Researchers describe the life cycle of four species of the world's most venomous caterpillars, genus Lonomia Walker, and discover new parasitoids and host plants ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285010 Article Title: Characterization of morphological and biological aspects of venomous caterpillars of the genus Lonomia Walker (Lepidoptera: Saturniidae) in Colombia Author Countries: Colombia, France Funding: This study was financially supported by The Universidad de Los Andes, Faculty of Sciences, ...

A new study published in Science Advances today provides evidence that large-scale, offshore, and fully-protected marine areas (MPAs) protect biodiversity without negatively impacting fishing and food security.  In the first-ever “before and after” assessment of the impact of establishing Mexico’s Revillagigedo National Park on the fishing industry, a team of US and Mexican researchers found that Mexico’s industrial fishing sector did not incur economic losses five years after the park’s creation despite a full ban on fishing activity within the MPA.  Established in 2017, ...

Acting as a team, twin stem cells activate the immune system to suppress tumor growth and prolong survival in representative preclinical models Overall survival for patients with melanoma that has spread to the brain is only four to six months. Immunotherapies, which harness the power of the immune system to attack cancer cells, have garnered excitement in recent years for their potential to revolutionize the treatment of metastatic melanomas, but results from early clinical studies indicate that the prognosis for most patients remains poor. Now, scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, have ...

Embargoed until Wednesday 31 May at 2.00pm EST  //  7.00pm UK BST The ground beneath Antarctica’s most vulnerable glacier has been mapped for the first time, helping scientists to better understand how it is being affected by climate change. Analysis of the geology below the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica shows there is less sedimentary rock than expected – a finding that could affect how the ice slides and melts in the coming decades. “Sediments allow faster flow, like sliding on mud,” says Dr Tom Jordan, a geophysicist with the British ...

PHILADELPHIA—New research has unlocked insights into how “good fat” tissue could potentially be harnessed to combat obesity and remove glucose from the blood, helping to control diabetes. Published today in Science Advances, the work is a collaboration between researchers with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Cambridge, Free University of Brussels and University of East Anglia. Human bodies consist of two types of fat: brown and white. Brown fat breaks down blood sugar (glucose) and fat molecules, generating heat in response to ...

Fresh insights into a protein that causes damage in kidneys and hearts could open up new treatment options for chronic kidney disease, research shows.   In a study in mice, scientists found that scarring in kidneys and hearts was driven by a protein called Indian Hedgehog (IHH), which is produced and released by a subset of cells in aged and injured kidneys.   Experts say further studies are needed to explore IHH as a potential target for therapies to treat chronic kidney disease (CKD) – a condition that affects 10 per cent of the world’s ...

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and the University of Cambridge have made an important discovery in the race to find treatments for obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes. A new study published today is the first to reveal the molecular structure of a protein called ‘Uncoupling protein 1’ (UCP1). This protein allows brown fat tissue, or ‘good fat’, to burn off calories as heat - in contrast to conventional white fat that stores calories. The breakthrough was made by an international collaboration between UEA, the University of Cambridge, ...

An international team, led by UBC Okanagan researchers, suggests a simple tweak to the first meal of the day might help people living with Type 2 diabetes (T2D) better control their blood sugar levels. Dr. Barbara Oliveira conducts research with Dr. Jonathan Little’s Exercise, Metabolism and Inflammation Lab in UBCO’s Faculty of Health and Social Development. Their latest study, published this week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, confirms that switching from a traditional western-style low-fat breakfast, like oatmeal, toast and fruit, to a low-carb meal higher in ...

The 6th World Conference on Targeting Phage Therapy 2023 which will be held in Paris on June 1-2 will welcome more than 70 communications (major, short and poster presentations), and gather more than 150 international in-person and virtual participants from 31 countries. Targeting Phage Therapy 2023: Strategic Questions Phage Therapy 2023’s aim is to present the most recent advances on phage therapy within different sessions and topics. Each speaker will highlight where we are now and where we are heading. We believe that phages will be the hottest topic not only to combat infection and antibiotic resistance, ...

A special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Health Equity titled “Improving Care for Veterans Through Health Equity Research" includes 13 articles that discuss issues vital to Veterans. These articles range from highlighting the importance of expanding the scientific workforce to promoting health equity within the Veterans Administration. Click here to read the issue now. Rachel Ramoni and Carolyn Clancy, from the Department of Veterans Affairs, coauthored the article titled “Improving Care for Veterans Through Health Equity Research.” To improve Veterans’ well-being, “we must actively ...

LA JOLLA, CA— A new “molecular editing” technique from Scripps Research enables chemists to add new elements to organic molecules at locations that were previously out of reach. The researchers described their new method in a paper that appeared on May 31, 2023, in Nature. The method uses a designer molecule called a ligand that helps a palladium-atom catalyst reach from one side of a carbon-atom ring to break a carbon-hydrogen bond on the other side, allowing a new set of molecules to join at that site. This molecule-building feat was previously impossible for so-called “saturated” rings of carbon atoms, which are common ...

URBANA, Ill. — Corn growers seeking to increase the amount of nitrogen taken up by their crop can adjust many aspects of fertilizer application, but recent studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show those tweaks don’t do much to improve uptake efficiency from fertilizer. That’s because, the studies show, corn takes up the majority of its nitrogen – about 67% on average – from sources occurring naturally in soil, not from fertilizer. The evidence for ...

Irvine, Calif., May 31, 2023 – Medicaid telemedicine coverage between 2013 and 2019 was associated with significant growth in telemedicine use and improved healthcare access, while private policies did not have such an association, according to a study led by the University of California, Irvine. An analysis of 20,000 records of U.S. adults under 65 with either state-level Medicaid or private policies showed that live video chats increased by 6 percentage points and that the ability to consistently access necessary care increased by 11 percentage points for Medicaid patients. Recently ...

There’s an intriguing exoplanet out there – 400 light-years out there – that is so tantalising that astronomers have been studying it since its discovery in 2009. One orbit for WASP-18 b around its star that is slightly larger than our Sun takes just 23 hours. There is nothing like it in our Solar System. A new study led by Université de Montréal Ph.D. student Louis-Philippe Coulombe about this exoplanet, an ultra-hot gas giant 10 times more massive than Jupiter, based on new data from the Canadian NIRISS instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) holds many surprises! Mapping an exoplanet An ...

Philadelphia, May 31, 2023 – About two-thirds of the risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is thought to arise from genetic influences, but about a third could be influenced by environment and lifestyle, opening the door for behavioral interventions that could delay or prevent pathophysiological changes that occur with AD. Now a new study in a mouse model of AD examines the effects of environmental enrichment on AD symptom progression and pathology. The study appears in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier. Gerd ...

East Hanover, NJ. May 31, 2023. A team of rehabilitation researchers discovered that prism adaptation therapy (PAT) was as beneficial for treating right-sided spatial neglect as left-sided spatial neglect in a cohort of individuals with stroke and traumatic and non-traumatic brain injuries. These novel findings and their clinical implications were reported in, “Prism adaptation treatment for right-sided and left-sided spatial neglect: A retrospective case-matched study,” (doi: 10.1016/j.arrct.2023.100263). The article was published open access on March 23, 2023, by the Archives of Rehabilitation Research and Clinical Translation. ...

In general, there is an issue around the quality of information about lupus on the internet. Rumours, unchecked data, and unconfirmed research all contribute to confusion and anxiety, and can lead to people taking the wrong actions for themselves and their disease. There is therefore a need for access to quality information about lupus. Therapeutic patient education (TPE) is a key way to help people self-manage chronic conditions such as lupus. An essential component of TPE is access to valid information ...

Apps have become ubiquitous in many parts of life, including for health. For people with an RMD,  personalized video exercises (PEV) may be useful to support rehabilitation and physical exercise. In an abstract shared at the 2023 EULAR annual congress, Davergne and colleagues explore the effectiveness of PEV provided through Apps in supporting rehabilitation for people with disability. The impact was measured in terms of a range of outcomes, including the effect on functional capacity, confidence in exercise performance, use of care, health-related quality of life, adherence, and adverse events. Data ...

“This evidence suggests that inflammation in PsA is not limited to skin and joints, but also involves the cardiovascular system”, says Nienke Kleinrensink, lead author on the abstract shared in a session on Comorbidities in RMD at the 2023 EULAR congress in Milan, Italy. The new finding is based on work done at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands. Part of the study was funded by Pfizer and Health Holland. The main objective was to investigate whether vascular inflammation is elevated in PsA patients. The team used positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) in 75 people with PsA with active peripheral arthritis, ...

The increased cardiovascular risks in RA include acute coronary syndromes (ACS). The extent to which DMARD-induced remission could reduce the risk of ACS in RA versus rates in the general population – and whether there are DMARD-specific beneficial effects on ACS risk – remain unknown. In a session titled, From hearts to lungs: comobidities in RA, Delcoigne and colleagues present new data on the risk of ACS in patients with RA who attained remission with methotrexate (MTX) or a tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi). The researchers defined and pooled cohorts of RA patients from registers in Norway and Sweden. This included 14,488 treatment courses ...

There is a large diagnostic delay for people with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). In 2008, the SPACE cohort started to assess the prevalence of axSpA – and the reliability of an early diagnosis in people with chronic back pain (CBP). Everyone taking part was under the age of 45, and with recent-onset CBP (over 3 months, and up to 2 years) of unknown origin. Now, Marques and colleagues present two abstracts of the 2-year primary outcome of the study at the EULAR congress. The first abstract assesses the 2-year prevalence of an axSpA diagnosis among people with recent onset CBP who had been referred to a rheumatologist and investigates the sustainability of a baseline diagnosis ...

Studies on the long-term consequences of COVID-19 (long-COVID) in patients with inflammatory rheumatic diseases (iRD) are scarce. Where available data do exist, they tend to be heterogeneous and largely inconclusive. In addition, it is not known whether correctly classifying patients with iRD as long-COVID cases is complicated by increased background noise due to the occurrence of persistent symptoms that could be attributed to either long-COVID or iRD. A team in the Netherlands aimed to compare the risk of developing long-COVID after infection with the Omicron ...

EULAR – The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology – held its 2023 annual congress in Milan, Italy. One of the abstracts chosen for presentation in the scientific session on Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) in children and young people, focused on the factors associated with diagnostic delay in FMF, using data from the Juvenile Inflammatory Rheumatism (JIR) cohort. Of 960 FMF patients enrolled, 80% received a diagnosis within 10 years of symptom onset; the remaining 20% had delayed diagnosis, and were significantly older with median age of 46.4 versus ...

EULAR – the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology – works on a broad spectrum of autoimmune and auto-inflammatory diseases. A rise in the incidence of some of these has been described, raising the possibility that incidence might be impacted by environmental factors. But there is a lack of available data, and commonalities and differences between some individual diseases also remain poorly understood. Conrad and colleagues aimed to clarify the picture by investigating 19 of the most common autoimmune diseases. Their work – shared at the 2023 EULAR congress in Milan, Italy – assesses trends over time, by sex, age, socioeconomic status, season ...

Early inflammatory arthritis is often undifferentiated, but it may develop into established RA or another arthropathy.1 Alternatively, it may resolve spontaneously, or remain undifferentiated for indefinite periods. Erosion is a key prognostic factor which can be detected with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).2 In addition, MRI allows direct visualization and assessment of (teno-) synovitis and bone marrow edema.3 Predicting early RA from MRI images of the hands and feet can help people access timely treatment, which may possibly ...