In a landmark study published today in Science Advances, Dr. Shai Bel and his research team at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University have uncovered crucial insights into how antibiotic use increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study demonstrates that antibiotics interfere with the protective mucus layer in the intestine, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of antibiotic effects and IBD development. IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects approximately 1% of the global population. This debilitating condition is ...

In a landmark advancement, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published today in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a huge step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states.  Such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to ...

Regions of the genome associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in African populations will be presented at the Future of Dementia in Africa conference on September 11-12, 2024. The studies highlight discrepancies compared to Caucasian populations and underscore that a lack of diversity in genomic studies potentially limits the effectiveness of targeted therapies across diverse populations.  The Future of Dementia in Africa conference will take place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a Nature Conference, ...

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun.  Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024. Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to ...

If you were to collect all the organisms from the ocean surface down to 200 meters, you’d find that SAR11 bacteria, though invisible to the naked eye, would make up a fifth of the total biomass. These bacteria, also known as Pelagibacterales, have evolved to thrive in nutrient-poor marine environments and play a significant role in global nutrient cycles. Despite their importance, the mechanisms behind their impact on the planetary ecosystem have remained unclear.  But now, a recent Nature paper by researchers from the Okinawa ...

Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have created the first two-dimensional version of the Bose glass, a novel phase of matter that challenges statistical mechanics. The details of the study have been published in Nature. As the name suggests, the Bose glass has some glassy properties and within it all particles are localised. This means that each particle in the system sticks to itself, not mixing with its neighbours. If coffee was localised, then when stirring milk into the coffee, the intricate pattern of black and white stripes would remain forever, instead of washing out to an average. To create this new phase of matter, the group overlapped several laser ...

New research has found four genes with some of the largest known effects on the timing of menopause discovered to date, providing new insight into links between menopause timing and cancer risk.   Genes come in pairs, and when women only have one working copy of the four new genes identified (ETAA1, ZNF518A, PNPLA8, PALB2), they have menopause between two and five-and-a-half years earlier than average.   Published in Nature, the large-scale analysis was funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome. The team first looked at variation in data from genetic sequencing of 106,973  post-menopausal ...

Rapa Nui or Te Pito o Te Henua (the navel of the world), also known as Easter Island, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. Located in the Pacific, it lies over 1,900 km east of the closest inhabited Polynesian island and 3,700 km west of South America. Although the island, its inhabitants and their rich culture have been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, two key elements of Rapanui history remain very controversial to this day. One of these is the theory of population collapse through "ecocide" or "ecological ...

With maps of the connections between neurons and artificial intelligence methods, researchers can now do what they never thought possible: predict the activity of individual neurons without making a single measurement in a living brain. For decades, neuroscientists have spent countless hours in the lab painstakingly measuring the activity of neurons in living animals to tease out how the brain enables behavior. These experiments have yielded groundbreaking insights into how the brain works, but they have only scratched the surface, leaving much of the brain unexplored. Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence and the connectome – a ...

BOSTON – Many clinical trials of new cancer drugs may be inappropriately excluding some people with "Duffy-null phenotype," a trait found predominantly in people of African or Middle Eastern descent, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Queen Mary University of London report in a new study. The Duffy-null phenotype results in relatively lower levels of white blood cells called neutrophils when measured in the blood. This is not because they have less neutrophils overall, but because they are more frequently located in other body tissues. Tests that restrict clinical trial eligibility to patients with certain blood levels of neutrophils may therefore ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, more than 50% of adults with uncontrolled hypertension in the U.S. were unaware of their hypertension and were untreated, and 70.8% of those who were treated had hypertension that remained uncontrolled. These findings have serious implications for the nation’s overall health given the association of hypertension with increased risk for cardiovascular disease.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, LaTonia C. Richardson, PhD, email lcrichardson@cdc.gov. To access the embargoed study: ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study of neighborhood opportunity and preterm birth, elevated risk associated with exposure to a very low opportunity neighborhood, coupled with the disproportionate exposure by race and ethnicity, points to a modifiable factor that may contribute to racial and ethnic inequities in preterm birth. Future research should investigate interventions that seek to address neighborhood opportunity.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Candice Belanoff, ScD, MPH, email cbelanof@bu.edu. To ...

Researchers have for the first time identified degeneration-associated “molecular markers” – observable changes in cells and their gene-regulating networks – that are shared by several forms of dementia that affect different regions of the brain. Critically, the UCLA-led research, published in the journal Cell, also identified markers specific to different forms of dementia, and the combined findings represent a potential paradigm shift in the search for causes, treatments and cures. “This ...

Neanderthal remains recently discovered in a cave in France support well-known theory of why the Neanderthals became extinct, researchers behind a new study say. In recent years, researchers have offered different explanations for why modern humans survived and the Neanderthals became extinct some 40,000 years ago. A new study from the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen supports one of the main hypotheses. The researchers behind the new study discovered Neanderthal remains of a male in a cave in southern France, ...

Analysis of air samples taken at altitudes of up to 3,000 metres above Japan has revealed the presence of a vast range of viable bacteria and fungi transported by air masses originating more than 2,000 kilometres away, in regions enriched with fertilisers and pesticides. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals a new way in which human, animal and plant pathogens may travel to distant geographical regions. This research has been led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by “la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the Daniel ...

The Wyss Institute at Harvard University announced today that Ropirio Therapeutics, Inc. (Ropirio) has secured a worldwide, exclusive license from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD) and Boston University (BU)’s Technology Development office for novel molecules that activate the lymphatic system - a first in the pharma industry. “There has been a tremendous amount of research into the lymphatic system over the last decade, with scientists uncovering new lymphatic vasculature and understanding the critical role it plays across a wide range of serious diseases. Ropirio is building on this explosion of research ...

Between 2018 and 2020, Australia implemented policy changes to improve the quality and safety of opioid prescribing, with a specific focus on oxycodone.  A new study led by The University of Queensland (UQ) using wastewater analysis has determined that oxycodone consumption in Australia dropped by 45% from 2019 to 2020, coinciding with those national policy changes.  In November 2019, the Australian National Prescribing Service launched a federal initiative to improve opioid prescribing.  The initiative involved alerting high-prescribing clinicians that their opioid prescribing practices were outside typical ...

A neighborhood’s walkability is affected by many factors such as street connectivity and density; access to destinations and aesthetics; investment in walking and biking infrastructure; and the presence or absence of urban natural features, specifically tree cover. Not all neighborhoods are alike. Many neighborhoods in impoverished and minority communities lack the cooling effect of vegetation and tree cover, especially in urbanized areas. As a result, residents face the “heat island effect,” where temperatures remain higher in urban areas ...

Recently, many major countries around the world, starting with the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, U.K., etc., have issued an administrative order to ensure the safety of AI technology, putting an emphasis on the safe, effective implementation of AI into their systems. In line with such trends, Korean researchers have collaborated with renowned AI experts from all around the world to create new AI-related international standards, garnering attention from the global AI community. Proposal No. Title Status ISO/IEC ...

WHAT: Newborns who had an atypical pattern of metabolites were more than 14 times as likely to die of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), compared to infants who had more typical metabolic patterns, according to a study funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. Metabolites are molecules produced by the body’s various chemical reactions. Researchers found that infants who died of SIDS had a specific pattern of metabolites compared to infants who lived to their first year. The researchers believe that checking for this pattern could provide ...

Biotechnological pesticides are a promising alternative to traditional chemical pesticides. But we have limited knowledge of how toxic they are to other organisms in the environment beyond regulatory assessments. A new research centre will now work to provide this knowledge – especially to ensure the EU has a chance of joining the growing market for biotechnological pesticides. As for now, Europe has failed to keep up. "If a thing kills something, we need to know how it kills, and who and what else it may kill," says Professor Nina Cedergreen of the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences. She is ...

Proper power grounding systems are necessary for maintaining the safety and reliability of critical electrical subsystem infrastructure, such as substations. Power grounding systems provide a low-resistance path for electrical fault currents to flow into the earth, preventing electrical shocks, fires, and damage to vital equipment. Investigation of soil resistivity is crucial for designing power grounding systems. For the most cost-effective and efficient grounding systems for electrical substations, it is imperative to carefully ...

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, have for the first time succeeded in combining two major research fields in photonics by creating a nanoobject with unique optical qualities. Since the object is a thousand times thinner than the human hair, yet very powerful, the breakthrough has great potential in the development of efficient and compact nonlinear optical devices. “My feeling is that this discovery has a great potential,” says Professor Timur Shegai, who led the study at Chalmers.   Photonic applications harness the power of light-matter interactions to generate ...

Thanks to an experiment started before the Great Depression, researchers have pinpointed the genes behind the remarkable adaptability of barley, a key ingredient in beer and whiskey. These insights could ensure the crop’s continued survival amidst rapid climate change.  Grown everywhere from Asia and Egypt to Norway and the Andes mountains of South America, barley is one of the world’s most important cereal crops and has been for at least 12,000 years. As it has spread across the globe, random ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- A computer algorithm can efficiently find genetic mutations that work together to drive cancer as well as other important genetic clues that researchers might someday use to develop new treatments for a variety of cancers. Reporting in the journal Frontiers in Bioinformatics, a Washington State University-led team used a novel network computer model to find co-occurring mutations as well as other similarities among DNA sequence elements across several types of cancer. The model allows for easier searches for patterns in huge seas of cancer genetic data. “This is a ...