Combined long-term survival results from nonrandomized phase II trial NRG Oncology RTOG 0630 and the ancillary analysis of the combined NRG-RTOG 0630/9514 trials indicate that pathologic complete response (pCR) is associated with improved survival outcomes for patients with localized soft tissue sarcoma (STS) who receive preoperative chemoradiotherapy or radiotherapy. This data suggests that pCR can be used as a prognostic factor for clinical outcomes in future STS research. These results were recently published in the JAMA Oncology. NRG-RTOG 0630 and 9514 both evaluated STS patients who were receiving either preoperative image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT; 0630) or neoadjuvant ...

Back in December, we announced that Pensoft joined 27 other publishers in sharing prices and services via the Journal Comparison Service developed by cOAlition S, in order to boost transparency in scholarly publishing. Now, we are up to another challenge: we have joined the Advisory Panel appointed by cOAlition S to help further the improvement and development of this important service. The Advisory Panel consists of twelve members (six publishers and six end-users) representing different stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem. Journal Comparison Service (JSC) is an initiative by cOAlition S aimed to improve ...

Some species of mussels can see. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes that help them detect predators such as an approaching starfish. However, the eyes of scallops differ significantly from the human eye. While in our eyes the combination of cornea and lens creates an image on the retina, in scallop eyes light is focused by a hemispherical mirror. Optical imaging with lenses or mirrors Creating images with mirrors instead of lenses is especially common in astronomical telescopes, in order to capture as much light as possible from planets, stars and galaxies. In the Schmidt telescope developed in the 1930s by Bernhard Schmidt (1879-1935) and still in use in many observatories today, ...

Lehigh Engineering researcher Arup SenGupta has developed a novel way to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the “infinite sink” of the ocean. The approach uses an innovative copper-containing polymeric filter and essentially converts CO2 into sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) that can be released harmlessly into the ocean. This new hybrid material, or filter, is called DeCarbonHIX (i.e., decarbonization through hybrid ion exchange material), and is described in a paper recently published in the journal Science Advances.  The research, which demonstrated a 300 percent increase in the amount of carbon captured ...

About The Study: In this updated systematic review and meta-analysis of 107 studies involving more than 4.8 million participants, daily low or moderate alcohol intake was not significantly associated with all-cause mortality risk, while increased risk was evident at higher consumption levels, starting at lower levels for women than men.  Authors: Jinhui Zhao, Ph.D., of the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.6185) Editor’s ...

About The Study: While the decline in employer-sponsored insurance in 2020 was offset by an increase in Medicaid coverage among newly unemployed white working-age adults, there was no such rise among newly unemployed Black and Hispanic workers.  Authors: Peter J. Huckfeldt, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.0168) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including ...

A groundbreaking technique developed by researchers affiliated with the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience presents a new way of gathering and organizing highly detailed information about organic tissues in record time. The methods could someday be used to rapidly process tissue biopsies in cancer care or detecting bacteria in food processing plants. Tissues emit signals, or intrinsic fields, that while detectable are very weak and hard to differentiate. The technique, detailed in a pair of papers published in Nature Methods ...

New University of British Columbia research is challenging a longstanding assumption that a baby’s gut microbiome is primarily shaped by their mother’s vaginal microbiome, while shedding new light on the factors that do influence its development. When babies are born, their gut is a nearly sterile environment. But that quickly changes as the infant’s digestive tract becomes home to trillions of microbial cells throughout their early development. This gut microbiome is an important part of overall health and alterations early in life have been associated with negative health outcomes later on, including asthma and obesity. It has ...

About Book: Green tech refers to materials and technology that are used to reduce adverse human impact on Earth. It encompasses a wide area of scientific research, including energy, atmospheric science, agriculture, material science, and hydrology. Using sustainable resources to produce energy for a better greener tomorrow has been at the epicentre of man’s thought since 1987, in the United Nations  Brundtland Report was published, which defined sustainable development as “needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It has real-world examples some ...

Researchers at the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics (IAP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have designed a novel ultramicro supercapacitor, a tiny device capable of storing an enormous amount of electric charge. It is also much smaller and more compact than existing supercapacitors and can potentially be used in many devices ranging from streetlights to consumer electronics, electric cars and medical devices.   Most of these devices are currently powered by batteries. However, over time, these batteries lose their ability to store charge and therefore have a limited shelf-life. Capacitors, on the other hand, can store electric charge for much ...

Ishikawa, Japan -- In the past few years, “AI” has become a major buzzword in technology. The prospect of a computer being able to do tasks which only a human could perform is a captivating thought indeed! AIs can be created using multiple different methods, but one of the most popular ones right now involves the use of deep neural networks (DNNs). These structures try to mimic the neural connections and function of the brain and are generally trained on a dataset before they are deployed in the real world. By training them on a dataset beforehand, ...

The poisonous birds inhabit one of Earth’s most pristine rainforests, a place as exotic as no other in the world. Hearing the words poisonous and bird coupled will be an eye-opener for most. But poisonous birds actually exist. And now, more species have been discovered in New Guinea’s jungles. "We managed to identify two new species of poisonous birds on our most recent trip. These birds contain a neurotoxin that they can both tolerate and store in their feathers," says Knud Jønsson of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Jønsson and fellow UCPH researcher, Kasun ...

Antarctic sea ice is an important component of the climate system, and may act as an early indicator of climate change. Under global warming, significant changes in Antarctic sea ice have been observed. Specifically, it experienced a slow increase during 1979–2014, but a rapid decline thereafter. Despite a modest recovery after the record minimum in 2017, the sea ice area during austral summer 2022 (December 2021 to February 2022) again hit a new record minimum, at 3.07 million km2, which is approximately a 25% reduction compared with its long-term mean during 1981–2010. The largest decline occurred in two regions: the central-eastern Ross Sea ...

Manganese oxides are natural reactive minerals and widely spread in aquatic and terrestrial environments, affecting the fate of metals (such as As3+ and Cd2+) and organic pollutants (such as phenols and diclofenac) through adsorption and oxidation in sewage treatment. Usually, the manganese (III/IV) oxides in the environment are thought to be formed by the oxidation of dissolved Mn(II) through abiotic or biotic processes. Oxidation of aqueous Mn(II) by dissolved oxygen is thermodynamically favored, but the kinetic is slow due to the high energy barrier of the reaction from dissolved ...

End-of-dry-season CO2 pulses recur each year in the atmosphere above the Australian continent, a discovery made by an international research team led by environmental physicist Prof. Dr André Butz of Heidelberg University. To investigate the carbon fluxes over Australia, the researchers studied atmospheric CO2 measurements. Their analyses show that CO2 emissions spike when heavy rain falls on dried-out soil, thus activating microorganisms in that soil. The findings suggest that dry regions have a greater influence on the variations in the global carbon cycle than previously thought. The Australian continent is dominated by dry ecosystems and widely varying precipitation patterns. ...

Ants are pretty much everywhere. There are more than 14,000 different species, spread over every continent except Antarctica, and researchers have estimated that there are more than four quadrillion individual ants on Earth-- that’s 4,000,000,000,000,000. But how ants evolved to take over the world is still a mystery. In a new study in the journal Evolution Letters, scientists used a combination of fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and ...

Now, Professor Niu serves as deputy director of the National Engineering Research Center of Tree Breeding and Ecological Restoration, deputy secretary general and standing member of the Pine Branch of the Chinese Society of forestry. He was selected as the national young top-notch talent of “Ten Thousand Talents Program”, leading talent of forest and grassland and technology innovation of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA), outstanding young scholarship of “Beilin Scholars Program” of Beijing Forestry University, etc. He also served as an evaluation committee member ...

Burnout is associated with adverse outcomes including medical errors and lower quality of care. While many studies have focused on physician or nurse burnout, the COVID-19 pandemic increased stress across the healthcare workforce, including support staff and healthcare teams who have a crucial role in patient care. A new study of 206 healthcare organizations led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, identified high levels of burnout, intent to leave the profession, and work overload across all members of the healthcare ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have created a means of speeding up and improving the evaluation process for drugs used to combat cervical cancer. The study led by Kaitlin Fogg, assistant professor of biological engineering in the OSU College of Engineering, is important because the American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 14,000 new cervical cancer cases will be diagnosed in the United States this year and that more than 4,000 women will die from the disease. Findings were published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research. Fogg and graduate students in the College of Engineering ...

The kidney plays a vital role in maintaining homeostasis within the body by eliminating toxic and superfluous substances in the bloodstream, including waste generated during metabolic processes, through urine. Nevertheless, toxicity can also be induced in the kidney from certain medications. Recently, a research team from POSTECH has engineered an artificial kidney that allows for the early detection of adverse drug reactions.    The POSTECH research team led by Professor Dong-Woo Cho and Professor Jinah Jang (Department ...

Overview A research team, led by Professor Yuji Nakamura of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology, discovered that the flickering of flames can be freely controlled by moving two flames closer together or further apart. Until now, it had been known that interference between flames separated by a certain distance causes the flames to flicker during in-phase or anti-phase. However, it was not possible to stably express the state of “stopping the flickering of flames” that should occur under critical ...

□ DGIST Professor Yoonkyu Lee’s research team illuminated intense light on the surface of a copper wire to synthesize graphene, thereby increasing the production rate and lowering the production cost of the high-quality transparent-flexible electrode materials and consequently enabling its mass production. This technology is applicable to various 2D materials[1], and its applicability can be extended to the synthesis of various metal-2D material nanowires.   □ The research team used copper-graphene nanowires to implement high-performance transparent-flexible ...

□ On February 16 (Thursday), the DGIST held a graduation ceremony for the first half of 2023, that is, those who graduated in February, at the Convention Hall in the Office of the University. A total of 242 students—29 doctoral, 87 master’s, and 126 bachelor’s students—received academic degrees in science and technology fields.   □ Jongho Lee (Minister of Science and ICT), Junghye Noh (the board chairman of DGIST and an honorary professor at SNU), Jonghan Kim (the administrative mayor of Daegu Metropolitan City), ...

□ The research team led by Professor Minseok Kim from the Department of New Biology at DGIST (President Yang Kuk) has developed a technology that can treat Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, an incurable hereditary disease, with electric stimulation instead of drug therapy. The core of this technology is electric stimulation that restores the abnormal distribution of peripheral myelin protein 22 (PMP 22)[1], the cause of the disease, to normal. The research team discovered it by conducting a series of electric stimulation experiments using a CMT disease subtype ...

□ The research team led by Professor Hongsoo Choi from DGIST (President Kuk Yang) in the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering has developed a microrobot capable of forming neural networks and sectioning hippocampal tissues in an in vitro environment in an ex vivo[1] state. Through the joint research with the team led by Dr. Jongcheol Rah from Korea Brain Research Institute, the possibility of analyzing structurally and functionally connected neural networks using a microrobot in an in-vitro environment during cell delivery and transplantation has been confirmed. The research findings are ...