We know that greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide should increase rainfall. The emissions heat the atmosphere, causing a one-two punch: warmer oceans make it easier for water to evaporate, and warmer air can hold more water vapor, meaning more moisture is available to fall as rain. But for much of the 20th century, that increase in precipitation didn’t clearly show up in the data. A new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley ...

Our cells are surrounded by a fragile membrane that’s only 5 nanometers thick, 1/20 of a soap bubble. Cells are easily damaged by physiological activities, including muscle contraction and tissue injury. To cope with such damage, cells are equipped with mechanisms that can repair membrane damage to a certain degree. Mechanical damage to the cell membrane was previously believed to trigger two simple cellular outcomes: recovery or death. In this study, however, the researchers uncovered a third outcome – cellular senescence.  “When I started this project, I simply aimed to understand ...

Australia can lay claim to two new species of native rodent thanks to a study from The Australian National University (ANU).  The aptly named delicate mouse was previously thought to be a single species spanning a massive stretch of the country from the Pilbara in Western Australia, across parts of the Northern Territory and through Queensland down to the New South Wales border.   But researchers at ANU and CSIRO thought there might be more to the story.   Lead author Dr Emily Roycroft, from ANU, said we now know there ...

Statement Highlights: A new American Heart Association scientific statement updates more than a decade of research identifying, managing and preventing neurodevelopmental delays and disorders among people with congenital heart disease. The new statement outlines important changes since the Association’s last statement in 2012, such as revised criteria to determine which children and adults are at high risk for neurological developmental delays and disorders, as well as an updated list of factors that may increase the risk. Critical next ...

Today, a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin and investigators from FutureNeuro announced a major discovery that has profound importance for our understanding of brain fog and cognitive decline seen in some patients with Long COVID. In the months after the emergence of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV2 in late 2019 a patient-reported syndrome termed Long-COVID began to come to the fore as an enduring manifestation of acute infection.    Long COVID has up to 200 reported symptoms to date, but in general patients report lingering symptoms such as fatigue, ...

The annual rate of carbon emissions due to the degradation of carbon stocks in mangrove forests is predicted to rise by nearly 50,000% by the end of the century, according to a new study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters. Mangroves in regions such as southern India, southeastern China, Singapore and eastern Australia are particularly affected.   Mangrove forests store a large amount of carbon, particularly in their soils, however human development in these areas has led to the degradation of these carbon ...

Scientists at the University of Zurich have developed an innovative neural cell culture model, shedding light on the intricate mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration. Their research pinpointed a misbehaving protein as a promising therapeutic target in the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Neurodegenerative diseases cause some of the neurons in our brains to die, resulting in different symptoms depending on the brain region affected. In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), neurons in the motor cortex and spinal ...

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has appointed Professor Ernst Kuipers, a renowned gastroenterologist, healthcare executive, and former Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport for The Netherlands, as NTU Singapore’s new Vice President (Research). Prof Kuipers will also be appointed to the tenured faculty rank of Distinguished University Professor, the highest faculty rank at NTU bestowed upon faculty members with extraordinary scholarly achievements that typically span multiple disciplinary boundaries. Announcing this new appointment, NTU President Prof Ho Teck Hua said: “We warmly welcome ...

A detailed survey of the volcanic underwater deposits around the Kikai caldera in Japan clarified the deposition mechanisms as well as the event’s magnitude. As a result, the Kobe University research team found that the event 7,300 years ago was the largest volcanic eruption in the Holocene by far. In addition to lava, volcanos eject large amounts of pumice, ashes and gases as a fast-moving flow, known as “pyroclastic flow,” and its sediments are a valuable data source on past eruptions. For volcanoes on land, geologists understand the sedimentation mechanism of pyroclastic flows well, but the sediments themselves get lost easily ...

Mass General Brigham pediatric clinicians created 45 videos on pediatric care topics including how-to for surgical procedures, best practices for intubation and intensive care, and translated them to Spanish through GPT-4 large language model. Videos distributed to clinicians in Guatemala and Colombia AI can offer health care professionals worldwide an inclusive resource for elevating pediatric standards of care, according to authors A team of pediatric clinicians at Mass General Brigham have turned to generative artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle problems plaguing child medical care delivery in resource-poor countries that increase risk for poor outcomes and mortality. The ...

A new computer model mimics Moon dust so well that it could lead to smoother and safer Lunar robot teleoperations. The tool, developed by researchers at the University of Bristol and based at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, could be used to train astronauts ahead of Lunar missions. Working with their industry partner, Thales Alenia Space in the UK, who has specific interest in creating working robotic systems for space applications, the team investigated a virtual version of regolith, another name for Moon dust. Lunar regolith is ...

WASHINGTON (Feb. 22, 2024)--A new study finds women in healthcare occupations endure significantly more stress and burnout compared to their male counterparts. The analysis by researchers at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences also found that job satisfaction and better work-life balance can protect women healthcare professionals from harmful stress.   “Human beings are not equipped to handle the combined, intense pressures in healthcare in part due to the pressure to not take time to care for yourself,” Leigh A. Frame, associate director of the GW Resiliency & Well-being Center, ...

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a new blood testing method that can detect potent opioids much faster than traditional approaches and potentially save lives.  The method, the latest effort by Waterloo researchers and entrepreneurs to lead health innovation in Canada, can simultaneously analyze 96 blood samples that could contain opioids such as fentanyl in under three minutes – twice as quickly as other techniques.  "The difference between our blood testing method and traditional methods used in laboratories and hospitals is that we can do it faster ...

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) has discovered a giant ultra-high-energy gamma-ray bubble structure in the Cygnus star-forming region, which is the first time that the origin of cosmic rays with energy higher than 10 Peta-Electronvolt (PeV, 1PeV=1015eV) has been discovered. This achievement was published in the form of a cover article in Science Bulletin on Feb. 26. The research was completed by the LHAASO Collaboration led by Prof. CAO Zhen as the spokesperson from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the ...

Imagine doubling the processing power of your smartphone, tablet, personal computer, or server using the existing hardware already in these devices.  Hung-Wei Tseng, a UC Riverside associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has laid out a paradigm shift in computer architecture to do just that in a recent paper titled, “Simultaneous and Heterogeneous Multithreading.”  Tseng explained that today’s computer devices increasingly have graphics processing units (GPUs), hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), or digital signal processing units as essential components. These components ...

Home health care use in the last three years of a patient’s life is associated with a higher likelihood of hospice care at the end of life, according to a Rutgers Health study.   Researchers, whose findings are published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, examined the home health care and hospice care experiences of more than 2 million people.   “In addition to benefits for the patient, hospice care also provides resources and support to help family caregivers cope with the physical, emotional and practical challenges of caring for a loved one at the end of life,” said Olga Jarrín, senior author of the ...

For the first time researchers have identified patterns of risk for several different types of cancer in men with fertility problems and their families.   The study, which is published today (Thursday) in Human Reproduction [1], one of the world’s leading reproductive medicine journals, found that families of men who have very few or no sperm in their semen have a higher risk of developing cancer, including developing cancer at younger ages, compared to families of fertile men.   The risk and the type of cancer varied greatly depending on whether the men had low numbers of sperm (oligozoospermic) or none (azoospermic), with several cancers identified ...

1. Background Many proteins within the body form complexes with other proteins, determining the fate of cells. Therefore, the analysis of protein-protein interactions (PPI) is a crucial process for understanding the biological function of target proteins. Membrane proteins, which account for over 30% of human genes, play a vital role in cell functions. Many membrane proteins are known to form complexes to exert their functions, making the elucidation of membrane protein PPIs essential for understanding protein function. However, the development of technologies to analyze PPIs, especially extracellular protein–protein interactions (exPPIs) of living cells, has ...

PHILADELPHIA—(Feb. 21, 2024)—The Wistar Institute’s associate professor Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen, Ph.D., has demonstrated, with his lab and collaborators, a connection between viral damage to the gut and premature biological aging. The group found that this pro-aging connection can contribute to both gut permeability and premature systemic & intestinal tissue aging in people living with chronic HIV infection, and their discovery is detailed in the newly published paper titled, “Distinct Intestinal Microbial Signatures Linked to Accelerated Systemic and Intestinal Biological Aging,” published in the journal Microbiome. When people's bodies age faster ...

Key points: Chronic exposure to fine particulate air pollutants (PM2.5) may increase seniors’ risk of cardiovascular hospitalization, with disproportionate impacts on residents of socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods. The findings suggest that to protect heart health, there is no safe threshold for chronic PM2.5 exposure, and that the EPA’s newly updated standard for the U.S.’s annual average PM2.5 level isn’t low enough to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease or protect public health overall. Boston, MA—Chronic exposure to fine particulate air pollutants ...

A UCL-developed app that provides speech therapy for people with the language disorder aphasia has been found to significantly improve their ability to talk. iTalkBetter, developed by the Neurotherapeutics Group at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, provides users the digital platform to practice over 200 commonly used words, in their own time and without any limits on the amount of therapy they receive. While employing games to maintain engagement, the app’s integrated speech recogniser analyses speech in real time to give the user feedback on whether they have named the displayed item correctly. A new study, published in eClinicalMedicine, ...

Using intravascular imaging to guide stent implantation during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in heart disease patients significantly improves survival and reduces adverse cardiovascular events compared to angiography-guided PCI alone, the most commonly used method. These are the results from the largest and most comprehensive clinical study of its kind comparing two types of intravascular imaging methods (intravascular ultrasound, or IVUS, and optical coherence tomography, or OCT) with angiography-guided PCI. The study, published Wednesday, February 21, in The Lancet, is the first to show that these two methods of ...

Short and long term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution is linked to an increased risk of hospital admission for major heart and lung diseases, find two large US studies, published by The BMJ today. Together, the results suggest that no safe threshold exists for heart and lung health. According to the Global Burden of Disease study, exposure to PM2.5 accounts for an estimated 7.6% of total global mortality and 4.2% of global disability adjusted life years (a measure of years lived in good health). In light of this extensive evidence, the World Health Organization ...

Children born in October are both more likely to be vaccinated against influenza and least likely to be diagnosed with influenza compared with children born in other months, finds a US study published by The BMJ today. The results suggest that birth month is associated with both timing of flu vaccination and the likelihood of a flu diagnosis - and that October is the optimal time for young children to have a flu shot, in line with current recommendations. Annual influenza vaccination is particularly important for young children, who are at higher risk of flu and severe ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 6:30 PM EST, Feb. 21, 2024 A UCLA Health-led study found a combination of interventions of one-on-one telehealth coaching, peer support forums, and automated text messages more than doubled the use of the HIV prevention strategy, called PrEP, among younger, at-risk Americans, a group that historically has had low use of the medication. The randomized controlled trial results, published in the journal Lancet Digital Health, tested combinations of interventions to improve HIV prevention behaviors, including pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, among younger Americans who have historically ...