A network of proteins found in the central nervous system could be harnessed to increase the effectiveness and reduce the side effects of popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs, according to new research from the University of Michigan.    The study, appearing today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, focused on two proteins called melanocortin 3 and melanocortin 4 found primarily on the surface of neurons in the brain that play a central role in regulating feeding behavior and maintaining the body's energy balance.   Melanocortin ...

Advances in 3D printing have enabled many applications across a variety of disciplines, including medicine, manufacturing, and energy. A range of different materials can be used to print both simple foundations and fine details, allowing for the creation of structures with tailored geometries. However, creating structures with micro-scale, precise internal voids and channels still poses challenges. Scaffolds used in tissue engineering, for example, must contain a three-dimensional complex network of conduits that mimic the human vasculature. With traditional additive manufacturing, where the material is deposited layer ...

Philadelphia, July 15, 2024 – Building upon groundbreaking research demonstrating how the SARS-CoV-2 virus disrupts mitochondrial function in multiple organs, researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) demonstrated that mitochondrially-targeted antioxidants could reduce the effects of the virus while avoiding viral gene mutation resistance, a strategy that may be useful for treating other viruses. The preclinical findings were recently published in the journal Proceedings ...

Climate change is causing the ice masses in Greenland and Antarctica to melt. Water from the polar regions is flowing into the world’s oceans –and especially into the equatorial region. “This means that a shift in mass is taking place, and this is affecting the Earth’s rotation,” explains Benedikt Soja, Professor of Space Geodesy at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at ETH Zurich. “It’s like when a figure skater does a pirouette, first holding her arms close to her body and then stretching ...

“FDG-PET is generally considered as a useful metabolic evaluation tool, while it is also thought to have an emerging role for assessment of systemic therapy response.” BUFFALO, NY- July 15, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on June 20, 2024, entitled, “Comparison of FDG-PET/CT and CT for evaluation of tumor response to nivolumab plus ipilimumab combination therapy and prognosis prediction in patients with unresectable malignant pleural mesothelioma.” Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive neoplasm and affected ...

A new UBC study published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) has unveiled insights into how microscopic organisms such as marine plankton move through water with different density layers.  Researchers Gwynn Elfring and Vaseem Shaik found that density layers, created by variations in temperature or salinity,  influence the swimming direction and speed of tiny particles navigating a liquid. Pushers and pullers “There are two different types of microscopic swimmers – ...

UTICA, NY – The president of SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly), Dr. Winston “Wole” Soboyejo, and postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Tabiri Kwayie Asumadu, have published a revolutionary new paper titled, "Robust Macroscale Superlubricity on Carbon-Coated Metallic Surfaces." This paper explores an innovative approach to reducing friction on metallic surfaces – a significant advancement that could have major real-world impacts. The study shows that superlubricity – a state with virtually no friction that was once believed to only be achievable at nanoscale – can now be maintained at macroscale for extended time ...

HOUSTON - (July 15, 2024) -  As parents, teachers and pet owners can attest, rewards play a huge role in shaping behaviors in humans and animals. Rewards – whether as edible treats, gifts, words of appreciation or praise, fame or monetary benefits – act as positive reinforcement for the associated behavior. While this correlation between reward and future choice has been used as a well-established paradigm in neuroscience research for well over a century, not much is known about the neural process underlying it, namely how the brain encodes, ...

Waltham — July 15, 2024 — The strengths of academic psychiatry departments and the fast-growing private telehealth sector are complementary, according to a Perspective article published in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, part of the Lippincott portfolio from Wolters Kluwer. Justin A. Chen, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and colleagues reviewed literature on provision of outpatient mental health care in the United States. They concluded that academic psychiatry departments and telehealth companies could mutually benefit from strategic collaboration.  Academic medical centers struggle to ...

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet with a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, but similar mass to Saturn that orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth, is tidally locked to its parent star. This means it has a constant dayside and a constant nightside—one side of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared ...

AMES, Iowa – As highly pathogenic avian influenza has spread in dairy herds across the U.S., the virus is being detected in raw milk. A new study by a broad team of researchers at Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine helps explain why. Sialic acid, a sugar molecule found on the surface of some animal cells, acts as a receptor for influenza. Without sialic acid providing an entry point to attach, invade and infect, a flu virus is unlikely to find a potential host hospitable. Before the recent HPAI outbreak ...

Humans make nearly 35,000 decisions every day, from whether it’s safe to cross the road to what to have for lunch. Every decision involves weighing the options, remembering similar past scenarios, and feeling reasonably confident about the right choice. What may seem like a snap decision actually comes from gathering evidence from the surrounding environment. And often the same person makes different decisions in the same scenarios at different times. Neural networks do the opposite, making the same decisions each time. Now, Georgia Tech researchers in Associate Professor Dobromir Rahnev’s lab are ...

Janusz Wojtusiak, Professor, Health Administration and Policy, College of Public Health, is set to receive funding for the project: “An Artificial Intelligence Solution to Social Isolation and Longlines of Caregivers of People with Dementia.” Wojtusiak and his graduate student Ghaida Alsadah will lay the foundation for a large study aimed at utilizing AI methods to address social isolation and loneliness among people who care for those with Alzheimer’s Disease and those suffering from dementia.  Addressing ...

Images   A new camera could prevent companies from collecting embarrassing and identifiable photos and videos from devices like smart home cameras and robotic vacuums. It's called PrivacyLens and was made by University of Michigan engineers.   PrivacyLens uses both a standard video camera and a heat-sensing camera to spot people in images from their body temperature. The person's likeness is then completely replaced by a generic stick figure, whose movements mirror those of the person it stands in for. The accurately animated stick figure allows a device relying on the ...

Astronomers have created the most detailed weather report so far for two distant worlds beyond our own solar system. The international study – the first of its kind – reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial objects, which are swathed in swirling clouds of hot sand amid temperatures of 950C. Using NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers set out to capture the weather on a pair of brown dwarfs – cosmic bodies that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars. These brown dwarfs, named collectively ...

July 15, 2024, Mountain View, CA -- The SETI Institute announced the latest findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) of the supernova remnant, Cassiopeia A (Cas A). These observations of the youngest known core collapse supernova in the Milky Way provide insights into the conditions that lead to the formation and destruction of molecules and dust within supernova ejecta. The study’s findings change our understanding of dust formation in the early universe in the galaxies detected by JWST 300 million years after the Big Bang. ...

Irvine, Calif., July 15, 2024 — As the planet continues to warm due to human-driven climate change, accurate computer climate models will be key in helping illuminate exactly how the climate will continue to be altered in the years ahead.   In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a team led by researchers from the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science and the University of Michigan Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering reveal how a climate model commonly used by geoscientists currently overestimates ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Forest scientists at Oregon State University studying tree regeneration have found that wildfire smoke comes with an unexpected benefit: It has a cooling capacity that can make life easier for vulnerable seedlings. An OSU College of Forestry collaboration led by faculty research assistant Amanda Brackett made the discovery while working to determine the effect of forest canopy cover on summer maximum temperatures near ground level. The study’s goal was to describe how heat waves and other future climate conditions might affect canopy cover’s influence on temperature. The scientists used previously established heat stress responses of seedlings from ...

WASHINGTON, July 15, 2024 — How would you stick a slice of banana to a sheet of copper? Until a few months ago, you couldn’t. But a new discovery called “hard-soft electroadhesion” enables chemists to stick almost any hydrogel to almost any metal, using nothing but an electric current. And you can unstick the materials simply by reversing the current. Recently reported in ACS Central Science, this astonishingly general phenomenon works with a wide variety of gels (including fruits, vegetables, meat and fish) and conductors (including metals and graphite). Join our host George as he attempts to replicate electroadhesion in his basement ...

About The Study: Follow-up of youth with pre-symptomatic type 1 diabetes demonstrated that the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with an accelerated progression to clinical disease and that this acceleration was confined to those with COVID-19. Further studies are required to determine whether COVID-19 also accelerates progression to type 1 diabetes in adults and whether vaccination and monitoring for COVID-19 symptoms should be considered for individuals with pre-symptomatic type 1 diabetes.  Corresponding ...

About The Study: The results of this study demonstrate that without a supportive family environment, gender identity development increases the risk of transgender youth attempting suicide or running away from home. Social services and community resources to establish supportive relationships between transgender children and their parents are essential. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Travis Campbell, Ph.D., email campbelt1@sou.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.2035) Editor’s ...

About The Study: This study found that despite a large number of randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews of massage therapy for painful adult health conditions rated a minority of conclusions as moderate-certainty evidence and that conclusions with moderate- or high-certainty evidence that massage therapy was superior to other active therapies were rare.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Selene Mak, Ph.D., M.P.H., email selene.mak@va.gov. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.22259) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study of contact sports athletes with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), years of contact sports participation were associated with substantia nigra tau pathology and neuronal loss, and these pathologies were associated with parkinsonism. Repetitive head impacts may incite neuropathologic processes that lead to symptoms of parkinsonism in individuals with CTE. Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Ann C. McKee, M.D. (amckee@bu.edu) and Thor D. Stein, M.D., Ph.D. (tdstein@bu.edu). To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2024.2166) Editor’s ...

WHY EARLY LIFE ANTIBIOTIC USE CAN INCREASE RISK OF ASTHMA: A POTENTIAL PREVENTION FOR ASTHMA LATER IN LIFE? Early exposure to antibiotics can trigger long term susceptibility to asthma, according to new research from Monash University. Importantly the research team isolated a molecule produced by gut bacteria that in the future could potentially be trialed as a simple treatment, in the form of a dietary supplement, for children at risk of asthma to prevent them developing the disease. Asthma affects over 260 million people globally and causes ...

Women who carry a particular form of a pain gene are more likely to respond well to a common medication used to treat long-term discomfort, research shows. In a study, women with chronic pelvic pain who had a naturally occurring variation of a gene, known as Neuregulin 3, in their DNA were more likely to experience relief after taking the painkilling drug gabapentin. Targeting gabapentin use to those with this genetic marker would avoid ineffective treatment and unwanted side-effects in those who are unlikely to respond, experts say. The findings could improve use of gabapentin in treating chronic pelvic pain – a persistent, disabling ...