WASHINGTON (April 11, 2024) – Vosoritide’s first global phase 2 study showed an average increased growth rate of 1.8 cm per year in children with hypochondroplasia, a genetic cause of short stature in children, according to researchers from Children’s National Hospital. “This is the first medicine that has been developed to specifically target the pathway involved in hypochondroplasia,” says Andrew Dauber, M.D., chief of Endocrinology at Children’s National. “These findings will help inform future studies of vosoritide for addressing growth disorders.”  This clinical trial ...

Inside the brains of people with psychosis, two key systems are malfunctioning: a "filter" that directs attention toward important external events and internal thoughts, and a "predictor" composed of pathways that anticipate rewards. Dysfunction of these systems makes it difficult to know what’s real, manifesting as hallucinations and delusions. The findings come from a Stanford Medicine-led study, publishing April 11 in Molecular Psychiatry, that used brain scan data from children, teens and young adults with psychosis. The results confirm ...

Megan Reiter, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to investigate the influence of neighboring stars on the formation of planets. The research funded by Reiter’s five-year, $951,446 NSF grant will shed light on a phenomenon that could significantly impact our understanding of how planets are born. “By exploring the intricate interplay between stars, planets and their environments, we hope to clarify the key forces that shape planet formation,” Reiter said. Observations show planets form in the ...

Join the International Society of Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) to celebrate Earth Day on 22 April 2024 by diving into the science of conservation, where the potential of stem cells is harnessed to foster a more sustainable and biodiverse future. This enlightening webinar co-hosted by Ashlee Hutchinson and Jun Wu will spotlight the revolutionary intersection of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), embryo models and genome engineering technologies with the noble cause of species preservation. As our planet faces unprecedented biodiversity loss, this program will unveil how cutting-edge scientific advancements offer a lifeline for endangered species, ...

NORMAN, OKLA. – Hanping Ding, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the Department of Energy through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to further research in clean hydrogen production. The funding is part of a $750 million effort in President Biden’s Investing in American agenda. The money from the Department of Energy will go to 52 projects across 24 states to position the United States as a global leader in the clean hydrogen industry. The combined outcomes of the 52 projects should allow the ...

Professor dr. Linda Amaral-Zettler, Research Leader at NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research and the Chair in Marine Microbiology at the University of Amsterdam has been awarded a prestigious Advanced ERC-grant by the European Commission today. Amaral-Zettler receives almost 3,5 million euros for her research into biodegradation in the marine environment. “Biodegradable sounds really nice”, she admits. “But before we repeat the mistakes we’ve made with fossil-fuel-based plastics back in the last millenium, we really want to understand how these materials interact with marine life and how long they last in the environment.” “Biodegradable ...

We depend on our cells being able to divide and multiply, whether it’s to replace sunburnt skin or replenish our blood supply and recover from injury. Chromosomes, which carry all of our genetic instructions, must be copied in a complete way during cell division. Telomeres, which cap the ends of chromosomes, play a critical role in this cell-renewal process—with a direct bearing on health and disease. The enzyme telomerase plays a key role in maintaining the length of telomeres as chromosomes replicate during ...

Modern biology textbooks assert that only bacteria can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a form that is usable for life. Plants that fix nitrogen, such as legumes, do so by harboring symbiotic bacteria in root nodules. But a recent discovery upends that rule.  In two recent papers, an international team of scientists describe the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell. The organelle is the fourth example in history of primary endosymbiosis — the process by which a prokaryotic cell is engulfed by a eukaryotic cell and evolves beyond symbiosis into an organelle. “It’s very rare that organelles ...

Reston, VA—PET/MRI can improve diagnostic accuracy for prostate cancer patients and help avoid unnecessary biopsies, according to new research published in the April issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. By applying the PRIMARY scoring system to PET/MRI results, researchers found that more than 80 percent of unnecessary biopsies could be avoided at the expense of missing one in eight clinically significant prostate cancer cases. The Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) is a five-point ...

The concept of “One Health” – which emphasizes the relationship between human, animal, plant and environmental health – has been gaining ground in scientific discussions in recent years. Brazilian and North American researchers developing research using this approach presented their work on Tuesday (April 9th), in Chicago (United States), during FAPESP Week Illinois. One of the panelists was Eduardo Esteban Bustamante, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. He talked about behavioral interventions that have been tested to promote physical activity and healthy eating – practices that, according to the researcher, ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst working on two different problems—how to quickly detect damaged buildings in crisis zones and how to accurately estimate the size of bird flocks—recently announced an AI framework that can do both. The framework, called DISCount, blends the speed and massive data-crunching power of artificial intelligence with the reliability of human analysis to quickly deliver reliable estimates that can quickly pinpoint and count specific features from very large collections ...

PRESS RELEASE Chicago, IL and Philadelphia, PA, USA, April 11, 2024: The Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) and The GOG Foundation, Inc. (GOG-F) Launch BRIDGES 2.0 Research Initiative with support from the Foundation for Women’s Cancer (FWC).  After a successful inaugural year, the SGO and the GOG-F join forces to collaborate, and proudly announce the launch of an expanded two-year clinical trial education program supported by the FWC.  This important career and clinical trial development initiative aims to cultivate the next generation of investigators in gynecologic oncology and will focus on clinical and translational research ...

It’s challenging to sustain a pregnancy when food is short, or conditions are otherwise tough. That’s why many mammalian embryos can postpone their growth to get through periods of environmental stress and then re-enter development when conditions improve. This stalling of development is known as embryonic diapause, and understanding the mechanisms behind it might help improve infertility treatments, such as embryo freezing. Now, researchers at the Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China, have discovered how nutrient depletion is sensed by embryos growing in hungry mouse mums to induce diapause. ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Most disease-causing bacteria are known for their speed: In mere minutes, they can double their population, quickly making a person sick. But just as dangerous as this rapid growth can be a bacterium’s resting state, which helps the pathogen evade antibiotics and contributes to severe chronic infections in the lungs and blood, within wounds, and on the surfaces of medical devices. Now, Scripps Research scientists have discovered how long chains of molecules called polyphosphates (polyP) are needed for bacteria to slow down movements within cells and let them enter this resting ...

SAN ANTONIO, April 10, 2024 – The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) has appointed Anthony Francis, a renowned leader in translating research to market opportunity, as associate vice president for innovation and development in the Office of the Vice President for Research. He joins the institution from the University of California San Francisco, where he was executive director of the Office of Technology Management and Advancement. Francis is credited with transforming ...

Researchers from the International Blast Injury Research Network at the University of Southampton conducted a survey to understand how the mental health of displaced Ukrainians has been affected by the ongoing war. Their findings, published in PLOS Global Public Health, describe high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and generalized anxiety among both refugees and people displaced within Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, at least 13 million people have been displaced from their homes. Both exposure ...

Image-based artificial intelligence spots parasitic worm infections in children's stool samples, particularly light intensity infections that may be missed by manual microscopy. ##### Article URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0012041 Article Title: Diagnosis of soil-transmitted helminth infections with digital mobile microscopy and artificial intelligence in a resource-limited setting Author Countries: Finland, Kenya, Sweden Funding: This research was financially supported by The Erling-Persson Foundation (grant number 2021 0110) JL, Vetenskapsrådet (grant number 2021-04811) JL, Finska Läkaresällskapet ...

What if changes in a person’s stress levels could be detected while they sleep using wearable devices? A new study by University of Vermont researchers published today in PLOS Digital Health is the first to find changes in perceived stress levels reflected in sleep data—an important step towards identifying biomarkers that may help flag individuals in need of support.  Given how critical sleep is to physical and mental health, the research team suspected signals might exist in sleep data, says Laura Bloomfield, a research assistant professor of mathematics and statistics and lead author of the study. “Changes in stress are visible.” When parsing baseline sleep ...

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate. “When doing background reading, ...

Shedding light on why some massive stars have magnetic fields even though these stars’ interiors layers don’t undergo convection, researchers report observational evidence that magnetic fields form in some such stars through stellar mergers. The magnetic fields of low-mass stars, like the Sun, are produced by a dynamo generated in the convective layers of the star’s interior. Massive stars – those 8 or more solar masses at formation – do not have the convective interiors required to sustain magnetic fields in ...

Thin oil films absorbed onto the surface of water droplets lead to anomalously stable, surfactant-free oil and water mixtures, according to a new study. The findings demonstrate a mechanism for stabilizing water droplets in a water-oil emulsification without the need for a surfactant, which could have important technological applications, including the creation of very pure and controlled materials. Oil and water cannot form homogenous mixtures. Instead, when combined, droplets of one fluid will disperse inside the other, forming ...

New US federal legislation sets aside nearly $14 billion for 574 federally recognized indigenous nations and villages, which can be used to support tribal climate responsiveness and energy sovereignty. In a Policy Forum, Kimberly Yazzie and colleagues present a roadmap for designing, implementing, and funding projects and people to accelerate the renewable energy transition while also benefiting the indigenous entities involved. According to the authors, this opportunity positions indigenous communities to develop their economies and energy projects ...

A nitrogen-fixing bacterial endosymbiont of marine algae is evolving into a nitrogen-fixing organelle, or nitroplast, according to a new study, thereby expanding a function that was thought to be exclusively carried out by prokaryotic cells to eukaryotes. Eukaryotic cells are remarkably complex and contain various organelles, which are specialized structures within a living cell that have specific biological functions. Two organelles, mitochondria and chloroplasts, play a key role in energy metabolism and ...

Picture in your mind a traditional “landline” telephone with a coiled cord connecting the handset to the phone. The coiled telephone cord and the DNA double helix that stores the genetic material in every cell in the body have one thing in common; they both supercoil, or coil about themselves, and tangle in ways that can be difficult to undo. In the case of DNA, if this overwinding is not dealt with, essential processes such as copying DNA and cell division grind to a halt. Fortunately, cells have an ingenious solution to carefully regulate DNA supercoiling. In this study published in the journal Science, researchers ...

Aya Takeoka at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS) in Japan and colleagues have discovered the neural circuitry in the spinal cord that allows brain-independent motor learning. Published in Science on April 11, the study found two critical groups of spinal cord neurons, one necessary for new adaptive learning, and another for recalling adaptations once they have been learned. The findings could help scientists develop ways to assist motor recovery after spinal cord injury. Scientists have known for some time that motor output from the spinal cord can be adjusted through practice ...