To find a fast, efficient way to clear harmful chemicals along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, researchers are turning to something already familiar with the task – several species of the aquatic grasses and rice that feel very much at home in murky coastal waters. The research team led by University of Houston’s Venkatesh Balan, associate professor of biotechnology in the Cullen College of Engineering’s Division of Technology, studies the abilities of these water-loving flora to uptake concentrations ...

HOUSTON – (April 13, 2023) – Body image can have a significant impact on a person’s life, especially in their youth. For those suffering from rib flaring associated with congenital deformations of the chest wall that cause it to jut out or cave in, a team of Rice University engineering students has come up with a potential solution. Pectus carinatum and pectus excavatum are conditions in which a person is born with their breastbone protruding outward or sunken inward, respectively. There ...

Public and private organizations around the world are developing fusion energy devices that could serve as models for fusion power plants. Scientists are striving to duplicate the fusion power that drives the sun and stars as a source of carbon-free energy to generate electricity without contributing to climate change. While fusion plants could help meet global energy demands without emitting greenhouse gases and producing long-lived radioactive waste, they could also have risks — many of which were discussed at a two-day workshop hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ...

In search of novel tactics to accommodate a larger student body and fulfill workforce demands, nursing schools are developing new approaches to optimize learning, engage learners, and provide methods to ensure competency in future nursing graduates. A recent study by Bethany Cieslowski, associate professor of Nursing, and colleagues found that immersive virtual reality (VR) training has been shown to be as effective as inpatient training for students learning to provide care for acute care pediatric ...

Irvine, Calif., April 13, 2023 — Scientists from the University of California, Irvine, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have made a significant contribution to the field of pancreatic cancer research. Their new study presents several crucial themes in the biology of pancreatic cancer that can serve as hallmarks for pancreatic cancer therapy. These themes include genomic alterations, metabolism, the tumor microenvironment, immunotherapy and innovative clinical trial design. The study appears in the journal Cell. (Link to study: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00142-3) Pancreatic ...

Scientists at four leading Illinois research institutions, three in the Chicago region, are forming a new collaboration to study the effects of drought on urban trees and develop more effective drought response strategies nationwide through a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The project is being led by researchers at The Morton Arboretum in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago and the Illinois State Water Survey at the Prairie Research ...

Ann Arbor, April 13, 2023 – Reducing caloric intake from added sugars is a Leading Health Indicator in Healthy People 2030, a national public health initiative led by the US Department of Health and Human Services that sets data-driven national objectives to improve health and wellbeing over the next decade. Although many Americans consume too much sugar, investigators found that only a modest reduction in added sugars intake is needed to reach a population mean of 11.5% of calories from added sugars by 2030. Prioritizing reducing added sugars intake among people not meeting recommendations could help those most at risk for chronic disease related to added sugars consumption. They report ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The current COVID-19 vaccines are designed to trigger an antibody response to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is vulnerable to mutations that could make the vaccine less effective over time. Focusing on the T-cell instead, Penn State researchers partnered with Evaxion Biotech on a study that was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of an artificial intelligence-generated vaccine in a live viral challenge model. Such a vaccine may provide long-lasting immunity against future emerging variants and could be used as a model for other seasonal viral diseases ...

HOUSTON – (April 13, 2023) – Need a little spring — or buzz — in your step? A wearable electrical-stimulation and vibration-therapy system designed by Rice University engineering students might be just what the doctor ordered for people experiencing foot pain and balance loss due to diabetic neuropathy. Rice engineering students in the StimuSock team — Abby Dowse, Yannie Guo, Andrei Mitrofan, Sarah Park and Kelly Xu — designed a sock with a smart insole that can deliver both transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) and vibration therapy that block pain signals to the brain and ...

Social media connects people and amplifies different aspects of humanity in good and bad ways. But the effects of social media appear neither universally good nor bad, but rather present an oscillating, dynamic system that can be divisive but also uniting, a new University of California, Davis, study suggests. Department of Communication researchers said their findings both in an observational study and simulation speak to the ongoing debate about social media’s contributions to political polarization, misinformation and echo chambers. To conduct their research, ...

Glenview, Illinois – Published monthly, the journal CHEST® features peer-reviewed, cutting-edge original research in chest medicine: Pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine and related disciplines. Journal topics include asthma, chest infections, COPD, critical care, diffuse lung disease, education and clinical practice, pulmonary vascular disease, sleep, thoracic oncology and the humanities. The April issue of the CHEST journal contains 50 articles, including clinically relevant research, reviews, case series, commentary and more. ...

A new clinical RNA sequencing platform at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) is helping to facilitate research into rare genetic conditions and carve a path for Precision Child Health, a movement at SickKids to deliver individualized care for every patient. RNA sequencing provides a different way of looking at the genes, by looking at how the body interprets the genetic code rather than looking directly at the genetic code itself. While DNA-based tests like genome sequencing take a picture of a person’s genetic code, scientists can better understand how the DNA is being read by also looking at RNA, which carries instructions for making ...

(CHAPEL HILL, N.C., April 13, 2023) New research led by the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health shows that bivalent COVID-19 boosters are still providing effective protection from hospitalization and death, even against the most recent omicron subvariants. Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers found that the bivalent boosters were 67% effective in preventing hospitalization and death in those who had been previously vaccinated or boosted. Effectiveness waned to 48% after four weeks, 44% after 10 weeks and 38% after 20 weeks. Though ...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) or heart diseases are still the leading cause of death globally. Fortunately, doctors are now equipped with more advanced and sophisticated tools that help them diagnose CVDs. A prominent example is intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), which enables cardiologists to obtain images of the inside of blood vessels using a thin ultrasound probe. These images can then be used to assess problems such as the thickening of arteries caused by fat or plaque buildup. While IVUS is undoubtedly a powerful ...

Hepatitis C and hepatitis B viruses both attack the liver, eventually causing deadly cirrhosis or cancer. But while antivirals can cure 95 percent of HCV infections, its cousin HBV has long eluded effective therapeutics. As a result, nearly 1 million people die from HBV every year. Now researchers from the lab of Rockefeller’s Charles M. Rice—who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering novel methods to grow and study HCV—have developed an approach for studying HBV in the lab that ...

Most cells evolve slowly, accumulating incremental changes that better suit their environments. Immune cells, because they must adapt rapidly to counter new threats, evolve much more quickly. Part of that, UCLA physicists now report, rests on their ability to forcibly pull antigens off other cells’ surfaces and “study” them. By using this type of mechanical force, the immune system’s B cells, which create antibodies that fight off harmful pathogens like viruses, bacteria and parasites by targeting their ...

Researchers have created the largest atlas of post-zygotic genome mutations in healthy human tissue ever assembled — a scientific advancement that could unlock new avenues for diagnosing and treating genetic disease. It is the largest ever in terms of the combined number of tissues and number of donors sampled. The study, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, published today in the journal Science. The development points the way toward understanding the genetic underpinnings of disease associated with cancer as well as innumerable conditions caused by cellular malfunction, including ...

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this “brain-to-brain synchrony,” shows a new study by a team of psychology and education researchers. The findings, which appear in the journal Psychological Science, offer new insights into the learning process.  “This is the first study to show that the extent to which students’ and teachers’ brainwaves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information from class,” says lead author Ido Davidesco, an assistant professor at the ...

Using first-of-their-kind observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team looked more than 13 billion years into the past to discover a unique, minuscule galaxy that generated new stars at an extremely high rate for its size. The galaxy is one of the smallest ever discovered at this distance—around 500 million years after the Big Bang—and could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the Universe came into existence. The paper is published in Science, one of the world's top peer-reviewed academic journals. The University of Minnesota researchers were one of the first teams to study ...

“Don’t poke the bear”, they said. But that’s exactly what a team of scientists have been doing, to discover the secrets of blood clotting. Hibernating bears, paralysed humans, and pigs kept in small enclosures all avoid dangerous blood clots, despite being immobile for extremely long periods. Research from the University of Reading, with partners in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden, shows that reduction of a key protein prevents the formation of blood clots in all three mammal species when they ...

(SAN ANTONIO) April 13, 2023 -  An international research team led by UTSA Associate Professor of Astrophysics Thayne Currie has made a breakthrough in accelerating the search for new planets.  In a paper slated for publication April 14 in Science, Currie reports the first exoplanet jointly discovered through direct imaging and precision astrometry, a new indirect method that identifies a planet by measuring the position of the star it orbits. Data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawai`i and space telescopes from the European Space Agency (ESA) were integral to the team’s discovery. An ...

Embargoed: Not for Release Until 19:00 (7.00 pm) British Summer Time, Thursday, 13 April 2023 Shift to ‘flash droughts’ as climate warms ‘Flash droughts’ have become more frequent due to human-caused climate change and this trend is predicted to accelerate in a warmer future, according to research published today [13 April 2023] involving the University of Southampton. The research published in Science shows that flash droughts, which start and develop rapidly, are becoming ‘the new normal’ for droughts, making forecasting and preparing for their impact more difficult. Flash ...

First Nations populations at greater risk of severe flu, research finds Responsible for over 5 million infections and 100,000 deaths every year, influenza remains one of the most challenging public health issues for populations globally, particularly First Nations communities.  New research from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) has found that First Nations populations around the world are significantly more likely to be hospitalised and die from influenza compared to non-Indigenous populations.  Researchers from the Doherty ...

A research group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have developed a unique material, based on nanofillers embedded in a hydrogel, that can channel mechanical energy in one direction but not the other, acting in a “nonreciprocal” way. With this composite material--which can be constructed at various sizes--the team was able to use vibrational up-and-down movements to make liquid droplets rise within a material against gravity. Using this material could thus make it possible to make use of random vibrations and move matter in a preferred direction. Channeling energy in a preferred direction is an ...

They’ve been called “dream” plastics: polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs. Already the basis of a fledgling industry, they’re a class of polymers naturally created by living microorganisms, or synthetically produced from biorenewable feedstocks. They’re biodegradable in the ambient environment, including oceans and soil. But there’s a reason PHAs haven’t taken off as a sustainable, environmentally benign alternative to traditional plastics. Crystalline PHAs are brittle, so not as durable and convenient as conventional plastics. They cannot easily be melt-processed and recycled, making them expensive to produce. Colorado State ...