[Rome, 3 June 2024] – Cacao of Excellence is delighted to announce the official launch of the 2025 Edition of the Cacao of Excellence Awards. Since its inception in 2009, Cacao of Excellence has been the premier platform for cacao producers to showcase the superior quality of their cacao, celebrating the diversity of flavours of cacao produced worldwide.   Held biennially, the Cacao of Excellence Awards bring together leading sensory evaluation experts and the chocolate industry to recognise and reward cacao producers who demonstrate excellence. The Awards offer the possibility for selected producers and the origins they represent to compete ...

In 1883 Osborne Reynolds injected ink into water in a short, clear pipe to observe its movement. His experiments showed that as the input water velocity increased, the flow went from laminar (smooth and predictable) to turbulent (unsteady and unpredictable) through the development of localized patches of turbulence, known today as “puffs.”  His work helped launch the field of fluid mechanics, but, as experiments often do, it raised more questions. For example, why do these transitions between laminar and turbulent flows occur and how can the transitions be characterized quantitatively? Although ...

A new proposal has emerged in response to the November 2021 floods that swept Sumas Prairie in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, causing mass evacuations and millions in damages. Instead of rebuilding the dykes to manage water flows and prevent future floods, scientists at UBC, along with members of the Sumas First Nation and other research partners, suggest an alternative: let Sumas Lake, which was drained in the early 1920s and converted into the farmland known as Sumas Prairie, return to its natural state. This ...

In light of the waste-to-wealth movement, technology for converting greenhouse gases into value-added materials has gained significant attention in recent years. One such technology is the catalytic conversion of methane into methanol, a widely used industrial solvent and raw material for chemical synthesis. The industrial process for conversion of methane to methanol is extremely energy and resource-intensive. In the past decade, scientists have developed several catalyst systems that can enable direct oxidation of methane to methanol. However, most of them are based on ...

CLEVELAND—A new study by researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine reveals that the popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic are linked to reduced incidence and recurrence of alcohol abuse or dependence. The team’s findings, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, may suggest a possible new treatment for excessive alcohol use—including alcohol-use disorder (AUD), a health condition that causes about 178,000 deaths in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ...

(LOS ANGELES) June 3, 2024 – Scientists at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI), have employed artificial intelligence techniques to improve the design and production of nanofibers used in wearable nanofiber acoustic energy harvesters (NAEH). These acoustic devices capture sound energy from the environment and convert it into electrical energy, which can then be applied in useful devices, such as hearing aids. Many efforts have been made to capture naturally occurring and abundant energy sources ...

June 3, 2024 (Rockville, MD) The National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) is announcing that the blue-ribbon selection committee, composed of world-renowned research leaders and visionaries, has awarded the 2024 Szent-Györgyi Prize for Progress in Cancer Research to Dennis J. Slamon, M.D., Ph. D. from UCLA Health for his groundbreaking research discoveries that helped to shape the field of precision medicine for breast cancer patients.   The cancer research community will celebrate Dr. ...

About The Study: This cohort study found that using decentralization through telemedicine and local care may substantially reduce cancer care’s greenhouse gas emissions; this corresponds to small reductions in human mortality.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Gregory A. Abel, M.D., M.P.H., email gregory_abel@dfci.harvard.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2024.2744) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, ...

BOSTON – Telemedicine visits for cancer care may not only be more convenient and easier to schedule than in-person appointments, they're also better for the planet, new research by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists shows. Based on an analysis of data from a regional cancer center, the researchers calculate that, nationwide, cancer care that utilizes telehealth and local care would generate 33.1% less greenhouse gas emissions than the traditional model of in-person care, primarily because of reduced travel to medical appointments. ...

The timing of our brain waves shapes how we perceive our environment. We are more likely to perceive events when their timing coincides with the timing of relevant brain waves. Lead scientist Sanne ten Oever and her co-authors set out to determine whether neural timing also shapes speech perception. Is the probability of speech sounds or words encoded in our brain waves and is this information used to recognise words? The team first created ambiguous stimuli for both sounds and words. For instance, the initial sounds in da and ga differ in probability: ‘d’ is more common than ‘g’. The Dutch words dat “that” and gat “hole” ...

About The Study: This quality improvement analysis of clinical trials for metastatic breast, lung, colon, pancreatic, and prostate cancers found that a large proportion of the U.S. population lived within 30 miles of a clinical trial site. This finding suggests that while many clinical trials are available, they are not evenly distributed across the country and may not be accessible to all individuals, particularly racial and ethnic minority individuals. This disparity in access to clinical trials raises important questions about equity and fairness in the distribution of health care resources and opportunities ...

Portland State will power up a new high-performance computing cluster that will give researchers at universities and colleges across Oregon the ability to advance computing-intensive research projects by processing large datasets and performing complex computations in a fraction of the time — thanks to a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure program. The Oregon Regional Computing Accelerator (Orca) aims to provide free-of-cost computing resources and cyberinfrastructure ...

It’s in your heart and liver, in the vegetables you eat, in the rogue cells that cause cancer. Those who live in temperate regions are surrounded by more of it than people who live in the tropics, and without it, humans wouldn’t exist. It’s called polyploidy, and only within the last few years have biologists begun to recognize its significance across the tree of life. “It’s one of the most important biological processes that hardly anybody knows about,” said Doug Soltis, a distinguished professor at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Soltis is one of 18 scientists who have received a combined ...

SAN ANTONIO — June 3, 2024 — Southwest Research Institute will enhance models to strengthen the earthquake resilience of America’s transportation infrastructure and improve public safety in earthquake-prone areas. As part of a contract with the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), an SwRI-led team will update and improve liquefaction models. Liquefaction occurs during an earthquake when intense shaking causes soil to temporarily act more like a fluid, losing its capacity to support roads and structures. “For highways specifically, sometimes state and ...

Unraveling the behavior of plasma increasingly requires intensive computing resources. That’s why plasma demands a calculated approach to computation.  As the new head of computational sciences at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Shantenu Jha is excited to be at the helm of the Lab’s computing efforts, fusing computer science expertise with PPPL’s pioneering research into the fourth state of matter. “I want to continue to grow the excellence that already exists in computing for fusion energy at PPPL, which ...

CLEVELAND—A new study by researchers at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine reveals that the popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic are linked to reduced incidence and recurrence of alcohol abuse or dependence. The team’s findings, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, may suggest a possible new treatment for excessive alcohol use—including alcohol-use disorder (AUD), a health condition that causes about 178,000 deaths in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. To date, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only three medications to treat AUD. The active ingredient ...

Blocking a protein known as CDK7 could prevent heart damage associated with a commonly used cancer chemotherapy medication, according to a study led by scientists at Washington State University. Importantly, the researchers also found that inhibiting CDK7 could help enhance the medication’s cancer-killing capability.   Based on an animal model, the study findings could provide a foundation for future treatment strategies to reduce chemotherapy-related heart toxicity and increase treatment effectiveness. ...

Although diet is the leading contributor to premature death from heart disease in the United States, fewer than one-quarter of people who undergo major heart events receive dietary counseling in the aftermath, a study finds.   The research, led by a team from the University of Michigan Health Frankel Cardiovascular Center, tracked nearly 150,000 patients seen at hospitals across Michigan for serious heart conditions — such as heart attack and heart failure — between late 2015 and early 2020.   Results published in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition ...

BOSTON—Healthy adults under the age of 75 are unlikely to benefit from taking more than the daily intake of vitamin D recommended by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) and do not require testing for vitamin D levels, according to a new Clinical Practice Guideline issued today by the Endocrine Society. For children, pregnant people, adults older than 75 years and adults with high-risk prediabetes, the guideline recommends vitamin D higher than the IOM recommended daily allowance. Vitamin D use and ...

Chocolate lovers may have been alarmed by a 2023 Consumer Reports finding that some dark chocolate brands could contain harmful levels of lead and cadmium. However, a new study by Tulane University published in Food Research International has found that dark chocolate poses no adverse risk for adults and contains nutritionally beneficial levels of essential minerals. The study sampled 155 dark and milk chocolates from various global brands sold in the United States and tested for the presence of 16 heavy metals ranging from the toxic (lead and cadmium) to the essential (copper, iron, zinc). The study then modeled the risk of eating one ounce of the chocolates per day which ...

Black patients with early-stage breast cancer who were treated with docetaxel chemotherapy every 3 weeks had less drug-induced peripheral neuropathy and significantly fewer dose reductions compared to those who received weekly paclitaxel, according to a trial by the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group (ECOG-ACRIN). Study EAZ171 is the first National Cancer Institute (NCI)-sponsored trial to focus specifically on enrolling a minority or underserved population to assess drug-induced toxicity (rather than drug efficacy) ...

In materials science, particularly in the study of glasses, the intermediate range order (IRO) is one of the most intriguing research areas owing to its significant influence over the physical properties of glasses. The IRO refers to the structural arrangement of atoms beyond the short-range order (atomic arrangement within a few atomic distances) but shorter than the long-range order (arrangement patterns over macroscopic distances). Notably, for covalent glasses, the IRO is marked by atomic density fluctuations. Scattering experiments provide a distinct signature of ...

Crucial shift in River Nile’s evolution during ancient Egypt discovered Researchers have explored how the River Nile evolved over the past 11,500 years and how changes in its geography could have helped shape the fortunes of ancient Egyptian civilisation. Research published in Nature Geoscience reveals a major shift in the Nile around four thousand years ago, after which the floodplain in the Nile Valley around Luxor greatly expanded. The findings raise the possibility that this shift could have contributed to the success of the ancient Egyptian agricultural economy at points between the Old and New Kingdom periods. ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study to be presented at the SLEEP 2024 annual meeting found robust evidence that implicates lower alertness, a key outcome of insufficient sleep, as a predictor of muted empathic responding, which suggests alertness may support both cognitive and affective empathy. Results show that slower response times on objective alertness tests were significantly associated with lower levels of empathic concern, and that lapses and false starts on these tests were significantly associated with poorer empathic accuracy. Additionally, those ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study to be presented at the SLEEP 2024 annual meeting found that sleep apnea is associated with increased odds of future utilization of health care services including hospitalization among older adults. Results show that participants aged 50 years and older with sleep apnea had a 21% higher odds of reporting future use of any health service compared with those without sleep apnea. Specifically, individuals with sleep apnea had 21% higher odds of hospitalization after controlling for potential confounders including demographics, body mass index, health conditions, and depressive symptoms. “Our research indicates that older adults who have sleep apnea are more ...