Vienna, Austria: Researchers have found that nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain encode complex information on numerous characteristics of other individuals in the same social group.   The work, which is being carried out in bats, is the first to show this in a large, mixed-sex group of wild, social animals, and is important because it sheds light on how the brain operates and generates thinking processes and behaviour.   Professor Nachum Ulanovsky, Head of the Center for Learning, Memory and Cognition at the Weizmann Institute of Science, ...

Despite gaining a bad rap in mainstream media in recent years, nanoparticles have been successfully used for decades in targeted drug delivery systems. Drug molecules can be encapsulated within biodegradable nanoparticles to be delivered to specific cells or diseased tissues. However, blood flow dynamics can significantly affect the nanoparticle’s ability to bind at the target site and stay adhered long enough for the drug to be released. Drawing inspiration from civil, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors Arif Masud and Hyunjoon Kong have developed and tested a new mathematical model to accurately simulate ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — What if you could take an ecologically degraded environment that presents a public health problem, and devise a powerful and elegant solution that not only restores its functionality but also reduces its health impacts while addressing food and water access and alleviating poverty? An international team of biologists, social scientists and medical researchers in the U.S. and Senegal did just that, and for their innovation and research, published in the journal Nature, has received several prestigious awards. “It feels gratifying to be recognized for work finding win-win solutions for the environment and people,” said UC Santa ...

State-level officials such as governors, state legislators and attorneys general are shaping U.S.-China relations as the two countries navigate a strained geopolitical relationship, according to new research by political scientist Kyle Jaros. “The state level has independent importance in the U.S.-China relationship — it’s not just a reflection of what’s happening at the national level,” said Jaros, associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. “The actions taken by state and local officials — and their Chinese counterparts — not only affect their own communities, ...

Since the peak of the AIDS epidemic, the U.S. has achieved significant advancements in preventing and treating HIV, though progress has been uneven across regions and slower than necessary. In Missouri, where the number of new HIV diagnoses and deaths has not improved since 2017, there is a need to recapture momentum in addressing the disease. In a bid to jump-start the stalled campaign against HIV in the region, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Saint Louis University plan to establish the Midwest Developmental Center for AIDS Research with funding from the National ...

More than one in 10 households in the United States last year did not have access to adequate and nutritious food, according to the U.S. government. Further, food and nutrition insecurity lead to a higher risk of poor pregnancy outcomes. The U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is one of the main federal food assistance programs that aims to reduce food insecurity for eligible pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding people and their children. WIC helps improve the health of participants and their families by providing access to food, nutrition education, and referrals ...

The field of synthetic biology, the science of manipulating biology, has a lot of “cooks in the kitchen,” which has both helped it flourish and made it unusually difficult to create a cohesive, consistent curriculum for students at every level of study. Each discipline involved — from chemical engineering to ethics — has a unique approach to teaching and literature, which creates inconsistencies between what scientists learn. Now, Northwestern University researchers propose a new way to teach synthetic biology that uses different levels of organization — starting at the molecular scale and growing ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — When most people think of artificial intelligence, they’re probably thinking of — and worrying about — ChatGPT and deepfakes. AI-generated text and images dominate our social media feeds and the other websites we visit, sometimes without us knowing it, and are often used to spread unreliable and misleading information. But what if text-generating models like ChatGPT could actually spot deepfake images?  A University at Buffalo-led research team has applied large language models (LLMs), including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, toward spotting deepfakes of ...

DETROIT — Wayne State University received a four-year, $5.2 million P30 environmental health sciences core center (EHSCC) grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in support of the “Center for Urban Responses to Environmental Stressors (CURES).” This grant will allow the interdisciplinary CURES team of researchers, educators and community partners to continue its ongoing quest to understand the basis for urban environmental health disparities and the human health impact of environmental exposure to complex chemical and non-chemical stressors in Detroit's urban landscape. CURES is one of ...

Jennifer Dill, director of Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been named the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Transportation Research Record (TRR). The TRR—the flagship journal of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board (TRB)—is one of the most cited and prolific transportation journals in the world, offering wide coverage of transportation-related topics. While maintaining her current role as the director of TREC, Dill will begin her duties ...

New York, NY— This week, the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Optometry held a continuation of their annual webinar series, Race in Optometry which started in 2020. Aimed at fostering a national dialogue that leads to necessary changes to increase diversity in the optometric profession and education, the annual webinar focused on Headwinds: Navigating Barriers to Success. This webinar was the seventh installment in a series hosted annually around the Juneteenth holiday by the College’s Office of Continuing Professional ...

Shared micromobility (including shared electric scooters and bikes provided by private companies) is one of the newest transportation options that has come to cities in the last several decades. A new report explores the different ways cities charge shared micromobility companies to operate, and how these funds are used. In the newly released report, John MacArthur of Portland State University, Kevin Fang of Sonoma State University and Calvin Thigpen of Lime examine data from 120 cities in 16 countries around the world. They also conducted a survey of cities’ shared micromobility ...

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of four research articles recently published across its six esteemed journals. Widely recognized for fostering innovation and advancing ecological knowledge, ESA’s journals consistently feature illuminating and impactful studies. This compilation of papers explores the potential for pines to establish in pine-free interior Alaska, internet sleuthing to assess birds’ extinction risk and more, showcasing the Society’s commitment to promoting cutting-edge research that furthers our understanding ...

A year of treatment with a medicine made of an antibody and chemotherapy drug has proven highly effective in preventing stage 1 HER2-positive breast cancer from recurring in patients, a team led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has found. In a clinical trial involving 512 patients with the earliest stage of breast cancer that tested positive for the HER2 protein, 97% of those treated with trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) after surgery were alive and free of invasive cancer five years after treatment. The results, published online today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest that T-DM1 is a reasonable treatment approach for this stage 1 population, the study authors ...

Ephemeral streams – temporary streams that only flow after rainfall or snowmelt – contribute more than 50% of the flow in downstream river systems and likely have a major influence on water quality across the United States, according to a new modeling study. The findings show how important ephemeral streams are for the transport of water and pollution into larger, more permanent water bodies. Excluding these streams from coverage under the U.S. Clean Water Act, say the authors, would significantly limit federal authority to protect downstream water quality. Ephemeral streams, which flow only in direct response to precipitation and are disconnected from groundwater sources, ...

Thanks to being rapidly entombed in volcanic ash – in a “Pompeii-like” process – Cambrian-age trilobites’ anatomy is more discernable than ever, via exquisitely preserved fossils. The fossils uncovered in Morrocco are reported in a new study that reveals microscopic details including of trilobite appendages and the trilobite digestive system. Trilobites are perhaps the most well-known creatures that lived during the Cambrian Period. These extinct marine arthropods’ hard exoskeleton lends itself to high fossilization potential, facilitating the identification of more ...

In a new study in mice, researchers introduce “CHARM,” a compact and versatile epigenetic editor that can be used to silence prion protein throughout the brain. The tool provides a path towards an effective first-line treatment for patients with deadly prion disease as well as other neurodegenerative diseases caused by the toxic buildup of unwanted proteins. Prion disease – a suite of devastating neurodegenerative disorders that result in rapid-onset dementia and death – is caused by misfolding of the prion protein, PrP, to form toxic aggregates that result in neuronal death. Previous research in mice has shown that removing PrP ...

LA JOLLA, CA—What happens when measles virus meets a human cell? The viral machinery unfolds in just the right way to reveal key pieces that let it fuse itself into the host cell membrane. Once the fusion process is complete, the host cell is a goner. It belongs to the virus now. Scientists in the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Vaccine Innovation are working to develop new measles vaccines and therapeutics that stop this fusion process. The researchers recently harnessed an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy to show—in ...

The most obese children with dengue are more than twice as likely as others to be hospitalized with dengue, according to study of 4,782 10- to 18-year-olds in Sri Lanka. #### Article URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0012248 Article Title: Is the rise in childhood obesity rates leading to an increase in hospitalizations due to dengue? Author Countries: Sri Lanka, United Kingdom Funding: This study has been supported by the World Health Organization Unity Studies (GNM and CJ), a global sero-epidemiological standardization initiative, with funding to the World Health Organization and the UK Medical Research Council (GSO). The World Health Organization ...

Researchers have described some of the best-preserved three-dimensional trilobite fossils ever discovered. The fossils, which are more than 500 million years old, were collected in the High Atlas of Morocco and are being referred to by scientists as “Pompeii” trilobites due to their remarkable preservation in ash. The trilobites, from the Cambrian period, have been the subject of research by an international team of scientists, led by Prof Abderrazak El Albani, a geologist based at University of Poitiers and originally from Morocco. The team included Dr Greg Edgecombe, a palaeontologist ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Researchers from MIT and the University of Michigan have discovered a new way to drive chemical reactions that could generate a wide variety of compounds with desirable pharmaceutical properties. These compounds, known as azetidines, are characterized by four-membered rings that include nitrogen. Azetidines have traditionally been much more difficult to synthesize than five-membered nitrogen-containing rings, which are found in many FDA-approved drugs. The reaction that the researchers used to create azetidines is driven by a photocatalyst that excites the molecules from their ground energy state. Using computational models that they developed, the researchers ...

Plants are powerhouses of molecular manufacturing. Over the eons, they have evolved to produce a plethora of small molecules — some are beneficial and valuable to humans, others can be deadly. For years, a good way for scientists looking for new medicines to distinguish beneficial plant-derived molecules from harmful ones has been through a scientific sniff test — dab a bit of the molecule at one end of a petri dish and drop tiny nematode worms (C. elegans) at the other, then wait to see if the chemically sensitive worms move toward or away from the compound in question, a process known as chemotaxis. This “artisanal” ...

The bottom of the ocean is not hospitable: there is no light; the temperature is freezing cold; and the pressure of all the water above will literally crush you. The animals that live at this depth have developed biophysical adaptations that allow them to survive in these harsh conditions. What are these adaptations and how did they develop? University of California San Diego Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Itay Budin teamed up with researchers from around the country to study the cell membranes of ctenophores (“comb jellies”) and found they had unique lipid structures that allow them to live under intense pressure. Their work appears in Science. Adapting ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL 27-Jun-2024 14:00 ET Drug development is typically slow: the pipeline from basic research discoveries that provide the basis for a new drug to clinical trials to production of a widely available medicine can take decades. But decades can feel impossibly far off to someone who currently has a fatal disease. Broad Institute Senior Group Leader Sonia Vallabh is acutely aware of that race against time, because the topic of her research is a neurodegenerative and ultimately fatal disease–fatal familial insomnia, a type of prion disease–that she will almost certainly develop as she ages. Vallabh and her husband, Eric Minikel, switched careers ...

For a broad range of industries, separating gases is an important part of both process and product—from separating nitrogen and oxygen from air for medical purposes to separating carbon dioxide from other gases in the process of carbon capture or removing impurities from natural gas. Separating gases, however, can be both energy-intensive and expensive. “For example, when separating oxygen and nitrogen, you need to cool the air to very low temperatures until they liquefy. Then, by slowly increasing the temperature, the gases will evaporate at different points, allowing one to become a gas again and separate out,” explains Wei Zhang, a University of Colorado Boulder professor ...