Science
press releases.

Science23 Oct 2024

Researchers receive grant to study invasive autumn olive

Almost a ubiquitous presence in landscapes across Southwest Virginia, the invasive autumn olive thrives. But it’s not supposed to be here. Autumn olive is known for its nitrogen-fixing ability, allowing it to thrive in poor soils and outcompete native plants. The shrub’s berries are edible, rich in antioxidants such as lycopene, and have a tart-sweet flavor. While its berries are beneficial for wildlife, the plant's aggressive spread disrupts local ecosystems, reducing biodiversity. With a one-year grant from the Powell River ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Nixing narcolepsy nightmares

Nightmares affect 30-40% of patients with narcolepsy, but are often overlooked Treatment can transform patients’ sleep and their daytime mood in a matter of weeks Study found overall reduction in nightmare severity and frequency in six patients CHICAGO --- A new Northwestern Medicine study has demonstrated a new way to treat narcolepsy-related nightmares. The scientists combined cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and lucid dreaming to help patients in a small clinical trial. “We had them imagine what they’d like to dream instead of their nightmare, almost like they’re writing a movie script,” said corresponding author ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

American Society of Anesthesiologists names Donald E. Arnold, M.D., FACHE, FASA, new president

PHILADELPHIA — Donald E. Arnold, M.D., FACHE, FASA, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, Mercy Hospital in St. Louis and member of the board of directors of Western Anesthesiology Associates, Inc., in Ballwin, Missouri, was today named president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the nation’s largest organization of anesthesiologists. Dr. Arnold assumed office at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2024 annual meeting and will serve for one year. “I’m honored to be named president of ASA and committed to serving our members, supporting the Society’s mission to advance the specialty, preserving physician-led anesthesia care, and above ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Family as a wealth factor

Wealth is one of the strongest indicators of social status, acting as a key indicator of social inequality and influencing access to education, health care and professional success. In a study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the University of Cologne, GESIS and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health examined how financial wealth changes related to various generational transitions within families. The study used data from Norwegian registries and focused on people born in 1953. Investigating changes in wealth within the ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Breathing deep: A metabolic secret of ethane-consuming archaea unraveled

Seeps on the deep seafloor naturally emit alkanes, which are pollutants that are potentially dangerous to life and act on global warming. Fortunately, the sediments around the seeps host microbes that act as a biological filter: They consume most of the alkanes before their release into the oceans and our atmosphere. This so-called anaerobic oxidation of alkanes is an important yet poorly understood microbial process. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, now ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Novel antibody platform tackles viral mutations

New York, NY, October 23, 2024 — Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with colleagues in the field, have developed an innovative antibody platform aimed at tackling one of the greatest challenges in treating rapidly evolving viruses like SARS-CoV-2: their ability to mutate and evade existing vaccines and therapies. Their findings, including preclinical studies in mice, introduce the Adaptive Multi-Epitope Targeting and Avidity-Enhanced (AMETA) Nanobody Platform, a new antibody approach for addressing how viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, evolve to evade vaccines and treatments. Details on the results were published October 23 ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Ultra-small spectrometer yields the power of a 1,000 times bigger device

Spectrometers are technology for reading light that date back to the era of famed 17th-century physicist Isaac Newton. They work by breaking down light waves into their different colors — or spectra — to provide information about the makeup of the objects being measured. UC Santa Cruz researchers are designing new ways to make spectrometers that are ultra-small but still very powerful, to be used for anything from detecting disease to observing stars in distant galaxies. Their inexpensive production cost makes them more accessible and customizable for specific applications. The team of researchers, led by an interdisciplinary ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Project Cure CRC awards nearly $5 million in research funding

Washington, D.C. – October 23, 2024 – Project Cure CRC, the breakthrough research fund of the leading nonprofit Colorectal Cancer Alliance (Alliance), has announced five new awardees of funds to advance urgent science in the colorectal cancer space. To date, 10 research grants have been awarded for a grand total of almost $5 million in critically needed funding. Recipients of the most recent grants totaling almost $1 million include investigators from the University of California, San Francisco, Indiana University, University of Saskatchewan, Georgetown University, and Anglia Ruskin University. ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

New parasite discovered amid decline of California’s unique Channel Island fox

California’s Channel Islands are home to the Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis), one of the smallest and most cherished species of island fox in the United States. Although no longer on the Endangered Species List, they remain a species of special concern due to their ecological importance. In the 1990s, the San Miguel Island fox nearly went extinct, dropping to just 15 individuals. A recovery program restored their numbers by 2010. However, from 2014 to 2018, the population fell to 30% of its peak right after a new acanthocephalan parasite, commonly known as thorny-headed worms, was identified on the island. This also occurred while a multi-year draught heated San ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Dehydration linked to muscle cramps in IRONMAN triathletes

PULLMAN, Wash. – As athletes prepare to dive into Hawaiian waters for the first part of the IRONMAN World Championship on Oct. 26, they may want to pay a little extra attention to the water inside their bodies. Contrary to previous research, a Washington State University-led study of three decades of the IRONMAN’s top competition found a connection between dehydration and exercise-induced muscle cramps. Based on medical data of more than 10,500 triathletes, the study, published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, found a strong link between dehydration and participants seeking treatment for muscle cramps during the competition. ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Safety and security: Study shines light on factors behind refugees’ resilience

“While exposure to persecution, war and displacement is associated with high rates of psychological disorders, such as PTSD and depression, remarkably the majority of refugees, despite having gone through very difficult experiences, don’t go on to develop a psychological disorder,” says Prof. Nickerson, Director of the Refugee Trauma and Recovery Program at UNSW’s School of Psychology. Despite this, previous research has focused on trying to understand factors that predict psychopathology or psychological distress, rather than factors that ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

British Sleep Society advocates for permanent Standard Time in the UK

The British Sleep Society has released a position statement in the Journal of Sleep Research advocating for the abolition of the twice-yearly clock changes in the UK and the restoration of permanent Standard Time (Greenwich Mean Time). This recommendation is based on scientific evidence highlighting the adverse effects of the clock change and Daylight Saving Time (DST) on sleep and circadian health. The British Sleep Society emphasizes that sleep is central to health and well-being and the enforced changes of clock time to DST can interfere negatively with sleep regulation. “What we often don’t realize is that DST changes our schedules, moving them ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Can reducing moose numbers help protect Canadian caribou populations from wolf predation?

Woodland caribou populations in Canada are declining because of habitat changes that benefit common prey species of wolves (such as moose and deer), leading to increasing numbers of wolves that kill caribou. To protect caribou, wildlife managers have reduced wolf numbers in some caribou ranges, but this may cause moose populations to grow, resulting in a wolf rebound. New research in The Journal of Wildlife Management has found that reducing moose populations to historical levels through hunting could be helpful for caribou conservation. The analysis included regions in British Columbia and Alberta with high moose populations where lethal wolf removals were annually conducted ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Sleep experts call for UK to abolish twice-yearly clock changes

A team of leading sleep researchers from the British Sleep Society have called for the government to abolish the twice-yearly clock changes in the UK due to the adverse effects on sleep and circadian health. After considering the available scientific evidence that circadian and sleep health are positively affected by the availability of natural daylight during the morning and negatively affected by the twice-yearly changes of clock time, especially when the clocks move forward in spring, the British Sleep Society recommends the abolition of the twice-yearly clock changes in the UK. With sleep being central to health and wellbeing, the Society has issued a statement ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Taking the “vibrational fingerprints” of molecules got 100 times faster

Researchers Takuma Nakamura, Kazuki Hashimoto, and Takuro Ideguchi of the Institute for Photon Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo have increased by a 100-fold the measurement rate of Raman spectroscopy, a common technique for measuring the “vibrational fingerprint” of molecules in order to identify them. As the measurement rate has been a major limiting factor, this improvement contributes to advancements in many fields that rely on identifying molecules and cells, such as biomedical diagnostics and material analytics. The findings were published in the journal Ultrafast ...

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Science23 Oct 2024

Gardens prevent pollinators from starving when farmland nectar is scarce, new study finds

Gardens offer a steady and reliable source of nectar all year round, helping to keep pollinators fed when farmland sources are limited, researchers have discovered. This consistency means that even small patches of gardens in rural areas can sustain pollinators, particularly in early spring and late summer when nectar is scarce. In the findings, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists at the University of Bristol discovered that gardens can provide between 50% and 95% of the total nectar during these critical ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Lifetime sudden cardiac death risk 4+ times higher for those with schizophrenia

The lifetime risk of an unexpected and sudden death from a cardiovascular cause in the absence of pre-existing heart disease—known as sudden cardiac death—is more than 4 times higher for people with schizophrenia than it is for the general population, indicates Danish research published online in the journal Heart. The risk is still around twice as high for those with other types of mental ill health, such as depression, whatever their age, indicate the findings, which suggest that an 18 year old can expect to live around 10 fewer years than someone of the same age without mental health issues. The research to date indicates ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

A new kind of authoritarianism: Democracy in decline at home and abroad

A majority of Americans worry this year’s general election will be tainted by fraud, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released earlier this month—an ominous indication of the state of democracy in the U.S. “When citizens lose trust in the electoral process, they may question the legitimacy of elected officials and the institutions they represent, which undermines the foundational principle that government authority is derived from the will of the people,” ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Harnessing science to tackle global crises

In a paper published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, an international team of researchers looked at how science could play a more active role in managing crises. The paper builds on the outcomes of the international conference “What Role for Science in Crisis Times? Outlook in the Health, Environment, and Agriculture Interconnected Areas”, held in Montpellier in 2022. To enhance science’s contribution to crisis management, the paper emphasises the need for interdisciplinarity, where science is integrated across disciplines, and transdisciplinarity, which incorporates various societal actors and stakeholders. By co-designing and co-producing ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Caltech's new fingerprint mass spectrometry method paves the way to solving the proteome

Caltech scientists have developed a method driven by machine learning that allows them to accurately measure the mass of individual particles and molecules using complex nanoscale devices. The new technique opens the possibility of using a variety of devices for the measurement of mass and, therefore, the identification of proteins, and could pave the way to determining the sequence of the complete proteome, the collection of all the proteins in an organism. Proteins are the engines of living systems. Which proteins are made, ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Invasive flathead catfish impacting Susquehanna’s food chain, researchers find

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Flathead catfish — native to the Mississippi River basin — were first detected in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania in 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In the two decades since then, the invasive species has spread throughout the river basin. The impact of the large predator on the waterway’s food webs and ecology was unknown, but now a research team is beginning to understand what Susquehanna flatheads are eating and how their presence is affecting native aquatic species in the river. The findings, which the team said state ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Javadi receives DOE Early Career Award to study qubit hosts

NORMAN, OKLA. – Alisa Javadi, Ph.D., professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program for research that offers the potential for advancing quantum technology development. Javadi’s research will test the use of cerium oxide as a host for quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing, need an environment free ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Texas Accounting Chair Steven Kachelmeier garners coveted award for scholarship

Texas Accounting Chair Steven Kachelmeier Garners Coveted Award for Scholarship AUSTIN, Texas — The American Accounting Association (AAA) presented its Lifetime Achievement Award for Behavioral Accounting Research to Steven Kachelmeier, a professor and chair of the Department of Accounting at The University of Texas McCombs School of Business. Kachelmeier, the Thomas O. Hicks Endowed Chair in Business, accepted this prestigious award during the weekend at the association’s 2024 Accounting ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Senolytics dasatinib and quercetin for prevention of pelvic organ prolapse in mice

“This study represents one of the first to evaluate the impact of senolytic agents D+Q on the clinical development of pelvic organ prolapse and expression of proteins associated with cellular senescence in a mouse model.” BUFFALO, NY- October 22, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science), Volume 16, Issue 19 on September 26, 2024, entitled, “Use of the senolytics dasatinib and quercetin for prevention of pelvic organ prolapse in a mouse animal model.” Pelvic organ prolapse is a common condition among women ...

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Science22 Oct 2024

Reaction conditions tune catalytic selectivity

UPTON, N.Y. — Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new theoretical framework for more accurately predicting the behavior of catalysts. These collections of atoms lower the energy needed for countless chemical reactions. The study reveals how conditions such as temperature and pressure can change a catalyst’s structure, efficiency, and even the products it makes. The findings are published in the journal Chem Catalysis. “Our results highlight the significant impact ...

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