A team of researchers has uncovered alarming trends in the first range-wide genetic study of an endangered bee species. The study, led by Colorado State University and published in the Journal of Insect Science, will inform conservation and recovery efforts for the rusty-patched bumblebee – a species that was once common in the United States but has declined from about 90% of its historic range.  The rusty-patched bumblebee was the first bee species to be federally listed as endangered in 2017 through the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Its numbers dropped rapidly starting in the late 1990s, likely due to a combination of pesticides, ...

ST. LOUIS, MO., April 4, 2024 — Acidic soil caused by changing climate patterns threatens agriculture sustainability across the globe. But the problem goes far beyond rising temperatures. One major cause for concern is more acidic soil, a product of increasing rainfall. Acidic soils with low pH are widespread globally and common in tropical and sub-tropical regions, where food security is a serious challenge. Climate change has exacerbated the problem. Acidic soil can result in aluminum toxicity, putting further stress on global agriculture. A new collaborative research team from the US and Brazil received a $2 ...

NEW YORK – April 4, 2024 – The Cardiovascular Research Foundation® (CRF®) is excited to introduce New York Valves: The Structural Heart Summit, the expanded next iteration of our renowned annual Transcatheter Valve Therapy (TVT®) conference. Taking place June 5-7, 2024, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, North in New York City, the new summit will be a world-class educational experience in the field of structural heart interventions. “New York Valves 2024 signifies an important milestone for our organization,” said Juan F. Granada, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of CRF® and New York ...

Mixing livestock and crops, integrating flower strips and trees, water and soil conservation and much more: Massive new global study led by the University of Copenhagen and University of Hohenheim, has examined the effects of diversified agriculture. The conclusion is abundantly clear – positive effects increase with every measure, while negative effects are hard to find. Laura Vang Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen can finally wipe the sweat from her brow. For the last four years, she has served as the link between 58 researchers on five continents and as lead author of a major agricultural study which gathered ...

In 1928, Indian physicist Sir C. V. Raman and his colleague K. S. Krishnan discovered that when light interacts with matter, parts of the scattered light undergo changes in energy due to interaction with molecular vibrations, resulting in what is known as Raman scattering. The discovery laid the foundation for Raman spectroscopy, a technique that takes advantage of these energy changes to create a unique fingerprint of the molecular structure of the material. Currently, dispersive Raman spectroscopy ...

Argininosuccinate lyase deficiency (ASLD), also known as argininosuccinic aciduria, is a disease that has been enriched in the Finnish genetic heritage. In this severe metabolic disease, the body does not process proteins normally, instead resulting in a very dangerous accumulation of argininosuccinic acid and ammonia. Excess ammonia causes disturbances of consciousness, coma and even death. In Finland, infants are screened for ASLD to determine the disease risk before symptoms develop. The treatment is an extremely ...

New York (April 4, 2024) — Today, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) and the AGS Health in Aging Foundation (HiAF) announced that the 2024 Thomas and Catherine Yoshikawa Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in Clinical Investigation will be awarded to C. Barrett Bowling, MD, MSPH, Associate Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at Duke University School of Medicine. The award will be presented at the AGS 2024 Virtual Annual Scientific Meeting (#AGS24), May 9-11 (pre-conference days May 7 & 8).  At the conference, Dr. Bowling will deliver a lecture on “Geriatricizing” Chronic Disease Research: A Geriatrician’s ...

During archaeological excavations in the Schöningen open-cast coal mine in 1994, the discovery of the oldest, remarkably well-preserved hunting weapons known to humanity caused an international sensation. Spears and a double-pointed throwing stick were found lying between animal bones about ten meters below the surface in deposits at a former lakeshore. In the years that followed, extensive excavations have gradually yielded numerous wooden objects from a layer dating from the end of a warm interglacial period 300,000 years ago. The findings suggested a hunting ground on the lakeshore. An interdisciplinary ...

Bacterial proteins often play a successful hide and seek game with the body’s immune system, making it difficult to combat the bacteria that cause diseases like staph infections.   Now, biomolecular engineer Aditya Kunjapur and colleagues have come up with a strategy to create bacteria that build and incorporate a key amino acid into their own proteins, which makes the proteins more “visible” to the immune system.   For this work toward building a better platform for possible future bacterial vaccines, Kunjapur is the winner of the 2024 BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation. ...

A flexible electronic fiber that utilizes the human body as part of the circuit enables textile-based electronics without the need for batteries or chips, researchers report. According to the authors, the approach is well-suited for scalable manufacture of comfortable fiber-based electronics for a wide range of applications, including “smart” clothing. Textile electronic systems are designed to equip textile or fiber assemblies with electronic functions for sensing, computation, display, or communication. They create vast opportunities ranging from physiological monitoring to powering ...

In this Policy Forum, Michael Cohen and colleagues highlight the unique risks presented by a particular class of artificial intelligence (AI) systems: reinforcement learning (RL) agents that plan more effectively than humans over long horizons. “Giving [such] an advanced AI system the objective to maximize its reward and, at some point, withholding reward from it, strongly incentivizes the AI system to take humans out of the loop,” write Cohen and colleagues. This incentive also arises for long-term planning agents (LTPAs) more generally, say the authors, and in ways empirical testing is unlikely to cover. It is thus critical to address extinction risk from these ...

In asthma, the tightening of muscles around the bronchi causes damage to the airway by squeezing and destroying epithelial cells, which promotes the airway inflammation and mucus production often associated with an asthma attack, researchers report. The findings suggest that preventing the mechanical damage caused by an asthma attack, rather than treating only its downstream symptoms, could pave the way for therapies that stop the whole asthma inflammatory cycle. Asthma is a common airway disorder affecting more than 300 million people worldwide. Although it is primarily considered an inflammatory disease, a diagnostic feature of asthma is mechanical bronchoconstriction – the ...

Promoting livestock biodiversity and soil conservation strategies provides both social and environmental benefits, according to a new study. The findings suggest that well-designed polices aimed at incentivizing the adoption of multiple diversification strategies could mitigate simplified agriculture’s negative environmental, health, and social impacts. “Our interdisciplinary analysis spanning a wide array of regions provides convincing evidence that agricultural diversification is a promising win-win strategy for providing social and environmental benefits,” write the authors. Agricultural lands tend to be simplified ecosystems designed ...

After two decades in the United States, Martin Hetzer returned home to Austria in 2023 to become the 2nd President of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). A year into his new role, the molecular biologist remains engaged in the realm of aging research. Hetzer is fascinated by the biological puzzles surrounding the aging processes in organs like the brain, heart, and pancreas. Most cells comprising these organs are not renewed throughout a human’s entire life span. Nerve cells (neurons) in the human brain, for instance, can be as old as the organism, even ...

Scientists at King’s College London have discovered a new cause for asthma that sparks hope for treatment that could prevent the life-threatening disease. Most current asthma treatments stem from the idea that it is an inflammatory disease. Yet, the life-threatening feature of asthma is the attack or the constriction of airways, making breathing difficult. The new study, published today in Science, shows for the first time that many features of an asthma attack—inflammation, mucus secretion, and damage to the airway barrier that ...

 It is possible to leave most of the lymph nodes in the armpit, even if one or two of them have metastases larger than two millimetres? This is shown in a trial enrolling women from five countries, led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The results open up for gentler surgery for patients with breast cancer.  Breast cancer can spread to the lymph nodes in the armpit. However, tumours found only in the breast and armpit lymph nodes are considered a localized disease, with the goal of curing the patient.  A challenging question for breast cancer surgeons revolves around what should ...

Music holds an important place in human culture, and we’ve all felt the swell of emotion that music can inspire unlike almost anything else. But what is it exactly about music that can bring on such intense sensations in our minds and bodies? A new study reported in the journal iScience on April 4 has insight from studies that systematically examine the way perception of unique musical chords elicits specific bodily sensations and emotions. “This study reveals the intricate interplay between musical uncertainty, prediction ...

Clinicians often find limited success in treating patients with traumatic brain injury, a condition long linked to contact sports and military services. A new study, published April 4 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, may offer new clues to better solutions. Scientists found a protein, TDP-43, that appears to drive nerve damage right after injury. Moreover, blocking a certain cell surface protein can correct faulty TDP-43 and curb nerve death in mouse and human cells. “There’s really nothing out there that can prevent the injury ...

Lack of respectful maternity care in the U.S. culminating in mistreatment in childbirth is a regular occurrence, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Yet until now experiences of this mistreatment had not been widely documented in the United States.  The findings are published in JAMA Network Open. To estimate the prevalence of mistreatment by care providers in childbirth, the researchers collected survey data from a representative sample of people who had a live birth in 2020 ...

An astrophysicist from The University of Texas at Dallas and his colleagues from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration are at the forefront of an ambitious experiment to study the expansion of the universe and its acceleration. Dr. Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) at UT Dallas, is a member of the DESI collaboration, an international group of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world engaged in a multiyear experiment to increase understanding of the ...

Music which surprises us can be felt in the heart, while music which matches our expectations can bring feelings of calmness and satisfaction, according to a new study. Researchers played eight short tunes made up of just four chords each to over 500 participants. Each tune had a varied mix of surprising and unsurprising, and certain and uncertain chord progressions. When asked to report how the tunes made them feel and where they were affected, participants’ answers showed that fluctuations in predictions about chord sequences were felt in specific parts of the body, notably the heart and abdomen. Researchers also ...

A nerve-stimulation treatment for obstructive sleep apnea that originally was approved only for people with body mass indexes (BMIs) in the healthy range recently was extended to patients with BMIs up to 40, a weight range generally described as severely obese. A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9. The expanded eligibility criteria for the treatment provide more sleep apnea patients with access to the increasingly popular therapy, known as hypoglossal nerve stimulation. However, new research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis indicates that the likelihood of successful nerve-stimulation treatment ...

About The Study: Among 7,998 adults hospitalized during the 16 months before the first respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine recommendations, RSV disease was less common but similar in severity compared with COVID-19 or influenza disease among unvaccinated patients and more severe than COVID-19 or influenza disease among vaccinated patients for the most serious outcomes of invasive mechanical ventilation or death.  Authors: Diya Surie, M.D., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in ...

About The Study: In this randomized crossover clinical trial with 62 participants, non-hospitalized patients with post-COVID condition (PCC) generally tolerated exercise with preserved cardiovascular function but showed lower aerobic capacity and less muscle strength than the control group. They also showed signs of postural orthostatic tachycardia and myopathy. The findings suggest cautious exercise adoption could be recommended to prevent further skeletal muscle deconditioning and health impairment in patients with PCC.  Authors: Andrea Tryfonos, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is the corresponding author.  To ...

People suffering from post-COVID have been discouraged from exercising because early observations  suggested it could be harmful. In a study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers from Karolinska Institutet show that post-covid does not mean that exercise must be strictly avoided.  People affected by post-COVID often experience symptoms such as extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, high resting heart rate, and muscle weakness. Symptoms are often exacerbated by exertion.  “The World Health Organization (WHO) and other major bodies have said that people with post-covid ...