risk of having another bleeding stroke. Most of these strokes are caused by changes in the narrowest blood vessels in the brain, a condition known as cerebral small vessel disease. A new study has found that differences in the extent of one type of cerebral small vessel disease may contribute to differences in people's risk for a second bleeding stroke. The research is published in the April 21, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Cerebral small vessel disease is an umbrella term for a number of conditions that involve changes in the smallest blood vessels in the ...

MINNEAPOLIS - Women who have migraine before menopause may have an increased risk of developing high blood pressure after menopause, according to a study published in the April 21, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Migraine is a debilitating disorder, often resulting in multiple severe headaches a month, and typically experienced more often by women than men," said study author Gianluca Severi, Ph.D. of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris. "Migraine is most prevalent in women in the years before menopause. After ...