•    Researchers to explore the use of gel electrolyte materials to improve lithium-ion batteries  •    The batteries are the most commonly used in electric vehicles and electronics •    Will use non-harmful, non-flammable and renewably sourced materials for next generation battery technologies. Aston University researchers are to explore the use of gel electrolyte materials to make lithium-ion batteries - the most commonly used for electric vehicles and electronics - safer and less environmentally damaging. The University has received a grant of £443,058 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research ...

When people hear about predicting heart disease, most will think of cholesterol levels. While cholesterol is a major contributor to heart disease, a recent study from Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham, found that a glycan biomarker of IgG is also an important predictor for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The researchers studied the sugar coatings on an antibody known as immunoglobulin G (IgG), which is implicated in the immune responses associated with chronic inflammation among participants in two case-control studies. The results of this investigation provide another biomarker for identifying risk of CVD, which could lead to earlier diagnosis ...

Sir Peter was knighted for his contribution to IT and businesses in the Midlands in 2002 He will provide guidance, support, advocacy and strong links to industry in his role The Institute will drive digital innovation and ensure digital inclusion. Aston University is delighted to announce that it has appointed one of the UK’s most respected and successful business leaders, Sir Peter Rigby, as honorary chair of its new Digital Futures Institute. The announcement of Sir Peter’s appointment was made in front of guests at the inaugural lecture given by Professor Abdul Sadka, director of the Digital ...

Yale School of Medicine and its Center for Infection & Immunity (CII) are receiving a $575,000 grant from PolyBio Research Foundation to fund Long COVID research. The grant—issued via PolyBio’s LongCovid Research Consortium (LCRC)— will support a collaboration to define mechanisms by which the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist for long periods of time in tissue and blood.  There is growing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 may not fully clear from Long COVID patients after initial infection. Instead, reservoirs of the virus can persist in patient tissue for months or even years, with recent research finding the SARS-CoV-2 ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An often-overlooked water plant that can double its biomass in two days, capture nitrogen from the air — making it a valuable green fertilizer — and be fed to poultry and livestock could serve as life-saving food for humans in the event of a catastrophe or disaster, a new study led by Penn State researchers suggests. Native to the eastern U.S., the plant, azolla caroliniana Willd — commonly known as Carolina azolla — also could ease food insecurity in the near future, according to findings ...

Lung cancer is not the most common form of cancer, but it is by far the deadliest. Despite treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, only about a quarter of all people with the disease will live more than five years after diagnosis, and lung cancer kills more than 1.8 million people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization. To improve the odds for patients with lung cancer, researchers from The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical Center have pioneered a novel approach to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly into cancer cells. “Our method ...

In our data-driven era, solving complex problems efficiently is crucial. However, traditional computers often struggle with this task when dealing with a large number of interacting variables, leading to inefficiencies such as the von Neumann bottleneck. A new type of collective state computing has emerged to address this issue by mapping these optimization problems onto something called the Ising problem in magnetism. Here's how it works: Imagine representing a problem as a graph, where nodes are connected by edges. Each node has two states, either +1 ...

DALLAS (SMU) – It’s a small piece of obsidian, just over 5 centimeters long, likely found on a hard-scrabble piece of ranchland in the Texas panhandle. But when SMU anthropologist Matthew Boulanger looks at it, he gets a mental image of Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado making his way across the plains more than 470 years ago in search of a fabled city of gold. Boulanger believes that the flaked-stone tool with its sharp edge was likely dropped by a member of Coronado’s ...

Direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) are a common treatment for patients with a wide variety of cardiovascular conditions. DOACs are the preferred treatment over vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) for many patients with atrial fibrillation or venous thromboembolism, since the latter would have a higher risk of intracranial bleeding and more complex dosing routine. However, new research suggests that DOACs should not be the first line of treatment for every patient who need to treat or prevent blood clots. A systematic overview from researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham, discusses the efficacy ...

UPTON, NY—A new analysis by the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, provides the first direct evidence of the imprint left by what may be the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields on “deconfined” nuclear matter. The evidence comes from measuring the way differently charged particles separate when emerging from collisions of atomic nuclei at this DOE Office of Science user ...

A recent study conducted in the lab of Dr. Hugo J. Bellen, distinguished service professor at Baylor College of Medicine and principal investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, has discovered a biological role of a specific transmembrane protein called TMEM208.  The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a majority of fruit flies lacking this gene do not survive, and the few that do survive have many developmental defects. Similarly, a child with variants ...

A gut microbial metabolite called 2-methylbutyrylcarnitine (2MBC) plays a role in exacerbating thrombosis -- the formation of blood clots – researchers report February 23rd in the journal Cell Metabolism. The results also revealed that 2MBC is accumulated in individuals with COVID-19, potentially explaining why these patients are at increased risk of thrombosis. “Our study provides mechanistic insight by implicating 2MBC as a metabolite that links gut microbiota dysbiosis to elevated thrombotic ...

About The Study: In this urban population-based cohort study of 2,180 participants, no modifiable risk factors of mortality at the level of the individual (e.g., depression or anxiety and substance use) or the family (e.g., household education level) were identified. However, the degree of neighborhood poverty in early childhood was significantly associated with death by unnatural causes (death due to unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide) in early adulthood, suggesting that economic policies are needed to advance health equity in relation to premature mortality.  Authors: Holly C. Wilcox, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg ...

About The Study: In this case-control study including 6,122 patients with hematologic cancers and SARS-CoV-2 infection, odds of severe COVID-19 remained high through mid-2022 despite vaccination, especially in patients requiring treatment.  Authors: Paul A. Monach, M.D., Ph.D., of the VA Boston Cooperative Studies Program in Boston, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.0288) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions ...

About The Study: In this study, recreational marijuana laws that allow recreational marijuana sales were associated with a 10% increase in workplace injuries among individuals ages 20 to 34. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that recreational marijuana impedes cognitive function and care among younger workers.  Authors: Joseph J. Sabia, Ph.D., of San Diego State University, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...

BOSTON - Amid continued debate over how to advance diversity and equity in higher education following the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Northeastern University today issued a “roadmap” of strategies to help academic health institutions maintain their commitments to racial and ethnic diversity among their students, staff, and faculty in academic health sciences. Their recommendations, published in JAMA Health Forum, outline 13 evidence-based strategies for increasing racial and ethnic equity in graduate-level health programs. “This ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Violence against teachers is likely to be higher in schools that focus on grades and test scores than in schools that emphasize student learning, a new study has found. Researchers surveyed over 9,000 U.S. teachers shortly before and during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic about their perception of the instructional emphasis in their schools. Participants also reported whether they had been subjected to physical, verbal or property violence – by students, parents, colleagues and/or administrators. Results ...

A new study identified a set of 140 genes that may help predict enhanced disease-free survival in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with a combination of immunotherapy and low-dose radiation. The results, published in Cell Reports Medicine on Feb. 23, suggested that this “gene signature” could be used to identify a subclass of lung tumors that is more likely to be eradicated by immunotherapies. Immunotherapy has saved countless lives but only 20 to 25 percent of patients respond to this treatment that activates a person’s ...

Psychology and Economics come together in a recent line of research, led by Ismael Rodríguez-Lara, Professor at the University of Malaga, who studies how lies affect economic decisions. It is a study developed together with the Professor at the University of California (Santa Barbara, USA) Gary Charness, considered one of the most influential economists in the world within the experimental area, that has analyzed the way in which morality influences the degree of lying in certain economic situations. The results of this research have been published in the scientific journal Economics ...

New exploration  in underwater navigation, a team from the Naval University of Engineering in Wuhan, China, has created novel algorithms that rectify inertial errors using sparse acoustic signals. This exploration offers novel method for the  issue of underwater navigation , where traditional satellite systems are ineffective due to their signals' inability to penetrate water effectively. The increasing demand for precise underwater Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) due to expanding marine exploration and activities highlights the limitations of traditional Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS) ...

Thanks to the rapid progress in tiny tech, we've been mainly using microfluidics to sort tiny particles by size. But now, there's a new way to sort them by shape, which could be a big deal for medical tests and chemistry. This study shows off a new method using sound waves to separate oddly shaped particles from round ones, without needing any labels. This breakthrough could lead to better ways to deliver drugs or diagnose diseases by offering a smarter approach to sort these tiny particles.  In the realm of microfluidics, separating micro-particles based solely on size has been the norm. However, distinguishing these particles ...

Downscaling of electronic devices, such as transistors, has reached a plateau, posing challenges for semiconductor fabrication. However, a research team led by materials scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) recently discovered a new strategy for developing highly versatile electronics with outstanding performance, using transistors made of mixed-dimensional nanowires and nanoflakes. This innovation paves the way for simplified chip circuit design, offering versatility and low power dissipation in future electronics. In recent decades, as ...

Iron is a micronutrient for plants. Biologists from the Institute of Botany at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) describe in a study, which has now been published in the Journal of Cell Biology, that regulatory proteins for iron uptake behave particularly dynamically in the cell nucleus when the cells are exposed to blue light – an important signal for plant growth. They found that the initially homogeneously distributed proteins relocated together into “biomolecular condensates” in the cell nucleus shortly after this exposure. Both iron deficiencies and excesses are problematic for plants. They ...

Microbially induced corrosion (MIC) is a prevalent issue in marine environments, leading to structural damages such as cracking in concrete infrastructure. This corrosion poses a persistent challenge, significantly reducing the lifespan of marine structures and resulting in substantial economic losses. In response to the need for an effective solution to combat the marine corrosion on concrete, researchers of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have developed a biomineralization approach to protect marine concrete from MIC.   Prof. ...

Certain genes associated with hypertension affect blood pressure from early in life, and they increase the risk of cardiovascular disease as you get older.  However, you can do something about it. “We are talking about really small differences, so small that they may fall within what is considered normal blood pressure. The problem is that they tend to last your whole life,” says PhD Candidate Karsten Øvretveit at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of ...