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 ...

In a study of patients who smoked when they were diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, those who quit smoking before starting chemotherapy or radiation responded better to treatment, were less likely to need their voice boxes surgically removed, and lived significantly longer than those who continued to smoke. The research, from the University of Oklahoma, is published in the journal Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. The study’s lead author, Lurdes Queimado, M.D., Ph.D., said the findings underscore the importance of integrating tobacco cessation programs into treatment plans for cancer of the larynx, an area of the throat involved in breathing, swallowing ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories and the Kansas City National Security Campus completed a crucial weapons component development milestone, prior to full rate production. The Mark 21 Replacement Fuze interfaces with the W87-0 warhead for deployment onto the Minuteman III and, eventually, the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The first production unit of the replacement fuze was approved through the National Nuclear Security Administration’s rigorous Quality Assurance Inspection Procedure ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) today announced the approval of funding awards totaling more than $150 million to support new patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) studies, research to strengthen the rigor and quality of patient-centered CER and a project to implement the findings of PCORI-funded research into practice. Among the nine awards for patient-centered CER, two include support for large, two-phased trials comparing approaches to treatments for heart failure and asthma. Two other large studies will compare health system strategies to improve hypertension control, and another will evaluate ...

Human beings are likely to adopt the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors of those around them.  Simple decisions like what local store is best to shop at to more complex ones like vaccinating a child are influenced by these behavior patterns and social discourse.  “We choose to be in networks, both offline and online, that are compatible with our own thinking,” explained Amin Rahimian, assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. “The social contagion of behavior through networks can help ...

In a new study published in Nature Chemistry, UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Ronit Freeman and her colleagues describe the steps they took to manipulate DNA and proteins — essential building blocks of life — to create cells that look and act like cells from the body. This accomplishment, a first in the field, has implications for efforts in regenerative medicine, drug delivery systems, and diagnostic tools. “With this discovery, we can think of engineering fabrics or tissues that can be sensitive to changes in their environment and behave in dynamic ways,” says Freeman, whose lab is in the Applied Physical Sciences Department of the UNC College ...

To properly protect forests and evaluate the state of natural resources, conservation practices and environmental policies, it is important to have accurate information on an area’s forest extent. One of the challenges facing researchers when it comes to evaluating the accuracy of forest extent, however, is that models use different remote sensing products that may have different definitions for what determines forest extent. In addition, on the ground surveys may sometimes come into conflict with what remote, satellite-based products are describing as forests.   To help quantify this problem, a group of researchers from ...

The brain processes information on many scales. Individual cells electrochemically transmit signals in circuits but at the large scale required to produce cognition, millions of cells act in concert, driven by rhythmic signals at varying frequencies. Studying one frequency range in particular, beta rhythms between about 14-30 Hz, holds the key to understanding how the brain controls cognitive processes—or loses control in some disorders—a team of neuroscientists argues in a new review article. Drawing on experimental ...

We use computers to help us make (hopefully) unbiased decisions. The problem is that machine-learning algorithms do not always make fair classifications, if human bias is embedded in the data used to train them — which is often the case in practice. To ease this "garbage in, garbage out" situation, a research team presented a flexible framework for mitigating bias in machine classification. Their research was published Apr. 8 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal. Existing attempts to mitigate classification bias, according to the team, are often held back by their reliance on specific metrics of fairness and predetermined ...

In the nine decades since humans first produced fusion reactions, only a few fusion technologies have demonstrated the ability to make a thermal fusion plasma with electron temperatures hotter than 10 million degrees Celsius, roughly the temperature of the core of the sun. Zap Energy’s unique approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch, has now joined those rarefied ranks, far exceeding this plasma temperature milestone in a device that is a fraction of the scale of other fusion systems. A new research paper, published this month in Physical ...