Researchers who had been using Fitbit data to help predict surgical outcomes have a new method to more accurately gauge how patients may recover from spine surgery. Using machine learning techniques developed at the AI for Health Institute at Washington University in St. Louis,  Chenyang Lu, the Fullgraf Professor in the university’s McKelvey School of Engineering, collaborated with Jacob Greenberg, MD, assistant professor of neurosurgery at the School of Medicine, to develop a way to predict recovery more accurately from lumbar spine surgery. The results published this month in the journal Proceedings of the ACM ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have developed a new computational method for linking molecular marks on our DNA to gene activity. Their work may help researchers connect genes to the molecular "switches" that turn them on or off. This research, published in Genome Biology, is an important step toward harnessing machine learning approaches to better understand links between gene expression and disease development. "This research is about bringing a three-dimensional perspective to studying DNA modifications and their function in our genome," says LJI Associate Professor Ferhat Ay, Ph.D., who co-led the study with LJI ...

There’s a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won’t find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.  Writing in Nature, the Will lab, supported by theoretical collaborator Tijs Karman at Radboud University in the Netherlands, has successfully created a unique quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) out of molecules. Their BEC, cooled ...

By Shawn Ballard The recent spike in food prices isn’t just bad news for your grocery bill. It also impacts the sugars used in biomanufacturing, which, by the way, isn’t quite as green as scientists and climate advocates expected. Surging prices and increasing urgency for genuinely sustainable manufacturing has pushed researchers to explore alternative feedstocks. Feng Jiao, the Elvera and William R. Stuckenberg Professor in in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, developed a two-step process to convert carbon dioxide ...

BOSTON—Widespread availability of telemedicine during the pandemic led to more equitable access to endocrinology care for patients with type 2 diabetes and heart disease, according to a study being presented Monday at ENDO 2024, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Boston, Mass. Patients who benefited included those living in rural areas and in neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status, according to the study. While most adults with type 2 diabetes receive care in the primary care setting, adults who have both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease ...

Imagine you’re deep in the backcountry on a hiking trip, and you fall and rip a deep gash in your lower leg. You’re a two-day walk away from proper treatment. After you stop the bleeding, your concern becomes keeping the wound clean. Now, imagine you had just the thing in your first aid kit—a spray-on bandage embedded with a mild painkiller and a disinfectant. A bandage meant to deliver relief, and degrade within 48 hours, giving you time to make it to the hospital. That’s one reality that Whitney Blocher McTigue, an assistant professor ...

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, received funding for the project: “CLAWS: Continuous and Lightweight Authentication for Wearable and Portable Embedded Systems.” “The target of this funding is to accelerate the transition of technology,” Pudukotai Dinakarrao said. Using this proposed authentication technique, Pudukotai Dinakarrao will collect the gait signal of a user continually using a lightweight always-on sensing methodology. The collected gait signal will be analyzed through resource-aware dynamic early-exit neural networks (EENets) for authentication.  The proposed technique ...

Exposure to current levels of ground-level ozone (O3) in Europe is one of the main causes of premature mortality due to air pollution, especially in summer. A study led both by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, in collaboration with the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), has quantified for the first ...

About The Study: This article discusses the need for better integration of clinical trials and health care delivery enterprises.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Derek C. Angus, M.D., M.P.H., email angusdc@pitt.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2024.4088) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict ...

New Curtin-led research has found evidence that fresh water on Earth, which is essential for life, appeared about four billion years ago - five hundred million years earlier than previously thought. Lead author Dr Hamed Gamaleldien, Adjunct Research Fellow in Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and an Assistant Professor at Khalifa University, UAE, said by analysing ancient crystals from the Jack Hills in Western Australia’s Mid West region, researchers have pushed back the timeline ...

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically improved health insurance coverage for millions of Americans who were automatically covered by Medicaid due to the national public health emergency. With the end of the emergency in April 2023, about 10 million people lost coverage as states began redetermining eligibility. However, an estimated three-quarters of disenrollments occurred not because states decided they were ineligible, but rather due to procedural reasons. These process-related issues could include enrollees not receiving ...

About The Study: Lower cognitive performance and greater psychopathology at baseline were associated with increased weight gain as children entered adolescence, and higher baseline body mass index was associated with more depressive symptoms over time. These longitudinal findings highlight the importance of cognitive and mental health to children’s healthy weight development and suggest that clinicians should monitor children with overweight or obesity for increased depression problems. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Tamara Hershey, Ph.D., email tammy@wustl.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media ...

About The Study: The results of this cohort study suggest that admission of COVID-19–positive patients into skilled nursing facilities early in the pandemic was associated with preventable COVID-19 cases and mortality among residents, particularly in facilities with potential staff and personal protective equipment shortages. The findings speak to the importance of equipping skilled nursing facilities to adhere to infection-control best practices as they continue to face COVID-19 strains and other respiratory diseases.  Corresponding Author: To contact ...

The burial mounds of Eberdingen-Hochdorf and Asperg-Grafenbühl, known as Fürstengräber, are among the richest burials of German prehistory, with gold finds and elaborate bronze vessels. A new genetic analysis has now revealed that the two princes, buried about 10 kilometers apart, were biologically closely related. "It has long been suspected that the two princes from the burial mounds in Eberdingen-Hochdorf and Asperg ‘Grafenbühl‘ were related," says Dirk Krausse of the State Office for the ...

The sharks we know today as the open ocean’s top predators evolved from stubby bottom dwellers during a dramatic episode of global warming millions of years ago. A massive outpouring of volcanic lava about 93 million years ago sent carbon dioxide levels soaring, creating a greenhouse climate that pushed ocean temperatures to their hottest. UC Riverside researchers discovered that some sharks responded to the heat with elongated pectoral fins.  This discovery is documented in a paper published today in the journal Current Biology. It was made by taking body length and fin measurements from over 500 living and fossilized shark species. “The ...

[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” ...