New Haven, Conn. — Decades after Purdue Pharma began to push physicians to prescribe addictive pain pills, the opioid crisis has been a slow-motion disaster, with overdoses destroying lives and families across the country. Now, it appears the consequences of those early marketing efforts are even more devastating. In a new study, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health show that infectious disease rates in the United States also climbed as a direct long-term result of the marketing of OxyContin. By ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – People who start taking medication soon after the first signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) may have a lower risk of disability later, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. MS is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. Symptoms of MS may include fatigue, numbness, ...

You’re a poker wizard. A friend knows all about French cuisine. Another friend is a Mozart expert. The three of you get together and share knowledge about your respective expertise. Each of you leaves learning something from the other two. People learn a lot by sharing and exchanging information. Can computers do the same with other computers—can robots, in effect, teach other robots how to learn by sharing knowledge? A team of researchers led by computer science Professor Laurent Itti and one of his Ph.D. students, Yunhao Ge, address this question in ...

As molecular biologists at Boston University and as husband and wife, Ruslan Afasizhev and Inna Afasizheva, have worked together for decades. Together, they have published dozens of papers on the mechanics of mitochondrial DNA and RNA in a single-celled, disease-causing parasite called Trypanosoma brucei. Now, years of breakthroughs have led to their latest paper published in Science, which provides a detailed look at a mystifying process called RNA editing and could potentially help treat a deadly disease. In ...

Researchers led by a team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created the first tool to map and visualize the areas where human settlements and nature meet on a global scale. The tool, which was part of a study recently published in Nature, could improve responses to environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of zoonotic diseases and loss of ecosystem biodiversity. These areas where people and wildlands meet are called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI for short. More technically, a WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) describes anywhere that has at least one house per 40 acres and is also 50% covered by wildland ...

Using an innovative method for measuring doctor turnover, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers determined that between 2010 and 2018, the annual rate at which physicians left their practices increased by 43 percent, from 5.3 percent to 7.6 percent a year.  The causes of this trend are not known, but warrant further investigation, according to the researchers. The study, published July 11 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also found that the first three quarters of 2020 (the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States) were not associated with higher turnover. However, more data are needed to fully understand turnover trends related to COVID-19. Whether doctors ...

New research from the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus has determined that enjoying a tasting at a winery goes well beyond the sip. Professor Annamma Joy, with UBCO’s Faculty of Management, conducts research in the area of consumer behaviour and branding with a special focus on luxury brands, fashion brand experiences, wineries and wine tourism. Dr. Joy, along with her collaborators and students, studied several Okanagan wineries over a three-year period to comprehensively document the experiences ...

Laura-Isobel McCall, Ph.D., and Zhibo Yang, Ph.D., co-principal investigators and associate professors of chemistry and biochemistry in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, have been awarded a prestigious R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health for their project, “Novel single-cell mass spectrometry to assess the role of intracellular drug concentration and metabolism in antimicrobial treatment failure.” “Our project builds upon Dr. ...

“This evidence strengthens the relevance of the findings by Pietrobono et al., shedding light on the potential application of SMO inhibitors in concert with BRD4 inhibitors.” BUFFALO, NY- July 19, 2023 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on May 26, 2023, entitled, “Combined targeting of HEDGEHOG signaling and BRD4 as a novel therapeutic option against melanoma.” The Hedgehog-GLI (HH/GLI) pathway is aberrantly activated in several types of cancer. Canonical HH/ GLI pathway is triggered by binding of HH ligands to the twelve-pass transmembrane receptor Patched 1 (PTCH1), which retrieves its inhibition ...

A study of data from about 500,000 people in the UK Biobank has uncovered small but statistically significant associations between signs of systemic inflammation and later risk of dementia. Dr. Krisztina Mekli of The University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 19, 2023. Millions of people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, and researchers are working to tease out the complex mechanisms behind these conditions. Prior research has suggested that inflammation—activation of the body’s innate immune system—may ...

Women working as STEM instructors are more likely than men in the same profession to disclose to their undergraduate students identities which could carry stigma, such as depression or growing up in a low-income household. In the new study, published July 19, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, Carly Busch of Arizona State University, USA, and colleagues suggest that these decisions to disclose may be in order to act as role models for students. Concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs) are identities that ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283134 Article Title: Gradient-mixing LEGO robots for purifying DNA origami nanostructures of multiple components by rate-zonal centrifugation Author Countries: USA Funding: The research in Hariadi lab was supported by the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award (1DP2AI144247), National Science Foundation SemiSynBio II (2027215), and Arizona Biomedical Research Consortium (ADHS17-00007401). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287719 Article Title: A double-pointed wooden throwing stick from Schöningen, Germany: Results and new insights from a multianalytical study Author Countries: UK, Germany Funding: T.T. and this project are funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 447423357. https://www.dfg.de/. The project is further funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture, with funds from the Future Lower Saxony Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation – project ...

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285372 Article Title: Ear health and quality of life in pet rabbits of differing ear conformations: A UK survey of owner-reported signalment risk factors and effects on rabbit welfare and behaviour Author Countries: UK Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. M.R.D.K included some of this questionnaire in part-fulfilment of her Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine at Royal Veterinary College. ...

Philadelphia, July 19, 2023—Why do nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) exacerbate gastrointestinal infections by Clostridioides difficile, the leading cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea worldwide? In a new paperpublished in Science Advances, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have begun to answer that question, showing that NSAIDs disrupt the mitochondria of cells lining the colon, sensitizing them to damage by pathogenic toxins.  Clostridioides ...

A 300,000-year-old hunting weapon has shone a new light on early humans as woodworking masters, according to a new study. State-of-the-art analysis of a double-pointed wooden throwing stick, found in Schöningen in Germany three decades ago, shows it was scraped, seasoned and sanded before being used to kill animals. The research indicates early humans’ woodworking techniques were more developed and sophisticated than previously understood. The findings, published today (Wednesday, 19 July) in PLOS ONE, also suggest the ...

·  Contacts between lysosomes and mitochondria are broken due to Parkinson’s mutation ·  Lysosomes cannot ‘feed’ mitochondria with essential metabolites  CHICAGO --- Northwestern Medicine scientists have uncovered a new mechanism by which mutations in a gene parkin contribute to familial forms of Parkinson's disease. The discovery opens a new avenue for Parkinson’s therapeutics, scientists report in a new study.  The Northwestern scientists discovered that mutations in parkin result in a breakdown ...

A research group in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute is creating the next generation of explorers — robots. The Autonomous Exploration Research Team has developed a suite of robotic systems and planners enabling robots to explore more quickly, probe the darkest corners of unknown environments, and create more accurate and detailed maps. The systems allow robots to do all this autonomously, finding their way and creating a map without human intervention. "You can set it in any environment, like a department store or a residential building after a disaster, and off it goes," ...

What determines whether we become overweight? Aside from lifestyle, predisposition plays a role, but genes cannot fully explain the inherited propensity to accumulate excess weight. A new study by Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in Science Translational Medicine* shows that a kind of formatting of the DNA code in one gene that is associated with satiety is implicated in a slightly elevated risk of excess body weight – at least in women. This “epigenetic marking” is established early on during the embryonic stage. People who are overweight, especially those who ...

“Don’t eat me!” That’s how one might translate the signal that the cancer cells in a glioblastoma send to the macrophages (white blood cells specialized in removing dead and dying cellular matter) in the brain. Immunotherapy attempts to enable these cells to eradicate the abnormal cells, but so far, it has met with little success when it comes to glioblastomas. Researchers led by Professor Gregor Hutter from the Department of Biomedicine at the University and University Hospital Basel have recently used patient data, experiments with mice, and samples from human tumors to study one of these “don’t eat me!” signals and its inhibitory ...

The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation and published in the journal Circulation, opens the prospect of treating the condition at the earliest stages. Being able to detect HCM earlier than ever before will also assist trials investigating gene therapies and drug treatments aimed at stopping the disease developing in those at risk. HCM is an inherited condition that affects around 1 in 500 people in the UK. It causes the muscular walls of the heart to become thicker than normal, affecting how well the heart can pump blood around the body. It is ...

When it comes to disaster response and recovery operations, it is crucial that workers are prepared before there is an emergency, according to Rutgers researchers. Their study, published in New Solutions: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, outlines the importance of the Worker Training Program to United States emergency and disaster-response infrastructure. "It is essential to identify and deliver core disaster training to responders and workers on a routine basis prior to an [emergency] event," said Mitchel Rosen, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health. “The failure ...

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights showcases the latest breakthroughs in cancer care, research and prevention. These advances are made possible through seamless collaboration between MD Anderson’s world-leading clinicians and scientists, bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back. Recent developments include promising results from combining immunotherapy with radiation for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a novel combination therapy for secondary and treatment-resistant ...

A good battery needs two things: high energy density to power devices, and stability, so it can be safely and reliably recharged thousands of times. For the past three decades, lithium-ion batteries have reigned supreme — proving their performance in smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But battery researchers have begun to approach the limits of lithium-ion. As next-generation long-range vehicles and electric aircraft start to arrive on the market, the search for safer, cheaper, and more powerful ...

The longest nerve in the human body starts in the brain and meanders its way down the neck and into the chest, where it splits into separate branches, winding its twisting tendrils to touch each internal organ. Known as the “information superhighway” and aptly named from the Latin word meaning “wanders,” the vagus nerve is a bundle of fibers responsible for the parasympathetic nervous system: digestion, heart rate, breathing.  Sending electrical impulses down this tenth cranial nerve has proven effective in treating conditions like depression and epilepsy, ...