It’s no surprise that your dog can learn to sit when you say “sit” and come when called. But a study appearing March 22 in the journal Current Biology has made the unexpected discovery that dogs generally also know that certain words “stand for” certain objects. When dogs hear those words, brain activity recordings suggest they activate a matching mental representation in their minds. “Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words,” says Marianna Boros (@FamDogProject) of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, one of the paper’s co-first authors. “They also don’t ...

It’s no surprise that dogs can learn to understand and respond to human words. Your dog can learn to sit when you say “sit” and come when called. But a new study has made the surprising discovery by recording brain activity that dogs generally also know that certain words “stand for” certain objects. When they hear those words, they activate a matching mental representation in their minds.  “Dogs do not only react with a learned behavior to certain words,” says Marianna Boros of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. “They also don’t just associate that word with an object ...

CNIO researchers provide a new hypothesis to understand the origin of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. It would be triggered by a similar problem to that occurring in a group of rare diseases called ribosomopathies. In ALS patients, motor neurons would accumulate an excess of non-functional ribosomal proteins that eventually collapse the cell's clearance systems and cause toxicity. The study also opens a new front in aging research. The authors provide experimental evidence that formally proves a kind of stress called ‘nucleolar stress’ cause aging in mammals. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a degenerative disease. ...

On the surface, the movement disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the cognitive disorder frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which underlies frontotemporal dementia, manifest in very different ways. In addition, they are known to primarily affect very different regions of the brain. However, doctors and scientists have noted several similarities over the years, and a new study in Cell reveals that the diseases have remarkable overlaps at the cellular and molecular levels, revealing potential targets that could yield therapies applicable ...

About The Study: In this study of 5,437 U.S. adults with health care visits in 2022, many patients, including those with the greatest care needs, chose telemedicine even after in-person visits were available. These findings support continuing this care delivery approach as an option valued by patients. Differences were not observed by most common measures of socioeconomic status. Continued monitoring of telemedicine use is needed to ensure equitable access to health care innovations.  Authors: Eva ...

About The Study: The results of this study of Medicare enrollees suggest that although nationally, Black and Hispanic individuals and individuals of other racial groups received more telemedicine visits during the pandemic and disproportionately lived in geographic regions with higher telemedicine use, after controlling for geographic region, Black and Hispanic individuals and individuals of other racial groups received fewer telemedicine visits than white individuals.  Authors: Felippe O. Marcondes, M.D., M.P.H., of Massachusetts General ...

More than half of all new doctors face some form of sexual harassment in their first year on the job, including nearly three-quarters of all new female doctors and a third of males, a new study finds.   That’s actually down somewhat from the percentage of new doctors who experienced the same five or six years before, according to the paper published in JAMA Health Forum by a team from the University of Michigan Medical School and Medical University of South Carolina.   And today’s ...

Academics are proposing a new and improved way to help researchers discover when consciousness emerges in human infancy. When over the course of development do humans become conscious? When the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes was asked about infant consciousness by his critics, he eventually suggested that infants might have thoughts, albeit ones that are simpler than those of adults. Hundreds of years later, the issue of when human beings become conscious is a question which remains a challenge for psychologists and philosophers alike.  But now, in response to a recent ...

A computational method for finding transition states in chemical reactions, greatly reducing computational costs with high reliability, has been devised. Compared to the most widely used existing method, the present method reduces the total computational cost by approximately 50 to 70%. The development, available on GitHub, is poised to accelerate advancements in material science, making the exploration of chemical reactions more accessible and efficient. This could lead to faster scientific discoveries and technological innovations. In chemical reactions, substances ...

There were multiple unsafe sleep practices at play in more than three-quarters of Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths reported in 23 jurisdictions between 2011 and 2020, a new study reveals. The researchers say the findings underscore the need for more comprehensive safe-sleep education for new parents, including from healthcare providers. Of 7,595 infant deaths reviewed, almost 60% of the infants were sharing a sleep surface, such as a bed, when they died. This practice is strongly discouraged by sleep experts, who warn that a parent or other bed partner could unintentionally ...

HOUSTON ― The Institute for Data Science in Oncology (IDSO) at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center today announced the appointment of its inaugural cohort of IDSO Affiliates. These 33 talented scientists, clinicians and staff bring diverse expertise to help IDSO leadership and focus area co-leads advance collaborative data science projects and align the institute’s efforts with MD Anderson’s mission to end cancer.     “We are proud to welcome these exceptional individuals to the growing IDSO community, and we look forward ...

Toughening has always been an important research direction of structure ceramics. The addition of secondary phases to the ceramic matrix to prepare composite ceramics is an effective toughening pathway in the field of structure ceramics. Both phase-type and microstructure of the secondary phases play a decisive role in the toughening effect of the ceramic matrix. Being different from the conventional independent phase as the secondary phase, B4C@TiB2 core–shell structural unit has been purposely designed as an innovative kind of secondary phase to toughen the Al2O3 ceramic matrix, providing a new concept for the toughening studies of structural ceramics.   A ...

Messenger RNA (mRNA) made its big leap into the public limelight during the pandemic, thanks to its cornerstone role in several COVID-19 vaccines. But mRNAs, which are genetic sequences that instruct the body to produce proteins, are also being developed as a new class of drugs. For mRNAs to have broad therapeutic uses, however, the molecules will need to last longer in the body than those that make up the COVID vaccines.  Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and MIT have engineered a ...

The last time you dropped a favorite mug or sat on your glasses, you may have been too preoccupied to take much notice of the intricate pattern of cracks that appeared in the broken object. But capturing the formation of such patterns is the specialty of John Kolinski and his team at the Laboratory of Engineering Mechanics of Soft Interfaces (EMSI) in EPFL’s School of Engineering. They aim to understand how cracks propagate in brittle solids, which is essential for developing and testing safe and cost-effective composite materials for use in construction, sports, and aerospace engineering. But traditional mechanics approaches to analyzing crack formation assume ...

Decommissioned offshore structures offer limited long-term ecological benefits if they are simply left in the ocean to serve as artificial reefs, a new study suggests. The research, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, saw researchers carrying out a comprehensive analysis of existing studies into the environmental impacts of marine artificial structures – including oil and gas platforms and offshore wind farms – all over the world. It highlighted that such installations can offer some ecological benefits – including increasing the diversity and abundance of fish species – in areas where the ...

There can be no analysis without data. In this spirit, researchers from the University of Bonn and the Swiss Federal Institution of Technology (ETH) Zurich have published a database containing over 6,000 agri-environmental policies, thus enabling their peers as well as policymakers and businesses to seek answers to all manner of different questions. The researchers have used two examples to demonstrate how this can be done: how a country’s economic development is linked to its adoption of agri-environmental policies and how such policies impact soil erosion. Their study has now been published in “Nature Food.” Embargo: Don´t publish before March 22, ...

Embargoed until 08:00 AM GMT / 04:00 AM ET Friday 22 March 2024 Bees need food up to a month earlier than provided by recommended pollinator plants Plant species which are recommended as ‘pollinator friendly’ in Europe begin flowering up to a month too late for bees, resulting in low colony survival and low production of queens.  This is the first time that research has quantified the decline in colony survival and queen production due to a shortage of early season food. Enhancing ...

Weak fluctuations in superconductivity1, a precursor phenomenon to superconductivity, have been successfully detected by a research group of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech). This breakthrough was achieved by measuring the thermoelectric effect2　in superconductors over a wide range of magnetic fields and over a wide range of temperatures from much higher than the superconducting transition temperature to very low temperatures near absolute zero. This revealed the full picture of fluctuations in superconductivity ...

The morphology of an animal's teeth often reflects its diet. A well-known example of a mammal that feeds in the water is the crabeater seal (Lobodon carcinophaga), which consumes large amounts of zooplankton. Crabeater seals have complex, jagged teeth, which are believed to function as a sieve to retain krill in their mouths and filter it from seawater. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that the Baikal seal (Pusa sibirica) also preys on large quantities of zooplankton and possesses distinctive jagged teeth. Thus, while behavioral observations and tooth morphology studies suggest a ...

Bottom Line: Among patients over 65 who received an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (allo-HCT) for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) between 2000 and 2021, leukemia-free and overall survival improved significantly over time. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Author: Ali Bazarbachi, MD, PhD, senior author of the study and a professor at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon Background: AML ...

  · Long genes have more potential sites for DNA damage · Genes involved in brain loss during aging and linked to Alzheimer’s are very long · New view of biological aging differs from previous beliefs CHICAGO --- What causes our body to age? Four complementary studies, including one from Northwestern Medicine, have come to the same conclusion: long genes.  In a new paper, the scientists write about their findings and how they advance existing knowledge about aging.  “Long genes ...

Water eletrolysis process is a system that produces hydrogen by electrolyzing water. It is an eco-friendly technology that can produce hydrogen fuel, a future energy source, without emitting environmental pollutants, but its limitations have been pointed out as low hydrogen production efficiency and high production costs. Recently, a team of researchers from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) published research that solved both problems at once, attracting attention.   A collaborative research team comprising Professor Jong Kyu Kim, Jaerim Kim, a Ph. D. candidate, Professor ...

Scientists believe that planetary systems like our solar system contain more rocky objects than gas-rich ones. Around our sun, these include the inner planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars –  the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt objects such as Pluto. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, on the other hand, contain mostly gas. But scientists also have known for a long time that planet-forming disks start out with 100 times more mass in gas than solids, which leads to a pressing question: When ...

Imagine if every time you saw a face, it appeared distorted. Well, for those who have a very rare condition known as prosopometamorphopsia (PMO), which causes facial features to appear distorted, that is reality. As the Dartmouth-based website about prosopometamorphopsia explains, "'Prosopo' comes from the Greek word for face 'prosopon' while 'metamorphopsia' refers to perceptual distortions.''' Specific symptoms vary from case to case and can affect the shape, size, color, and position ...

VIDEO available to download HERE of scientist Ruchi Gupta explaining how she hopes to make a lollipop or lozenge to diagnose mouth cancer. The film features mouth cancer survivor Rachel Parsons and contains explicit images. A ‘LOLLIPOP’ that can diagnose mouth cancer early could become a reality, thanks to a pioneering project funded by Cancer Research UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Dr Ruchi Gupta at the University of Birmingham has been awarded £350,000 over the next three years by Cancer Research UK and EPSRC to make a prototype flavoured ‘lollipop’ from a material called a smart hydrogel. Smart ...