(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — As artificial intelligence continues to boom, scaling algorithms to ever-increasing data sets also becomes a bigger hurdle. Such is the case in the domain of natural language processing (NLP), or, the effort to get machines to understand and communicate with human language (think: ChatGPT, search engines and other text-based modalities). “A key challenge in this domain is the tradeoff between scalability and accuracy,” said UC Santa Barbara computer scientist ...

Irvine, Calif., April 16, 2024 — Arctic and boreal latitudes are warming faster than any other region on Earth. In three new studies, Earth system scientists at the University of California, Irvine report how the ecosystems in these regions are changing.   In a study published in Global Change Biology, a team led by Earth system science Ph.D. candidate Jinhyuk Kim from the lab of James Randerson, professor of Earth system science, reveals how wildfires are increasing rates of photosynthesis in Canada and Alaska.    They find that increasing wildfires are wiping out black spruce forests that grow relatively slowly and contribute to the organic layer of the underlying ...

Scientists have found a way to transform metal waste into a highly efficient catalyst to make hydrogen from water, a discovery that could make hydrogen production more sustainable. A team of researchers from the University of Nottingham's School of Chemistry and Faculty of Engineering have found that the surface of swarf, a byproduct of the metal machining industry, is textured with tiny steps and grooves on a nanoscale level. These textures can anchor atoms of platinum or cobalt, leading to an efficient electrocatalyst ...

For Immediate Release April 16, 2024 Microplastics, algal blooms, seafood safety are public health concerns addressed by new Oceans and Human Health Centers    NIH and NSF jointly fund new research centers to better understand how ocean-related exposures affect people’s health.  To address plastics and other problems that could affect human health, the NIH and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) are jointly funding four new Centers for Oceans and Human Health and renewing two centers as part of a marine-related health research program. Each Center will focus on a different aspect ...

Almost one-fifth of the global land surface is classified as highly susceptible to rainfall-triggered landslides. According to the World Health Organization, landslides are more widespread than any other geological hazard to occur worldwide and are increasing because of climate change.  Alba Yerro-Colom, assistant professor in the Charles E. Via, Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is motivated to advance the understanding of these natural occurrences while considering how vegetation and changes in rainfall patterns could better predict their potential damage. She ...

Researchers from the University of Michigan Health Rogel Cancer Center have created a urine-based test that detects pieces of DNA fragments released by head and neck tumors. The test could potentially facilitate early detection of this cancer type, which currently does not have a reliable screening method. Human papillomavirus (HPV) is widely recognized for causing cervical cancer, but is increasingly found to cause cancers in the mouth, throat and other head and neck regions. Early detection is critical because detecting a cancer at ...

TAMPA, Fla. — Moffitt Cancer Center has treated its first patient in an investigator-initiated, phase 1 clinical trial investigating the safety and efficacy of a chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy for prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bone. Roughly 90% of men with advanced prostate cancer will develop bone metastases. The disease significantly impacts patients, causing extreme bone pain. The CAR T-cell therapy, developed in the lab of Moffitt immunologist Daniel Abate-Daga, PhD, utilizes gamma delta T cells to target a tumor biomarker highly expressed in bone metastatic prostate cancer called prostate stem cell antigen. ...

 Wiley, one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in research and learning, today announced the 2024 release of its Wiley Identifier of Natural Products (AntiBase Library + ChemWindow). With an extensive collection of over 95,000 compounds, this growing natural products database serves as a powerful drug discovery screening tool to narrow down possible novel compounds having antimicrobial, antitumor, or other desired effects. Additionally, it finds applications in food and cosmetics, agriculture, pesticides, and ...

NEWPORT, Ore. – Researchers who created “family trees” for nearly 10,000 fish found that first-generation, wild-born descendants of hatchery-origin Chinook salmon in an Oregon river show improved fitness. The finding, based on data collected over 13 years, is encouraging for Chinook salmon recovery efforts, said Kathleen O’Malley, an associate professor at Oregon State University and the study’s senior author. In this study, fitness is measured by the number of adult offspring a fish produces, with higher fitness leading to more offspring. “Previous studies have shown that hatchery-origin Chinook salmon have lower reproductive success ...

“Break a leg!” is a welcome blessing of good luck, but who wants to hear that they have actually broken a bone? What’s worse, fractures that are displaced or complex require surgery and possibly lengthy recovery times while the patient remains partly or wholly immobilized. Aiming to shorten recovery times, an Osaka Metropolitan University-led research group is focusing on plasma irradiation as a treatment method to speed up bone healing. The Department of Orthopedic Surgery’s Kosuke Saito, a graduate student in the Graduate School of Medicine, Associate Professor Hiromitsu Toyoda, and Professor Hiroaki ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) have identified the mechanisms through which anthracyclines, a widely used class of anticancer drugs, damage the hearts of patients receiving this treatment. The study, published in the journal JACC: CardioOncology, also identifies possible treatments for this complication, which affects an estimated one third of cancer survivors.   More than 4 million people in Europe are diagnosed with cancer every year. Fortunately, survival rates have increased significantly thanks to improved treatments and advances in diagnosis. Anthracyclines, ...

Young male blue tits are less successful in fathering offspring outside their breeding pair, not because of a lack of experience, but because they are outcompeted by older males, Bart Kempenaers and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany report in a study publishing April 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. Many birds form breeding pairs but will also mate and produce offspring outside of that pairing — known as “extra-pair” paternity. Inexperienced males in their first year of breeding ...

A new study examines the development of two machine learning models to classify the immunophenotype of a cancer specimen. The digital pathology approach presented can characterize and classify cancer immunophenotypes in a reproducible and scalable fashion, holding promise for the application of such a. method to identify patients that may benefit from immunotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to the study published in the peer-reviewed journal AI in Precision Oncology. Click here to ...

A nearby supernova in 2023 offered astrophysicists an excellent opportunity to test ideas about how these types of explosions boost particles, called cosmic rays, to near light-speed. But surprisingly, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected none of the high-energy gamma-ray light those particles should produce. On May 18, 2023, a supernova erupted in the nearby Pinwheel galaxy (Messier 101), located about 22 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The event, named SN 2023ixf, is the most luminous nearby supernova discovered since Fermi launched in ...

An international team of scientists found a way to improve battery design that could produce safer, more powerful lithium batteries. The team used quasi-elastic neutron scattering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to set the first benchmark, one-nanosecond, or one billionth of a second, for a mixture of lithium salt and an organic polymer electrolyte. “It all comes down to the study of materials,” said Eugene Mamontov, ORNL Chemical Spectroscopy group leader. “And polymer electrolytes won’t catch fire the way liquid electrolytes do in lithium batteries.” The team used the neutron technique to validate computer ...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) currently afflicts nearly seven million people in the U.S. With this number expected to grow to nearly 13 million by 2050, the lack of meaningful therapies represents a major unmet medical need. Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys have now identified promising real-world links between common HIV drugs and a reduced incidence of AD. The study, led by Jerold Chun, M.D., Ph.D., was published in Pharmaceuticals. Chun’s new research builds on his lab’s landmark ...

John Turner, Professor, Religious Studies, is set to receive funding for: “Israel Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship.”  This funding will support a postdoctoral teaching fellow for three (3) academic years starting in fall 2024. Regarding the importance of this funding, Turner said, “Curricula across academic units at George Mason contain very little material about the modern State of Israel, a significant gap given the importance of the nation and region to contemporary politics and conflict. This grant will enable RELI to address this gap and add content on this important subject.” Turner will receive $248,460 from Israel ...

With large language models that take notes during patient visits and algorithms that identify disease, artificial intelligence has begun to prove its worth as an assistant for physicians. But a new study from Stanford Medicine shows the potential of AI as a facilitator — one that helps doctors and nurses connect to achieve more efficient, effective patient care. The study, which published in JAMA Internal Medicine last month, describes an AI-based model in use at Stanford Hospital that ...

Pollinators are declining rapidly, largely due to land conversion and intensification of agriculture. To mitigate their crisis, low-disturbance habitats, such as sown wildflower plantings (commonly known forms are wildflower strips at the edges of arable fields), could promote pollinators by restoration of their resources (food, sheltering and nesting habitats). However, comprehensive knowledge is lacking on how landscape context, spatial configuration and age of wildflower plantings, seasonality and flower composition affect pollinator communities, especially from East-Central Europe. To understand these effects, researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, established ...

In a new study, a Johns Hopkins Medicine-led research team reports that social stress during adolescence in female mice later results in prolonged elevation of the hormone cortisol after they give birth. The researchers say this corresponds to the equivalent hormonal changes in postpartum women who were exposed to adverse early life experiences — suggesting that early life stress may underlie a pathophysiological exacerbation of postpartum depression (PPD).  The team’s findings, first published online Apr. 11, 2024, in Nature Mental Health, also suggest that current drug ...

LAWRENCE —  A book co-edited by a University of Kansas scholar that collects the experiences and know-how of younger Indigenous archaeologists, titled “Indigenizing Archaeology: Putting Theory into Practice,” is newly published by the University Press of Florida.   Carlton Shield Chief Gover, acting assistant professor of anthropology and acting assistant curator of archaeology at KU, conceived and co-edited the new volume. Its chapters include lessons and case studies from the discipline.  “This is the first book to our knowledge completely comprised of Indigenous scholars in ...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (April 16, 2024) — A new study from Van Andel Institute scientists offers a first look into the complex molecular changes that occur in brain cells with Lewy bodies, which are key pathological hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease and some dementias. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, reveal that brain cells with Lewy bodies exhibit a specific gene expression pattern akin to a disease-related fingerprint. “We’ve long known that Lewy bodies play a role in Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases but there are still many ...

Most people do not give the U.S. electric grid a second thought — we flip a switch and the lights come on. Behind the scenes are thousands of power plants and utilities linked by millions of miles of transmission lines. And to make raw electricity useful, grid transformers convert high voltage to lower voltage that millions of households can plug into.  Transformers are aging and approaching an average of being 30 to 40 years old. Plus, they face more stress than ever before brought on by factors such as renewable energy and by extreme weather events such as hurricanes, heat waves, and winter storms.  Case in point — the 2021 event in Texas that ...

CORVALLIS, Oregon – An Oregon State University researcher who made color history in 2009 with a vivid blue pigment has developed durable, reddish magentas inspired by lunar mineralogy and ancient Egyptian chemistry. Mas Subramanian, distinguished professor of chemistry, and collaborators at OSU report the findings of the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, in the journal Chemistry of Materials. The new pigments, which could be used as energy-efficient coatings for vehicles and buildings, are based on divalent chromium, Cr2+,  and are ...

Toronto, ON - A new research study out of the University of Toronto sheds light on the intricate relationship between conformity to masculine gender norms and muscle dysmorphia symptomatology among a diverse sample of Canadian adolescents and young adults. The study entitled "Exploring the Association Between Conformity to Masculine Gender Norms and Muscle Dysmorphia Symptomatology in a Gender-Diverse Canadian Population" was recently published in the journal Sex Roles. Muscle dysmorphia, characterized ...