HAMILTON, ON – Mar 24, 2024 – Tobacco users in Canada are exposed to higher levels of cyanide than smokers in lower-income nations, according to a large-scale population health study from McMaster University. Scientists made the discovery while investigating the molecule thiocyanate – a detoxified metabolite excreted by the body after cyanide inhalation. It was measured as a urinary biomarker of tobacco use in a study of self-reported smokers and non-smokers from 14 countries of varying socioeconomic status. “We expected the urinary thiocyanate levels would be similar across regions and reflect primarily smoking intensity. However, ...

The application of dynamical systems theory to areas outside of mathematics continues to be a vibrant, exciting, and fruitful endeavor. These application areas are diverse and multidisciplinary, covering areas that include biology, chemistry, physics, climate science, social science, industrial mathematics, data science, and more. This conference strives to amass a blend of application-oriented material and the mathematics that informs and supports the discipline. The goals of the conference are a cross-fertilization of ideas from different application areas and increased communication between ...

The study of geophysical systems at all scales, whether from a scientific or technological perspective, calls for sophisticated mathematical modeling, efficient computational methods, and pervasive integration with data. This effort is fundamentally interdisciplinary. This conference aims to stimulate the exchange of ideas among geoscientific modelers, applied mathematicians, statisticians, and other scientists, fostering new research in the mathematical foundations with an impact on geoscience applications. END ...

Researchers have discovered a way to “translate” quantum information between different kinds of quantum technologies, with significant implications for quantum computing, communication, and networking. The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, was funded by the Army Research Office (ARO), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (HQAN), which is led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It represents a new way to convert quantum information from the format used by quantum computers to the format needed ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.   After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth while protecting it from heat, vibrations, and earthly contaminants.     “Once the sample capsule touches down, our team ...

COLUMBIA, Mo— The name of the game is customer satisfaction, especially in the airline industry where companies are constantly jockeying for business by promising better service than their competitors. Now a professor at the University of Missouri has used artificial intelligence to sort through thousands of customer reviews and identify where airlines are falling short. Sharan Srinivas, an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Department of Marketing, used AI to analyze nearly 400,000 unique, ...

A mining technology pioneered by researchers at the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin could reduce the amount of energy needed to access critical minerals vital for modern energy technologies and capture greenhouse gases along the way. Transitioning the world’s energy to technologies and sources with low-carbon emissions will take, in part, tremendous amounts of lithium, nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals that exist in low concentrations in the Earth’s crust. Mining those elements takes much energy and produces waste, which can negatively affect the environment and create significant amounts of greenhouse ...

Wastewater from biorefineries that convert plants into fuel is full of organic materials that cannot be efficiently treated with conventional wastewater systems, making it costly and energy-intensive to manage. However, those rich organic materials are an untapped source of chemical energy that can be recovered as valuable products, including biogas, a clean-burning renewable fuel. A study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found that recovering resources from wastewater can substantially improve the economic and environmental sustainability of second-generation ...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Stellantis today announced the launch of the Battery Workforce Challenge, which includes a three-year collegiate engineering competition; vocational training; youth education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM); and career and technical education.   DOE has set a bold target to address the climate crisis and puts our nation on a path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by 2050 for the benefit of all Americans. Key to this target goal are the design and development of advanced batteries to electrify ...

Toronto, ON - A new national study, published in LGBT Health, finds that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth are twice as likely to report trouble falling or staying asleep than their straight peers. Greater depression, stress, and family conflict contribute to the sleep problems of LGB youth. “Young people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual may face discrimination and negative attitudes because of their sexual orientation. These experiences can make it harder for them to get a good night’s sleep,” says lead author, Jason Nagata, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. “Difficulties getting ...

A bone marrow transplant can be a lifesaving treatment for people with relapsed blood cancers, but a potentially lethal complication known as graft-versus-host disease put limitations on this procedure. New research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison is helping to change that by identifying the cell population that causes GVHD, a target that may make bone marrow transplants safer and more effective. An allogenic (from a donor) bone marrow transplant is a common treatment for blood cancers and other diseases of the immune system. During the transplant, the patient’s immune cells are replaced with the donor’s ...

Receiving medication for opioid use disorders, such as buprenorphine after an overdose, leads to lower mortality risk, according to a Rutgers study.   Drug overdose deaths are a significant public health concern in the United States. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were more than 105,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021, which were largely attributed to opioids. Rutgers researchers found that opioid-involved overdose deaths following nonfatal overdose events are largely preventable with buprenorphine medication for opioid use disorder.   The medication, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is a highly effective ...

Many parts of rural America with less access to health care also have limited broadband internet that could help them take advantage of increasingly popular online health services. A new study by the University of Cincinnati highlighted disparities in access to digital technology that could widen the gap in access to health care. The study found that socially vulnerable communities in the United States face more barriers to adequate health care, live in areas with fewer health care resources and have less access to high-speed internet. UC researchers ...

MADISON—Corporate investments in climate-tech start-ups are a growing but overlooked aspect of energy innovation. According to a new report from Morgan Edwards, a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her lead co-author at University of Maryland, these investments should be more fully considered as methods to advance climate technology. The report was published in the journal Joule on March 17. Start-up companies have the potential to rapidly commercialize innovation, but they don’t always have the resources to make such ventures successful. Corporations, on the other ...

“In summary, our goal was to identify additional therapeutic targets for KRAS-driven PDAC.” BUFFALO, NY- March 24, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Genes & Cancer on March 10, 2023, entitled, “VCP/p97, a pleiotropic protein regulator of the DNA damage response and proteostasis, is a potential therapeutic target in KRAS-mutant pancreatic cancer.” Researchers have recently shown that proteins involved in the DNA damage response (DDR) are critical for KRAS-mutant pancreatic ductal ...

Putting less sugar in sodas and reducing the package size of sodas sold in supermarkets may help reduce our collective sugar intake and thus lower the associated health risks. Good news for consumers, but how does it affect manufacturers? Research conducted in the US has shown that marketing diet or sugar-free varieties does not lead to an increase in the overall turnover of soda manufacturers. This is because consumers tend to switch from sugary to sugar-free versions of the same brand. However, reducing the package size of soda does have a positive effect on the sales ...

A group of scientists from the University of Seville, in collaboration with experts from the University of the Basque Country, has led the first detailed study of the evolution of the discontinuity of Venus’s clouds, a gigantic atmosphere wave with the appearance of a “tsunami” that is propagated in the planet’s deepest clouds and which, it is believed, may be playing a very significant role in the acceleration of Venus’s fast-moving atmosphere. The observations were carried out non-stop for more than 100 days. “This observational ...

BOSTON – New research from Boston Medical Center found that substance use disorders do not increase the likelihood of dying from COVID-19. Published in Substance Abuse: Research and Treatment, the study showed that the increased risk for severe COVID-19 in people with SUD that has been seen may be the result of co-occurring medical conditions. Multiple large cohort studies from early in the pandemic have shown higher rates of hospitalization, intubation, and death from COVID-19 in those with SUD, while other studies found no ...

Embargoed for release: Friday, March 24, 2023, 12:00 PM ET Key points: The Environmental Protection Agency is currently considering new limits on PM2.5 air pollution. Implementing stronger limits would protect the health of all Americans, and in particular could reduce mortality rates among communities that are most threatened by air pollution—including Black and low-income Americans—by up to 7%.  Structural racism and poverty combine to change PM2.5 susceptibility, but structural racism may be more impactful when determining susceptibility. Stronger air quality policies may also drive innovative ways to reduce the emission of heat-trapping gasses and could save ...

When someone smiles at us, we tend to smile back. On the other hand, if we spend time with someone who is mad or stressed, we end up absorbing these negative emotions. This tendency to align with the emotions of others is called emotional contagion. This basic form of empathy has been programmed in our brain for thousands of years and it is not difficult to get why. When there is a threat, this phenomenon allows fear to spread quickly, increasing the chances of survival. Besides, by mimicking emotions, we establish social bonds with others. But this behavior is not exclusive to humans. New data from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) confirm that the ...

Fungicide application, while helpful in controlling plant diseases, has complicated limitations that may cost growers both peace of mind and quantity of yield. Plant pathogens which would otherwise be killed off by fungicides can evolve to avenge their dead siblings, developing resistance that renders the standard dose of fungicide application ineffective. To delay fungicide resistance, growers commonly use mixtures of fungicides to treat yield-limiting fungal diseases—based on extensive research outlining how to construct these mixtures. However, this research does not completely translate to the common, real-world scenario where one fungicide ...

Your circadian rhythm doesn’t just govern your sleeping schedule; it can also impact cancer development, diagnosis, and treatment. In a review paper publishing in the journal Trends in Cell Biology on March 24, researchers discuss the role of circadian rhythms in tumor progression and spread and describe how we could better time when patients are tested for cancer and when they receive therapies to improve diagnostic accuracy and improve treatment success. “The circadian rhythm governs most of the cellular functions implicated in cancer progression, ...

Newly developed mRNA vaccines against Zika virus and HIV-1 produced strong antibody responses that transferred from pregnant rabbits to their offspring, researchers report March 24th in the journal Molecular Therapy. As noted by the authors, the results support further development of their vaccine platform, LIONTM/repRNA, for maternal and neonatal settings to protect against mother-to-child transmission of pathogens in animals and humans. The recent success of mRNA vaccines in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a catalyst for the development of mRNA vaccines targeting other infectious diseases. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized mRNA vaccines for children ...

A novel statewide incentive program intended to improve “warm hand-offs” from Pennsylvania emergency departments to opioid use disorder treatment programs is associated with a 50% improvement in the initiation of medication-assisted treatment in Medicaid-enrolled patients, according to new research from University of Pittsburgh, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Pennsylvania and Vital Strategies scientists. The finding, published today in JAMA Health Forum, points to a potential policy ...

About The Study: Marriage and children were associated with a greater earnings penalty for female physicians, primarily due to fewer hours worked relative to men, in this study of 95,000 U.S. physicians. Addressing the barriers that lead to women working fewer hours could contribute to a reduction in the male-female earnings gap while helping to expand the effective physician workforce.  Authors: Lucy Skinner, M.P.H., of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit ...