University of Pittsburgh scientists independently validated a new blood test platform that can simultaneously measure more than a hundred biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. The platform might improve clinicians’ ability to capture the multifaceted nature of Alzheimer’s pathology and streamline early disease diagnostics. The report was published in Molecular Neurodegeneration today. “Alzheimer’s disease should not be looked at through one single lens,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., M.Sc., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt. “Capturing aspects of Alzheimer’s pathology in a panel of clinically validated biomarkers would increase ...

In a collaborative effort between Texas A&M University and Sandia National Laboratories, researchers have significantly improved a new joining technology, interlocking metasurfaces (ILMs), designed to increase the strength and stability of a structure in comparison to traditional techniques like bolts and adhesives, using shape memory alloys (SMAs). ILMs offer the potential to transform mechanical joint design in manufacturing for aerospace, robotics and biomedical devices.    “ILMs are poised to redefine joining technologies ...

Medical professionals have a responsibility to lead the fight against climate misinformation to ensure that the public is well informed about the health risks posed by climate change, say experts in The BMJ today. Misinformation (inaccurate information spread without malicious intent) and disinformation (deliberately deceptive information) in health is not new, write Professor Andy Haines and colleagues. Just as the rapid spread of false information during the covid-19 pandemic undermined public trust in science and public health interventions, false information also pervades the climate change debate, influencing public perception and ...

Former GP Sarah Benn was suspended by the medical practitioners tribunal service (MPTS) after an arrest for her involvement in climate protests. In The BMJ today, two experts debate the question of when and whether doctors in such cases should be sanctioned. The recent case of Sarah Benn has sparked debate, partly because of a perception that the GMC referred her to a MPTS tribunal for taking part in peaceful protests, says Andrew Hoyle, assistant director at the GMC. In reality, he explains ...

Extreme rainfall events are associated with an increased risk of death from all causes as well as from heart and lung diseases, finds an analysis of data from 34 countries and regions published by The BMJ today. The health effects of extreme rainfall varied by local climate and vegetation coverage, providing a global perspective on the effect of extreme rainfall events on health. Climate change is intensifying the frequency and severity of short term rainfall events, and emerging evidence suggests a compelling link between rainfall events and adverse health outcomes, particularly transmission ...

Peer-reviewed – Scoping Review - People  New research from the University of East Anglia has uncovered a significant gap in understanding of a harmful form of domestic abuse known as subtle or covert abuse.   Unlike more obvious forms of physical or verbal abuse, subtle abuse is less visible but can be just as damaging to victims.   The review found that current research on this topic is limited, despite its potentially widespread impact.  The findings suggest that subtle abuse ...

The key to more accurate rainfall predictions may lie in the intricate dance of falling snowflakes, a new study has found.   The research, observing the physical motion of falling ice crystals, will help scientists better estimate where and when these crystals will melt into raindrops, a crucial stage in the formation of many types of rain.  Published today (Thursday 10 October) in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the study involved scientists watching how fake snowflakes fell in a substance ...

ASPB is delighted to welcome its new President, Hong Ma, who was elected in 2023 as President-elect and served in this role starting October 1, 2023. He stepped into his role as ASPB President on October 1, 2024 following the end of now-Past President Leeann Thornton’s term. “A top priority is to support and train young plant biologists toward becoming members of a community with greater diversity, to amplify the voices of diverse members of our society, and to promote diversity and representation in society leadership and society activities,” ...

Artificial Intelligence has learned to master language, generate art, and even beat grandmasters at chess. But can it crack the code of abstract reasoning—those tricky visual puzzles that leave humans scratching their heads? Researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering Information Sciences Institute (ISI) are putting AI’s cognitive abilities to the test, pushing the multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to solve visual problems once reserved for human IQ tests. The result? A glimpse into how far AI has come—and where it still stumbles. USC Viterbi ISI Research ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oct. 9, 2024 – Though in this year’s presidential election healthcare has seemingly taken a back to other issues including the economy and democracy, nearly eight in 10 registered voters still say the issue that has been critical in nearly every presidential campaign in modern history, remains extremely (37%) or very important (42%) to whom they cast their vote, according to a new a West Health-Gallup poll of voters. This sentiment is consistent with what’s been expressed in most previous elections, although slightly more ...

Irvine, Calif., Oct. 9, 2024 — In the chaos of a wildfire, heat, wind, flames and fuel interact to produce embers that are lofted into surrounding areas, starting new spot fires and spreading destruction and property loss in California’s wildland-urban interface. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have conducted first-of-their-kind field experiments to better understand the physics of these firebrands, and their results can help authorities better model the outcomes of disasters that are happening with greater frequency in a warming climate. In a paper published recently in the journal Physics of Fluids, UC Irvine team members describe their ...

More than four years after the COVID-19 pandemic caused the world to come to a standstill, lessons in pandemic response are still being learned. What we know: the global pandemic disproportionately affected racial and ethnic minority groups across the U.S., with Black and Hispanic individuals being three to four times more likely to die from COVID compared to white individuals.  Daniel Harris, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the University of Delaware's College of Health Sciences (CHS), took a deep dive into rarely obtained COVID-19 ...

Baylor University researcher Aaron Wright, Ph.D., has earned a $5.6 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Transformative Research Award for a project that he and collaborators hope could lead to personalized – and revolutionary – treatments for gut microbiome diseases like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis and more. Wright, a nationally recognized microbiome researcher and chemical biologist who serves as The Schofield Endowed Chair in Biomedical Science in Baylor’s Department of Biology, will partner on the project with colleagues from Weill ...

October 9, 2024—(BRONX, NY)—Stem cell researcher Teresa Bowman, Ph.D., has been appointed chair of the department of developmental & molecular biology (DMB) at Albert Einstein College of Medicine after a comprehensive national search. Dr. Bowman will begin her new role on December 1, following the longtime leadership of Richard Stanley, Ph.D. “Dr. Bowman has demonstrated her leadership abilities, commitment to mentorship, and dedication to the College of Medicine since she ...

Changes need to be made to the UK legal system to protect people from exploitative litigation designed to prey on vulnerabilities, a new study warns. Reforms need to be made to protect adults from unfairness during copyright enforcement legal proceedings. This would also help to prevent children being exposed to adult pornography online. The malicious litigation typically involves copyright holders or their agents of online pornographic works obtaining contact details of internet users via a court order to ...

According to highly cited conventional models, cooling and a major drop in sea levels about 34 million years ago should have led to widespread continental erosion and deposited gargantuan amounts of sandy material onto the ocean floor. This was, after all, one of the most drastic climate transitions on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs. Yet a new Stanford review of hundreds of studies going back decades contrastingly reports that across the margins of all seven continents, little to no sediment has ever been found dating back to this transition. The discovery of this globally extensive gap in the geologic record was published this week in Earth-Science Reviews. “The ...

Cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CALD) is a rare progressive, genetic brain disease that primarily presents in young boys, causing loss of neurological function and ultimately leading to early death. Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, Boston Children’s Hospital, and collaborators have shown that six years after treatment with the first gene therapy approved for CALD, 94 percent of patients have had no decline in neurological functioning, with over 80 percent remaining free of major disability. Findings, published in two articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, describe long-term outcomes ...

MINNEAPOLIS – A new study has found some cancers to be slightly more frequent in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) than in people without MS. The study is published in the October 9, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Types of cancers found to have a small increased risk include bladder, brain and cervical cancers. The study does not prove that MS increases a person’s risk of cancer. It only shows an association. With MS, the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty, white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. MS is chronic and can be unpredictable and disabling. “People ...

Using mechanisms inspired by nature to create new technological innovations is a signature of one Virginia Tech research team. The group led by Associate Professor Michael Bartlett has created an octopus-inspired adhesive, inspired by the shape of octopus suckers, that can quickly grab and controllably release challenging underwater objects. Having the ability to grab and release these underwater objects like heavy rocks, small shells, and soft beads, and other debris could be a powerful tool for underwater salvage and even rescue operations. Their findings have been published in Advanced Science. This work was performed with undergraduate researchers Austin Via, Aldo Heredia, ...

Newly discovered ancient birds from Late Cretaceous North America were hawk-sized and had powerful raptor-like feet, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alexander Clark of the University of Chicago, U.S. and colleagues. The most diverse birds during the Cretaceous Period were a now-extinct group called enantiornithines, known from all over the world during this time. However, enantiornithines and other Mesozoic birds are mainly known from Lower Cretaceous deposits, with a relatively poor record ...

Bat species richness in San Diego, C.A. decreases as artificial lights, urbanization, and unconserved land increase, with Townsend's big-eared bat especially affected ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310812 Article Title: Quantification of threats to bats at localized spatial scales for conservation and management Author Countries: U.S.A. Funding: The United States Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center and Ecosystems Mission Area provided funding and support, and the National ...

Satellite data on the proximity of hundreds of M-84 bomb craters to hospitals in the Gaza Strip suggests that, as of November 2023, hospitals were not being given special protection from indiscriminate bombing, as mandated by international humanitarian law. That is one finding out of a new study published this week in PLOS Global Public Health by Dennis Kunichoff of Harvard University, and colleagues. On October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas militant attacks in Israel. Among the munitions being used are United-States-provided Mark-84 (M-84) bombs, which are air-dropped explosive munitions that shoot more than 1000 pounds ...

The Hell Creek Formation in what’s now the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming was once home to some of the world’s most beloved dinosaurs, like Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex (including SUE, one of the largest, most complete, and best-preserved T. rex specimens ever found). But these giant dinosaurs weren’t alone in their ecosystem, and in a paper in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists have described two new species of birds that lived alongside these dinosaurs 68 million years ago. The researchers ...

Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world, with male-coded words appearing twice as often as female-coded words on average, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lee Crawfurd from the Center for Global Development, United Kingdom, and colleagues. School textbooks play an important role in shaping norms and attitudes in students—one reason why controversy ...

Interview with Lee Crawfurd   ###   What first drew you to study gender bias in school textbooks, and why did you choose to investigate this topic? I was raised by a gay feminist single mother who was a school teacher and loves to challenge gender stereotypes, so this is something I've always been interested in. This personal background, combined with recent advancements in computerized text analysis and the new availability of digital textbooks, led me to this line of research.   What are the key findings from your research? It's not really news that there is some ...