Science
press releases.

Science10 Jan 2024

Genetics may influence the body’s response to low oxygen, Pitt study finds

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 10, 2024 – University of Pittsburgh Schools of Medicine researchers uncovered a fundamental mechanism that controls the body’s response to limited oxygen and regulates blood vessel disease of the lung. By combing through genomes of more than 20,000 individuals in the U.S., France, England and Japan and combining the results with molecular studies in the lab, the team discovered a shared genetic trait that could predict a higher risk of small lung vessel disease called pulmonary hypertension and its more severe ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Feeling depressed linked to short-term increase in bodyweight, study finds

Increases in symptoms of depression are associated with a subsequent increase in bodyweight when measured one month later, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. The study, published today in PLOS ONE, found that the increase was only seen among people with overweight or obesity, but found no link between generally having greater symptoms of depression and higher bodyweight. Research has suggested a connection between weight and mental health – with each potentially influencing the other – but the relationship is complex and remains poorly understood, ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

MD Anderson research highlights for January 10, 2024

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights showcases the latest breakthroughs in cancer care, research and prevention. These advances are made possible through seamless collaboration between MD Anderson’s world-leading clinicians and scientists, bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back. Recent developments at MD Anderson include insights into the effects of the gut microbiome on remote tumors, a screening strategy for ovarian cancer early detection, a combination approach ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

JMIR Aging accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE

JMIR Publications is pleased to announce that JMIR Aging has been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE, which is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database. JMIR Aging had already been indexed in PubMed previously. MEDLINE is a more selective subset of PubMed, consisting of the top 5,200 biomedical journals. Indexing in MEDLINE also means that articles are now also indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) and other metadata. Selection for MEDLINE is a result of a thorough review of the journal by reviewers from the Literature ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Dry-cleaning fluid becomes a synthetic chemist's treasure

The widely used dry-cleaning and degreasing solvent perc can be converted to useful chemicals by a new clean, safe and inexpensive procedure. The Kobe University discovery using on-demand UV activation may open the path to upcycling perc and thus contribute to a more sustainable society. Organic synthesis is the production of useful chemicals, such as drugs, from other available chemicals. In general, chemists use source materials to create simple building blocks, such as carbonate esters, and combine them to increasingly complex structures. The source materials for this need to be reactive, but that also usually makes them toxic, such as the commonly ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Countries and companies need to address declining global fertility rates, doctors say

The global fertility rate is declining and most governments are failing to recognize and address the impact on economies and societies, say a group of physicians invited by the International Federation of Fertility Societies (IFFS) in a new paper and campaign launched today. “Not including the effects of migration, many countries are predicted to have a population decline of more than 50% from 2017 to 2100,” the physicians write in “Declining global fertility rates and the implications for family planning and family building,” published January 10, 2024 in Human Reproduction Update. “By 2050, 77% of predominantly high-income countries, and ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Global prevalence of adolescent use of nonprescription weight-loss products

About The Study: This meta-analysis that included 90 studies with 604,000 participants found that use of weight-loss products occurs at high levels in adolescents, especially girls. These findings suggest that, given the ineffectiveness of these products for weight loss coupled with their harmful long-term health consequences, interventions are required to reduce use of weight-loss products in this group. Authors: Natasha Yvonne Hall, Pharm.B., M.H.E., of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Almost 1:10 adolescents non-prescription weight loss products globally

One in ten adolescents globally have used ineffective and potentially harmful non prescribed weight loss products in their lifetime, with 2% using them in the previous week. A review, of over 90 studies of 600,000+ participants, headed by Ms Natasha Hall fro0m Monash University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that adolescent use of non prescription weight loss products is 5.5% overall, 2% in the past week; 4.4% in the past month, 6.2% in the past year and 8.9% in their lifetime. The authors caution against the long term consequences of these ineffective treatments. END ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

General A-site alloying strategy helps to prepare noble metal-occupied MAX phases

Researchers led by Prof. HUANG Qing from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with researchers from the Zhejiang Institute of Tianjin University, and Linköping University, Sweden, has proposed a general A-site alloying strategy for the preparation of noble metal-occupied MAX phases. This work was published in Matter. MAX phases are a family of ternary layered transition metal carbides that have attracted great attention ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Dramatic decline in cigarette use among U.S. teens over three decades

Cigarette smoking remains the leading avoidable cause of premature death in the United States, accounting for approximately 500,000 deaths or 1 in 5 deaths annually. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, most adults who smoke cigarettes started before age 18, so preventing cigarette smoking in adolescents is important to reducing smoking in adults. In a new study, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators explored overall trends in cigarette smoking among a large sample of U.S. adolescents in grades nine to 12 from 1991 to 2021. They ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Finding a home for the wandering mushrooms —— Phylogenetic and taxonomic updates of Agaricales

Many edible, medicinal, and poisonous mushrooms that we are familiar with belong to the order Agaricales, which is a group of fungi with important economic and ecological value. Understanding the phylogenetic relationships of Agaricales can help us to know their evolutionary history and diversity, as well as their interactions with other organisms. Moreover, the phylogenetic framework of Agaricales can provide a basis for conserving biodiversity, such as measuring phylogenetic diversity and assessing the uniqueness and importance of different species. Previous studies divided Agaricales into 8 suborders and 46 families, but the systematic position and phylogenetic relationship ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Study on lamprey embryos sheds light on the evolutionary origin of vertebrate head

The origin of the vertebrate skull is a topic of much debate among evolutionary biologists. Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the vertebrae and somites. On the other hand, others believe that the vertebrate head has evolved as a new, unsegment body part, unrelated to other widely observed embryonic segments somites. Interestingly, previous studies on embryos have revealed the presence of some vestiges of somites ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Unveiling the reproductive secrets of red-swamp crayfish

Procambarus clarkii is a crustacean species native to American freshwater bodies. Brought to Japan in the 1920s as a feed for frogs, this crustacean has slowly taken over the Japanese freshwaters by predation and propagation. In fact, in 2023, the red-swamp crayfish was designated as an invasive alien species by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment and of the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. One way to control the growth in population of red-swamp crayfish and the accompanying crisis is to capture the red-swamp crayfish in their reproductive ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Discovery of immense fortifications dating back 4,000 years in north-western Arabia

The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis—one of the longest known going back to this period—was just revealed by a team of scientists from the CNRS1 and the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU). This new walled oasis is, along with that of Tayma, one of the two largest in Saudi Arabia. While a number of walled oases dating back to the Bronze Age had already been documented, this major discovery sheds new light on human occupation in north-western Arabia, and provides ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Prestigious American Historical Review showcases UT class where video games meet history

Tore Olsson put his students in touch with American history through his popular and award-winning class “Red Dead America: Exploring America’s Violent Past Through the Hit Video Games.” Now this engagement has reached beyond the classroom—the historical profession’s most prestigious journal, the American Historical Review, just published a major feature on the class as an example of creative and innovative history teaching. Olsson is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in UT’s Department of History. His focus as a historian is the United States since the Civil War, with a particular interest in the US South, ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

Early menopause and HRT among hormonal factors linked to heightened rheumatoid arthritis risk

Early menopause—before the age of 45—taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and having 4 or more children are among several hormonal and reproductive factors linked to a heightened risk of rheumatoid arthritis in women, finds a large long term study published in the open access journal RMD Open. Women are more susceptible to this autoimmune disease than men, note the researchers. They are 4–5 times as likely as men to develop rheumatoid arthritis under the age of 50, and twice as likely to do so between the ages of 60 and 70. And the disease seems to take a greater physical toll on women than it does on men. While ...

Read the release

Science10 Jan 2024

No laughing matter: Leadership critical to help address NHS retention crisis

Frontline healthcare workers in busy hospitals feel that they are “just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic” according to new research into the impact of under-resourced and high-pressure emergency hospital departments in the UK. A study from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and University of Bath, led by clinical psychologist Dr Jo Daniels in collaboration with colleagues at UWE Bristol and the University of Bristol, argues that hospitals need better leadership to help change cultures and support people’s basic needs. In addition to reflections ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Meagan Brem and team receive grant to study alcohol-fueled acts of violence among intimate partners

Beer pong. Quarters. Flip cup. The drinking games college students play can seem like an alcohol-laced version of intramural sports. When college-aged drinkers imbibe too heavily, the risk for physically harming a romantic partner rises considerably. What if there was a way for heavy drinkers to monitor their alcoholic intake and blood-alcohol levels in real time, before an intimate situation cascades into physical violence? Or, as Virginia Tech researcher and assistant professor of psychology Meagan Brem put it: “If we can identify ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Unlocking the secrets of a "hot Saturn" and its spotted star

Led by researchers from Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx), a team of astronomers has harnessed the power of the revolutionary James Webb Space Webb Telescope (JWST) to study the "hot Saturn" exoplanet HAT-P-18 b. Their findings, published last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, paint a complete picture of the HAT-P-18 b's atmosphere while exploring the great challenge of distinguishing its atmospheric signals from the activity of its star. HAT-P-18 b is located over 500 light-years away ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

ChatGPT poem regurgitation raises ethical questions

ITHACA, N.Y. – Ask ChatGPT to find a well-known poem and it will probably regurgitate the entire text verbatim – regardless of copyright law – according to a new study by Cornell University researchers. The study showed that ChatGPT was capable of “memorizing” poems, especially famous ones commonly found online. The findings pose ethical questions about how ChatGPT and other proprietary artificial intelligence models are trained – likely using data scraped from the internet, researchers said. “It’s generally not good for large language models to memorize large chunks of text, in part because it’s a privacy concern,” ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Sylvester-led research group unveils the first individual risk prediction model for multiple myeloma

MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL JAN. 9, 2024 AT 4 PM EST) – A multicenter collaboration led by researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has produced the first computational model for newly diagnosed multiple myeloma that predicts an individual’s personalized prognosis based on their tumor genomics and treatments. The prediction model for individualized risk in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma, or IRMMa, improves on previous prognostic tools because it takes into account ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Current research on prevalence of prolonged grief disorder is inadequate

Waltham — January 8, 2024 — Proper procedures for diagnosing prolonged grief disorder (PGD) are not being followed in research into its prevalence, according to a study published in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, part of the Lippincott portfolio from Wolters Kluwer. What’s more, most published literature doesn’t clearly acknowledge the limitations of the methodology used. The lead investigator was Margaret S. Stroebe, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Utrecht University and the University of Groningen ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

New book provides roadmap for police management of public order

Managing public order at large demonstrations, protests, and assemblies is a demanding and necessary task. A new book provides an international review of public order management experiences and effective practices. Through practical examples grounded in multidisciplinary theory and science, the book offers a roadmap to improve police response and increase safety at large gatherings in democratic countries. The book, Public Order Policing: A Professional's Guide to International Theories, Case Studies, and Best Practices, was edited by researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV); ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Transatlantic project works to fortify coastal resilience against rising seas

Climate change is leading to an increase in sea level rise, putting millions of people in danger of severe coastal flooding in coming years. Sherif Abdelaziz, associate professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech, is collaborating with researchers from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, to find solutions to keep coastal areas safe by enhancing the resilience of sea walls against increasing coastal flooding. The PIONEER project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is aiming to be the initial step in a global collaboration to strengthen coastal ...

Read the release

Science9 Jan 2024

Different pain types in multiple sclerosis can cause difficulty staying active

For patients with multiple sclerosis, a regular exercise routine is important for managing symptoms. Due to different causes of chronic pain though, physical exercise can be more difficult for some. Research published in the Journal of Pain from the University of Michigan found that widespread pain with nociplastic features, also known as WPNF, can make engaging in physical activity a painful task for some patients with MS. “WPNF is a chronic and diffuse pain which can be challenging ...

Read the release