Washington, D.C. — Feb. 23, 2024 —Streams with ample connections to shallow groundwater flowpaths have greater microbial diversity and are more effective at preventing toxic forms of metals—often products of upstream mining—from entering and being transported downstream. These streams are also better at detoxifying those metals already present. The research is published this week in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Under favorable conditions, the zone lining a stream channel stores nutrients and oxygen that meet nutritional and respiratory needs of local invertebrates and fish. That ...

Across the globe, more than 39 million people are living with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS, including more than 1.3 million new HIV diagnoses last year. The majority of those afflicted — approximately 76% — have access to antiviral therapy that allows them to live with HIV as a chronic disease. Sharilyn Almodóvar, Ph.D., from the Department of Immunology and Molecular Microbiology at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) School of Medicine and the TTUHSC Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, said that even with the widespread ...

WHO PQ paves the way for public procurement of SKYTyphoid™ by UN organizations Addition of new vaccine will diversify, expand TCV supply amid expected growing demand   February 23, 2024, SEOUL, Korea – SK bioscience and the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) announced today that the typhoid conjugate vaccine developed by SK bioscience with technology transfer from IVI has achieved the World Health Organization prequalification (PQ), which paves the way for public procurement of the vaccine by UN organizations and gives a boost to the global TCV supply.   WHO PQ certifies the safety, efficacy, and GMP of a vaccine by evaluating its manufacturing ...

Should we be using polygenic risk score assessment for embryo selection? Providing in-depth analysis, the Social, Ethical and Legal Issues Committee of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) has released a new Points to Consider statement to assist healthcare professionals and patients in understanding the safety and utility of preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) as a clinical service. “Clinical Utility of Polygenic Risk Scores for Embryo Selection: A Points to Consider Statement of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG)” was published in the College’s flagship journal, Genetics ...

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. ...

Researchers at UBC Okanagan are revisiting old building practices—the use of by-products and cast-offs—as a way to improve building materials and sustainability of the trade. A technique known as rammed earth construction uses materials that are alternatives to cement and are often more readily available in the environment. One such alternative is wood fly ash, a by-product of pulp mills and coal-fired power plants, explains Dr. Sumi Siddiqua, with UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering. Industry has been trying to find a use for materials like fly ash ...

Whiteflies, particularly the African cassava whitefly (Bemisia tabaci, SSA1-SG1), pose a significant threat to agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa by transmitting viruses that cause cassava brown streak disease and cassava mosaic virus disease. In a new study published in PeerJ Life & Environment, Dr. Tadeo Kaweesi and his team at the National Agricultural Research Organization identify potential gene targets that could revolutionize the management of this devastating pest and prove vital for food security in the region.   In the article ("In silico prediction of candidate gene targets ...

Milan (Italy), 23 February 2024 – TWIN is the name of the new robotic exoskeleton for lower limbs, designed and developed by Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL, the joint laboratory between the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) and the Prosthetic Center of INAIL (the prosthetic unit of the National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work), which will allow patients to wear it more easily. Presented today in Milan during a press conference held at the Museum of Science and Technology, TWIN was demonstrated ...

Lockdown drills, practiced to help prepare children for shooting incidents at school, make those who have been exposed to violence feel safer – a new study of thousands of students in the US indicates.    The finding, reported in a new peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of School Violence, contradicts claims that the drills traumatize children, without making them feel safer.    Ensuring that students feel safe – and are safe – in schools is essential for them to learn and thrive, explains ...

t’s official. Getting the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep a night is currently out of reach for almost one-third of the population as Flinders University experts found 31% of adults had average sleep durations outside the recommended range. The global study of thousands of adults published in Sleep Health found only 15% of people slept the recommended 7-9 hours for five or more nights per week – and among those who did achieve an average of 7-9 hours per night over the nine month monitoring period, about 40% ...

In recent news, there has been a case where a patient experienced pain due to a surgical procedure involving sutures, resulting in the unintended presence of gauze within the patient's body. Gauze is typically employed to control bleeding during medical interventions, aiding in hemostasis. However, when inadvertently left in the body, it can lead to inflammation and infection. Addressing this issue, recent research has been published by researchers focusing on a hemostatic agent derived from mussels and silkworm cocoons. This hemostatic agent has garnered attention in the academic community due to its efficacy in clotting blood and its safety within ...

A new research study led by A*STAR.Singapore Immunology Network (A*STAR.SIgN) has found that neutrophils—one of the most abundant white blood cells in our body—change drastically in certain cancers, adopting a new function whereby they promote tumour growth. By carefully studying neutrophils as soon as they enter the tumour, scientists from A*STAR.SIgN also uncovered ways to accurately differentiate tumour-promoting neutrophils from normal neutrophils present in the rest of the body. Neutrophils play important and irreplaceable roles in fighting infections, ...

Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) depict the regulatory mechanisms of genes within cellular systems as a network, offering vital insights for understanding cell processes and molecular interactions that determine cellular phenotypes. Transcriptional regulation, a prevalent type for regulating gene expression, involves the control of target genes (TGs) by transcription factors (TFs). One of the major challenges in inferring GRNs is to establish causal relationships, rather than just correlation, among the various components ...

Image-sentence retrieval task aims to search images for given sentences and retrieve sentences from image queries. The current retrieval methods are all supervised methods that require a large number of annotations for training. However, considering the labor cost, it is difficult to re-align large amounts of multimodal data in many applications (e.g., medical retrieval), which results in unsupervised multimodal data. To solve the problem, a research team led by Yang YANG published their new research on 15 Feb 2024 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and ...

Deep learning modeling that incorporates physical knowledge is currently a hot topic, and a number of excellent techniques have emerged. The most well-known one is the physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). PINN integrates the residuals of the system’s governing partial differential equations (PDEs) and the initial value/boundary conditions into the loss function, thus the resulting model satisfies the constraints of the physical laws represented by the PDEs. However, PINN cannot work if equations among the key physical quantities of the system have not been established. To ...

Osaka, Japan – Well-being is important for everyone, especially when we feel lonely or isolated. Depression is a serious challenge for many people and finding an effective solution is key. In a recent study published in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from Osaka University used a mouse model of depression to reveal that one form of ketamine (a common anesthetic) in low doses can improve social impairments by restoring functioning in a specific brain region called the anterior insular cortex. Ketamine is often used at low doses to treat depression, but its actions in the brain remain relatively unclear. Generally, ketamine refers to a mix of two different forms of ketamine: ...

The evolutionary success of the first large predators on land was driven by their need to improve as killers, researchers at the University of Bristol and the Open University suggest. The forerunners of mammals ruled the Earth for about 60 million years, long before the origin of the first dinosaurs. They diversified as the top predators on land between 315–251 million years ago. Researchers studied the jaw anatomy and body size of carnivorous synapsids, using these traits to reconstruct the likely feeding habits of these ancient predators and chart their ecological ...

AI holds the potential to revolutionize healthcare, but it also brings with it a significant challenge: bias. For instance, a dermatologist might use an AI-driven system to help identify suspicious moles. But what if the machine learning model was trained primarily on image data from lighter skin tones, and misses a common form of skin cancer on a darker-skinned patient?   This is a real-world problem. In 2021, researchers found that free image databases that could be used to train AI systems to diagnose skin cancer contain very few images ...

Increased use of Paxlovid, the antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19, could prevent hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and save tens of billions of dollars a year, according to a new epidemiological model published by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. In fact, epidemiologists found that treating even 20% of symptomatic cases would save lives and improve public health. A 2023 National Institutes of Health study found that only about 15% of high-risk patients take Paxlovid when infected with COVID-19. Using a multiscale mathematical model based on ...

From smart virtual assistants and self-driving cars to digital health and fraud prevention systems, AI technology is transforming almost every aspect of our daily lives—and education is no different. For all its promise, the rise of AI, like any new technology, raises some pressing ethical and equity questions. How can we ensure that such a powerful tool can be accessed by all students regardless of background?  Inspired by this call to action, USC researchers have created a low-cost, accessible learning kit to help college and high school students build their own “robot friend.” Students can personalize the robot’s ...

  A special 13-article supplement to the peer-reviewed journal Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (DTT) examines the “Development and Future of Automated Insulin Delivery (AID) Systems. Click here to read the supplement now. Included in the supplement is the article titled “A Peek Under the Hood: Explaining the MiniMed™ 780G Algorithm with Meal Detection™ Technology", by Benyamin Grosman, PhD and his Medtronic algorithm team with co-authors Ohad Cohen, MD, and Robert Vigersky, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Medtronic. James Thrasher, MD “Early ...

RENO, Nev. – A multi-agency study, spearheaded by researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, underscores the impacts of strategic cattle grazing, particularly on restoring the declining population of the greater sage-grouse bird, a keystone species in the Great Basin region.   Amidst ongoing decline, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acted by listing the sage-grouse for protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2011. This move prompted the Bureau of Land Management to develop a federal conservation plan for the species ...

Recent clinical trials utilizing high doses of adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors have highlighted a new challenge to AAV gene transfer – activation of the complement system. A new article in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy describes how a convergence of AAV-specific, environmental, and patient-specific factors shaping complement responses likely contribute to differential outcomes seen in clinical trials. Click here to read the article now. Complement responses may contribute to priming of the adaptive immune system or serious adverse events ...

By Ann Kellett, Texas A&M University School of Public Health A new study from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health suggests that city dwellers who have more exposure to urban green spaces require fewer mental health services. The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, was conducted by Jay Maddock, Ph.D., Regents Professor of environmental and occupational health at Texas A&M, and colleagues from the Center ...

University of Queensland researchers have identified an opportunity to reduce infections in people living with cystic fibrosis. Professor Matt Sweet, Dr Kaustav Das Gupta and Dr James Curson from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience have discovered a fault in the bacteria-killing function of immune cells in people with CF and a potential way to get around it. CF is a chronic disease in which defects in the CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) channel cause a build-up of mucus in the lungs, airways and digestive system, leading to ...