ANN ARBOR, Mich. –  Among things many families don’t wish to pass down to their children and grandchildren: medical issues. One in five parents say their child has been diagnosed with a hereditary condition, while nearly half expressed concerns about their child potentially developing such a condition, a new national poll suggests. And two thirds of parents want their healthcare provider to suggest ways to prevent their child from developing a health problem that runs in the family, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National ...

by Amy Norton PISCATAWAY, NJ – After years of being seen as dangerous “party drugs,” psychedelic substances are receiving renewed attention as therapies for addiction -- but far more research is needed, according to a new special series of articles in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, published at Rutgers University. Psychedelics are substances that essentially alter users’ perceptions and thoughts about their surroundings and themselves. For millennia, indigenous cultures have used plants with psychedelic properties in traditional medicine and spiritual rituals. And for a time in the mid-20th ...

Amid the rising human population and pressure on food supplies, the world can’t be everyone’s oyster. But perhaps there might be more oysters to eat if an Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team’s findings mean sturdy plastic rafts will be used in their farming. Conventional oyster farming uses bamboo rafts with additional flotation devices such as Styrofoam. Though relatively affordable, these rafts can be damaged in typhoons. The OMU-led researchers propose a polyethylene raft that keeps costs manageable but is about five times more durable than a bamboo raft. OMU Graduate School of Engineering Associate ...

Despite increased funding for cataract surgeries to private, for-profit clinics, access to surgery fell 9% for lower-income people, according to new research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.240414. “Unexpectedly, despite new public funding for operations provided in private for-profit surgical centres, which was intended to fully cover all overhead costs and remove the need to charge patients, this disparity did not decrease, but instead grew ...

With tick-borne viruses such as Powassan virus increasing in Canada, clinicians should consider these infections in patients with encephalitis, as a case study shows in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.240227. Although rare, Powassan virus is serious, with a death rate of 10%–15% in people with encephalitis, and it can cause lingering health effects after infection. The virus can transmit within 15 minutes of tick attachment, and symptoms can develop 1–5 weeks later. In this case study, a 9-year-old child with up-to-date vaccinations ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL 12:01 A.M. AUGUST 26, 2024  NOTE TO EDITOR: (To download broadcast-quality video and other multimedia elements: https://bit.ly/3M2ljhX (password: naloxone) COLUMBUS, Ohio – International Overdose Awareness Day is a worldwide campaign held each Aug. 31 that acknowledges the grief of family and friends left behind from those who have died from a drug overdose. This year’s campaign theme “Together we can” highlights the power of the community standing together to help end overdose. However, a new survey of 1,000 Americans from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical ...

Many of us feel that we, or our children, spend too much time staring at a screen. From gaming to social media use or ‘doomscrolling,’ it can sometimes feel that we are mindlessly spending hours going down a rabbit hole of technology. However, according to Catherine Knibbs, a psychotherapist who specializes in cybertrauma and online harms, there are tangible steps we can all take to wrestle back control from the hands of the technology corporations. In her new book, Managing Your Gaming and Social ...

DALLAS (SMU) – An international team of researchers led by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs has found matching sets of Early Cretaceous dinosaur footprints on what are now two different continents.  More than 260 footprints were discovered in Brazil and in Cameroon, showing where land-dwelling dinosaurs were last able to freely cross between South America and Africa millions of years ago before the two continents split apart. “We determined that in terms of age, these footprints were similar,” Jacobs said. “In their geological and plate ...

In a world overrun by petroleum-based plastics, scientists are searching for alternatives that are more sustainable, more biodegradable and far less toxic to the environment. Two new studies by biologists at Washington University in St. Louis highlight one potential source of game-changing materials: purple bacteria that, with a little encouragement, can act like microscopic factories for bioplastics. A study led by graduate student Eric Conners found that two relatively obscure species of purple bacteria have the ability to produce polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), natural ...

The sounds babies make in their first year of life may be less random than previously believed, according to a language development researcher from The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Pumpki Lei Su, an assistant professor of speech, language, and hearing in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is co-lead author on two recent articles in which researchers examined the sounds babies make. The results suggest that children in their first year are more active than previously thought in their acquisition of speech. “We observed in these studies that infant vocalizations are not produced randomly; they form a pattern, producing three categories of sounds in clusters,” ...

Key takeaways The 7.5- magnitude earthquake beneath Japan’s Noto Peninsula on Jan. 1, 2024, occurred when a “dual-initiation mechanism” applied enough energy from two different locations to break through a fault barrier – an area that locks two sides of a fault in place and absorbs the energy of fault movement, slowing it down or stopping it altogether. An international team of researchers led by UCLA graduate student Liuwei Xu, professor Lingsen Meng and UC Santa Barbara’s Chen Ji analyzed a preceding seismic swarm and identified a previously unknown barrier in the region of the swarm. The team’s data collection methods could ...

  Photos   The soils of northern forests are key reservoirs that help keep the carbon dioxide that trees inhale and use for photosynthesis from making it back into the atmosphere.   But a unique experiment led by Peter Reich of the University of Michigan is showing that, on a warming planet, more carbon is escaping the soil than is being added by plants.   "This is not good news because it suggests that, as the world warms, soils are going to give back some of their carbon to the atmosphere," said Reich, director of the Institute for Global Change ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 23, 2024) – The lotus leaf is a pioneer of self-cleaning, water-repellant engineering. Water droplets all but hover on its surface, whose unique texture traps air in its nanosized ridges and folds. Rice University bioengineers report harnessing the lotus effect to develop a system for culturing cancer cell clusters that can shed light on hard-to-study tumor properties. The new zinc oxide-based culturing surface mimics the lotus leaf surface structure, providing a highly tunable platform for the high-throughput generation of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor models. The superhydrophobic array device (SHArD) designed by Rice bioengineer Michael King and ...

CHICAGO --- Despite the association between mask mandates/mask wearing and reduced death rates during the pandemic, masking remains controversial and highly politicized, with many people still asking, “do masks work, and should they be recommended?” In an editorial about the use of surgical face masks in public, published today, Aug. 23, in The BMJ, Northwestern Medicine internal medicine experts Drs. Jeffrey Linder and Rachel Amdur make the case for masking but acknowledge it’s not a cut-and-dried topic.  The ...

AUGUST 23, 2024, NEW YORK – A Ludwig Cancer Research study has identified a metabolic switch in the immune system’s T cells that is essential to the generation of memory T cells—which confer lasting immunity to previously encountered pathogens—and a T cell subtype found in tumors that drives anti-tumor responses during immunotherapy. Led by Ludwig Lausanne’s Ping-Chih Ho and Alessio Bevilacqua and published in the current issue of Science Immunology, the study identifies PPARβ/δ, a master regulator of gene expression, as that essential molecular switch. Ho, Bevilacqua and their colleagues also show that the switch’s dysfunction compromises ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nearly half of counties in the United States have at least one ‘pharmacy desert’ where there is no retail pharmacy within 10 miles, according to a new study published by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James). “As pharmacies close, more and more Americans are left without easy access to medications, with disproportionate consequences on certain communities. We found that patients in counties with higher social vulnerabilities and fewer primary care providers were up to 40% more likely to reside in a region ...

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request.  EAST LANSING, Mich. – A study out of Michigan State University found that nondeceptive placebos, or placebos given with people fully knowing they are placebos, effectively manage stress — even when the placebos are administered remotely.   Researchers recruited participants experiencing prolonged stress from the COVID-19 pandemic for a two-week randomized controlled trial. Half of the ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. – A team of researchers at Michigan State University has discovered a set of methods that enabled the first successful CRISPR-based genome editing in Nile grass rats. The study, published in BMC Biology, is the first to successfully edit genomes in Nile grass rats. As diurnal rodents, Nile grass rats have similar sleep/awake patterns to humans which could be advantageous in preclinical or translational research. Currently, preclinical research relies heavily on laboratory mice, which are nocturnal rodents who are active at night and sleep during the day. With these different sleep patterns, diurnal and nocturnal ...

Underserved high school students often lack access to artificial intelligence education that could prepare them for future careers in technology. Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science and Clemson University are hoping to change that. To help bridge the educational divide, the research team received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to democratize access to AI education. Future fair and equitable technologies depend on a robust AI education, and expanding access to that education is crucial.  The project is part of the NSF’s Experiential Learning for ...

Children’s exposure to food and drink ads during kids’ TV shows has dropped substantially since food and beverage makers pledged to stop advertising unhealthy fare during children’s TV shows. Yet, according to research from the University of Illinois Chicago, children under 12 still see more than 1,000 food-related ads a year, most of them for unhealthy products.  For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers analyzed television ratings and advertising data from 2013 through 2022. The study authors found that a dramatic decline in food and drink advertisements during kids’ shows did not ...

New research from Oregon Health & Science University reveals negative health consequences for people who are overweight and ignore their body’s signals to sleep at night, with specific differences between men and women. The study published this week in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. “This study builds support for the importance of good sleep habits,” said lead author Brooke Shafer, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Sleep, Chronobiology and Health Laboratory in the OHSU School of Nursing.  “Sleep practices, like going to bed when you’re tired or setting aside your screen at ...

San Francisco, CA (August 12, 2024) – Pendulum Therapeutics, in collaboration with BiomeSense, announces the launch of an innovative new pilot study entitled "Detection of Akkermansia muciniphila Utilizing Serial Longitudinal Samples with the BiomeSense GutLab™: An Open-Label Proof of Concept Study." Pendulum Therapeutics and BiomeSense are two biotech companies at the forefront of microbiome science. Their groundbreaking research aims to advance the scientific understanding of the human microbiome by focusing on continuous detection of Akkermansia muciniphila, a keystone strain in the gut microbiome, using a new data generation technology.  About ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A multi-institutional team of scientists in the United States, led by physicist Peng Wei at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate “topological superconductor.”  Topology is the mathematics of shape. A topological superconductor uses a delocalized state of an electron or hole (a hole behaves like an electron with positive charge) to carry quantum information and process data in a robust manner. The researchers report today in Science Advances that they combined trigonal tellurium ...

When NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with an asteroid moon called Dimorphos in 2022, the moon was significantly deformed—creating a large crater and reshaping it so dramatically that the moon derailed from its original evolutionary progression—according to a new study. The study’s researchers believe that Dimorphos may start to “tumble” chaotically in its attempts to move back into gravitational equilibrium with its parent asteroid named Didymos. “For ...

People with multiple sclerosis (MS) are far less likely than those without the condition to have the molecular hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The discovery suggests a new avenue of research through which to seek Alzheimer’s treatments, said Matthew Brier, MD PhD, an assistant professor of neurology and of radiology and the study’s first author. “Our findings imply that some component of the biology of multiple sclerosis, ...