Philadelphia, August 15, 2023—In a development that could accelerate the discovery of new diagnostics and treatments, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a versatile and low-cost technology for targeted sequencing of full-length RNA molecules. The technology, called TEQUILA-seq, is highly cost-effective compared to commercially available solutions for targeted RNA sequencing and can be adapted for different research and clinical purposes. The details were described in a paper in Nature Communications. On the journey ...

Physician-scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine recently conducted a large-scale analysis to assess the impact of a newly introduced equation used to evaluate one’s heart failure risk. The study, published in the Journal of Cardiac Failure, showed that the new and old kidney function equations had comparable values in predicting the risk of heart failure.  Naman Shetty, M.D., a clinical research fellow in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease and ...

BY SUHTLING WONG | AUGUST 15, 2023  A College of Medicine researcher is developing a new antibiotic related to penicillin to treat tuberculosis (TB) and related lung infections. Dr. Kyle Rohde, an infectious disease expert, recently received a $3.4 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to create new antibiotics that target mycobacterial infections caused by pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium abscessus.  TB infected 11 million people in 2021, ranking it 13th as the leading cause of ...

A University of Texas at Arlington researcher is working on the prototype of a golf swing training system that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with portability and can be used at home or on the driving range. Nicholas Gans, a UT Arlington principal research scientist and division head for the UT Arlington Research Institute (UTARI), leads the project, which is funded by a nearly $53,000 grant from the University and Fort Worth-based IGSC.AI LLC. Gans’ initial work is considered a preliminary proof of concept. “We’ll use a camera-based ...

New Cleveland Clinic research shows how mosquito-transmitted viruses – like Zika, West Nile, Yellow Fever and dengue viruses – hijack host cells to promote their own replication and infection. Published in Cell Host and Microbe, a recent study from the laboratory of Michaela Gack, Ph.D., Scientific Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida Research & Innovation Center, opens the door to developing new therapeutics for flaviviruses, a class of viruses for which either no or very limited treatments currently exist. This is Dr. Gack’s first research study funded by a prestigious National ...

New York, August 10, 2023 – Researchers at Applied Biological Laboratories Inc. discovered how natural bioactive molecules can effectively relieve cold and flu symptoms by protecting the mucosal barrier function and reducing inflammation during these infections. Together, they call these molecules, which include lysozyme and lactoferrin, the “Mucosal Immune Complex.” The research, led by Nazlie Sadeghi-Latefi, PhD, highlights the importance of supporting mucosal barrier immunity to prevent and treat colds and flu. This work will be presented at the American Chemical Society Fall 2023 Meeting on August 15, 2023. Mucosal ...

One of the most popular strategies to increase energy efficiency and reduce pollution in homes — which are responsible for approximately 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — is the transitioning from gas to electric stoves. An international team of researchers investigated the health and environmental impacts of a program in Ecuador that put induction stoves in 750,000 households. In the Aug. 15, 2023 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that both greenhouse gas emissions ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Aug. 15, 2023 — A potentially game-changing theoretical approach to quantum computing hardware avoids much of the problematic complexity found in current quantum computers. The strategy implements an algorithm in natural quantum interactions to process a variety of real-world problems faster than classical computers or conventional gate-based quantum computers can. “Our finding eliminates many challenging requirements for quantum hardware,” said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is coauthor of a paper on the approach in the journal Physical Review A. “Natural systems, such as the electronic ...

East Hanover, NJ – August 15, 2023 –  "Understanding Spinal Cord Injury: A Course for Personal Care Assistants" a new interactive online course designed to enhance the training of personal care assistants (PCAs) for individuals with spinal cord injury, was presented today at the Paralyzed Veterans of America Healthcare (PVA) Summit + Expo at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld Hotel in Orlando, FL, by Jeanne Zanca, MPT, PhD, FACRM, assistant director of the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research at Kessler Foundation, and chair of the Foundation’s Institutional Review ...

Researchers led by Ludovic Bellier at the University of California, Berkeley, US, demonstrate that recognizable versions of classic Pink Floyd rock music can be reconstructed from brain activity that was recorded while patients listened to the song. Published August 15th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study used nonlinear modeling to decode brain activity and reconstruct the song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1”. Encoding models revealed a new cortical subregion in the temporal lobe that underlies rhythm perception, which could be exploited ...

As the chords of Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” filled the surgery suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients undergoing epilepsy surgery. The goal? To capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if they could reconstruct what the patient was hearing. More than a decade later, after detailed analysis of data from 29 such ...

 Diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is still a daunting challenge because of the degree of complexity involved, requiring highly specialized professionals. Autism is a multifactorial neurodevelopment disorder with widely varying symptoms. In the United States, about 1 in 36 children have been diagnosed with ASD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and yet there are no biochemical markers to identify it with precision. A quantitative diagnostic method is proposed by Brazilian researchers in an article published in ...

BOSTON - Researchers have developed a new algorithm for recovering the 3D refractive index distribution of biological samples that exhibit multiple types of light scattering. The algorithm helps optimize a new imaging approach called intensity diffraction tomography (IDT). Jiabei Zhu from Boston University will present this research at the Optica Imaging Congress. The hybrid meeting will take place 14 – 17 August 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts. “3D quantitative phase imaging (QPI) has superior features for various applications in the field of biomedical imaging. As a label-free technique, QPI ...

As an energy carrier, hydrogen holds the prominent advantages of high gravimetric energy density, high abundance, and zero emission, yet its effective storage and transportation remain a bottleneck problem for the widespread applications of hydrogen energy. To address such an issue, different types of hydrogen storage materials are developed and carefully investigated in the past decades. Among them, magnesium hydride (MgH2) has been considered as one of the most promising hydrogen storage materials because of its high capacity, excellent reversibility, sufficient magnesium reserves, and low cost. However, the poor thermodynamic and kinetic properties ...

Two molecular languages at the origin of life have been successfully recreated and mathematically validated, thanks to pioneering work by Canadian scientists at Université de Montréal. Published this week in the Journal of American Chemical Society, the breakthrough opens new doors for the development of nanotechnologies with applications ranging from biosensing, drug delivery and molecular imaging. Living organisms are made up of billions of nanomachines and nanostructures that communicate to create higher-order entities able to do many essential things, such as moving, thinking, surviving and reproducing. “The key to life’s emergence ...

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest movements of refugees since the Second World War. More than 7.4 million Ukrainians have sought asylum in Europe, almost three times the number of people who found refuge in Europe during Syria’s civil war in 2015 and 2016. To investigate whether and how the willingness of host populations to receive refugees has changed since 2016, an international research team involving ETH Zurich, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University surveyed 33,000 people in 15 European countries. The first wave of the survey took place in February 2016 and the second from May to June ...

In a new study, scientists Stewart Edie of the Smithsonian, Shan Huang of the University of Birmingham and colleagues drastically expanded the list of bivalve species, such as clams, oysters, mussels, scallops and their relatives, that humans are known to harvest and identified the traits that make these species prime targets for harvesting. They also discovered that some of these same traits have also made this group of shellfish less prone to extinction in the past and may protect these shellfish in the future. The authors flagged certain ocean regions, such as the east Atlantic and northeast and southeast Pacific, as areas of special concern for management and conservation. The ...

In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter (recently renamed X), which had previously served as the leading social media platform for environmental discourse. Since then, reports a team of researchers in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution on August 15, there has been a mass exodus of environmental users on the platform—a phenomenon that could have serious implications for public communication surrounding topics like biodiversity, climate change, and natural disaster recovery. “Twitter has been the dominant social ...

Levels of grey matter in two parts of the brain may be linked to a desire to start smoking during adolescence and the strengthening of nicotine addiction, a new study has shown. A team of scientists, led by the universities of Cambridge and Warwick in the UK and Fudan University in China, analysed brain imaging and behavioural data of over 800 young people at the ages of 14, 19 and 23. They found that, on average, teenagers who started smoking by 14 years of age had markedly less grey matter in a section of the left frontal lobe linked to ...

About The Study: In this study, most U.S. infants who required intensive care for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) lower respiratory tract infections were young, healthy, and born at term. These findings highlight the need for RSV preventive interventions targeting all infants to reduce the burden of severe RSV illness.  Authors: Natasha Halasa, M.D., M.P.H., of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, and Angela P. Campbell, M.D., M.P.H., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, are the corresponding authors.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...

About The Study: In this study of high-use social media platforms, physicians from across the U.S. and representing a range of medical specialties were found to propagate COVID-19 misinformation about vaccines, treatments, and masks on large social media and other online platforms and that many had a wide reach based on number of followers. Authors: Sarah L. Goff, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

Inside all living cells, loosely formed assemblies known as biomolecular condensates perform many critical functions. However, it is not well understood how proteins and other biomolecules come together to form these assemblies within cells. MIT biologists have now discovered that a single scaffolding protein is responsible for the formation of one of these condensates, which forms within a cell organelle called the nucleolus. Without this protein, known as TCOF1, this condensate cannot form. The findings could help to ...

The Lundquist Institute (TLI) at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center announced today that TLI Principal Investigator, Michael Yeaman, PhD, has been awarded a grant totaling $11.5M from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Department of Health & Human Services.  Along with his role at TLI, Dr. Yeaman is Professor of Medicine at UCLA, and Chief, Division of Molecular Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.     This new NIH U19 Center program will decode patterns of the human immune system and microbial pathogens that result in infections that are not ...

Most infants admitted to the intensive care or high acuity unit for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections during fall 2022 were previously healthy and born at term, according to a new study reported in JAMA Network Open. The findings from this study support the use of preventative interventions in all infants to protect them from RSV, the leading cause of lower respiratory tract infections (LRTI) and hospitalizations worldwide. RSV accounts for about 57,000-80,000 hospitalizations in children younger than 5 years with 1 in 5 RSV-positive hospitalized children being admitted ...

CLEVELAND–Life’s random rhythms surround us–from the hypnotic, synchronized blinking of fireflies…to the back-and-forth motion of a child’s swing… to slight variations in the otherwise steady lub-dub of the human heart.   But truly understanding those rhythms—called stochastic, or random, oscillations—has eluded scientists. While researchers and clinicians have some success in parsing brain waves and heartbeats, they’ve been unable to compare or catalogue an untold number of variations and sources.   Gaining such insight into the underlying ...