About The Study: In this study of nearly 1.2 million children, prediction models achieved high performance in predicting the likelihood of autistic spectrum disorder, using information from routine developmental assessments. This tool may be seamlessly integrated in the clinical workflow to improve early identification of children who may benefit from timely interventions.  Authors: Guy Amit, Ph.D., of the KI Research Institute in Kfar Malal, Israel, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.51052) Editor’s ...

Ions are everywhere, from our daily surroundings to the cosmic expanse. As common table salt (NaCl) dissolves into sodium (Na+) and chloride (Cl-) ions in water, it imparts a salty taste. Once absorbed by the body, these ions regulate nerve impulses and muscle movements. In the sun, plasma—a gathering of ions in the gaseous state—undergoes nuclear fusion reactions, transmitting light and energy to Earth. One of the most noteworthy usage ions in everyday life is found in lithium-ion batteries, ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Every time a cancer cell divides, it sustains damage to its own DNA molecules. Researchers, including Gaorav Gupta, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UNC School of Medicine, have long wondered how cancers are able to evade detection by the body’s own defenses, despite the immune system being on constant watch for cells displaying DNA damage. New findings by Gupta’s lab, which were published in Nature, shows how the cGAS-STING pathway – a pathway inside cells essential for activating the inflammatory immune response – is unleashed to prevent cancer formation by detecting DNA damage within ...

One in ten adolescents globally have used ineffective and potentially harmful non prescribed weight loss products in their lifetime, with 2% using them in the previous week. A review, of over 90 studies of 600,000+ participants, headed by Ms Natasha Hall fro0m Monash University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that adolescent use of non prescription weight loss products is 5.5% overall, 2% in the past week; 4.4% in the past month, 6.2% in the past year and 8.9% in their lifetime. The authors caution against the long term consequences of these ineffective treatments. END ...

One of the important breakthroughs that made it possible to program or reprogram cell fate more efficiently and with higher fidelity in a dish was discovering how to make use of a small set of molecular cowboys called pioneer transcription factors (TFs). Every cell in our bodies has more than 200 transcription factors expressed inside, riding along the DNA helix instructing specific genes to activate and deactivate. During the early stages of fetal development, a small subset of “pioneer” TFs act inside ...

Researchers led by Prof. HUANG Qing from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with researchers from the Zhejiang Institute of Tianjin University, and Linköping University, Sweden, has proposed a general A-site alloying strategy for the preparation of noble metal-occupied MAX phases. This work was published in Matter. MAX phases are a family of ternary layered transition metal carbides that have attracted great attention ...

A paper describing the architectures, opportunities, and challenges of the IoB was published in the journal Green Energy and Intelligent Transportation on September 7th, 2023.   The present battery technology employed in electric vehicles (EVs) faces several critical challenges. Firstly, the limited operation range of EVs remains a major concern for potential users, as it affects their ability to travel long distances without the need for frequent recharging. Additionally, long charging times are inconvenient ...

The boundary between everyday reality and the quantum world remains unclear. The more massive an object, the more localized it becomes when being made quantum through cooling down its motion to the absolute zero. Researchers, led by Oriol Romero-Isart from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck, propose an experiment in which an optically levitated nanoparticle, cooled to its ground state, evolves in a non-optical (“dark”) potential created by electrostatic or magnetic forces. This evolution in the dark potential ...

Columbia engineers have built a new AI that shatters a long-held belief in forensics–that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are unique. It turns out they are similar, only we’ve been comparing fingerprints the wrong way! New York, NY—January 12, 2024—From “Law and Order” to “CSI,” not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go ...

JMIR Publications is pleased to announce that JMIR Mental Health (JMH) has been accepted for inclusion in MEDLINE, which is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database. JMIR Mental Health had already been indexed in PubMed previously. MEDLINE is a more selective subset of PubMed, consisting of the top 5,200 biomedical journals. Indexing in MEDLINE also means that articles are now also indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) and other metadata. Selection for MEDLINE is a result of a thorough review of the ...

Reducing stimulant use was associated with significant improvement in measures of health and recovery among people with stimulant use disorder, even if they did not achieve total abstinence. This finding is according to an analysis of data from 13 randomized clinical trials of treatments for stimulant use disorders involving methamphetamine and cocaine. Historically, total abstinence has been the standard goal of treatment for substance use disorders, however, these findings support the growing recognition that a more nuanced perspective on measuring treatment success may be beneficial. The study, published in Addiction, was led by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public ...

Boston – Like a criminal entering a witness protection program, cancer cells can shed their past and take on a new identity. Detecting such an identity-switch is particularly challenging when metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) advances from adenocarcinoma to neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC), a very difficult cancer to treat. Now, however, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Trento, Italy, have developed a blood test, described in Cancer Discovery, that can ...

Cigarette smoking remains the leading avoidable cause of premature death in the United States, accounting for approximately 500,000 deaths or 1 in 5 deaths annually. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, most adults who smoke cigarettes started before age 18, so preventing cigarette smoking in adolescents is important to reducing smoking in adults.  In a new study, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators explored overall trends in cigarette smoking among a large sample of U.S. adolescents in grades nine to 12 from 1991 to 2021. They ...

Many edible, medicinal, and poisonous mushrooms that we are familiar with belong to the order Agaricales, which is a group of fungi with important economic and ecological value. Understanding the phylogenetic relationships of Agaricales can help us to know their evolutionary history and diversity, as well as their interactions with other organisms. Moreover, the phylogenetic framework of Agaricales can provide a basis for conserving biodiversity, such as measuring phylogenetic diversity and assessing the uniqueness and importance of different species.   Previous studies divided Agaricales into 8 suborders and 46 families, but the systematic position and phylogenetic relationship ...

Québec, January 10, 2024 – In people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), changes in neurons appear to activate immune cells. Lowering the inflammation could reduce the symptoms of the disease, according to a study led by Chantelle Sephton, a professor at Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine.    ALS is caused by the loss of upper motor neurons, located in the brain, and lower motor neurons, which extend from the spinal cord to the muscles. Using a genetically modified mouse ...

The frigid Arctic Ocean is far removed from the places most people live, but even so, “forever chemicals” reach this remote landscape. Now, research in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters suggests that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) won't stay there indefinitely. Instead, they are transported in a feedback loop, with the Arctic Ocean potentially exporting as many PFAS to the North Atlantic Ocean as it receives, circulating the compounds around the world. To ...

Trailblazing engineer Ashok Veeraraghavan, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University, is the recipient of the 2024 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology). He was chosen for his revolutionary imaging technology that seeks to make the invisible visible. View a video on Dr. Veeraraghavan's groundbreaking research here.  Imagine taking a pristine picture through fog, smoke and rain. Imagine taking interior images of the human body through skin, bone ...

Forward-thinking biochemist Vincent Tagliabracci, Ph.D., Associate Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, is the recipient of the 2024 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences from TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology). He was chosen for his potentially life-saving research in understanding how enzymes work. View a video on Dr. Tagliabracci's groundbreaking research here.  Dr. Tagliabracci and his team at UT Southwestern Medical Center have shined a new light on an array of physiological processes that rely on enzymes called protein kinases (PKs) and their biological cousins called ...

A worldwide leader in nanoporous materials research, Shengqian Ma, Ph.D., Professor and Welch Chair in Chemistry, the University of North Texas, is the recipient of the 2024 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Physical Sciences from TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology). He was chosen for his innovative work in the field of decontamination. View a video on Dr. Ma's groundbreaking research here.  In a time of growing concern for the Earth and humanity’s ecosystem, Dr. Ma’s work could have an incredibly important impact on environmental and energy sustainability. His research was primarily ...

A true pioneer in space, robotics engineer Kimberly A. Hambuchen, Ph.D., Deputy Chief, Software, Robotics and Simulation Division at NASA Johnson Space Center, is the recipient of the 2024 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Technology Innovation from TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology). She was chosen for her seminal research in developing new methods for making robots more autonomous and usable by humans across a time delay. View a video on Dr. Hambuchen's groundbreaking research here. Dr. Hambuchen’s research focuses on human-robot ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Teens from larger families have poorer mental health than those with fewer siblings, according to a large analysis of children in the United States and China.   The details of the pattern vary depending on factors such as the spacing of sibling ages and the age of the siblings.   But the fact that the overall pattern was found in both countries is striking, said Doug Downey, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.   “Our results couldn’t have been easily predicted before we did the study,” Downey said.   “Other studies have shown that having more siblings ...

The origin of the vertebrate skull is a topic of much debate among evolutionary biologists. Some believe that the vertebrate head has developed as a result of modification of the segmental elements of the trunk, such as the vertebrae and somites. On the other hand, others believe that the vertebrate head has evolved as a new, unsegment body part, unrelated to other widely observed embryonic segments somites. Interestingly, previous studies on embryos have revealed the presence of some vestiges of somites ...

Procambarus clarkii is a crustacean species native to American freshwater bodies. Brought to Japan in the 1920s as a feed for frogs, this crustacean has slowly taken over the Japanese freshwaters by predation and propagation. In fact, in 2023, the red-swamp crayfish was designated as an invasive alien species by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment and of the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. One way to control the growth in population of red-swamp crayfish and the accompanying crisis is to capture the red-swamp crayfish in their reproductive ...

Research Highlights: Despite drops in overall cardiovascular disease deaths from 1999-2019, cardiovascular disease deaths in which substance use was cited as a contributing factor increased an average of 4% per year, with the death rate accelerating to 6.2% from 2012-2019. Prominent increases in cardiovascular deaths associated with substance use were most notable among women, American Indian or Alaskan individuals, younger individuals, rural area residents and users of cannabis and psychostimulants. Identifying high-risk groups is crucial for prioritizing preventive measures to reduce substance use linked with cardiovascular disease deaths, particularly ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Sequencing all of the RNA in a cell can reveal a great deal of information about that cell’s function and what it is doing at a given point in time. However, the sequencing process destroys the cell, making it difficult to study ongoing changes in gene expression. An alternative approach developed at MIT could enable researchers to track such changes over extended periods of time. The new method, which is based on a noninvasive imaging technique known as Raman spectroscopy, doesn’t harm cells and can be performed repeatedly. Using ...