or many plants, more branches means more fruit. But what causes a plant to grow branches? New research from the University of California, Davis shows how plants break down the hormone strigolactone, which suppresses branching, to become more “bushy.” Understanding how strigolactone is regulated could have big implications for many crop plants. The study was published August 1 in Nature Communications. “Being able to manipulate strigolactone could also have implications beyond plant architecture, including on a plant’s resilience to drought and pathogens,” said senior author Nitzan Shabek, an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of ...

How would you summarize your study for a lay audience? Some proteins, such as programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1), can stop the immune system from attacking cancer cells and, therefore, support the growth of cancer. Therapies targeting these proteins can be highly effective, but tumors can become resistant. We applied a method to detect proteins on a single–cell level to uncover human carcinoembryonic antigen cell adhesion molecule 1 (CEACAM1) patterns in melanoma. We found that increased ...

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards $5.2 million to top clinical investigators The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has named six new Damon Runyon Clinical Investigators. The recipients of this prestigious award are outstanding, early-career physician-scientists conducting patient-oriented cancer research at major research centers under the mentorship of the nation's leading scientists and clinicians. The Clinical Investigator Award program was designed to increase the number of physicians capable of translating scientific discoveries into new treatments for cancer patients. Each Awardee will receive $600,000 over three years, ...

August 6, 2024 — Thoracic ossification of the posterior longitudinal ligament (TOPLL) is a rare condition associated with ectopic bone formation in the thoracic spine. A long-term follow-up study from Japan shows significant and lasting improvement in outcomes with posterior decompression and fixation surgery for patients with T-OPLL, reports The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  "Surgical treatment of T-OPLL is effective in improving neurological function, quality ...

A new way to combat Alzheimer’s disease has been discovered by Takaomi Saido and his team at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan. Using mice with the disease, the researchers found that treatment with dopamine could alleviate physical symptoms in the brain as well as improve memory. Published in the scientific journal Science Signaling on August 6, the study examines dopamine’s role in promoting the production of neprilysin, an enzyme that can break down the harmful plaques in the brain that are the ...

Millions of Americans consume supplements that contain potentially hepatoxic botanical ingredients, according to a study from University of Michigan researchers. Over a 30-day period, 4.7% of the adults surveyed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted from 2017 to 2020 took herbal and dietary supplements containing at least one of the botanicals of interest: turmeric; green tea; ashwagandha; black cohosh; garcinia cambogia; and red yeast rice containing products. The resulting paper, “Estimated Exposure ...

Sometimes you just can’t win, and that goes double for people navigating the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States. Having nuanced opinions of politics in the U.S. turns out to be a very lonely, and unpopular, road, according to a recent study from a research team that includes assistant professor Aviva Phillipp-Muller from Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business.   Published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the study found that people who express ambivalence about political topics – ranging from COVID-19 mask mandates, immigration and the death ...

EL PASO, Texas (Aug. 6, 2024) – Grab a drink with friends at happy hour and you’re likely to feel chatty, friendly and upbeat. But grab a drink alone and you may experience feelings of depression. Researchers think they now know why this happens. “Social settings influence how individuals react to alcohol, yet there is no mechanistic study on how and why this occurs,” said Kyung-An Han, Ph.D., a biologist at The University of Texas at El Paso who uses fruit flies to study alcoholism. Now, Han and a team of UTEP faculty and students have taken a key step in understanding the neurobiological process behind social drinking and how it boosts ...

A team of researchers, led by the University of Houston, has discovered two new ways of preventing and treating respiratory viruses. In back-to-back papers in Nature Communications, the team - from the lab of Navin Varadarajan, M.D. Anderson Professor of William A. Brookshire Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering - reports the development and validation of NanoSTING, a nasal spray, as a broad-spectrum immune activator for controlling infection against multiple respiratory viruses; and the development of NanoSTING-SN, a pan-coronavirus nasal vaccine, that can protect against infection and disease by all members of the coronavirus family.  NanoSTING ...

A new UBC study has revealed regular seasonal shifts in people’s moral values. The finding has potential implications for politics, law and health—including the timing of elections and court cases, as well as public response to a health crisis. The research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed survey responses from more than 230,000 people in the U.S. over 10 years and revealed that people’s embrace of certain moral ...

The chemical and energy industries depend upon catalysts to drive the reactions used to create their products. Many important reactions use heterogeneous catalysts — meaning that the catalysts are in a different phase of matter than the substances they are reacting with, such as solid platinum reacting with gases in an automobile’s catalytic converter. Scientists have investigated the surface of well-defined single crystals, illuminating the mechanisms underlying many chemical reactions. However, there is much more to be learned. For heterogeneous catalysts, their 3D atomic structure, their chemical composition and the nature of ...

When we’re sick, the first step on the road to recovery is a visit to the doctor’s office.  It turns out the same may also be true for breathing life into America’s democracy. A Rutgers University–New Brunswick study published in the journal JAMA Health Forum finds that physicians can play a crucial role in strengthening political inclusion of marginalized groups by aiding patients in voter registration. “Hospitals aren’t the first place we think of when it comes to voter registration,” said Katherine McCabe, an associate professor of American politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and lead ...

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it’s expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices. A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device’s useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more ...

Working with human stem cells that form a kind of “mini intestine-in-a-dish,” Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have found several molecular mechanisms for COVID-19-related diarrhea, suggesting potential ways to control it. Details of the experiments in a model of human intestinal tissue, called enteroids, are described on July 30 in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Along with the unpleasant aches, fever, sore throat, cough, respiratory distress and other symptoms that may accompany COVID-19 infection, up to half of people who get the virus will experience diarrhea. Some 30% of them will go on to develop ...

Leuven, 6 August 2024 - A team of researchers from the lab of Prof. Stein Aerts (VIB-KU Leuven) presents Nova-ST, a new spatial transcriptomics technique that promises to transform gene expression profiling in tissue samples. Nova-ST will make large-scale, high-resolution spatial tissue analysis more accessible and affordable, offering significant benefits for researchers. The research was published in Cell Reports Methods. Transcriptomics is the study of gene expression in a cell or a population of cells, but it usually does not include spatial information about where those genes were active. This hurdle limited our understanding of complex ...

BUFFALO, NY- August 6, 2024 – On July 28, 2024, Mikhail V. Blagosklonny M.D., Ph.D., from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center published a new editorial in Volume 16, Issue 14 of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science), entitled, “Targeted cancer therapy: the initial high concentration may slow down the selection for resistance.” “Unfortunately, any targeted therapy is, always, started with low levels of the drug in the organism, selecting for drug resistance. One should propose that initial drug levels must be maximized, ...

Mayonnaise continues to help researchers better understand the physics behind nuclear fusion. “We’re still working on the same problem, which is the structural integrity of fusion capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, and Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise is still helping us in the search for solutions,” says Arindam Banerjee, the Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University and Chair of the MEM department in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.  In simple terms, fusion reactions are what power the sun. If the process could ...

Minxiang “Glenn” Zeng, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University, has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further his research about printable semiconductors and electronics under extreme environments.   The grant supports Zeng’s work in understanding and controlling the thermal degradation pathways of printed metal chalcogenides, which are semiconductor materials including selenides, tellurides and sulfides. His goal is to develop strategies to enhance the thermal stability ...

The 8th Annual Meeting of the Digital Olfaction Society (DOS) will take place on December 5-6, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan, and Online. The DOS meeting is uniquely aimed at digitizing scents, transferring them, and re-creating them in different parts of the world. The two-day event includes one day dedicated to talks and another day for demonstrations. Under the slogan "Olfaction to Digital Olfaction", the congress will explore the latest advances in olfaction science and digital olfaction technologies, highlighting their transformative impact across multiple fields. The first day of the congress will focus on olfaction science, scent-based diagnosis and treatment ...

In 2023, roughly 60,000 firework shells exploded above Manhattan’s East River as part of Macy’s Fourth of July show. The resulting air pollutant levels were many times higher in the hours after the display than those seen when smoke from a Canadian wildfire had blanketed the area a month before. This is according to the results of a new study, led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, which measured air quality just before and after the Independence Day event, one of the largest in the United States. Tiny particles of hazardous metals and organic compounds peaked at 3,000 micrograms per cubic meter at an air sampling site ...

A paper out today in Nature Communications reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone.   Dated to about 700,000 years old, the new findings shed light on the evolution of Homo floresiensis, the so-called ‘Hobbits’ of Flores whose remains were uncovered in 2003 at Liang Bua cave in the island’s west by a team co-led by Australian-New Zealand archaeologist Professor Mike Morwood (1950–2013).   Archaeological evidence suggests these diminutive, small-brained humans inhabited Liang Bua ...

About The Study: The results from this study suggest that the higher fracture risk among older women with type 2 diabetes may be due to impaired physical function and not skeletal characteristics.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Mattias Lorentzon, MD, PhD, email mattias.lorentzon@medic.gu.se. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.25106) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, the artificial intelligence (AI) model demonstrated strong performance in accurately identifying myopia, strabismus, and ptosis using only smartphone images. These results suggest that such a model could facilitate the early detection of pediatric eye diseases in a convenient manner at home. Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Lin Li, MD, PhD (jannetlee130@gmail.com), and Jie Xu, DHM (xujie@pjlab.org.cn). To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: This study identifies demographic biases in artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images of physicians with disproportionate representation of white and male physicians and concerning underrepresentation of other races and ethnicities (Asian and Latino) and female physicians in some platforms. This bias has the potential to reinforce stereotypes and undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within health care.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Sang Won Lee, MSc, email sangwon_lee@hms.harvard.edu. To access the embargoed ...

Leuven, 7 August 2024—The mechanisms underlying intellectual disabilities or autism remain largely unknown. Researchers in the labs of Prof. Pierre Vanderhaeghen and Prof. Vincent Bonin at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and NERF have discovered that mutations in a gene called SYNGAP1 disrupt the prolonged development of human neurons, which is thought to be essential for normal cognitive function. Their work has interesting implications for our understanding and treatment ...