The history of the Earth has been one of physical extremes—extreme atmospheric conditions, extreme chemical environments, and extreme temperatures. There was a time when the Earth was so hot all the water was vapor, and the first rain only fell once the planet cooled enough. Soon after, life emerged and through it all, life has found a way. Today life is found almost everywhere on Earth we have looked; it is difficult to find places where life does not exist. The remarkable ability of life to adapt to variable conditions is one of its defining characteristics. Of its many adaptations, the ability of life to adapt to varying temperatures ...

20 years on from the invasion of Iraq, nearly 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and in the midst of war in Ukraine and contested questions about migration and the legacies of war, a brand new Centre for the Study of Violence will launch this week at the University of Bath. Led by academics across the University’s Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, including political theorists, development and humanitarian scholars, plus crime, defence and security experts, the new Centre will be the first of its kind in the UK. It aims to help society rethink how violence operates and to find ways to imagine a more peaceful world. The Centre ...

A history of participating in campus recreational sports can offset stress and contribute to academic competence even during high-stress periods such as a pandemic lockdown, shows a new study. Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that participation in activities such as fitness classes and intramural and drop-in sports before the pandemic was linked to lower levels of stress and higher levels of perceived competence to handle challenges and master school workload during the lockdown.  The study used factor and regression analyses based on self-reported ...

INDIANAPOLIS, March 26, 2023 — In chemistry, we have He, Fe and Ca — but what about do, re and mi? Hauntingly beautiful melodies aren’t the first things that come to mind when looking at the periodic table of the elements. However, using a technique called data sonification, a recent college graduate has converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. Today, the researcher reports the first step toward an interactive, musical periodic table. The researcher will present his results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting ...

INDIANAPOLIS, March 26, 2023 — The cold blast of an air conditioner can be a welcome relief as temperatures soar, but “A/C” units require large amounts of energy and can leak potent greenhouse gases. Today, scientists report an eco-friendly alternative — a plant-based film that gets cooler when exposed to sunlight and comes in a variety of textures and bright, iridescent colors. The material could someday keep buildings, cars and other structures cool without requiring external power. The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person March 26–30 ...

INDIANAPOLIS, March 26, 2023 — Black women and others with curly or kinky hair encounter a vast and confusing array of haircare options. Advice on the best products to use for a certain type of hair is often contradictory, and the results can be highly variable. Now, scientists are bringing order to this chaos by identifying properties such as the number of curls or coils in a given length of hair that could eventually help users pick the perfect product and achieve consistent results. The researchers will present their findings today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person ...

INDIANAPOLIS, March 26, 2023 — If you’ve ever seen a shooting star, you might have actually seen a meteor on its way to Earth. Those that land here are called meteorites and can be used to peek back in time, into the far corners of outer space or at the earliest building blocks of life. Today, scientists report some of the most detailed analyses yet of the organic material of two meteorites. They’ve identified tens of thousands of molecular “puzzle pieces,” including a larger amount of oxygen atoms than they had expected. The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society ...

Scientists have found that depression and anxiety sufferers who have had a traumatic childhood tend to grow up as angry adults, and the worse the trauma, the angrier the adult. This can affect personal mental health and social interaction, but also makes it more difficult to treat the depression and anxiety. This work is presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris. Previously, the researchers had found that more than 40% of patients with both anxiety and depression had a tendency towards anger. This compares to only around 5% of healthy controls. The present ...

A group of European researchers have shown that exposure to human odours, extracted from other people’s sweat, might be used to boost treatment for some mental health problems. In a preliminary study, the researchers were able to show that social anxiety was reduced when patients underwent mindfulness therapy while exposed to human ‘chemo-signals’, or what we commonly refer to as body odour, obtained from underarm sweat from volunteers.  Presenting the results of a pilot study at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris, lead researcher Ms Elisa Vigna, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said: “Our state of mind causes us to produce molecules ...

A new study shows that men and women are affected differently by childhood trauma: women are more affected by childhood emotional trauma and sexual abuse, whereas men are more affected by  childhood emotional and physical neglect. Lead researcher, Dr Thanavadee Prachason (from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands) said, “Our findings indicate that exposure to childhood maltreatment increases the risk of having psychiatric symptoms in both men and women. However, exposure to emotionally or sexually abusive experiences during childhood increases the risk of a variety of psychiatric symptoms particularly ...

Sophia Antipolis, 27 March 2023:  Patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) benefit from early rhythm control therapy. It reduces cardiovascular deaths, strokes, and other adverse outcomes by 20% compared to usual care. The beneficial effects of early rhythm control were shown by the pan-European EAST – AFNET 4 trial and confirmed by other large health studies. However, what is the price of the new treatment strategy? A cost-effectiveness analysis revealed: the health benefits of early rhythm control come at reasonable additional costs. The analysis was published today in EP Europace, a journal of the European ...

A new study examining the gene expression of gut microbes suggests that the heart-healthy benefits of walnuts may be linked to beneficial changes in the mix of microbes found in our gut. The findings could help identify other foods or supplements with similar nutritional benefits.   Researchers led by Kristina S. Petersen from Texas Tech University in Lubbock found that introducing walnuts into a person’s diet may alter the gut’s mix of microbes — known as the microbiome — in a way that increases the body’s production of the ...

Results from the NRG Oncology Phase II NRG-GOG-0279 clinical study indicate that women with locally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the vulva who received gemcitabine concurrently with cisplatin and intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) exhibited increased rate of pathologic complete responses (pCR). This is also the first clinical trial to standardize IMRT. These findings were presented during the Plenary Session at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) 2023 Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer. “Women with locally ...

Locally advanced cervical cancer remains an area of high therapeutic need, with recent trials failing to demonstrate evidence of benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy or immune checkpoint blockade administered concurrent with chemoradiation. Results from the NRG-GY017 randomized trial comparing the anti-PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab before and concurrent with chemoradiation (CRT) indicated favorable outcomes for 2-year disease-free survival (DFS) and demonstrated evidence of improved immunogenicity with neoadjuvant atezolizumab in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer. These findings were presented during the Plenary Session at the Society of Gynecologic ...

Marseille, France – 26 March 2023:  More than 40% of women report anxiety four months after a cardiac arrest compared with 23% of men, according to research presented today at ESC Acute CardioVascular Care 2023, a scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1   “Cardiac arrest occurs with little or no warning and it’s common to feel anxious and low afterwards,” said study author Dr. Jesper Kjaergaard of Rigshospitalet - Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark. “After the initial shock and confusion, patients and their families have an abrupt change in their way of life, with medical investigations ...

A statewide effort to treat the pain of surgery patients without increasing their risk of long-term dependence on opioids has paid off in Michigan, a study shows. In less than two years, the effort led to a 56% reduction in the amount of opioids patients received after having six different common operations, and a 26% drop in the chance that they would still be filling opioid prescriptions months after their surgical pain should have eased. Both of those drops beat national trends for similar patients, according to the new study published ...

Business alliances are valuable because they help companies supplement critical skills, enter new markets, and gain competitive advantages. In the pharmaceutical industry, strategic alliances are common because they help companies reduce risks and share the large R&D costs of bringing new drugs to market — like the partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech on vaccines. Such partnerships can take years to develop and are critical to a pharma company’s success. But when biopharmaceutical companies merge, preserving their preexisting alliances isn’t always a priority, according to a new Texas McCombs study. “High-performing alliances ...

CHICAGO—March 24, 2023—Illinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Ren Wang has been honored with the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) award. The two-year grant will support Wang’s groundbreaking research project, which aims to enhance the robustness of machine learning models by infusing key principles of the immune system into neural networks. Wang’s innovative project, titled “Immune-Inspired Learning Foundations of Neural Network General Robustness,” not only advances the theory and ...

**Note: the release below is a special early release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April). Please credit the congress if you use this story** Embargo: 2301H UK time Friday 24 March   Most patients admitted to hospital with acute viral respiratory infections are given antibiotics. Now new research to be presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April), suggests that prescribing antibiotic therapy to adults hospitalised with common viral respiratory infections such as influenza is unlikely to ...

A major new study confirms the trend to fewer suicides in Europe. The findings show that suicide rates are down in 15 countries (including Germany and Italy), and stable elsewhere (including France, Spain and UK). Only Türkiye shows a significant increase. This work is presented for the first time at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris. Suicide is one of the major causes of premature death, globally around 700,000 suicides are reported each year. European suicide rates have been generally ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Phosphorus is a natural mineral that is essential for plant growth and development, and Earth’s agricultural-grade phosphorus reserves are expected to be depleted in 50 to 100 years. A new discovery by researchers at Michigan State University and the Carnegie Institution for Science is changing their understanding of iron toxicity in plants caused by low phosphorus levels.  “Once the world’s supply is used up, we can’t make more phosphorus,” said Hatem Rouached, an assistant professor in MSU’s ...

The Science Nuclear physicists have found a new way to see details inside atomic nuclei. They do so by tracking interactions between particles of light and gluons—the gluelike particles that hold together the building blocks of protons and neutrons. The method relies on harnessing a new type of quantum interference between two dissimilar particles. Tracking how these entangled particles emerge from the interactions lets scientists map out the arrangement of gluons. The Impact This technique is similar to how positron emission tomography (PET) scans image the brain and other body parts, but ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – March 24, 2023 – Researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative. The NIH HEAL initiative, which launched in 2018, was created to find scientific solutions to stem the national opioid and pain public health crises. The funding is part of the HEAL Data 2 Action (HD2A) program, designed to use real-time data to guide actions and change processes toward reducing overdoses and improving opioid use disorder treatment ...

The traditional treatment for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer is a lobectomy, where a surgeon eradicates cancerous tissue by removing an entire lung lobe. Yet, new research finds that select patients with early-stage disease who undergo a less invasive procedure have comparable outcomes, sparking hope for a less aggressive approach to lung cancer surgery. The 10-year study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine and led by University of Chicago Medicine medical ...

Louisiana’s newly released draft of the state’s 2023 Coastal Master Plan proposes to spend $16 billion on the construction of new tidal marshes as a key strategy to combat coastal land loss. An important question is whether these newly created marshes will be similar in ecological value to the existing natural marshes. A new study published in the journal Ecosphere and funded by the NOAA RESTORE Science Program addresses this issue, and the results provide positive news for the state’s plans to rebuild the coastline. “This work is really exciting because ...