Despite some of the most successful international vaccination campaigns in history, the poliovirus continues to circulate around the world, posing a threat of neurological damage and even paralysis to anyone who is not vaccinated. While the original polio strains, called wildtype, have largely been eliminated, new strains can develop from the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which is the one most used in the developing world. Oral vaccines use live, weakened virus that occasionally mutates to an active form, leading to outbreaks even in countries believed to have eliminated polio.  Scientists at UCSF and the UK’s National Institute of Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) have developed ...

·  Many racial and ethnic groups not well aware of food allergies ·  Lack of food allergy research in racial and ethnic communities ·  ‘These individuals need to be aware so they can be diagnosed and treated’   CHICAGO --- Food allergy has not been on the radar of most racial and ethnic communities. But a new Northwestern Medicine study — the first population-based food allergy study in the U.S. to explore racial and ethnic differences in all age groups — shows why it should be.  The new study found the prevalence of food allergy is highest among Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black and ...

Ants navigate their richly aromatic world using an array of odor receptors and chemical signals called pheromones. Whether foraging or defending the nest, mating or tending to their young, ants both send and receive chemical signals throughout their lives. The importance of this system is underscored by how well equipped the ant brain is to process the abundance of scents: The olfactory processing center in the ant’s brain has 10 times as many subdivisions as fruit flies do, for example, even though their brains are about the same size. And yet how the ant olfactory system encodes scent data has remained largely unknown. To whittle ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world. Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero, things smaller than a fraction ...

Researchers from the UvA Institute of Physics and ENS de Lyon have discovered how to design materials that necessarily have a point or line where the material doesn’t deform under stress, and that even remember how they have been poked or squeezed in the past. These results could be used in robotics and mechanical computers, while similar design principles could be used in quantum computers. The outcome is a breakthrough in the field of metamaterials: designer materials whose responses are determined by their structure rather than their chemical composition. To construct a metamaterial with mechanical memory, physicists ...

When we walk around in our everyday life, we might not think of the Earth itself very often. But this planet is the foundation of our life. The air we breathe, the water we drink and the gravity that pins us to the ground.   Up until now, researchers believed that it took more than 100 million years for the Earth to form. And it was also common belief that water was delivered by lucky collisions with water-rich asteroids like comets. However, a new study from the University of Copenhagen suggests that it might not have happened entirely by chance. “We show that the Earth formed by the very ...

An international team led by Stefan Pelletier, a Ph.D. student at Université de Montréal's Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets announced today having made a detailed study of the extremely hot giant exoplanet WASP-76 b. Using the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini-North Telescope, the team was able to identify and measure the abundance of 11 chemical elements in the atmosphere of the planet. Those include rock-forming elements whose abundances are not even known for giant planets in the Solar System such as Jupiter or Saturn. The team's study is published in ...

Some of the world’s best minds that are focused on profitable and sustainable livestock production attended and presented at the recent Second U.S. Precision Livestock Farming Conference. Hosted by University of Tennessee AgResearch, the May 21-24 event at the UT Conference Center in Knoxville attracted 219 attendees representing 22 countries and 32 U.S. states. Participants included academics, representatives of government agencies and allied industries as well as producers. The conference had a central theme of “Field Application of PLF Technologies” and academic presentations along with two industry and producer panels included interactive dialogues among the attendees ...

The results of a yearlong science program show that one of the best ways to instill a lasting interest in science among children is to engage them alongside their family members. This finding runs counter to the current framework, in which children attend science-related summer camps and after-school programs apart from their families, diminishing the long-term potential of what they learn. “We wanted to see if we could support families as a whole, as opposed to giving a student a really amazing one-off experience and sending them ...

INDIANAPOLIS — In one of the first studies to investigate racial disparities in the pharmacologic treatment of insomnia, researchers from Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University report that patients belonging to racial minority groups were significantly less likely to be prescribed medication following diagnosis of insomnia than White patients. The study found that Black patients were much less likely to have been prescribed an FDA-approved insomnia medication at any time post diagnosis than White patients. Other non-White individuals were significantly less likely to be prescribed an FDA-approved medication two, three, and four years after insomnia diagnosis ...

New York, NY, June 14, 2023 — The New York Academy of Sciences and the Leon Levy Foundation announced today the first cohort of Leon Levy Scholars in Neuroscience; a continuation of an earlier fellowship program started by the Foundation in 2009 that has supported 160 fellows in neuroscience. This highly regarded postdoctoral program supports exceptional young researchers across the five boroughs of New York City as they pursue innovative investigations in neuroscience and advance in their careers toward becoming independent principal investigators. Designed to broaden the field and to support researchers who might otherwise not ...

June 14, 2023, TORONTO — Funding announced today by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) will help six Ontario-based research teams pursue their ultimate goal of improving the lives of people with cancer. Funding comes through OICR’s Innovation to Implementation (I2I) program, which aims to help ensure new discoveries about preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer are adopted into healthcare policy and clinical practice. “Every cancer researcher wants their work to have ...

NEW YORK (June 14, 2023)— Dr. Jonathan Weinsaft, an esteemed physician-scientist who focuses on clinical research and cardiovascular imaging, has been appointed chief of the Greenberg Division of Cardiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, effective July 1. The Greenberg Division of Cardiology, housed within the Weill Department of Medicine, is dedicated to diagnosing and treating patients with disorders of the heart and blood vessels that comprise the cardiovascular system. In his new role, Dr. Weinsaft will further strengthen the division as a leader in scientific and technological ...

In a recent study, researchers created a diagnostic test to identify functional sperm in infertile men that could change the treatment of male infertility and assisted reproductive technology. “Male infertility is a recognized issue and deserves scientific and clinical attention,” said Andrei Drabovich, an assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Alberta and corresponding author of the Molecular & Cellular Proteomics study. One in every six couples trying to conceive experience infertility issues. In fact, about 10% of men in the United States are infertile. The most ...

In the early 2000s, scientists from the UK made a worrisome discovery that the oceans are teeming with small particles of plastic (less than one millimeter in length) due to the continuous degradation of plastic waste. These microscopic particles of plastic have become a major environmental concern. Scientists classify these small particles as either microplastics or nanoplastics based on their size; the latter term is used exclusively for particles smaller than one micrometer. These particles easily get embedded into the bodies of marine and freshwater animals, ...

Researchers have created a small device that ‘sees’ and creates memories in a similar way to humans, in a promising step towards one day having applications that can make rapid, complex decisions such as in self-driving cars. The neuromorphic invention is a single chip enabled by a sensing element, doped indium oxide, that’s thousands of times thinner than a human hair and requires no external parts to operate. RMIT University engineers in Australia led the work, with contributions from researchers at Deakin University and the University of Melbourne. The team’s research demonstrates a working device that captures, processes and stores visual ...

SDE BOKER, Israel, June 14, 2023 – Photovoltaic technology is indispensable for our ability to mitigate climate change. Nonetheless, more than 70% of the energy made available to us by the sun is wasted in conventional photovoltaic cells. There is little hope for sustainable technological advancement without addressing this issue. The operational temperature is a critical factor in a solar cell's ability to convert sunlight to free energy. Accordingly, much research has been directed toward understanding the temperature effects in the efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells. Surprisingly, ...

Glucose oxidase (GOx)-based biosensors have attracted much attention for their potential in rapid glucose detection and continuous monitoring, which are crucial for disease diagnosis and prevention, as well as for controllable production in sugar-making and fermentation processes. The glucose oxidase/electrocatalysts/electrode (GOx/ECs/electrode) cascade system serves as the core part of most glucose biosensing devices (both invasive and non-invasive). However, patterned assembly of these cascade sensing units remains challenging, thus limiting the ...

Ishikawa, Japan -- Bone-conduction (BC) headphones enhance hearing capability by generating vibrations in bone or skin close to the ear, including the regio temporalis. They simultaneously leave the ear canal open to allow the surrounding air-conducted (AC) sounds for normal hearing. However, word intelligibility – recognition ability – is often poor during bone-conducted speech perceived using BC headphones due to the attenuation of its high-frequency components, especially under noisy conditions. While inserting ear plugs in the ear canal help improve ...

A new study from Australia, New Zealand and Germany published in the New England Journal of Medicine raises important questions about the success or otherwise of emergency medicine.  The study examined the drug tranexamic acid, which is commonly used to limit bleeding during surgery. However, its usefulness in emergency settings as a pre-emptive strike in life-threatening bleeding has been controversial, and recent studies have provided contradictory results about whether or not it saves lives or causes dangerous blood clotting.  The Pre-hospital ...

AMES, IA — Last month, the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General both issued health advisories. Their concerns and recommendations for teens, parents and policymakers addressed a mounting body of research that shows two trends are intertwined. Young people are using social media more, and their mental health is suffering. Researchers at Iowa State University found a simple intervention could help. During a two-week experiment with 230 college students, half were asked to limit their ...

Dr. Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a theoretical astrophysicist at The University of Texas at Dallas, has spent his career seeking answers to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, including why the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating and whether gravity behaves differently beyond our closest cosmic neighbors. To study these and other questions, a large collaboration of scientists, including Ishak-Boushaki and UTD physics doctoral students Cristhian Garcia Quintero, Leonel Medina Varela and Yunan Xie, are using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic ...

Scientists need to get out of the lab and into the rain, say an interdisciplinary group of researchers led by John T. Van Stan of Cleveland State University. Writing in the journal BioScience, the authors make the case that human observation of storm events (be it rain, snow, or occult deposition) is key to understanding wet weather and its myriad effects on the natural world.                 Recently, Van Stan and colleagues noted a trend in the scientific community towards relying on remote ...

A study led by researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research shows for the first time how a gene called RELA, known to regulate inflammation, also plays an essential role in maintaining normal blood-sugar levels. The findings, published in Diabetologia, have implications for the prevention of steroid-induced diabetes, a temporary form of diabetes that affects up to half of hospital patients treated with high-dose steroids. “Our discovery sheds new light on a complex network of factors governing glucose metabolism and how it can go awry in diabetes,” says Professor ...

Wildfire smoke is a threat to air quality, public health, and ecosystems throughout the U.S. Notwithstanding the impact of this year’s Canadian wildfires, the West typically sees much higher exposure to wildfire smoke than other regions of the country. New research from Harvard University, the U.S. Forest Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that controlled burns – particularly in coastal areas of northern California and the Pacific Northwest – could dramatically reduce the overall amount of wildfire smoke exposure in vulnerable rural communities and dense ...