Why was Balto, a famous sled dog from the 1920s, able to survive the unforgiving conditions of Alaska? It was one of many findings uncovered through the Zoonomia Project, which involved researchers from Texas Tech University. More than a dozen researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences were among the major collaborators in the Zoonomia Project who will publish their multi-year comparative genomic analysis of mammals and the influence of genetic change on health and disease in the April 28 issue of Science magazine. The laboratory of David Ray, professor and associate chair of the department, studies transposable elements ...

The American beech, Fagus grandifolia, is a North American staple and the dominant species in many northeastern forests. In 2012, a new disease was first spotted, infecting trees in northeastern Ohio. The worst afflicted had dark banding on their leaves, which emerged crumpled and leathery in the spring. Not until 2018 would experts discover the nematode pest, Litylenchus crenatae mccannii, overwintering in the buds of infected trees.  As it marches across the continent, researchers are still ...

In a recent publication released by PubMed, American scientists led by Dr. Dufault at the Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute, reported alarming increases in the numbers of children requiring special education services. While student enrollment in US schools remained stable from 2006-2021, the percentage of children receiving special education services increased 10.4%.  Of the three disability categories under which children with autism may receive services, autism caseload percentages tripled jumping from 4% to 11% while developmental delay caseload ...

Key takeaways Feasible for small and large hospitals: Pilot institutions in the study included community hospitals and academic medical centers representing every region of the United States. Geriatric surgical patients are a growing population: American College of Surgeons standards for geriatric surgery address a growing population that most hospitals serve. Standards help address barriers to implementation: ACS geriatric surgery standards help hospitals identify and address challenges to providing optimal care, including staffing, manpower, and lack of geriatricians in many hospitals.   CHICAGO: ...

LA JOLLA, CA—The insomnia drug suvorexant (Belsomra®) might be an effective treatment for opioid use disorder, according to a preclinical study from Scripps Research. In the study, published April 27, 2023, in Frontiers in Pharmacology, the Scripps Research scientists found that suvorexant reduced prescription opioid intake and helped protect against relapse in rats modeling opioid use disorder (OUD). If the results translate to humans in clinical trials, the insomnia drug could offer a promising approach for the millions of people who have OUD. “Our results suggest that repurposing suvorexant could be a good strategy for reducing drug intake and blocking relapse in cases ...

From New York to North Carolina and as far west as Illinois, the invasive spotted lanternfly is causing chaos in many states where agricultural and forestry industries are essential to the economy. It has been estimated that crops and forest production losses caused by insects and pathogens are close to $40 billion a year. Spotted laternflies, native to mainland China, prey upon 70-plus host plant species, stealing their nutrients with their piercing snouts, called stylets. They are often characterized as “hitchhikers” for their ability to move ...

New York (April 27, 2023) – The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) annually honors researchers, clinicians, educators, and emerging health professionals who have made outstanding contributions to high-quality, person-centered care for older adults. This year’s award recipients include 19 leaders representing the breadth of medical disciplines championing care for us all as we age.  Clinical Student Research Award Matthew Ryan Cosmai  Clinician of the Year Award Shelley R. McDonald, DO, PhD David H. Solomon Memorial Public Service Award Alan Lazaroff, ...

Amid rising evidence that additives designed to improve plastics also disrupt sex hormones, a Rutgers laboratory trial shows that plastic itself can do likewise when inhaled at moderate levels. Previous studies focused on chemicals such as bisphenol-A (BPA) that make plastics stiffer or more flexible. These findings spurred ongoing efforts to find safer plastic additives. The Rutgers study showed that microscale and nanoscale particles (MNPs) of polyamide, a common plastic better known as nylon, produced endocrine-disrupting ...

April 27, 2023 – One of the most highly-anticipated events at the ATS 2023 International Conference, which  kicks off May 19, is the “Breaking News: Clinical Trial Results in Pulmonary Medicine.” Taking place on Monday, May 22, the series of presentations will focus on the latest regarding COPD and asthma treatment. Register now to hear these presentations live. A question-and-answer period will follow all presentations: Seralutinib Treatment in Adult Subjects with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension: Results from the TORREY Study Effect of Ensifentrine, a Novel PDE3 and PDE4 Inhibitor, on Lung Function, Symptoms and Exacerbations in Patients with COPD: ...

Engineering a synthetic oscillator that cycles between the two deterioration pathways that lead to cell death can slow aging in yeast cells, increasing their longevity by more than 80%, a new study reports. The findings represent a proof-of-concept example of using synthetic biology to reprogram the cellular aging process. Given that the underlying aging pathways are conserved, the findings may one day enable the design of synthetic gene circuits that promote longevity in more complex organisms. Cellular aging is a fundamental and complex biological process ...

Neural networks made from photonic chips can be trained using on-chip backpropagation – the most widely used approach to training neural networks, according to a new study. The findings pave the way toward developing optically driven and energy-efficient machine learning technologies that reduce both the carbon footprint and costs of AI computation. Neural networks (NNs) are an approach to machine learning conceptually inspired by the biology of the brain and have become a mainstay in various modern scientific and commercial AI technologies, including the widely discussed ChatGPT architectures. ...

Ever since scientists first read the complete genetic codes of creatures like fruit flies and humans more than two decades ago, the field of genomics has promised major leaps forward in understanding basic questions in biology. And now comes a major installment of that promise. In what Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and HHMI Professor Beth Shapiro calls a treasure trove of research, more than 150 researchers from 50 institutions are publishing 11 different papers in the April 28, 2023, issue of Science. The research brings new insights from the Zoonomia Project, an unprecedented collaborative effort led by Elinor Karlsson, director of the Vertebrate Genomics ...

CRISPR claimed scientific fame for its ability to quickly and accurately edit genes. But, at the core, CRISPR systems are immune systems that help bacteria protect themselves from viruses by targeting and destroying viral DNA and RNA. A new study published in Science reveals a previously unrecognized player in one such system – a membrane protein that enhances anti-viral defense – simultaneously broadening our understanding of and raising more questions related to the complexities of CRISPR. Uncovering New Clues about CRISPR CRISPR systems consist of two major components – a guide RNA that targets a specific viral DNA or RNA sequence and a Cas enzyme ...

For millennia, humans have used knots for all kinds of reasons — to tie rope, braid hair, or weave fabrics. But there are organisms that are better at tying knots and far superior — and faster — at untangling them. Tiny California blackworms intricately tangle themselves by the thousands to form ball-shaped blobs that allow them to execute a wide range of biological functions. But, most striking of all, while the worms tangle over a period of several minutes, they can untangle in mere milliseconds, escaping at the first sign of a threat from a predator. Saad Bhamla, assistant ...

New Haven, Conn. — What the human genome is lacking compared with the genomes of other primates might have been as crucial to the development of humankind as what has been added during our evolutionary history, according to a new study led by researchers at Yale and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The new findings, published April 28 in the journal Science, fill an important gap in what is known about historical changes to the human genome. While a revolution in the capacity to collect data from genomes ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted over the years to find the genes underlying common human traits, from eye color to intelligence and physical and mental illnesses. Patrick Sullivan, MD, FRANZCP, the Yeargan Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Genetics at the UNC School of Medicine, and the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium have produced a new packet for the journal Science, to give researchers another way to understand human disease, using the power of evolutionary genomics. “This is a tool that can give us a lot of important hints about human disease,” ...

Solving a riddle that has confounded biologists since bacterial spores — inert, sleeping bacteria —  were first described more than 150 years ago, researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered a new kind of cellular sensor that allows spores to detect the presence of nutrients in their environment and quickly spring back to life. It turns out that these sensors double as channels through the membrane and remain closed during dormancy but rapidly open when they detect nutrients. Once open, the channels allow electrically charged ions to flow out through the cell membrane, setting in motion ...

HOUSTON – (April 27, 2023) – Research supports the promise of psychedelics in treating conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, but the future regulatory landscape for these drugs remains unclear. Experts from Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania, American University and Harvard Law School call for creativity and collaboration at the federal and state levels in developing policies for the use and oversight of psychedelics and a commitment to developing a strong evidence base for efficacy and safety. In a paper published in the journal Science, the authors, experts in bioethics, law and ...

Contrary to what is stated in biology textbooks, the growth of fish doesn’t slow down when and because they start spawning. In fact, their growth accelerates after they reproduce, according to a new article published in Science.   “Fish don’t have to choose between growth or reproduction because, in the real world, they don’t occur simultaneously but rather sequentially,” says University of British Columbia (UBC) fisheries researcher Dr. Daniel Pauly, co-author of ...

Counting problems arise in many different fields, e.g., statistical physics, economics and machine learning. In order to study the complexity of counting problems, several natural frameworks have been proposed. Two well studied frameworks are counting constraint satisfaction problems (#CSP) and Holant problems. For counting satisfaction problems over the Boolean domain, two explicit tractable families namely  and , are identified; any function set which is not contained in these two families is proved to be #P-hard. Furthermore, counting CSPd is the counting constraint satisfaction problem restricted to the instances where every variable occurs a multiple of d times. The team ...

IVF procedures can be improved by combining genetic and clinical data to predict the number of eggs retrieved in patients undergoing ovarian stimulation. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011020 Article Title: Personalized prediction of the secondary oocytes number after ovarian stimulation: A machine learning model based on clinical and genetic data Author Countries: Poland Funding: The research was co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the ...

Results from the NRG Oncology RTOG 0631 clinical trial comparing stereotactic vs. conventional radiotherapy for localized vertebral metastases of the spine did not meet its primary endpoint. Data from the study suggests that radiosurgery was not considered superior in terms of pain responses at 3 months following treatment, and even displayed worse pain response, than the conventional external beam radiotherapy (cEBRT). These results were recently published in the JAMA Oncology. cEBRT is currently the standard of care for treating ...

A study supported by the National Institutes of Health found that people who experienced acute kidney injury (AKI) during a hospitalization, including those admitted with AKI or who developed AKI in the hospital, were more likely to revisit the hospital or die shortly after discharge, compared to people hospitalized without AKI. AKI is a sudden loss of kidney function that usually lasts for a short time. The research, funded by NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), was ...

Inflammation is a complex biological process that can eradicate pathogens and promotes repair of damaged tissues. However, deregulation of the immune system can lead to uncontrolled inflammation and produce lesions instead. Inflammation is also involved in cancer. The molecular mechanisms underlying inflammation are not fully understood, and so developing new drugs represents a significant challenge. As far back as 2020, Dr. Raphaël Rodriguez, CNRS research director and head of the Chemical Biology team at Institut Curie (Equipe ...

A research team led by Prof. HYEON Taeghwan at the Center for Nanoparticle Research within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Seoul, South Korea has developed a new photocatalytic platform for the mass production of hydrogen. The group’s study on the photocatalytic platform led to the development of a floatable photocatalytic matrix, which allows efficient hydrogen evolution reaction with clear advantages over conventional hydrogen production platforms such as film or panel types. The importance of alternative energy has recently increased due to global challenges such as environmental ...