BGI Europe A/S, a wholly owned subsidiary of BGI Genomics, announced its NIFTY® non-invasive prenatal testing kit and software (CE-IVDD List B) were granted an extension under its existing CE-IVDD certification to include the DNBSEQ-G99 model to meet the European Union regulations for medical devices. In January 2024, BGI Genomics unveiled the NIFTY® ultra-fast non-invasive prenatal genetic testing product, utilizing the innovative DNBSEQ-G99 platform. Designed for both small and medium throughput, this platform ensures top-notch testing ...

Living in neighborhoods with high levels of violence can affect children’s development by changing the way that a part of the brain detects and responds to potential threats, potentially leading to poorer mental health and other negative outcomes, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. However, nurturing parents can help protect kids against these detrimental effects, according to the study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology. “Decades of research ...

A groundbreaking technology that can recognize human emotions in real time has been developed by Professor Jiyun Kim and his research team in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at UNIST. This innovative technology is poised to revolutionize various industries, including next-generation wearable systems that provide services based on emotions. Understanding and accurately extracting emotional information has long been a challenge due to the abstract and ambiguous nature of human affects such as emotions, ...

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center today announced it has acquired certain assets from Bellicum Pharmaceuticals, Inc. related to the CaspaCIDe® switch platform and the GoCAR® platform. The transaction also includes clinical-grade stocks of rimiducid, an agent used to trigger the switches. As a result of this acquisition, MD Anderson may incorporate these platforms into its own cell therapy programs. The institution also intends to make the technology ...

From Bangladesh to India to Texas, Tom Varner is leveraging his research to improve sources for drinking water around the world. Varner, a UTSA doctoral student in environmental science and engineering, explored the mobility of arsenic from the sediments surrounding the Meghna River in Bangladesh as part of a National Science Foundation-funded project. The river flows through central Bangladesh, where elevated concentrations of arsenic in the groundwater threaten the welfare of millions of people. Long-term exposure to arsenic, which is toxic when ingested, can lead ...

A large-scale clinical trial of treatment strategies for Crohn’s disease has shown that offering early advanced therapy to all patients straight after diagnosis can drastically improve outcomes, including by reducing the number of people requiring urgent abdominal surgery for treatment of their disease by ten-fold. The PROFILE trial, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, involved 386 patients with newly-diagnosed active Crohn’s disease. Recruiting from 40 hospitals across the UK, and supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network, it sought to test whether a biomarker – a genetic signature ...

Anxiety-related disorders can have a profound impact on the mental health and quality of life of affected individuals. Understanding the neural circuits and molecular mechanisms that trigger anxiety can aid in the development of effective targeted pharmacological treatments. Delta opioid receptors (DOP), which localize in the regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation, play a key role in the development of anxiety. Several studies have demonstrated the therapeutic effects of DOP agonists (synthetic compounds which selectively bind to DOPs and mimic the effect of ...

If storms become stronger in the future due to climate change, more nitrogen may be released from the bottom of coastal seas. This is shown by research of marine biogeochemist Dunia Rios-Yunes at NIOZ in Yerseke. Rios-Yunes will defend her PhD-thesis today at the University of Utrecht. “The dynamics of nutrients in deltas and estuaries have been a bit of a blind spot for marine science, so far”, she says.  Inflatable couch  For her experiments, Rios-Yunes spent many hours on an inflatable couch on ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (02/19/2024)—For the first time, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have demonstrated that it is possible to provide accurate, high-resolution predictions of carbon cycles in agroecosystems, which could help mitigate the impacts of climate change. The study by scholars from the UMN-led National Artificial Intelligence Institute for Climate-Land Interactions, Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy (AI-CLIMATE) and UIUC-led Agroecosystem Sustainability ...

We know that greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide should increase rainfall. The emissions heat the atmosphere, causing a one-two punch: warmer oceans make it easier for water to evaporate, and warmer air can hold more water vapor, meaning more moisture is available to fall as rain. But for much of the 20th century, that increase in precipitation didn’t clearly show up in the data. A new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley ...

Our cells are surrounded by a fragile membrane that’s only 5 nanometers thick, 1/20 of a soap bubble. Cells are easily damaged by physiological activities, including muscle contraction and tissue injury. To cope with such damage, cells are equipped with mechanisms that can repair membrane damage to a certain degree. Mechanical damage to the cell membrane was previously believed to trigger two simple cellular outcomes: recovery or death. In this study, however, the researchers uncovered a third outcome – cellular senescence.  “When I started this project, I simply aimed to understand ...

Australia can lay claim to two new species of native rodent thanks to a study from The Australian National University (ANU).  The aptly named delicate mouse was previously thought to be a single species spanning a massive stretch of the country from the Pilbara in Western Australia, across parts of the Northern Territory and through Queensland down to the New South Wales border.   But researchers at ANU and CSIRO thought there might be more to the story.   Lead author Dr Emily Roycroft, from ANU, said we now know there ...

Statement Highlights: A new American Heart Association scientific statement updates more than a decade of research identifying, managing and preventing neurodevelopmental delays and disorders among people with congenital heart disease. The new statement outlines important changes since the Association’s last statement in 2012, such as revised criteria to determine which children and adults are at high risk for neurological developmental delays and disorders, as well as an updated list of factors that may increase the risk. Critical next ...

Today, a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin and investigators from FutureNeuro announced a major discovery that has profound importance for our understanding of brain fog and cognitive decline seen in some patients with Long COVID. In the months after the emergence of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV2 in late 2019 a patient-reported syndrome termed Long-COVID began to come to the fore as an enduring manifestation of acute infection.    Long COVID has up to 200 reported symptoms to date, but in general patients report lingering symptoms such as fatigue, ...

The annual rate of carbon emissions due to the degradation of carbon stocks in mangrove forests is predicted to rise by nearly 50,000% by the end of the century, according to a new study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters. Mangroves in regions such as southern India, southeastern China, Singapore and eastern Australia are particularly affected.   Mangrove forests store a large amount of carbon, particularly in their soils, however human development in these areas has led to the degradation of these carbon ...

Scientists at the University of Zurich have developed an innovative neural cell culture model, shedding light on the intricate mechanisms underlying neurodegeneration. Their research pinpointed a misbehaving protein as a promising therapeutic target in the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Neurodegenerative diseases cause some of the neurons in our brains to die, resulting in different symptoms depending on the brain region affected. In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), neurons in the motor cortex and spinal ...

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has appointed Professor Ernst Kuipers, a renowned gastroenterologist, healthcare executive, and former Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport for The Netherlands, as NTU Singapore’s new Vice President (Research). Prof Kuipers will also be appointed to the tenured faculty rank of Distinguished University Professor, the highest faculty rank at NTU bestowed upon faculty members with extraordinary scholarly achievements that typically span multiple disciplinary boundaries. Announcing this new appointment, NTU President Prof Ho Teck Hua said: “We warmly welcome ...

A detailed survey of the volcanic underwater deposits around the Kikai caldera in Japan clarified the deposition mechanisms as well as the event’s magnitude. As a result, the Kobe University research team found that the event 7,300 years ago was the largest volcanic eruption in the Holocene by far. In addition to lava, volcanos eject large amounts of pumice, ashes and gases as a fast-moving flow, known as “pyroclastic flow,” and its sediments are a valuable data source on past eruptions. For volcanoes on land, geologists understand the sedimentation mechanism of pyroclastic flows well, but the sediments themselves get lost easily ...

Mass General Brigham pediatric clinicians created 45 videos on pediatric care topics including how-to for surgical procedures, best practices for intubation and intensive care, and translated them to Spanish through GPT-4 large language model. Videos distributed to clinicians in Guatemala and Colombia AI can offer health care professionals worldwide an inclusive resource for elevating pediatric standards of care, according to authors A team of pediatric clinicians at Mass General Brigham have turned to generative artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle problems plaguing child medical care delivery in resource-poor countries that increase risk for poor outcomes and mortality. The ...

A new computer model mimics Moon dust so well that it could lead to smoother and safer Lunar robot teleoperations. The tool, developed by researchers at the University of Bristol and based at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, could be used to train astronauts ahead of Lunar missions. Working with their industry partner, Thales Alenia Space in the UK, who has specific interest in creating working robotic systems for space applications, the team investigated a virtual version of regolith, another name for Moon dust. Lunar regolith is ...

WASHINGTON (Feb. 22, 2024)--A new study finds women in healthcare occupations endure significantly more stress and burnout compared to their male counterparts. The analysis by researchers at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences also found that job satisfaction and better work-life balance can protect women healthcare professionals from harmful stress.   “Human beings are not equipped to handle the combined, intense pressures in healthcare in part due to the pressure to not take time to care for yourself,” Leigh A. Frame, associate director of the GW Resiliency & Well-being Center, ...

University of Waterloo researchers have developed a new blood testing method that can detect potent opioids much faster than traditional approaches and potentially save lives.  The method, the latest effort by Waterloo researchers and entrepreneurs to lead health innovation in Canada, can simultaneously analyze 96 blood samples that could contain opioids such as fentanyl in under three minutes – twice as quickly as other techniques.  "The difference between our blood testing method and traditional methods used in laboratories and hospitals is that we can do it faster ...

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) has discovered a giant ultra-high-energy gamma-ray bubble structure in the Cygnus star-forming region, which is the first time that the origin of cosmic rays with energy higher than 10 Peta-Electronvolt (PeV, 1PeV=1015eV) has been discovered. This achievement was published in the form of a cover article in Science Bulletin on Feb. 26. The research was completed by the LHAASO Collaboration led by Prof. CAO Zhen as the spokesperson from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the ...

Imagine doubling the processing power of your smartphone, tablet, personal computer, or server using the existing hardware already in these devices.  Hung-Wei Tseng, a UC Riverside associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has laid out a paradigm shift in computer architecture to do just that in a recent paper titled, “Simultaneous and Heterogeneous Multithreading.”  Tseng explained that today’s computer devices increasingly have graphics processing units (GPUs), hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), or digital signal processing units as essential components. These components ...

Home health care use in the last three years of a patient’s life is associated with a higher likelihood of hospice care at the end of life, according to a Rutgers Health study.   Researchers, whose findings are published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, examined the home health care and hospice care experiences of more than 2 million people.   “In addition to benefits for the patient, hospice care also provides resources and support to help family caregivers cope with the physical, emotional and practical challenges of caring for a loved one at the end of life,” said Olga Jarrín, senior author of the ...