Using laboratory-grown cells from humans and genetically engineered mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have evidence that modifying a specific protein in immune white blood cells known as CD8+ T cells can make the cells more robust, potentially opening the door for better use of people’s own immune system T cells to fight cancer. The findings were published Oct. 3 in the journal JCI-Insight. “Maximizing the effectiveness of T-cell-based therapies remains a critical challenge,” says David Kass, M.D., Abraham and Virginia Weiss Professor of Cardiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of ...

Crop modification can be traced to the beginning of agriculture and human civilization. Native Americans, for example, developed corn from a wild grass called teosinte more than 7,000 years ago. Methods to increase crop resiliency and sustainability have evolved, and improved, over time. Biotechnology, or the use of biology to develop new products and organisms, is an application that holds great promise for impactful changes to the agricultural systems. Through this method, the DNA in plant cells is modified — for instance ...

Washington, D.C. – Registration is open for the 34th National Science Bowl® (NSB), hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. Thousands of students compete in the contest annually as it has grown into one of the largest academic math and science competitions in the country. Teams – four or five students and a teacher who serves as a coach – can sign up to participate in the NSB by registering with the coordinator for their regional competition. Details can be found on the NSB registration page. The competition is divided into two categories: high school and middle school. Regional competitions typically last one or two days ...

Individual neighbourhoods will be intimately involved in providing local solutions to collective problems. One measure will be distributed renewable energy production — energy produced at local levels, either by solar technology, wind or other methods, will push cities to achieve their net-zero targets. However, even these power-generating neighbourhoods will remain vulnerable to power outages resulting from natural disasters such as hurricanes, fires or floods. And all of these are likely to become increasingly common due to the effects of climate change. ...

The increasingly urgent climate crisis has led to a boom in commercial tree plantations in an attempt to offset excess carbon emissions. However, authors of a peer-reviewed opinion paper publishing October 3 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution argue that these carbon-offset plantations might come with costs for biodiversity and other ecosystem functions. Instead, the authors say we should prioritize conserving and restoring intact ecosystems. “Despite the broad range of ecosystem functions and services provided ...

CINCINNATI—Until the COVID-19 pandemic exploded, few people outside of research labs and intensive care units had heard of a cytokine storm. But once this dangerous form of infection-triggered runaway inflammation started claiming lives by the thousands, a legion of scientists jumped into the hunt for ways to calm these storms. Now, a study led by immunobiology experts at Cincinnati Children’s, offers important new details on how two elements of our body’s immune system clash with each other to prompt a chain of reactions that can release deadly floods of cell-killing, organ-damaging ...

About The Study: The results of this meta-analysis indicate that adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) was associated with a reduced major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular event recurrence risk, suggesting that treatment adherence is a key factor in secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with obstructive sleep apnea. Authors: Ferran Barbé, M.D., of the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Respiratorias (CIBERES) in Madrid, is the corresponding author. To access the ...

Spending on mental health services for children and adolescents has risen by more than one-quarter since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing to rise even as the use of telehealth plateaued, according to a new RAND Corporation study.   Spending on mental health for people aged 19 and younger rose by 26% from March 2020 to August 2022 among a large group whose families have employer-provided insurance. During the same period, use of mental health services increased by 22%.   The study found that use of telehealth for pediatric patients increased more than 30-fold during the early months of the pandemic and remained ...

Key takeaways  A tool for evaluating the overall cost of a surgical procedure, called a scorecard, helps reduce costs of surgical procedures between 5% and 20% without adversely affecting clinical outcomes.   Further implementation of scorecards may move surgeons toward energy-efficient operating rooms, which are the largest hospital producer of emissions and waste.    CHICAGO (October 3, 2023): Surgical scorecards, a tool that gives direct feedback ...

About The Study: After comparing mental health care service utilization and spending rates for children and youths with commercial insurance across three periods from January 2019 through August 2022, this study found differences between periods as well as different rates of change within each period for both visit types (in-person and telehealth), even after accounting for state and patient sex. Utilization and spending increased over the entire timeframe. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorders, and adjustment disorder accounted for most visits and spending in all phases. Authors: Mariah ...

About The Study: This study found an increasing trend in psychotropic medication dispensation among Swedish children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes from 2006 to 2019, persistently higher than those without type 1 diabetes. These findings call for further in-depth investigations into the benefits and risks of psychotropic medications within this population and highlight the importance of integrating pediatric diabetes care and mental health care for early detection of psychological needs and careful monitoring of medication use. Authors: Shengxin ...

WILMINGTON, Del. (October 3, 2023) – Many children and adolescent girls diagnosed with an ovarian mass may be able to avoid ovary removal and its lifelong consequences with the use of a consensus-based risk stratification algorithm. Algorithm use helps doctors gauge the patient’s risk of a malignancy and guides preoperative decision making, according to a new multi-institutional study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Researchers at 11 U.S. children’s hospitals ...

Device can manipulate which organ is driving a disease to study its downstream effects   Can serve as intermediate step between animal studies and clinical trials to test new drugs ‘We wanted to make it as easy as using a smartphone’ Imagine a device smaller than a toddler’s shoebox that can simulate any human disease in multiple organs or test new drugs without ever entering — or harming — the body.  Scientists at Northwestern University have developed this new technology — called Lattice — to study interactions between up to eight unique organ tissue cultures (cells from a human ...

New Discoveries in the Development of Alzheimer's Disease in a Study led by Professor Michael Glickman and Dr. Inbal Maniv from the Faculty of Biology at the Technion were Published in Nature Communications. Alzheimer's disease was named after the German researcher Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who first described it in 1906. The disease is characterized by the degeneration and death of nerve cells, processes that lead to a progressive impairment of cognitive abilities. It occurs typically in adults over the age of 65, but a small percentage of all Alzheimer's patients are hereditary cases that affect younger ...

The ability to have access to the Internet or use a mobile phone anywhere in the world is taken more and more for granted, but the brightness of Internet and telecommunications satellites that enable global communications networks could pose problems for ground-based astronomy. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign aerospace engineer Siegfried Eggl coordinated an international study confirming recently deployed satellites are as bright as stars seen by the unaided eye. “From our observations, we learned that AST Space Mobile’s BlueWalker 3—a constellation prototype satellite featuring a ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A new artificial intelligence (AI) model combines imaging information with clinical patient data to improve diagnostic performance on chest X-rays, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Clinicians consider both imaging and non-imaging data when diagnosing diseases. However, current AI-based approaches are tailored to solve tasks with only one type of data at a time. Transformer-based neural networks, a relatively new class of AI models, have the ability to combine imaging and ...

A two-phase NIH grant will fund research into a new CRISPR-based gene therapy platform that will target genetic brain diseases like Angelman syndrome and H1-4 (HIST1H1E) syndrome. A roughly $40 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awarded to Yale School of Medicine will support the development of a gene-editing platform technology capable of reaching the human brain. The innovative new genome-editing technology, which was developed from the first phase from NIH Common Fund Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program, could potentially lead to treatments or cures for many neurogenetic diseases. Neurogenetic disorders ...

When scientists viewed the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest galaxies, they were shocked. The young galaxies appeared too bright, too massive and too mature to have formed so soon after the Big Bang. It would be like an infant growing into an adult within just a couple years. The startling discovery even caused some physicists to question the standard model of cosmology, wondering whether or not it should be upended. Using new simulations, a Northwestern University-led ...

Van Andel Institute’s Nick Burton, Ph.D., has earned a five-year, nearly $2.9 million New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund to find new ways to fix or prevent insulin resistance, a key driver of Type 2 diabetes.   Although manageable with treatment, there currently is no way to repair the underlying mechanisms that cause the disease. Furthermore, it remains unclear why some people are more prone to Type 2 diabetes while others are resistant. To find a solution, Burton ...

SAN ANTONIO — October 3, 2023 —A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Planetary Scientist and Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are similar enough to suggest a common origin. The SwRI study suggests that these “building blocks” could guide further work on planetesimal formational models. Stern presented these findings this week ...

NEW YORK, Oct. 3, 2023 — Mandë Holford, a professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry departments at Hunter College and The City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY Graduate Center), has won a National Institutes of Health Common Fund Pioneer Award for her trailblazing research exploring the therapeutic opportunities and properties of venoms from cephalopods and other marine mollusks. Holford received one of eight Pioneer Awards granted in 2023, which will total more than $47.7 million over five years. This is the first time a CUNY ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. (Oct. 4, 2022) – A synthetic peptide developed by researchers at the Medical College of Georgia could help reduce vascular problems associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome in COVID-19. In severe cases, COVID-19 is associated with the syndrome, which happens when fluid builds up in the tiny, elastic air sacs in the lungs, keeping them from filling with enough air and keeping oxygen from reaching the bloodstream. “These are the people who get the sickest from ...

MedAxiom, the premier source for cardiovascular organizational performance solutions, has released its 2023 Cardiovascular Provider Compensation and Production Survey Report that includes data from the largest number of providers since its debut. The report features a foreword from MedAxiom President and CEO Jerry Blackwell, MD, MBA, FACC, on the consistency of year-over-year data from 2021 to 2022, the importance of a robust pool of data to form the foundation of the report, and the application of data as a strategic planning tool.  2023 Report Highlights:   Compensation and production ...

Quantum annealing (QA) is a cutting-edge algorithm that leverages the unique properties of quantum computing to tackle complex combinatorial optimization problems (a class of mathematical problems dealing with discrete-variable functions). Quantum computers use the rules of quantum physics to solve such problems potentially faster than classical computers. In essence, they can explore multiple solutions to a problem simultaneously, giving them a significant speed advantage for certain tasks over classical computers. In particular, QA harnesses the phenomenon of “quantum ...

LOS ANGELES — City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, is opening a multicenter clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of robotic-assisted, single-incision mastectomies. The minimally invasive procedure, which preserves the nipple and leaves only a small hidden scar on the side of the body, could potentially lead to significant improvements for breast surgery. “City of Hope is once again taking the lead in investigating innovations, treatments and therapies that are making big leaps forward for patients with cancer. We’re participating ...