DETROIT – Neuroscience researchers at Wayne State University published a review article that confirms the usefulness of neurofilament light (NfL) blood levels to predict the likelihood and rate of progression of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease. Blood-based NfL is a minimally invasive and easily accessible biomarker, making it a useful clinical biomarker. Youjin Jung and Jessica Damoiseaux, Ph.D., analyzed existing literature to examine the association between serum or plasma NfL and ...

Cedars-Sinai investigators are leaders in the innovation and use of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) with balloon-expandable valves. They now show that redo TAVR procedures are both safe and effective when compared with situations in which patients with similar risk profiles undergo the same procedure for the first time.    The novel findings, published today in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, are significant because recent randomized clinical trials have shown that TAVR is a meaningful treatment option for both younger and lower-risk surgical ...

Research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has shown that higher levels of inflammation in the blood of patients with obesity undergoing bariatric surgery predicts poorer weight loss six months after the procedure. Published in Psychological Medicine and led by researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, this is the first study to investigate the links between depression and inflammation in patients with obesity before and after bariatric surgery. The analysis showed a strong relationship ...

*Note- this is an early release from the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) meeting in Hamburg, October 2-6. Please credit the meeting if you use this story* New research to be presented at this year’s Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Hamburg, Germany (2-6 October) shows that use of low dose (100mg daily) aspirin among older adults aged 65 years and older is associated with a 15% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The authors, led by Professor Sophia Zoungas, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, ...

URBANA, Ill. — Love it or hate it, broccoli is chock-full of health-promoting chemicals linked to heart health, cancer prevention, immune function, weight management, and more. However,  some people are less efficient than others at unlocking those chemical benefits. A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign suggests gut microbe communities may be responsible for the variation. With a new grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the team plans to identify which microbes maximize the benefits of broccoli and other brassica ...

In the intricate world of light, a journey through inhomogeneous media often leads to distortions in space, time, spectrum, and polarization. These distortions, detrimental to applications like optical manipulation, imaging, and communication, have long posed a challenge. Enter the art of wavefront shaping (WS) — a potent tool for correcting these wave maladies in linear optics. But that's not all. Nonlinearity adds a twist, finding purpose in fields from biological sensing to phototherapy. Now, picture combining these forces — ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists have established the effectiveness of vaccines they developed to prevent the disfiguring skin disease leishmaniasis in animal studies, and Phase 1 human trial planning is in motion for the most promising candidate. But in new work, the research team has determined how these vaccine candidates, created using mutated disease-causing parasites, prompt molecular-level changes in host cells that have specific roles in helping generate the immune response. Despite using the same CRISPR ...

Since 2009, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness across the United States has shrunk by more than 50%, according to a 2022 Department of Housing report. With the support of a $150,000 grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the University of Missouri School of Law Veterans Clinic is aiming to continue this trend here at home with a new program designed to further empower veterans in taking steps out of homelessness. The Veterans Outreach Program will help attorneys connect with veterans experiencing homelessness with the goal of offering them the legal assistance ...

Although the COVID-19 pandemic was the first time most of humanity learned of the now infamous disease, the family of coronaviruses was first identified in the mid-1960s. In a new study, molecular biologist Steven Van Doren, a scientist in the University of Missouri College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, has uncovered unexpected actions of a key player in how the coronavirus infects its target — a discovery that could guide further vaccine development. Funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Van Doren and his team studied the fusion peptide, an important feature of the spike protein that serves to bind the virus with ...

“To our knowledge, our study is the first to evaluate the specific function of Dectin-1 in the setting of aging and HIV-infection.” BUFFALO, NY- August 31, 2023 – A new research paper was published on the cover of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 16, entitled, “Dectin-1 stimulation promotes a distinct inflammatory signature in the setting of HIV-infection and aging.” Dectin-1 is an innate immune receptor that recognizes and binds β-1, 3/1, 6 glucans on fungi. In this new study, researchers Archit Kumar, Jiawei Wang, Allen Esterly, Chris ...

A recent study published in Nature Metabolism has revealed the pathogenic mechanism underlying a rare pediatric neurodegenerative disorder known as mitochondrial enoyl reductase protein-associated neurodegeneration (MEPAN) syndrome. The study was led by Dr. Hugo J. Bellen, distinguished service professor at Baylor College of Medicine, and Chair of Neurogenetics at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital (Duncan NRI), and Dr. Debdeep Dutta, a postdoctoral fellow in the Bellen lab. The Duncan NRI team found that in patients and animal models of this disorder, a large number of neurons ...

CLEVELAND– Case Western Reserve University biochemical researchers have identified a new function of a key protein that leads to cancer–a finding they believe could lead to more effective treatments for a range of cancers and other diseases.   The protein is LSD1 (lysine-specific histone demethylase 1A), which functions as a type of traffic cop inside human cells. It controls gene activity during embryonic development and regulating gene expression throughout life.   Scientists have also identified in recent years that the overexpression of LSD1—in this instance, producing too many proteins—can ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The ability to accurately detect heat and pain is critical to human survival, but scientists have struggled to understand on a molecular level exactly how our bodies sense these potential risks. Now, University at Buffalo researchers have unraveled the complex biological phenomena that drive these critical functions. Their research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Aug. 28, has uncovered a previously unknown and completely unexpected “suicidal” reaction in ion channel receptors that explains the complicated mechanisms that underlie sensitivity to temperature and pain. The ...

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have discovered some new and surprising ways that viral RNA and influenza virus are detected by human lung cells, which has potential implications for treating people affected by such viruses. Influenza viruses remain a major threat to human health and can cause severe symptoms in young, elderly, and immuno-compromised populations, leading to annual epidemics which endanger between 3 and 5 million people of severe illness and cause 290,000 to 650,000 deaths worldwide. These viruses primarily target respiratory epithelial cells ...

PHILADELPHIA – A broad new strategy could hold hope for treating virtually all blood cancers with CAR T cell therapy, which is currently approved for five subtypes of blood cancer. Scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated the potential efficacy of this approach in preclinical tests. In the study, published today in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers used engineered CAR T cells to target CD45—a surface marker found on nearly all blood cells, including nearly all blood cancer cells. Because CD45 is found on healthy blood cells too, the research team used CRISPR base-editing to develop a method ...

JooYoung Seo, assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded a $649,921 Early Career Development grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS grant RE-254891-OLS-23), under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, which supports “developing a diverse workforce of librarians to better meet the changing learning and information needs of the American public by enhancing the training and professional development of librarians, developing faculty and library leaders, and recruiting and ...

PHILADELPHIA (August 31, 2023) – A main crux of neuroscience is learning how our senses translate light into sight, sound into hearing, food into taste, and texture into touch.  Smell is where these sensory relationships get more complex and perplexing.    To address this question, a research team co-led by the Monell Chemical Senses Center and start-up Osmo, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company spun out of machine learning research done at Google Research, Google DeepMind (formerly known as Google Brain), are investigating how airborne chemicals connect to odor perception in the brain. To this end they discovered that a machine-learning ...

Brian K. Lee and colleagues have developed a Principal Odor Map (POM) that models the connections between an odorant’s chemical structure with its perceptual property of smell. The map performed as well as some highly trained human “sniffers” in describing odor quality, and could be used for predicting odor intensity and perceptual similarity between odorants. The map moves researchers closer to being able to match molecular properties of odorants to their perceptual properties, a challenge that has proved difficult for olfactory science. (For other senses, neuroscientists have been able to map light wavelengths ...

How a new method of inferring ancient population size revealed a severe bottleneck in the human population which almost wiped out the chance for humanity as we know it today. An unexplained gap in the African/Eurasian fossil record may now be explained thanks to a team of researchers from China, Italy and the United States. Using a novel method called FitCoal (fast infinitesimal time coalescent process), the researchers were able to accurately determine demographic inferences by using modern-day human genomic sequences from 3,154 individuals. These findings indicate that early human ancestors went through a prolonged, severe bottleneck in which approximately 1,280 ...

Between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, the population of human ancestors crashed, according to a new genomic model by Wangjie Hu and colleagues. They suggest that there were only about 1280 breeding individuals during this transition between the early and middle Pleistocene, and that the population bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years. The researchers say about 98.7% of the ancestral population was lost at the beginning of the bottleneck. This decline coincided with climate changes that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease ...

A randomized trial involving 811 undergraduate students at a U.S. Hispanic-Serving Institution (HIS) university found that students assigned to calculus classes focused on collaborative learning and student engagement had a greater understanding of calculus concepts and improved grades compared to those assigned to classes taught in a traditional lecture style. Laird Kramer and colleagues note that the success of the engagement “treatment” occurred across all racial and ethnic groups, academic majors, and genders. Since ...

A new estimate of the genetic mutation rate in four wild species of baleen whales suggests that these rates are higher than previous estimates, with some interesting implications for calculations of past whale abundance and low cancer rates. For instance, the new mutation rate determined by Marcos Suárez-Menéndez and colleagues reduces estimates of abundance in pre-exploitation whale populations by 86%, which has implications for population-rebuilding goals of whale conservation programs. The mutation rate—the probability ...

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Polysiloxanes, the scientific name for silicones, possess exceptional properties, and are used in numerous fields ranging from cosmetics to aerospace. They are absolutely everywhere! However, they have a major flaw, as small, cyclic oligosolixanes—toxic for the environment and identified as an endocrine disruptor—form during their synthesis. To correct this drawback, a team of scientists1 led by a CNRS researcher recently developed a new process for synthesising silicones in a cleaner and more environmentally-friendly ...

New research from the University of Washington and Polar Bears International in Bozeman, Montana, quantifies the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and the survival of polar bear populations. The paper, published online Aug. 31 in Science, combines past research and new analysis to provide a quantitative link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear survival rates. A warming Arctic is limiting polar bears’ access to sea ice, which the bears use as a hunting platform. In ice-free summer months the bears must fast. While in a worst-case scenario ...