Scientists have found that the spatial arrangement of plants in drylands can be a sign of the environment degrading, according to a new study. One of the iconic features of drylands is the striking appearance of islands of plants surrounded by bare soil. This spatial structure of arid vegetation has long fascinated scientists, but now a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has shed new light on why these plants group in this way. An international team of scientists, including from the University of Birmingham, combined field data from 115 sites around the world, and used mathematical models and remote sensing to build a picture of how the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The next generation of advanced telescopes could sharpen the hunt for potential extraterrestrial life by closely scrutinizing the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, new research suggests. The next generation of advanced telescopes could sharpen the hunt for potential extraterrestrial life by closely scrutinizing the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, new research suggests. Published recently in The Astronomical Journal, a new paper details how a team of astronomers from The Ohio State University examined upcoming telescopes’ ability to detect chemical ...

A startling number of people conceal an infectious illness to avoid missing work, travel, or social events, new research at the University of Michigan suggests. The findings are reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Across a series of studies involving healthy and sick adults, 75% of the 4,110 participants said they had either hidden an infectious illness from others at least once or might do so in the future. Many participants reported boarding planes, going on dates, and engaging in other social interactions while secretly sick. More than 61% of healthcare workers participating in the study also ...

A new study in the peer-reviewed journal Telemedicine and e-Health found that hypertension management via telehealth increased among Medicaid recipients regardless of race and ethnicity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to read the article now. Jun Soo Lee, PhD, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and coauthors, reported that from February-April 2023, the number of hypertension-related telehealth outpatient visits per 100 persons increased from 0.01 to 6.13, and the number of hypertension-related in-person visits decreased from 61.88 to 52.63. The investigators ...

Michiganders will continue to have the opportunity to advance medical research aimed at advancing individualized health care through a renewed award to Henry Ford Health + Michigan State University Health Sciences from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us Research Program. The award includes $18.3 million in initial funding to support a consortium of 8 health care provider organizations with a presence in 16 states.  Henry Ford has led the consortium since 2017. The renewed award allows participation to continue until at least 2028. The multimillion-dollar multi-year award represents the largest NIH research grant in Henry Ford’s 108-year history.  All ...

Chicago, IL – January 24, 2024 – The first study to map the prevalence of bilateral hearing loss in the United States by state and county finds that rates of hearing loss are higher among men, non-Hispanic Whites, and residents of rural areas. Bilateral hearing loss is hearing loss in both ears. West Virginia, Alaska, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Arizona had the highest rates of hearing loss, while the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Connecticut had the lowest (see top ten highest and ...

The Chicago-based Great Lakes ReNEW coalition has been awarded one of the largest, if not the largest, climate awards in the city’s history – up to $160 million over 10 years as one of the inaugural U.S. National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines.   Authorized in the “CHIPS and Science Act of 2022,” the NSF Engines program is designed to support the development of diverse regional coalitions of universities, local governments, the private sector and nonprofits to create solutions to today’s pressing issues.  Selected from an initial pool of more ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Clinical research led by Indiana University School of Medicine investigators and their collaborators in Uganda has revealed that hydroxyurea significantly reduces infections in children with sickle cell anemia. Their latest findings enhance strong evidence of hydroxyurea’s effectiveness and could ultimately reduce death in children in Africa, the continent most burdened by the disease.  The group’s research, recently published in the journal Blood, revealed that hydroxyurea treatment resulted in a remarkable ...

The University of Manchester and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics have announced the establishment of the SPIE-Manchester Postgraduate Scholarship in Photonics. The $500k gift from the SPIE Endowment Matching Program will be matched 100% by the University and will be used to support both early-career and returning researchers from the University’s Photon Science Institute in partnership with the Royce Institute, the UK’s national institute for advanced materials research and innovation. The partnership was announced today (29 January) during the SPIE Photonics West conference in San Francisco. Photonics is the study of light and its interactions ...

New material is self-assembling, long-lasting and recyclable. As electronic devices get smaller, the materials needed to create them get smaller as well. Nanoscience is the study of extremely small materials that find uses in energy storage, electronics, health and safety applications and more. Now a team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed a new self-assembly method to fabricate multilayered 2D nanosheets. A nanosheet is an extremely small, lasagna-like material made of ultrathin layers of polymers and nanoparticles. These nanosheets have significantly ...

Researchers at OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences have embarked on a revolutionary new research study that could improve the detection of a deadly disease — pancreatic cancer — and give patients a chance to live longer, healthier lives. The research focuses on an innovative combination of imaging techniques: a newly created contrast agent that recognizes pancreatic cancer cells, paired with Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography, or MSOT. Together, the approach can detect pancreatic cancer cells the width of an eyelash ...

As sea levels rise due to global warming, ecosystems are being altered. One small silver lining, scientists believed, was that the tidal wetlands found in estuaries might produce less methane – a potent greenhouse gas – as the increasing influx of seawater makes these habitats less hospitable to methane-producing microbes.   However, research from biologists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley indicates that these assumptions aren’t always true. After examining the microbial, chemical, and geological features of 11 wetland zones, the team found that a wetland region exposed ...

A new qualitative study highlights the negative interpersonal and psychological consequences associated with “yo-yo dieting,” also known as weight cycling. The work underscores how toxic yo-yo dieting can be and how difficult it can be for people to break the cycle. “Yo-yo dieting – unintentionally gaining weight and dieting to lose weight only to gain it back and restart the cycle – is a prevalent part of American culture, with fad diets and lose-weight-quick plans or drugs normalized as people pursue beauty ...

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.  The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.  Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have ...

January is a time when many people are looking for new diet routines, and intermittent fasting is trending, as are traditional calorie cutting programs. Research conducted with animal models suggests that intermittent fasting slows aging, and those animals live longer. Researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and the University of Alabama at Birmingham are conducting the DiAL-Health study to see if eating for 8 hours and fasting for 16 each day shows similar results in people. These researchers ...

Like it or not, social media has become the new mall for kids. It’s where they want to be, and it’s a place they can easily go—often with no guidance, no oversight, and no guardrails. And when the content gets ugly or confusing or weird, it can be tough for them to know what to do. Dominic DiFranzo, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, has devoted his research to helping kids better navigate the perils of social media. He and his team have recently received two grants from the National Science Foundation to develop artificial intelligence tools ...

Vijay Shah, Assistant Professor, Cybersecurity Engineering, received funding for the project: "Fingerprinting Technology for Enhancing 5G/NextG O-RAN Supply Chain Risk Management."   In this project, Shah is focusing on distinctive power signatures and electromagnetic emanations to fortify supply chain risk management of 5G/Next G networks.   This technology has the potential to create a robust framework for comprehensive validation and testing across the entire lifespan of deployed Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) systems. This, in turn, could ...

'Millennials don't really want to work. They're far too focused on avocado toast and chai lattes!' Just one of the many clichés expressed by workers over the age of fifty. And those being criticized? Well, they often reply with a bored 'OK, Boomer' followed by an eye roll and some ironic remark about the excessively performance-driven worldview of those born between the mid 1950s and the mid 1960s. Work, it seems, just isn't as important to the young as it is to older generations. But it's not just about baby boomers and millennials. Parked between them is Generation X, ...

Calcium ions are essential for cells, but can be toxic in higher concentrations. A team of researchers has now designed and prepared a combination drug that kills tumor cells by modulating the calcium influx into the cell. An external calcium source is not necessary because only the calcium ions already present in the tumor tissue are used, according to the study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Biological cells need calcium ions, among other things, for the proper functioning of the mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells. However, ...

A University of Houston optometry researcher is warning against the use of low-level red light (LLRL) therapy as a method to control myopia, or nearsightedness, especially in children. Over the last few years, LLRL has emerged as a viable myopia treatment after studies reported the treatment as effective and responsible for significant reduction in myopia progression. The company behind one of the devices reports that it is already being used to address myopia in over 100,000 pediatric patients.   But the excitement over its results as a myopia treatment may have come too soon, ahead of its proven safety.  "Based on measurements in our laboratory, ...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29, 2024 — Counterfeit detector pens use a starch-iodine reaction to identify fake bills. But could you fool them with chemistry? In today’s episode, we dive into the chemistry of iodine, its color and its clock reactions, all while making a little extra cash on the side.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDaVCyOBSsY Reactions is a video series produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. Subscribe to Reactions at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on Twitter @ACSReactions. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader ...

Humans and our closest relatives, living apes, display a remarkable diversity of types of locomotion—from walking upright on two legs to climbing in trees and walking using all four limbs.  While scientists have long been intrigued by the question of how humans’ bipedal stance and movement evolved from a quadrupedal ancestor, neither past studies nor fossil records have permitted the reconstruction of a clear and definitive history of the early evolutionary stages that led to human bipedalism. However, a new study, which centers on recently discovered evidence from skulls of a 6-million-year-old fossil ape, Lufengpithecus, ...

Five cases of Alzheimer’s disease are believed to have arisen as a result of medical treatments decades earlier, reports a team of UCL and UCLH researchers. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the amyloid-beta protein, and is usually a sporadic condition of late adult life, or more rarely an inherited condition that occurs due to a faulty gene. The new Nature Medicine paper provides the first evidence of Alzheimer’s disease in living people that appears to have been medically acquired and due to transmission of the amyloid-beta protein. The people described in the paper had all been treated as ...

About The Study: Although the association of food security and life expectancy varied across sex and racial and ethnic groups, overall, lower levels of food security were associated with a higher risk of premature mortality and a shorter life expectancy in this study of 57,000 adults. The findings of this study highlight the potential importance of improving food security in promoting population health and health equity.  Authors: Lu Qi, M.D., of Tulane University in New Orleans, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 35,000 adults age 50 or older suggest that wealth inequality in the U.S. is associated with significant inequities in survival. Wealth redistribution policies may substantially reduce those inequities and increase population longevity.  Authors: Kathryn E. W. Himmelstein, M.D., M.S.Ed., of Massachusetts General Hospital 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/jamainternmed.2023.7975) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and ...