Bryan Maldonado, a dynamic systems and controls researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been recognized by the 2023 Hispanic Engineer National Achievements Awards Conference, or HENAAC, with the Most Promising Engineer Award.   Given by Great Minds in STEM, or GMiS, the award highlights engineers who have made significant contributions to raising science, technology, engineering and math education awareness in underserved communities. Maldonado will receive ...

Prior vaccination against tetanus and diphtheria, with or without pertussis (Tdap/Td); herpes zoster (HZ), better known as shingles; and pneumococcus are all associated with a reduced risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research from UTHealth Houston. A pre-press version of a study was published online recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. It was led by co-first authors Kristofer Harris, program manager in the Department of Neurology with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston; Yaobin Ling, graduate research assistant ...

Charlottesville, VA – The first sample dataset from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) initiative is now available to researchers, with the project’s initial full dataset scheduled for release in the coming months through the Center for Open Science (COS).  The GFS, a partnership among Gallup, COS, and researchers at Baylor University and Harvard University, is a $43.4 million, five-year study of 200,000 individuals in 22 countries. The GFS data will be an open-access resource for researchers, journalists, policymakers, and ...

Drawing on UMass Lowell’s expertise in spacecraft design and track record of successful missions, the university has secured $5.5 million in state funding to launch a research center where scientists, industry leaders and startups can build and test miniature satellites and components essential to spaceflight.   The initiative, known as the Massachusetts Alliance for Space and Technology and Sciences, or MASTS, is anchored by a two-year, $5.5 million grant from the state via the Massachusetts ...

A new study led by Vinod M. Menon and his group at the City College of New York shows that trapping light inside magnetic materials may dramatically enhance their intrinsic properties. Strong optical responses of magnets are important for the development of magnetic lasers and magneto-optical memory devices, as well as for emerging quantum transduction applications.   In their new article in Nature, Menon and his team report the properties of a layered magnet that hosts strongly bound excitons -- quasiparticles with particularly strong optical interactions. Because of that, the material is capable of trapping light -- all by itself. As their experiments ...

HAMILTON, ON (August 16, 2023) – Some women with early-stage, low-risk breast cancer may not need radiotherapy after breast conserving surgery according to new research led by McMaster University, BC Cancer, Hamilton Heath Sciences, and the University of British Columbia. The research, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Aug. 17, shows women 55 or older with a specific subtype of Stage 1 breast cancer can be effectively treated with just surgery and endocrine therapy.  The ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – Only a small percentage of older adults who are in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease meet the eligibility criteria to receive new monoclonal antibody treatments, drugs that target amyloid-ß plaques in the brain, an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. The new research is published in the August 16, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Clinical trial results for these drugs are only available in people in the early symptomatic stages of the disease, mild cognitive impairment ...

Key points: In a study of adults in the United Kingdom, those who adhered closely to a Mediterranean lifestyle—including eating a healthy, plant-based diet with limited added salts and sugars and getting adequate rest, exercise, and socialization—were found to have a 29% lower risk of all-cause mortality and a 28% lower risk of cancer mortality compared to those who were nonadherent to the lifestyle. Adherence to Mediterranean lifestyle habits around adequate rest, exercise, and socialization was most strongly associated with lower risk of all-cause and cancer mortality, and was independently associated with a lower ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The historically high heat waves that gripped the southwest United States and southern Europe this summer are causing problems for more than just humans. Extreme heat waves affect pollinators and the pathogens that live on them, creating a mutual imbalance that could have major economic and public health consequences. A global research team led by Penn State was the first to study how extreme heat waves affect the host-pathogen relationship between two species of solitary bees (Osmia cornifrons and Osmia lignaria) and a protozoan pathogen (Crithidia mellificae). The researchers recently published their findings in the journal Frontiers ...

WINSTON-SALEM, NC, August 2023 – Brinter Bio-Implant company joined the RegeneratOR’s Innovation Accelerator in 2023, located in the Regenerative Medicine Hub (RegenMed Hub), a rapidly growing regenerative medicine ecosystem based in the Innovation Quarter, in Winston-Salem. Brinter is developing the world’s first personalized 3D bioprinted implants for meniscus repair using the company’s patented 3D bioprinting technology. The company’s bioprinters use a modular multi-material 3D bioprinting platform scalable from manual ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a fluorescence microscope that uses structured illumination for fast super-resolution imaging over a wide field of view. The new microscope was designed to image multiple living cells simultaneously with a very high resolution to study the effects of various drugs and mixtures of drugs on the body. “Polypharmacy — the effect of the many combinations of drugs typically prescribed to the chronically sick or elderly — can lead to dangerous interactions and is becoming a major issue,” said Henning Ortkrass ...

In a new study, the attitudes of non-Muslim American participants towards Muslim Americans who identified strongly with both parts of their dual identity—Muslim and American—were just as positive as their attitudes towards Muslim Americans who identified only as American. In addition, exposure to dual-identified Muslim Americans was linked to more positive attitudes towards non-American Muslims. The same was also found in the American-Mexican context. Aharon Levy of Columbia University and Yale University, US, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August 16, 2023. Many prior studies have shown that people tend to have positive attitudes ...

Mosquito nets treated with multiple insecticides can control malaria when pyrethroid resistance leads normal nets to fail ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0289469 Article Title: Effectiveness of dual active ingredient insecticide-treated nets in preventing malaria: A systematic review and meta-analysis Author Countries: Australia, USA, Malawi Funding: This work was funded by the World Health Organisation, APW202903809 The funder of the study had a role in the development of the protocol, the wording and development of the review questions, the interpretation ...

Shelter dogs followed at their new homes for six months post-adoption were reported as showing more behaviors like stranger aggression or training problems by the end of the study—but owner satisfaction remained high, with 94 percent of owners reporting their dog’s behavior as excellent or good, according to a study published August 16, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kyle Bohland from the Ohio State University, US, and colleagues. Although two million dogs are adopted from US shelters every year, very little research has been done on shelter dog behavior after placement into a home. Bohland and colleagues surveyed ...

In the wake of the 1918/1919 “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic, the probability of low birth weight and stillbirth increased among women in Switzerland, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE Kaspar Staub of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and colleagues. Impaired neonatal health is an ongoing public health concern worldwide. Understanding determinants that impede normal fetal and infant development and growth is crucial for ameliorating neonatal ...

Researchers at Rutgers and Emory University are gaining insights into how schizophrenia develops by studying the strongest-known genetic risk factor.   When a small portion of Chromosome 3 is missing – known as 3q29 deletion syndrome – it increases the risk for schizophrenia by about 40 fold. Researchers have now analyzed overlapping patterns of altered gene activity in two models of 3q29 deletion syndrome, including mice where the deletion has been engineered in using CRIPSR, and human brain organoids, or three-dimensional tissue cultures used to study disease. These two systems both exhibit impaired mitochondrial ...

Over recent decades, there was a large variation in cyclone-related excess deaths by hurricane, state, county, year, and social vulnerability for counties in the United States, with 83 percent of hurricane-related deaths occurring more recently and 94 percent in more socially vulnerable counties. Results of a study by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Colorado State University, Imperial College London, University of California Irvine, and Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health are published in the journal Science ...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has updated its recommendation for malaria-preventing mosquito nets based on new research from the University of Adelaide. Dr Timothy Barker, of the JBI Adelaide GRADE Centre, located at the University of Adelaide, led a team which proved the effectiveness of a combination of insecticides when used to treat malaria-preventing mosquito nets. Mosquito nets treated with pyrethroid insecticides have been distributed into malaria-prone regions globally since 2005, but some mosquito populations have developed a resistance to the substance. “The number of malaria cases actually ...

Giant dust storms in the Gulf of Alaska can last for many days and send tonnes of fine sediment or silt into the atmosphere, and it is having an impact on the global climate system, say scientists.  The storms are so extensive they can be seen by satellites orbiting the Earth. An image captured by the Landsat satellite in 2020 shows dust blowing out of the valley and over Alaska’s south coast. Exactly how the dust may be influencing the global climate system is not yet clear, although new research from the University of Leeds and the National Centre for Atmospheric ...

Children and adolescents of the 1959-61 Chinese famine: Survivors face increased risk of non-communicable diseases 50 years later, with those exposed in utero or under age 2 at double the risk. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0002161 Article Title: Exposure to the 1959–1961 Chinese famine and risk of non-communicable diseases in later life: A life course perspective Author Countries: Switzerland, UK Funding: Mengling Cheng acknowledges funding from the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research “LIVES - Overcoming vulnerability: ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, for example, use the same word hunden, meaning "the dog", to communicate that the dog is in the house or that someone found the dog or gave food to the dog. In Icelandic, on the other hand, three different word forms would be used in these situations, corresponding to the nominative, accusative, and dative case respectively: hundurinn, hundinn, and hundinum. This grammatical distinction in the case system, along with many others, sets Icelandic apart ...

Washington, D.C. - The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science is pleased to announce that the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting applications for the 2023 Solicitation 2 cycle.  Applications are due on November 8, 2023, at 5:00 pm ET. SCGSR application assistance workshops will be held on Thursday, September 14, 2023, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM ET and Tuesday, October 10, 2023, 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM ET. The first workshop will provide a general overview of the program and the application requirements and will include a time for discussing potential research topics ...

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the National Institutes of Health, awarded a $750,000 training program grant to researchers at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health to support master’s students in the Industrial Hygiene Program. Industrial hygiene is the art and science devoted to the anticipation, recognition, evaluation and control of workplace hazards. It focuses on worker protection from hazards that could include chemical, physical, biological, radiological and ergonomic agents. “Occupational injury and illness affect millions of workers and their families every year and are tremendous ...

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics (OJPHI) Editor-in-Chief: Edward K Mensah PhD, MPhil and theme editor Nsikak Akpakpan MD, PhD welcome submissions to a special theme issue examining "Precision Public Health." The inaugural issue of the Online Journal of Public Health Informatics under the JMIR Publications platform will feature articles on precision public health, a technology-enhanced, data-driven targeted approach to public health practice and research.  The current special issue invites articles in the following as well ...

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 16, 2023 — Human-caused climate change is shortening the snow cover period in the Arctic. But according to new research led by Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine, some parts of the Arctic are getting deeper snowpack than normal, and that deep snow is driving the thawing of long-frozen permafrost carbon reserves and leading to increased emissions of greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane.   “It is the first long-term experiment where we directly measure the mobilization of ancient carbon year-round to show that deeper snow has the possibility to rather ...