SAN FRANCISCO—Neuroscientist Rusty Gage, PhD, will be the recipient of the 2024 Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize, awarded by Gladstone Institutes. He was selected for pioneering stem cell biology of the central nervous system and the use of reprogrammed cells to study age-related neurodegenerative disease and psychiatric disorders. Gage is a professor in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he also serves as the Vi and John Adler Chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease. He was president of the Salk Institute from 2018 to 2023. Over the course of his scientific career, Gage has made several paradigm-shifting ...

Researchers in the Stanford Radio Glaciology lab use radio waves to understand rapidly changing ice sheets and their contributions to global sea-level rise. This technique has revealed groundwater beneath Greenland, the long-term impacts of extreme melt, a process that could accelerate ice sheet mass loss in Antarctica, the potential instability of an ice sheet that could raise sea levels by 10 feet, and more.  Now, PhD students within the group have created an open-source tool that others can use to make ice-penetrating radar systems, core instruments ...

Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence. But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the story poorly, a sign that people distrust and dislike AI-generated art.  “People don’t like when they think a story is written by AI, whether it was or not,” said Haoran “Chris” Chu, Ph.D., a professor of public relations at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study. “AI is good at writing something that is consistent, ...

​​​​HOUSTON, Oct. 21, 2024 – The University of Houston and Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University have awarded seed grants to six innovative energy projects as part of their transatlantic research collaboration. The projects, which bring together researchers from both universities, focus on cutting-edge solutions ranging from advanced hydrogen sensing technology to converting waste into sustainable products. “This partnership is rooted in a shared commitment to advancing research that supports a just energy ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 21 October 2024     @Annalsofim          Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, ...

The updated national colorectal cancer screening guidelines that recommend screening begin at age 45 — rather than 50 — can benefit younger adults, a new Kaiser Permanente study found. The study, published October 22 in Annals of Internal Medicine, included more than 267,000 Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California, Washington, and Colorado ages 45 to 50 who received their first invitation for colorectal cancer screening along with a fecal immunochemical test (FIT) kit between January and September 2022. “The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered the age to start screening  in response to studies showing an increased rate of colorectal cancer in ...

SAN ANTONIO, Oct. 21, 2024 – Patrick Sung, DPhil, director of the Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute and associate dean for research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) is the latest recipient of the 2024 Basser Global Prize. A leading researcher in the field of DNA damage repair and cancer biology, Sung has been awarded the prestigious prize for his groundbreaking contributions in elucidating the DNA repair functions of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The award recognizes Sung’s contributions in advancing the knowledge of these critical genes and their implications for hereditary ...

NYU Tandon School of Engineering and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology ) College of Business will introduce the MOT NYU-KAIST dual degree master's program in technology management, offering students a global perspective on tech leadership and the opportunity to study in both Brooklyn, New York and Daejeon, South Korea.   This program expands the historic partnership between NYU and KAIST that drives advances in research and education, and forges new industrial collaborations and investments by leveraging the distinct strengths of both universities.  While dual-degree master’s ...

Two faculty members at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), an independent organization of leading professionals from multiple scientific fields including health, medicine and the natural, social and behavioral sciences. NAM serves alongside the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering to provide objective advice for the nation and international scientific communities. An announcement of 100 new members was made Oct. 21. Being ...

Eight cities in the United States have implemented taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, which contribute to health issues including obesity and Type 2 diabetes. New research from the University of Washington investigated responses to sweetened beverage taxes using the purchasing behavior of approximately 400 households in Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Philadelphia – all of which recently introduced beverage taxes. The study was published online Sept. 30 in Health Economics. Researchers found that after the tax was introduced, lower-income households decreased their purchases of sweetened beverages by nearly 50%, while higher-income households reduced purchases by 18%. Since ...

PHILADELPHIA — Despite advances in cardiovascular medicine, Black patients are 22% more likely than white patients to die in the hospital after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, according to a study of more than 1 million patients presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2024 annual meeting. “Our large study shows that disparities in cardiovascular health care delivery in the U.S. are ongoing, especially in Black patients,” said Vinicius Moreira, M.D., lead author of the study and chief anesthesiology resident at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago. “We found Black patients who have ...

A new study has found that after watching a docudrama about the efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row, people were more empathetic toward formerly incarcerated people and supportive of criminal justice reform. The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, published Oct. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “One of the hardest things for groups of people who face stigma, including previously incarcerated people, is that other Americans don’t perceive ...

Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it’s revealing secrets about Earth’s past.     Nadja Drabon, an early-Earth geologist and assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is insatiably curious about what our planet was like during ancient eons rife with meteoritic bombardment, when only single-celled bacteria and archaea reigned – and when it all started to change. When ...

DURHAM, N.C. – The El Niño event, a huge blob of warm ocean water in the tropical Pacific Ocean that can change rainfall patterns around the globe, isn't just a modern phenomenon. A new modeling study from a pair of Duke University researchers and their colleagues shows that the oscillation between El Niño and its cold counterpart, La Niña, was present at least 250 million years in the past, and was often of greater magnitude than the oscillations we see today. These temperature swings were more intense in the past, and the oscillation occurred even when the continents were in different places than they are now, according to the study, which appears the week ...

Breathing thin air at extreme altitudes presents a significant challenge—there’s simply less oxygen with every lungful. Yet, for more than 10,000 years, Tibetan women living on the high Tibetan Plateau have not only survived but thrived in that environment. A new study led by Cynthia Beall, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Case Western Reserve University, answers some of those questions. The new research, recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), reveals how the Tibetan women’s physiological ...

Microbes in the environment, not fossil fuels, have been driving the recent surge in methane emissions globally, according to a new, detailed analysis published Oct 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by CU Boulder researchers and collaborators. “Understanding where the methane is coming from helps us guide effective mitigation strategies,” said Sylvia Michel, a senior research assistant at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research(INSTAAR) and a doctoral student in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU Boulder. “We need to know more about those emissions to ...

HERSHEY, Pa. — Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors. A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine has re-engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate and kill solid tumors grown in the lab. They created a light-activated switch that controls protein function associated with cell ...

The Arctic is threatened by strong climate change: the average temperature has risen by about 3°C since 1979 – almost four times faster than the global average. The region around the North Pole is home to some of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, and has experienced low anthropogenic disturbance for decades. Warming has increased the accessibility of land in the Arctic, encouraging industrial and urban development. Understanding where and what kind of human activities take place is key to ensuring sustainable development in the region – for both people and the environment. Until now, a comprehensive assessment of this part of the world has ...

A new PET scan reliably detects benign tumors in the pancreas, according to research led by Radboud university medical center. Current scans often fail to detect these insulinomas, even though they cause symptoms due to low blood sugar levels. Once the tumor is found, surgery is possible. The pancreas contains cells that produce insulin, known as beta cells. Insulin is a hormone that helps the body absorb sugar from the blood and store it in places like muscle cells. This regulates blood sugar levels. In rare cases, the beta cells malfunction, resulting in a benign tumor called ...

During the late middle Pleistocene, between 300 and 400 thousand years ago, at least three ancient elephant relatives died near a river in the Kashmir Valley of South Asia. Not long after, they were covered in sediment and preserved along with 87 stone tools made by the ancestors of modern humans. The remains of these elephants were first discovered in 2000 near the town of Pampore, but the identity of the fossils, cause of death and evidence of human intervention remained unknown until now. A team ...

Mercouri Kanatzidis, a materials scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and professor at Northwestern University, will receive the 2025 ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials from the American Chemical Society, the nation’s leading professional organization of chemists. The award ​“recognizes and encourages creative work in the chemistry of materials,” according to the citation. At Argonne, Kanatzidis’s work has focused on the implications of a ...

When it comes to sustainable energy, harnessing nuclear fusion is—for many—a holy grail of sorts. Unlike climate-warming fossil fuels, fusion offers a clean, nearly limitless source of energy by combining light atomic nuclei to form heavier ones, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. But it isn’t easy replicating and controlling the process that powers the sun. “We eventually want to move to producing energy this way,” says Brian Leard ’21 ’25G, a ...

Plants control their water consumption via adjustable pores (stomata), which are formed from pairs of guard cells. They open their stomata when there is a sufficient water supply and enough light for carbon dioxide fixation through photosynthesis. In the dark and in the absence of water, however, they initiate the closing of the pores. SLAC/SLAH-type anion channels in the guard cells are of central importance for the regulation of the stomata. This has been shown by the group of Professor Rainer Hedrich, biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität ...

When it comes to building muscle, not all proteins are created equal. New research from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) reveals that 100% ground beef packs a bigger punch for muscle protein synthesis than a soy-based counterpart. In fact, the study suggests that a person would need double the amount of soy-based protein to achieve the same results. Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the study examined the anabolic response — how the body builds muscle — after consuming a 4-ounce beef patty versus one or two 4-ounce patties of a soy-based product. The results? Just one serving of beef did the ...

A pilot study led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine found that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially lead to easier, faster and more efficient hospital quality reporting while retaining high accuracy, which could lead to enhanced health care delivery.  The study results, published in the October 21, 2024 online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) AI, found an AI system using large language models (LLMs) can accurately process hospital quality measures, ...