For hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have teemed with single-celled organisms called foraminifera, hard-shelled, microscopic creatures at the bottom of the food chain. The fossil record of these primordial specks offers clues into future changes in global biodiversity, related to our warming climate.   Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that’s among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that major environmental stress events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological ...

In a new study in Issues, Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development and the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy & Administration at the University of Delaware, explored the role of student loans on hopeful students striving for college degrees, particularly in STEM.  The cost of attending a public four-year college in the United States has more than doubled since the early 1990s, when inflation is factored in.  Undergraduate student loan debt has become unmanageable for a wide swath of borrowers ...

As computer programming becomes an increasingly valued skill in the workforce, there is a greater need to understand how people learn to code most effectively. Statistics show that up to 50% of students who enroll in introductory programming courses in the United States eventually drop out, suggesting a mismatch between how coding is learned and the way it’s taught. A new study from the University of Washington, published March 5 in Scientific Reports, examines that issue. The researchers recorded electrophysiological brain responses of varyingly skilled programmers as they read ...

Physicist Denis T. Keane is the 2024 recipient of the Gopal K. Shenoy Excellence in Beamline Science Award. He is a beamline scientist and director of the Dupont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team (DND-CAT) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Photon Source (APS) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. He is also a research professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Northwestern University. The annual award recognizes active beamline scientists at the APS, ...

A small-scale surveillance system in Tanzania for reporting livestock abortions could help protect livelihoods and provide insights on potential livestock-to-human infections. The research, published April 16 as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, is described by editors as an important study with convincing findings of potential interest to the fields of veterinary medicine, public health and epidemiology. Loss of livestock through abortion is a major concern for the worldwide livestock industry, resulting in significant ...

Researchers have described the optimal timing for COVID-19 patients to take the antiviral, Paxlovid, to get the most benefit from the treatment, according to a study published April 16 in eLife. The findings suggest that taking Paxlovid three to five days after COVID-19 symptoms emerge may maximise the drug’s ability to reduce viral loads, minimise viral spread and reduce viral rebound. They also indicate that broader use of Paxlovid during this window might be a powerful tool to help curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 ...

INDIANAPOLIS—A new $4.8 million grant will support researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology to study how human neurodegenerative diseases are affected by the misfolding of the protein TDP-43. Misfolding occurs when a protein adopts a conformation which differs from the native one. The researchers, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, have developed an innovative approach to deciphering the role of TDP-43 misfolding in the pathology ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 86 graduate students representing 31 states and Puerto Rico for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2023 Solicitation 2 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation. “The Graduate Student Research program is a unique opportunity ...

Health-monitoring apps can help people manage chronic diseases or stay on track with fitness goals, using nothing more than a smartphone. However, these apps can be slow and energy-inefficient because the vast machine-learning models that power them must be shuttled between a smartphone and a central memory server. Engineers often speed things up using hardware that reduces the need to move so much data back and forth. While these machine-learning accelerators can streamline computation, they are susceptible to attackers who can steal secret ...

A rapidly spreading virus threatens the health of the cacao tree and the dried seeds from which chocolate is made, jeopardizing the global supply of the world’s most popular treat. About 50% of the world’s chocolate originates from cacao trees in the West Africa countries of Ivory Coast and Ghana. The damaging virus is attacking cacao trees in Ghana, resulting in harvest losses of between 15 and 50%. Spread by small insects called mealybugs that eat the leaves, buds and flowers of trees, the cacao swollen shoot virus disease (CSSVD) is among the most damaging threats to the root ingredient of chocolate. “This ...

Post-mitotic neurons in the brain that re-enter the cell cycle quickly succumb to senescence, and this re-entry is more common in Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study published April 9th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Kim Hai-Man Chow and colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The phenomenon may provide an opportunity to learn more about the neurodegeneration process, and the technique used to make this discovery is readily applicable to other inquiries about unique populations of cells in the brain. Most neurons in the ...

Phage therapy is being explored to treat multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, but what are the direct effects of phages on the human host? This study shows that therapeutic phages can be detected by epithelial cells of the human respiratory tract, eliciting proinflammatory responses that depend on specific phage properties and the airway microenvironment.   ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002566 Article ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, April 23, 2024 Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu ## The tobacco industry has long appealed to youth through targeted marketing that glamorizes smoking with imagery of candy-flavored products, celebrity endorsements, social settings, and other enticing tactics. That marketing approach appears to be particularly effective on social media, according to a new study led by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researchers.  Published in the journal Addictive Behaviors, the study found that frequent social media use was linked to an increased risk of youth using ...

LAWRENCE — Locations around the globe are experiencing climate disasters on a regular basis. But some of the most marginalized populations experience disasters so often it has come to be normalized. A new study from the University of Kansas found residents of one Seoul, South Korea, neighborhood have grown so accustomed to living through extreme climate events they have developed a “disaster subculture” that challenges both views of reality and how social agencies can help. Joonmo Kang, assistant professor ...

New York (April 23, 2024) —The American Geriatrics Society (AGS) will honor William J. Hall, MD, MACP Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Rochester this year with the prestigious Nascher/Manning Award, given biannually at the AGS Annual Scientific Meeting (#AGS24 will be held virtually May 9 – 11 (pre-conference days: Tuesday & Wednesday, May 7-8). The Nascher/Manning Award was named in honor of Ignatz Leo Nascher, MD who was the first clinician to advocate for establishing a specialty focused on the care ...

STRASBOURG, France, 23 April 2024 — Why do stressed bats shed more viruses? How do some key species engineer whole landscapes? How do humans and animals work in groups to solve problems, shape behavior? These eight research projects are among the Human Frontier Science Program’s (HFSP) 93 Research Grant and Fellowship Awards recently announced to begin in 2024. “HFSP has funded basic research in the life sciences for the benefit of humankind, and sustainability science spans some of the most complex research imaginable,” said HFSP Chief Scientific Officer Guntram Bauer. “These investigations examine highly interrelated living systems – many ...

The average wind turbine generates enough electricity in 46 minutes to power a home in the United States for an entire month, according to the United States Geological Survey. And with more than 70,800 turbines scattered throughout the country, wind power has now surpassed hydroelectric power as the largest producer of renewable energy. With a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy, researchers from Virginia Tech are pioneering processes to make this sustainable energy source even more sustainable. The grant is part ...

A new study led by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) highlights the lasting financial impact of a cancer diagnosis for many working-age adults and their families in the United States. It shows a cancer diagnosis and the time required for its treatment can result in employment disruptions, loss of household income and loss of employment-based health insurance coverage, leading to financial hardship. When combined with high out-of-pocket costs for cancer care, nearly 60% of working-age cancer survivors report at least one type of financial hardship, such as being unable to afford ...

“The ultimate goal of exploiting model organisms to screen for anti-aging interventions is to identify treatments that might translate to healthy lifespan extension in humans.” BUFFALO, NY- April 23, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 16, Issue 7, entitled, “The coupling between healthspan and lifespan in Caenorhabditis depends on complex interactions between compound intervention and genetic background.” Aging is characterized by declining health that results ...

USC faculty members Paul K. Newton and Nicolás Lell Benavides have been awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships for 2024. Newton, professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering and mathematics at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and Benavides, a lecturer at the USC Thornton School of Music, were chosen by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation from nearly 3,000 applicants. They are among 188 inductees chosen this year for their excellence in scholarship and the arts. “Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, ...

The council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has elected USC faculty members Pinchas Cohen, Andrea Hodge, Jay Lieberman and Gaurav Sukhatme to the ranks of AAAS fellows. The honor, which recognizes researchers whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished,” is among the most prized in academia. The recognition honors excellence in research, technology, industry and government, teaching, and communicating and interpreting science to the public. The new cohort joins more than 40 of their USC peers already inducted into AAAS. The newly elected AAAS ...

Alzheimer’s disease causes significant problems with memory, thinking and behavior and is the most common form of dementia, affecting more than 50 million people around the world each year. This number is expected to triple by the year 2050. Using their own state-of-the art imaging technologies, scientists at the University of California San Diego have now revealed how the metabolism of lipids, a class of molecule that includes fats, oils and many hormones, is changed in Alzheimer’s disease. They also revealed a new strategy to target this metabolic system with new and existing drugs. The findings are published in Cell Metabolism. “Lipids ...

Turbulence is ubiquitous in nature. It exists everywhere, from our daily lives to the distant universe, while being labelled as “the last great unsolved problem of classical physics” by Richard Feynman. Prof. Dr. Huirong Yan and her group from the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam and DESY have now discovered a long-predicted phenomenon: the weak-to-strong transition in small amplitude space plasma turbulence. The discovery was made by analyzing data from ESA’s Cluster mission – a constellation of four spacecraft flying in formation around Earth and investigating how the Sun and the Earth interact. The ...

Researchers from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Computing and Engineering, and independent researchers have developed a groundbreaking model, dubbed GREENSKY, that significantly enhances the energy efficiency and operational time of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cellular networks. In the ever-evolving landscape of wireless communication, UAVs play a pivotal role, especially in rural, remote, and disaster-struck areas where traditional network infrastructure is absent. ...

A study analyzing a large sample of Medicare admissions at nearly 2,000 acute care hospitals nationwide during 2019 found that most hospitals—nearly four out of five—admitted a significantly different proportion of Black fee-for-service Medicare patients age 65 and older compared to the proportion of the same group of patients admitted to any hospital in that hospital’s market area.  The researchers say that understanding hospital choices within neighborhoods and markets could ...