In a study published in the journal Circulation Research, researchers at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC)  led by Dr. José Luis de la Pompa reveal the essential role of the protein neuregulin-1 (Nrg1) in the intricate transformation of the heart from its delicate primordial structure into a powerful pumping organ. The findings not only highlight the pathways through which the human heart forms, but also suggest important directions for future medical advances. Commenting on the study, Dr. de la Pompa, head of the ...

Students who feel they have been victimized because of social characteristics such as their ethnicity or their sexuality are at additional risk of trauma, a new national US study has revealed.  Published in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Violence, the research, of more than 2,200 young victims of bullying, found students reported that their physical health; self-esteem; social relationships, and schoolwork suffered more if they felt bias was behind the perpetrators’ actions.   This was particularly ...

The study, supported by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and published in the European Heart Journal, is the first to assess how different movement patterns throughout the 24-hour day are linked to heart health. It is the first evidence to emerge from the international Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep (ProPASS) consortium. Cardiovascular disease, which refers to all diseases of the heart and circulation, is the number one cause of mortality globally. In 2021, it was responsible for one in three ...

Never being visited by friends or family is associated with an increased risk of dying, according to a study published in BMC Medicine. The authors suggest that their findings could be used to help identify patients at a higher risk of dying due to social factors, and to develop more effective interventions to combat the increased risk of death associated with social isolation. Although previous research has identified associations between deaths due to any causes and both a ‘sense of loneliness’ and living alone, the combined impacts of different types of social interaction ...

Lisbon, Portugal: Patients with breast cancer in conflict zones around the world are being “massively under-served” by governments, UN aid agencies and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Professor Richard Sullivan told the Advanced Breast Cancer Seventh International Consensus Conference (ABC 7). [1]   Among people fleeing conflict zones, either displaced within their own country or across borders to other countries, patients with breast cancer are the “single largest group of cancer patients that present to UN agencies and international NGOs,” said Prof. Sullivan, who is director of the Institute of Cancer Policy and co-director of the Centre for ...

Is the US reporting system for vaccine safety broken?  Investigation raises concerns that the system is not operating as intended and signals are being missed A US reporting system designed to detect potential safety issues with vaccines is supposed to be user-friendly, responsive, and transparent. But an investigation published by The BMJ today finds it’s not meeting its own standards. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), co-managed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), collects reports of symptoms, ...

Gut bacteria protects against diarrhoeal disease Peer reviewed - Systematic review – people and animals The severity of a diarrhoeal disease could be down to the bacteria in your gut – according to new research from the University of East Anglia. Cryptosporidiosis is responsible for over 100,000 deaths annually – predominantly in children under five. It also affects animals, and a new study published today shows that large animals – including primates - with less different ...

A long-beaked echidna named after Sir David Attenborough and last seen by scientists in 1961 has been photographed for the first time in an Indonesian tropical forest. An international team of researchers worked with local communities to deploy over 80 camera traps to film the elusive animal. Besides rediscovering the echidna, the team uncovered a wealth of species completely new to science, including beetles, spiders, and a remarkable tree-dwelling shrimp. A wide range of images and video footage from the expedition are available (see link below). More than sixty years after it was last recorded, an expedition ...

A panel of international experts representing the World Health Organization’s Guideline Development Group has updated its guidance on treatments for patients with covid-19. The new recommendations published by The BMJ are part of a living guideline, developed by the World Health Organization with the methodological support of MAGIC Evidence Ecosystem Foundation, to provide up to date, trustworthy guidance on the management of covid-19 and help doctors make better decisions with their patients. The guidance ...

A four-year, $2.6 million grant to study circadian rhythm and novel therapies to protect the heart during a heart attack or cardiac surgery has been awarded to UTHealth Houston by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. Principal investigator Holger Eltzschig, MD, PhD, professor, and co-investigator Wei Ruan, MD, PhD, assistant professor, from the Department of Anesthesiology, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, are studying translational, pharmacologic, and interventional strategies targeting ...

The immune system is a crucial part of our survival, regularly fending off wide-ranging attacks on the body, both internal and external. Unsurprisingly, the elegant defense system that protects us from viruses, bacterial infections, cancer, and other threats is immensely complicated. Each time it mounts a response, it must quickly and carefully orchestrate communication across vast numbers of cells and molecules. Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is working to figure out how, exactly, the immune system does this — and when and why it fails.  “There's always the next question, the next ...

Researchers from the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ (VMBS) Veterinary Education, Research, and Outreach (VERO) program have joined an international team studying how coronaviruses are spread and whether an individual’s microbiome (the collection of microbes living in or on the body) might impact that transmission. Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can cause a variety of diseases in many species, from the common cold and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in people, to diarrhea in calves and respiratory disease in ...

Astronomers once again have combined the observational powers of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to create one of the most detailed and colorful portraits of the cosmos, just in time for the holiday season. The new image, dubbed the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster by the research team that includes Texas A&M University astronomer Dr. Lifan Wang, combines visible light from Hubble with infrared light detected by Webb to showcase MACS0416, a galaxy cluster about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. Because the cluster is able to magnify the light from more distant background galaxies through a phenomenon known as gravitational ...

NEW YORK, NY and SANTA BARBARA, CA — The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2023 Glenn Foundation for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellowships in Aging Research. This program supports postdoctoral fellowswho study basic research mechanisms of aging and/or translational findings that have potential to directly benefit human health.   Selected through a rigorous review process, ten, one-year, $75,000 Postdoctoral ...

Soaring, wings outstretched, many birds sail through the air unhindered. However, species that dine on fruit, seeds and nectar must negotiate tiny gaps in cluttered foliage to secure a feast. To pass through apertures, many birds pull in their wings, folding them closer to their bodies. However, some of the most manoeuvrable aviators, hummingbirds, have lost the ability to fold their wings at the wrists and elbows. ‘Unless hummingbirds implement distinctive strategies to transit narrow apertures, they may be unable to enter gaps less than one wingspan wide’, ...

Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation — they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through. But hummingbirds can't bend their wing bones during flight, so how do they transit the gaps between leaves and tangled branches? A study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that hummingbirds have evolved their own unique strategies — two of them, in fact. These strategies have not been reported before, likely because hummers maneuver too ...

New survey data from the 7th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (NAP7) published in Anaesthesia (the journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) shows that potentially serious complications occur in one in 18 procedures under the care of an anaesthetist. The risk factors associated with these potentially serious complications include very young age (babies); comorbidities; being male; increased frailty; the urgency and extent of surgery; and surgery taking place at night and/or at weekends. This paper has been produced by a team of authors across ...

Laser epilation, commonly known as laser hair removal, reduced the risk of recurrence in patients with pilonidal disease, an inflammatory, painful, and sometimes chronic or recurring condition, according to research conducted by Peter C. Minneci, M.D., Chair of Surgery at Nemours Children’s Health, Delaware Valley, and published in JAMA Surgery. Pilonidal disease occurs when cysts form between the buttocks. It is believed to be an inflammatory reaction to hair or debris that gets caught in the crease of the buttocks. The disease occurs in 26 to 100 per 100,000 people and is most common in adolescents and young ...

A new study examining the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022, which overturned Roe v. Wade's constitutional protection of abortion rights, finds that the American public's support for abortion increased after the decision. The findings were published today in Nature Behaviour. "Our results show the extent to which the Supreme Court is out of step with the American public," says co-author Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth and director of the Polarization Research Lab. The study's findings were based on a large, three-wave survey before the leak ...

The next time your friend displays remarkable openness to their opposite political camp’s ideas, you might try pinching them. Okay, we don’t really recommend that.  But new evidence shows that people with increased sensitivity to pain are also more likely to endorse values more common to people of their opposite political persuasion. It doesn’t stop there. They also show stronger support for the other camp’s politicians, and, get this --  more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2020 if they are liberal, or Joe Biden if they are conservative. Even ...

Critical Path Institute (C-Path) is pleased to announce the release of a new peer-reviewed publication, titled “Transforming Drug Development for Neurological Disorders: Proceedings from a Multi-disease Area Workshop,” now published in Neurotherapeutics, The Journal of the American Society for Experimental Neurotherapeutics. A distinguished team of C-Path scientists and patient-advocates spearheaded by Diane Stephenson, Ph.D., C-Path’s Executive Director of the Critical Path for Parkinson’s Consortium (CPP), has presented its learnings from C-Path’s 2022 Neuroscience Program Annual Workshop. The publication can be accessed in its entirety here. Neurological ...

Over the past decade, AI has permeated nearly every corner of science: Machine learning models have been used to predict protein structures, estimate the fraction of the Amazon rainforest that has been lost to deforestation and even classify faraway galaxies that might be home to exoplanets. But while AI can be used to speed scientific discovery — helping researchers make predictions about phenomena that may be difficult or costly to study in the real world — it can also lead scientists astray. In the same way that chatbots sometimes “hallucinate,” ...

Lasers have become relatively commonplace in everyday life, but they have many uses outside of providing light shows at raves and scanning barcodes on groceries. Lasers are also of great importance in telecommunications and computing as well as biology, chemistry, and physics research. In those latter applications, lasers that can emit extremely short pulses—those on the order of one-trillionth of a second (one picosecond) or shorter—are especially useful. Using lasers operating on such small timescales, researchers can study physical and chemical ...

An analysis of beeswax in managed honeybee hives in New York found a wide variety of pesticide, herbicide and fungicide residues – exposing current and future generations of bees to long-term toxicity. The study, published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, notes that people may be similarly exposed through contaminated honey, pollen and wax in cosmetics. Though the chemicals found in wax are not beneficial to humans, the small amounts in these products are unlikely to ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, partnering with colleagues in Australia, have identified a novel bacterial protein that can keep human cells healthy even when the cells have a heavy bacterial burden. The discovery could lead to new treatments for a wide array of diseases relating to mitochondrial dysfunction, such as cancer and auto-immune disorders. Mitochondria are organelles that supply most of the chemical energy needed to power cells’ biochemical reactions. An article on the study is published in the journal PNAS. The researchers ...