When low doses of cancer drugs are administered continuously near malignant brain tumours using so-called iontronic technology, cancer cell growth drastically decreases. Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, and the Medical University of Graz, Austria, demonstrated this in experiments with bird embryos. The results, published in the Journal of Controlled Release, is one step closer to new types of effective treatments for severe cancer forms. Malignant brain tumours often recur despite surgery and post-treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. This is because cancer cells can “hide” deep within tissue and then regrow. ...

Conventional drug delivery is often like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. Whether the drug is swallowed, injected, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin, it ultimately diffuses to most parts of the body, including those where it isn’t needed – or where it even might cause harm. But what if the delivery could be targeted at exactly the right spot? This would allow the total dose to be dramatically lower, thus minimizing side-effects. Now, scientists from the US have found a way to perfect a promising, ...

Osaka, Japan — As detrimental as viruses may sound, they can be helping hands for farmers when it comes to dealing with plant pathogens. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have discovered that a mycovirus that infects plant pathogenic oomycete Globisporangium ultimum can increase the latter’s sensitivity to specific fungicides. Their findings could lead to innovative approaches for controlling plant diseases, reducing reliance on chemical treatments, and minimizing agricultural loss. Their results were published in Microbiological Research ...

Chemical sensors whose signals can be amplified by various triggers hold huge potential in multidisciplinary sciences. However, developing such systems was considered a highly challenging task, until a team of researchers from Tokyo Tech recently came up with a novel signal-amplification system that can be flexibly manipulated by a dynamic allosteric effector or a trigger. This new chemosensor system exhibited exception signal amplification by altering the sumanene monomer concentrations. Synthetic supramolecular hosts and artificial receptors have found an exciting application in the form of chemical sensors or chemosensors, ...

An innovative synthesis strategy opened up the way to 2D/3D fused frameworks using inexpensive quinolines as feedstock, report scientists from Tokyo Tech. By leveraging a light-sensitive borate intermediate, the scientists could transform quinoline derivatives into a great variety of 2D/3D fused frameworks in a straightforward and cost-effective manner. Their findings are expected to enable the synthesis of highly customizable drug candidates.   Quinolines have garnered much attention from chemists wanting to synthesize compounds known as 2D/3D fused frameworks. These complex organic molecules have a lot of medical potential due to their highly ...

Measuring the heart rate of great apes in captivity is essential for both health management and animal studies. However, existing most methods are either invasive or inaccurate. Now, researchers from Japan have investigated the potential of using millimeter-wave radar technology to estimate heart rate from subtle body movements in chimpanzees. Their efforts will hopefully pave the way to better practices and techniques for monitoring heart rates in wild and captive primates.        Just like in humans, heart rate is a critically important and informative vital sign in nonhuman primates. Heart diseases are among the main causes ...

Tapping into the vast amount of data now available on social media, a new study from scientists at the University of California San Diego introduces a powerful new approach to understanding the nation’s health, in this case the vaping epidemic.  The study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on June 19, was led by John W. Ayers, Ph.D., from the Qualcomm Institute within UC San Diego.  “Researchers studying social media have tended to analyze the frequency and content of posts,” said Ayers, who is deputy director of informatics at the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, vice chief of innovation in the Division of Infectious ...

Niigata, Japan - Tuberculosis is still one of the deadliest infectious diseases, causing over one million deaths each year worldwide. Additionally, about one-fourth of the world's population carries Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) without showing any symptoms, and most of these carriers do not develop the disease. The current anti-tuberculosis vaccine, BCG, is administered worldwide. However, considering that more than 10 million new tuberculosis cases are reported each year, its effectiveness is deemed ...

USC recently hosted its first Music, Health, and Policy workshop as part of Los Angeles County Arts and Health Week, filling Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall on the University Park Campus. Event organizer Assal Habibi, an associate professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who explores the intersection between music and the human brain, brought together a wide range of experts on the importance of art and its effect on human development and well-being. “The workshop aims to bring people together ...

A private (fee-paying) school and/or a ‘higher status’ (Russell Group*) university education may be linked to better mid-life health—at least in the UK—suggests research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Alongside the level of education achieved, the type of educational institution a person attends may also influence subsequent health outcomes, suggest the researchers. Published research to date indicates that educational attainment is associated with better subsequent health. But other aspects ...

Twelve months of heavy resistance training—exercise that makes muscles work against a force—around retirement preserves vital leg strength years later, show the follow up results of a clinical trial, published online in the open access journal BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.   Depletion of leg muscle strength is regarded as a strong predictor of death in older people, so is important to maintain, say the researchers. Skeletal muscle mass and function naturally decline with advancing age, ultimately often interfering with mobility and autonomy in older people, note the researchers. Resistance training, which ...

A multi-institutional study led by University of Illinois and Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) scientists concluded that, although soil moisture varies significantly both within a single field and from field to field due to varying soil properties and different management practices, soil moisture distribution relative to the field average remains consistent across time within each field.  Over three years, the team used sensor measurements and a high-density campaign to reveal that the drier areas remain the drier areas and the wetter areas remain the wetter areas. The study also deduced this finding, reliable estimations of ...

The severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the planetary science community is greater than in the general U.S. population, according to a study led by a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa scientist and published this week in Nature Astronomy.  “After reading about so much anxiety and depression in academia, and as someone who loves both planetary science and psychology, I felt like I needed to do something because there are so many people suffering,” said David Trang, an assistant researcher in the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the ...

As space travel becomes more common, it is important to consider the impacts of space flight and altered gravity on the human body. Led by Dr. Ana Diaz Artiles, researchers at Texas A&M University are studying some of those impacts, specifically effects on the eye. Gravitational changes experienced by astronauts during space travel can cause fluids within the body to shift. This can cause changes to the cardiovascular system, including vessels in and around the eyes.  As the commercialization of space flight becomes more common and individual space travel increases, astronauts will not be the ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Haewon Jeong, an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, experienced a pivotal moment in her academic career when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. She was investigating how machine learning (ML) models can discriminate against students in education-related applications. Discrimination, or bias, occurs when a model used to train algorithms makes incorrect predictions that systematically disadvantage a group of people. Bias in ML models can lead to inaccurate or unfair predictions, which can have serious consequences in fields such as healthcare, finance and criminal justice. ...

University of Toronto engineering researchers have designed a new way to recycle steel that has the potential to decarbonize a range of manufacturing industries and usher in a circular steel economy.  The method is outlined in a new paper published in Resources, Conservation & Recycling and co-authored by Jaesuk (Jay) Paeng, William Judge and Professor Gisele Azimi.   It introduces an innovative oxysulfide electrolyte for electrorefining, ...

      MEDIA INQUIRES   WRITTEN BY Laura Muntean   Paul Schattenberg laura.muntean@ag.tamu.edu   paschattenberg@ag.tamu.edu 601-248-1891   210-859-5752 FOR ...

June 18, 2024   Non-native Plants and Animals Expanding Ranges 100 Times Faster than Native Species, Finds New Research Led by UMass Amherst Native species cannot move fast enough on their own to avoid climate-driven chaos   AMHERST, Mass. – An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed ...

BOSTON (MA), June 18, 2024 – Jim Free, associate administrator for NASA, will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday, July 31, at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) in Boston. Free, the senior advisor to Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, is NASA’s third highest-ranking executive and its highest-ranking civil servant. In addition to leading the agency’s 10 center directors and the mission directorate associate administrators at NASA Headquarters ...

When people get a prescription for the opioid addiction medication called buprenorphine, they almost always fill it — even if they have to pay more out of their own pocket, a new study shows. Whether it’s their first prescription for the medication, or they’ve been taking it for months, nearly all patients pick up the order from the pharmacy, according to the new findings from a University of Michigan team. Even among those just starting on buprenorphine, higher costs aren’t a deterrent. The researchers say this suggests that removing barriers ...

SEATTLE — June 18, 2024 — Fred Hutch Cancer Center announced the recipients of the 2024 Dr. Eddie Méndez Scholar Award, which recognizes outstanding early-career scientists from underrepresented backgrounds who are studying cancer, infectious diseases and basic sciences.   The eight postdoctoral awardees come from research institutions across the U.S. and are experts in a range of subjects including cancer immunology, fungal model systems and craniofacial development. “We enthusiastically congratulate this year’s recipients who were chosen from a very competitive pool of candidates,” said Christina Termini, PhD, MM, co-director ...

NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected Lockheed Martin Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, to build the spacecraft for NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program. This cost-plus-award-fee contract is valued at approximately $2.27 billion. It includes the development of three spacecraft as well as four options for additional spacecraft. The anticipated period of performance for this contract includes support for 10 years of on-orbit operations and five years of on-orbit storage, for a total of 15 years for each spacecraft. ...

TUCSON, Ariz., June 18, 2024 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a leader in accelerating drug development for rare diseases, today announced the targeted integration of additional Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) datasets into C-Path’s Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform (RDCA-DAP®) as part of a partnership with Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance (FARA).   This update includes data from two natural history studies; the FA-CHILD study, which focuses on pediatric ...

In low- and middle-income countries, anemia reduction efforts are often touted as a way to improve educational outcomes and reduce poverty. A new study, co-authored by a global health economics expert from the University of Notre Dame, evaluates the relationship between anemia and school attendance in India, debunking earlier research that could have misguided policy interventions. Santosh Kumar, associate professor of development and global health economics at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, is co-author of the study, published in Communications ...

A class of drugs already on the market to lower blood pressure appears to reduce adults’ risk of developing epilepsy, Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues have discovered. The finding comes out of an analysis of the medical records of more than 2 million Americans taking blood pressure medications. The study, published June 17 in JAMA Neurology, suggests that the drugs, called angiotensin receptor blockers, could prevent epilepsy in people at highest risk of the disease, ...