Scientists are reporting the first evidence that our Earth and the universe around us are awash in a background of spacetime undulations called gravitational waves. The waves oscillate very slowly over years and even decades and are thought to originate primarily from pairs of supermassive black holes leisurely spiraling together before they merge.   The findings, reported in a series of papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, come from 15 years’ worth of observations made ...

University of Cambridge psychologists have developed the first validated “misinformation susceptibility test”: a quick two-minute quiz that gives a solid indication of how vulnerable a person is to being duped by the kind of fabricated news that floods online spaces.  The test, proven to work through a series of experiments involving over 8,000 participants taking place over two years, has been deployed by polling organisation YouGov to determine how susceptible Americans are to fake headlines.  The first survey to use the new 20-point test, called ‘MIST’ ...

Following 15 years of data collection in a galaxy-sized experiment, scientists have “heard” the perpetual chorus of gravitational waves rippling through our universe for the first time — and it’s louder than expected. The groundbreaking discovery was made by scientists with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) who closely observed stars called pulsars that act as celestial metronomes. The newly detected gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time — are by far the most powerful ever measured: They carry roughly a million times as much energy as ...

You can't see or feel it, but everything around you — including your own body — is slowly shrinking and expanding. It's the weird, spacetime-warping effect of gravitational waves passing through our galaxy, according to a new study by a team of researchers with the U.S. National Science Foundation's NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center. The findings published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters are from the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a collaborative team of researchers from more than 50 institutions in the U.S. and abroad. The team ...

Astrophysicists using large radio telescopes to observe a collection of cosmic clocks in our Galaxy have found evidence for gravitational waves that oscillate with periods of years to decades, according to a set of papers published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The gravitational-wave signal was observed in 15 years of data acquired by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Physics Frontiers Center (PFC), a collaboration of more than 190 scientists from the US and Canada who use pulsars ...

Astronomers using data collected by CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, have found their strongest evidence yet for low-frequency gravitational waves. For nearly 20 years the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array collaboration has monitored a set of rapidly spinning stars that pulse like a lighthouse, called pulsars. They are looking for nanosecond pulse delays caused by gravitational waves to provide further evidence for Einstein’s general theory of relativity and build on our understanding of the Universe. By ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of time-space predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago, are permeating the universe at low frequencies, according to a multiyear National Science Foundation project led by Oregon State University scientists. The findings appear in a collection of five papers authored by researchers from the NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center co-directed by Xavier Siemens, professor of physics in the OSU College of Science. Evidence of the gravitational waves, whose oscillations are ...

It’s a dilemma that many a regular bettor probably faces often -- deciding when to place a sports bet. In a study entitled “A statistical theory of optimal decision-making in sports betting,” Jacek Dmochowski, Associate Professor in the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York, provides the answer. His original finding appears in the journal PLOS One.  “The central finding of the work is that the objective in sports betting is to estimate the median outcome. Importantly, this is not the same as the average outcome,” said Dmochowski, whose expertise ...

Use of menopausal hormone therapy is associated with an increased rate of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, suggests a large Danish study published by The BMJ today. An increase was seen in long term users of menopausal hormone therapy, but also in short term users around the age of menopause (55 years or younger) as is currently recommended. These findings align with the largest clinical trial carried out on this topic, and the researchers call for further studies “to explore if the observed association in this study between menopausal hormone therapy use and increased risk of dementia illustrates a causal ...

Peer-reviewed / Randomised Controlled Trial / People A randomised controlled trial including 347 participants with lower back or neck pain found there was no benefit of taking opioid pain relievers compared to placebo. There was no significant difference in pain scores between those given opioid pain relievers and those given placebo after six weeks; while patients given the placebo had slightly lower pain scores after a year. The authors warn that there is no evidence that opioids should be prescribed ...

Increasing numbers of doctors are opting to take voluntary early retirement, rather than waiting to claim their pension at retirement age, official figures show. Figures provided to The BMJ by the NHS Business Services Authority under a freedom of information request show that the number of GPs and hospital doctors in England and Wales opting for voluntary early retirement has increased by an average of 9.3% year on year, rising from 376 in 2008 to 1424 in 2023. Over the same period, the number retiring on the basis of age has fallen, from 2030 in 2008 to 1721 in 2023.  The rise in early retirement was seen for hospital doctors and GPs. The number of hospital doctors ...

Opioid pain-relieving medicines are not more effective than a placebo in relieving acute back and neck pain and may even cause harm, according to a world-first trial led by the University of Sydney. The researchers say this is proof that treatment guidelines should be updated to advise against the use of opioids for this purpose. Over 577 million people worldwide experience low back and neck pain at any one time. Despite a global push to reduce the use of opioids, in Australia approximately 40 to 70 percent of those who present with neck and back complaints are prescribed opioids for their pain. The OPAL trial recruited close ...

Vitamin D supplements may reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events such as heart attacks among people aged over 60, finds a clinical trial published by The BMJ today. The researchers stress that the absolute risk difference was small, but say this is the largest trial of its kind to date, and further evaluation is warranted, particularly in people taking statins or other cardiovascular disease drugs. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a general term for conditions affecting the heart or blood vessels and is one of the main causes of death globally. CVD events such as heart attacks and strokes are set to increase as populations continue ...

A new AI tool that could help doctors assess the early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s more quickly and efficiently, has been developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield.   The system, known as CognoSpeak, uses a virtual agent displayed on a screen to engage a patient in a conversation. It asks memory-probing questions inspired by those used in outpatient consultations and conducts cognitive tests, such as picture descriptions and verbal fluency tests.   The tool then uses artificial intelligence and speech technology to analyse language and speech patterns to look for signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other memory ...

  New York, NY (June 28, 2023)–Striving to improve organ transplant survival rates, internationally renowned researchers in immunology and bioengineering at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received $15.1 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to lead a novel, five-year multi-center research program that will explore trained immunity—the innate immune system’s ability to remember infections and other insults—as a target for preventing organ transplant rejection. Each ...

One of humankind’s most precious fertilizers is slipping away. Phosphorus, which today comes mostly from nonrenewable reserves of phosphate rock, typically winds up in municipal waste streams. In the best cases, wastewater treatment plants sequester about 90% of that phosphorus in “sludge” and decompose that sludge into something known as digestate. Engineers hope to establish a more sustainable cycle for reusing phosphorus, but toxic compounds in digestate limit the possibility of recycling it as fertilizer — it’s hard to recover phosphorus from solid waste like digestate. “Existing ...

An analysis on the positive effects of exercise on blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes shows that while all exercise helps, certain activities – and their timing – are extremely good for people’s health. The study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, provides a comprehensive but straightforward summary of the benefits of exercise on controlling blood glucose levels in people with Type 2 diabetes. “The challenge with this is that most, if not all, people know exercise is good for them but they don’t know the best approach,” said Steven Malin, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at the Rutgers ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Mary-Ann Bjornsti, Ph.D., professor and former chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, begins her term July 1 as president of the largest coalition of biological and biomedical research associations in the United States, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, also known as FASEB. Bjornsti, the Newman H. Waters Chair of Clinical Pharmacology, has served as associate director for Translational Research at the O’Neal ...

June 28, 2023—Population Council experts and our partners at Women Deliver (WD2023) in Kigali, Rwanda will share how we can collectively build evidence-based solutions to achieve gender equality and equity. The Council will lead the Girls Deliver: Pre-Conference on Adolescent Girls and key high-profile events on the sidelines of WD2030 to advance global discourse of the linkages between gender equality with pressing issues such as adolescents, education, and climate.  “The Council is thrilled to collaborate with youth, global activist, feminist, political, and research leaders to cultivate an ecosystem ...

A new drug, investigated by Amsterdam UMC together with colleagues around the world, is effective as a treatment against ulcerative colitis. With the clinical trial demonstrating a doubling in the rates of remission, to up to 50%, in certain groups. The results of this clinical trial are, today, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.   Around the world, it is estimated that millions live with ulcerative colitis, a condition that is only growing in prevalence. Geert D’Haens, lead author and Professor of Gastroenterology at Amsterdam UMC, says “there is still a high unmet need for safe and effective treatments for ulcerative colitis. This new medicine meets this ...

A team of researchers led by Dr. Marcus Conrad from Helmholtz Munich discovered a novel anti-cancer drug, called icFSP1, which sensitizes cancer cells to ferroptosis. Ferroptosis is characterized by the iron-dependent oxidative destruction of cellular membranes, which is counteracted by ferroptosis suppressor protein-1 (FSP1), one of the guardians of ferroptosis. Although FSP1 has been considered as an attractive drug target for cancer therapy, in vivo efficacious FSP1 inhibitors have been lacking. To this end, the team carefully evaluated hits from a screen of around ten thousand small molecule compounds and identified icFSP1 as a new in vivo effective drug. Importantly, the team ...

Neutrons look inside working solid-state battery to discover its key to success   Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory were the first to use neutron reflectometry to peer inside a working solid-state battery and monitor its electrochemistry. They discovered that its excellent performance results from an extremely thin layer, across which charged lithium atoms quickly flow as they move from anode to cathode and blend into a solid electrolyte. “We want better batteries,” said ORNL’s Andrew Westover, who co-led a study published in ACS Energy Letters with James Browning at the lab’s Spallation Neutron ...

A new survey shows that the largely Indigenous population of Greenland is highly aware that the climate is changing, and far more likely than people in other Arctic nations to say they are personally affected. Yet, many do not blame human influences—especially those living traditional subsistence lifestyles most directly hit by the impacts of rapidly wasting ice and radical changes in weather. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. "Greenland is off the charts when it comes to the proportion of people who are seeing and personally experiencing the effects of climate change. But there is a big mismatch between ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – NASA has awarded a $799,954 Phase II STTR contract to AnalySwift LLC, a Purdue University-affiliated commercial software provider. The company will develop DATC, or Design tool for Advanced Tailorable Composites, and launch it at the end of the two-year contract. Allan Wood, AnalySwift president and CEO, said advancements in simulation capabilities have not always kept pace with those in manufacturing techniques. He said DATC will significantly improve NASA’s capabilities to design and analyze aerospace structures made from advanced tailorable composites. “DATC will be used to design next-generation aerospace structures, such as hybrid/blended ...

Gene editing and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been topics of significant debate in recent years. A new study from the Alliance for Science, an initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, has revealed a positive shift in public sentiment towards one aspect of agricultural biotechnology, showing that gene editing consistently receives higher favorability ratings than GMOs in both social and traditional English-language media.  The study was published after analyzing data from a five-year period between January 2018 and December 2022. The data provides valuable insights for the scientific community and professionals in science communication.  "Our ...