The early treatment of obesity in children is effective in both the short and long term, researchers from Karolinska Institutet report in a study published in The International Journal of Obesity. The researchers followed over 170 young children in Sweden who had received treatment for diagnosed obesity. The children were recruited to the randomised controlled study when they were between four and six years old via children’s clinics in Region Stockholm.  The children and their parents were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: standard treatment, parental support group, or parental support group with follow-up telephone ...

In a sign that exposure to certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be playing a role in cancers of the breast, ovary, skin and uterus, researchers have found that people who developed those cancers have significantly higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies. While it does not prove that exposure to chemicals like PFAS (per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances) and phenols (including BPA) led to these cancer diagnoses, it is a strong signal that they may be playing a role and should be studied further. The study showed that particularly for women, higher ...

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat presents evidence and theories around collapse and extinction, while locating the responsibility of museums in our changing world   Stressors like climate trauma, corporate deceit and political incompetence signal the threat of societal collapse, a new book asserts. This claim lays the foundation for exploring arguments of ‘collapsology’ in new work by Robert R. Janes Ph.D., Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat. The book also contends with the unique role that can be played by museums during a mounting climate crisis. “Social ...

(18 September 2023, Athens, Greece) A novel study has shown that Senolytics, a new class of drugs, have the potential to prevent the transfer of senescence*, a key mechanism of ageing, and the associated physical and cognitive impairments in recipients of older donor organs. 1 The pioneering research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, opens promising avenues for expanding the organ donor pool and enhancing patient outcomes. By transplanting older donor organs into younger ...

Barcelona, Spain: If doctors in hospital emergency departments are trained to carry out ultrasound on patients with suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT), they can nearly halve the time the patients spend in these departments.   Dr Ossi Hannula, an emergency medicine specialist at the Wellbeing Services County of Central Finland, Jyväskylä, Finland, who presented the findings at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Monday), said his findings could help to reduce overcrowding in emergency departments ...

Imagine coming-to, jaws gripping the top of a swaying blade of grass, unaware of how you got there. That's the reality for ants infected with the lancet liver fluke, a tiny parasitic flatworm. Liver flukes have a complicated, almost insanely conceived life cycle, which begins with the hijacking of the ant’s brain. The unsuspecting ant climbs up and clamps its powerful jaws onto the top of a blade of grass, making it more likely to be eaten by grazers such as cattle and deer. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant ...

(17 September 2023, Athens, Greece) New research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, demonstrates that neonatal* kidney transplantation can offer a ‘game-changing’ solution to the pressing organ shortage crisis. 1 To assess the feasibility of neonatal organ donation, researchers analysed neonatal mortality in the United States and the long-term development of these kidneys after transplantation as well as the ethical and social considerations surrounding the procedure. 1 The study revealed that out of the 21,000 infants who lost their lives ...

(17 September 2023, Athens, Greece) Islet transplantation significantly reduces the risk of transplantation failure and enhances life expectancy in individuals with type 1 diabetes who undergo kidney transplantation, a new study has revealed. 1 This breakthrough research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, compared the long-term outcomes of patients with type 1 diabetes who underwent kidney transplantation and received an islet transplantation*, with patients who underwent kidney transplantation and then managed their diabetes with insulin ...

In a recent article published in Volume 3 of the journal Psychoradiology, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University have unveiled the groundbreaking "Attention-CensNet" (A-CensNet), a fusion model that predicts cognitive scores by amalgamating movie-watching functional magnetic resonance imaging (mfMRI) and eye-tracking data. In this model, participants serve as nodes, mfMRI data are translated into node features, and eye-tracking details forge the connections between participants, creating graph edges. By employing ...

Fatty liver disease is a condition characterised by a build-up of fat in the liver and is the most common chronic liver disease that affects over one billion people. Over time, this can lead to complications including cirrhosis, liver failure, liver cancer, and heart health issues. The disease is now known as metabolic (dysfunction) associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD). This is because the disease is now understood to be linked to metabolic factors, such as obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. MAFLD is a multisystem disorder with a heterogeneous disease course and outcomes. This means that it can affect multiple organs, and the course of the disease can vary from person ...

Most artificially intelligent systems are based on neural networks, algorithms inspired by biological neurons found in the brain. These networks can consist of multiple layers, with inputs coming in one side and outputs going out of the other. The outputs can be used to make automatic decisions, for example, in driverless cars. Attacks to mislead a neural network can involve exploiting vulnerabilities in the input layers, but typically only the initial input layer is considered when engineering a defense. For the first time, researchers augmented a neural network’s inner layers with a process involving random noise to improve its resilience. Artificial intelligence (AI) ...

Scientists have used genomics to reveal distinct sexual networks for syphilis transmission, defined geographically or by sexual preference, among a background of wider circulation in England. They also show a presence of drug resistance in the majority of cases. By grouping closely related strains of the bacterium that causes syphilis – Treponema pallidum –, researchers demonstrate how a large number of cases are linked together. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)* sequenced ...

Images Highlights: The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, is investing in machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to accelerate the speed of research and development in nuclear science. Michigan State University researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, are leading five of these new grant projects.   These projects aim to enhance the breadth of FRIB’s activities, covering nuclear physics experiments and theory, as well as particle accelerator operations.   FRIB is a DOE-SC user facility, meaning that these advances will serve ...

The University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center announced today that it has earned a National Cancer Institute “Comprehensive” Cancer Center designation, the highest level of recognition awarded by the NCI. Markey is the first and only center in Kentucky to achieve this designation, and the next-closest Comprehensive Cancer Center is nearly 200 miles from Lexington. There are currently only 72 NCI-Designated Cancer Centers in the country, and 56 of those are Comprehensive Cancer Centers.  As the federal government’s principal ...

Ratings on platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor can greatly impact high-priced New York City restaurants that service tourists, but have less of an effect on restaurants frequented by “locals” outside of tourist areas, according to new Cornell research. “In neighborhoods frequented by ‘locals,’ the advent and expansion of internet-based ratings platforms did not result in greater disparities in restaurant sales despite how ubiquitous they are and how frequently we anecdotally use them,” said Jason Greenberg, associate ...

The feel of a cat’s fur can reveal some information, but seeing the feline provides critical details: is it a housecat or a lion? While the sound of fire crackling may be ambiguous, its scent confirms the burning wood. Our senses synergize to give a comprehensive understanding, particularly when individual signals are subtle. The collective sum of biological inputs can be greater than their individual contributions. Robots tend to follow more straightforward addition, but Penn State researchers have now harnessed the biological concept for application in artificial intelligence (AI) to develop ...

Genetically speaking, we are individuals different from each other because of slight variations in our DNA sequences – so-called genetic variants – some of which have dramatic effects we can see and comprehend, from the color of our eyes to our risk for developing schizophrenia – a debilitating psychiatric condition affecting many millions worldwide. For several years, scientists have studied the entire genomes of thousands of people – called genome-wide association studies, or GWAS – to find approximately 5,000 genetic variants associated with schizophrenia. Now, ...

Rochester Institute of Technology scientists have once again used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey to change the way we think about the universe and its distant galaxies. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Rebecca Larson, postdoctoral research associate, co-authored a paper, “Confirmation and refutation of very luminous galaxies in the early Universe,”  published in Nature confirming ...

Researchers from Western and Brown University have made groundbreaking progress towards identifying the root cause and potential therapy for preeclampsia. The pregnancy complication affects up to eight per cent of pregnancies globally and is the leading cause of maternal and fetal mortality due to premature delivery, complications with the placenta and lack of oxygen. The research, led by Drs. Kun Ping Lu and Xiao Zhen Zhou at Western, and Drs. Surendra Sharma and Sukanta Jash at Brown, has identified ...

WASHINGTON (September 15, 2023) – As misinformation flourished online during the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of platforms announced policies and practices aimed at combating the spread of misinformation. Did those efforts work? New research published today in Science Advances suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine misinformation policies of Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, were not effective in combating misinformation. The study, led by researchers at the George Washington University, found that Facebook’s efforts were undermined by the core design features ...

Twenty-year experiment finds that active replanting beats natural recovery for restoring logged tropical forests. The higher the diversity of replanted tree species, the more quickly canopy area and biomass recovered. Results emphasize the importance of preserving biodiversity in pristine forests and restoring it in recovering logged forest. Satellite observations of one of the world’s biggest ecological experiments on the island of Borneo have revealed that replanting logged forests with diverse mixtures of seedlings can significantly accelerate their recovery. The results have been published today in the journal Science Advances. The ...

Enrollment in a Phase 1 trial of a new investigational universal influenza vaccine candidate has begun at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The trial is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, and will evaluate the investigational vaccine for safety and its ability to elicit an immune response. Currently available seasonal influenza (or “flu”) vaccines are effective at preventing specific strains of influenza. Each year, the vaccines are re-evaluated and changed to best match the strains of flu predicted to be the most dominant in the upcoming flu ...

A University of Massachusetts Amherst neuroscientist has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke to advance knowledge on human brain development by using an unusual subject: the brain of the sea slug. This tiny invertebrate is an ideal candidate to study for brain development because it adds a countable number of neurons to its brain – the number increases more than 40-fold in less than eight weeks to a total of about 10,000 neurons – while the animal grows and performs behaviors, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have successfully transferred an important gene from one compartment of a plant cell to another to produce tobacco plants that lack pollen and viable seeds, while otherwise growing normally. Their findings could lead to better ways of producing hybrid seeds to maximize crop productivity, or to introduce seedlessness in fruit species lacking the often-desired trait, such as raspberries, blackberries or muscadine grapes. The researchers began the work in the energy-producing portion of a cell, the mitochondria. In plants, aberrations within the mitochondrial genome can be associated with ...

A research project supported by FAPESP shows that the construction of new hydroelectric power plants in Brazil’s South region could have an impact on more than 30% of the habitat of Phrynops williamsi, the Williams’ side-necked turtle. The species occurs only in areas of Atlantic Rainforest and Pampa (the grassland biome adjacent to Brazil’s border with Uruguay and Argentina), and is classed as “Vulnerable” (facing a high risk of extinction) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). An article on the study is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by ...