CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Tumors constantly shed DNA from dying cells, which briefly circulates in the patient’s bloodstream before it is quickly broken down. Many companies have created blood tests that can pick out this tumor DNA, potentially helping doctors diagnose or monitor cancer or choose a treatment. The amount of tumor DNA circulating at any given time, however, is extremely small, so it has been challenging to develop tests sensitive enough to pick up that tiny signal. A team of researchers from MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now come up with a way to significantly boost that signal, by temporarily slowing the clearance of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream. The ...

Sea otters may be key drivers of changes in California's kelp forests, according to data spanning a century ##### In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Climate: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000290 Article Title: Sea otter recovery buffers century-scale declines in California kelp forests Citation: Nicholson TE, McClenachan L, Tanaka KR, Van Houtan KS (2024) Sea otter recovery buffers century-scale declines in California ...

Norovirus outbreaks are detectable by wastewater monitoring earlier than by other surveillance methods depending on reporting practices, making this a potentially important public health tool.  #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000198 Article Title: Norovirus GII wastewater monitoring for epidemiological surveillance Author Countries: USA Funding: This study was supported by funding from the University of Michigan through the Public Health Infection ...

The cost of climate change may be six months off the average human lifespan, according to a study published January 18, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Amit Roy from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and The New School for Social Research, U.S. Temperature and rainfall — two telltale signals of climate change — cause myriad public health concerns, from the acute and direct (e.g., natural disasters like flooding and heat waves) to the indirect yet equally devastating (e.g., respiratory and mental illnesses). While impacts like these are observable and well documented, existing research has not established a direct link between climate change and life ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) kills upwards of 1.6 million people a year, making it one of the leading causes of death by an infectious agent worldwide—and that number is only growing larger. How, exactly, Mtb evades the immune system isn’t yet known, but a collaborative team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Seattle Children’s Research Institute recently discovered something surprising: prior exposure to a genus of bacteria called Mycobacterium seems to remodel the first-line defenders in the body’s immune system. Furthermore, how ...

6 in 10 sampled under-5s in India have micronutrient deficiencies, and 4 in 10 have anaemia, per survey of 17,230 children.  #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0002095 Article Title: Prevalence and determinants of anemia due to micronutrient deficiencies among children aged 12–59 months in India–Evidence from Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey, 2016–18 Author Countries: India Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Evanston, IL In a paper to be published in Science Jan. 18, scientists Chad Mirkin and Sharon Glotzer and their teams at Northwestern University and University of Michigan, respectively, present findings in nanotechnology that could impact the way advanced materials are made.   The paper describes a significant leap forward in assembling polyhedral nanoparticles. The researchers introduce and demonstrate the power of a novel synthetic strategy that expands possibilities in metamaterial design. These are the unusual materials that underpin “invisibility cloaks” and ultrahigh-speed optical computing systems.  "We manipulate ...

Repeated failures to reproduce make fruit flies stressed and frustrated, which in turn makes them less resilient to other types of stress, Julia Ryvkin at Bar-Ilan University and colleagues report in the open-access journal PLOS Genetics, publishing January 18. Animals are motivated to take actions that improve their survival and reproduction through reward systems in the brain, but failure causes stress. The reward systems have been extensively studied, but less attention has been paid to how animals respond to failure. To investigate, researchers compared ...

Most people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus recover after the acute illness. However, a significant proportion of infected individuals develop long-lasting symptoms with a wide range of manifestations. The causes and disease mechanisms of Long Covid are still unknown, and there are no diagnostic tests or targeted treatments. Part of the immune system active for too long A team of researchers led by Onur Boyman, professor of immunology at the University of Zurich (UZH) and Director of the Department of Immunology at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ), has shown in a study that the complement system plays an important role in Long Covid. It is part of the innate immune system ...

JANUARY 18, 2024, NEW YORK – A Ludwig Cancer Research study has generated a granular portrait of how the cellular and molecular components of the blood vessels that feed brain metastases of melanoma and lung and breast cancers differ from those of healthy brain tissue, illuminating how they help shape the internal environment of tumors to support cancer growth and immune evasion. Led by Ludwig Lausanne’s Leire Bejarano and Johanna Joyce, researchers also developed a platform to identify potentially targetable vulnerabilities in the vasculature of brain metastases. They report in the current issue of Cancer ...

We tend to separate the brain and the muscle—the brain does the thinking; the muscle does the doing. The brain takes in complex information about the world and makes decisions, and the muscle merely executes. This has also shaped how we think about a single cell; some molecules within cells are seen as ‘thinkers’ that take in information about the chemical environment and decide what the cell needs to do for survival; separately, other molecules are seen as the ‘muscle,’ building structures needed for survival.   But a new study shows how the molecules that build structures, i.e, the muscle, can themselves do both the thinking and the doing. The ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists created a new drug delivery system, called the Spatiotemporal On-Demand Patch (SOP), which can receive commands wirelessly from a smartphone or computer to schedule and trigger the release of drugs from individual microneedles. The patch’s thin, soft platform resembles a Band-Aid and was designed to enhance user comfort and convenience, since wearability is a crucial factor for chronically ill patients. The research team, led by Juan Song, PhD, professor of pharmacology ...

AUSTIN, Texas –– Artificial intelligence has become the Swiss Army knife of the business world, a universal tool for increasing sales, optimizing efficiency, and interacting with customers. But new research from Texas McCombs explores another purpose for AI in business: to contribute to the social good. It can do so by helping businesses better serve vulnerable consumers: anyone in the marketplace who experiences limited access to and control of resources. “AI is widely recognized for its operational and ...

Structural insights into a potent antimalarial drug candidate’s interaction with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum have paved the way for drug-resistant malaria therapies, according to a new study by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Van Andel Institute. The antimalarial molecule, TDI-8304, is one of a new class of experimental therapeutics that targets the proteasome, an essential, multiprotein complex in P. falciparum cells. Two years ago, the researchers showed in a preclinical study that TDI-8304 potently kills malaria parasites at multiple stages of their life cycle and ...

RICHMOND, Va. (Jan.  18, 2024) – New research from Virginia Commonwealth University fundamentally challenges the paradigm that business organizations should promote profit above all else. Christopher S. Reina, Ph.D., executive director of the VCU Institute for Transformative Leadership, lays out the foundation for transforming business to be much more people-centered and humanistic in “Humanistic Organizing: The Transformative Force of Mindful Organizational Communication.” ...

The quantum ground state of an acoustic wave of a certain frequency can be reached by completely cooling the system. In this way, the number of quantum particles, the so-called acoustic phonons, which cause disturbance to quantum measurements, can be reduced to almost zero and the gap between classical and quantum mechanics bridged. Over the past decade, major technological advances have been made, making it possible to put a wide variety of systems into this state. Mechanical vibrations oscillating between ...

DALLAS, January 17, 2024 — The American Heart Association and National Football League are asking classrooms, afterschool programs and other student groups to join the NFL PLAY 60 Fitness Tracking Competition from Jan. 22 to Feb. 9. The classroom with the most activity minutes in each of the 32 NFL club markets will receive a $1,000 grant with an additional $1,000 PLAY 60 grant awarded to the top classroom overall. The competition and the goal of NFL PLAY 60 is to increase physical activity in kids which impacts overall mental and physical wellness which is essential to help children reach their full potential. The NFL PLAY 60 Fitness Tracking Competition takes place ...

Electrical deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a well-established method for treating disordered movement in Parkinson’s disease. However, implanting electrodes in a person’s brain is an invasive and imprecise way to stimulate nerve cells. Researchers report in ACS’ Nano Letters a new application for the technique, called magnetogenetics, that uses very small magnets to wirelessly trigger specific, gene-edited nerve cells in the brain. The treatment effectively relieved motor symptoms in mice without damaging surrounding ...

Evolutionary biologists have long suspected that the diversification of a single species into multiple descendent species – that is, an “adaptive radiation” – is the result of each species adapting to a different environment. Yet formal tests of this hypothesis have been elusive owing to the difficulty of firmly establishing the relationship between species traits and evolutionary “fitness” for a group of related species that recently diverged from a common ancestral species. A global team of biologists led by McGill University have compiled nearly two decades of field data – representing the study ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn., January 18, 2024) St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital today announced a nearly $13 million investment toward a new research collaboration with scientists at Columbia University, Duke University and Stanford University to expand the understanding of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCR), which are vital proteins that impact human health and disease. The collaborative research project is led by two St. Jude researchers, Scott Blanchard, Ph.D., and M. Madan Babu, Ph.D., who are working with Nobel laureate and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Robert Lefkowitz, M.D., of Duke University; Jonathan Javitch, M.D., Ph.D., of ...

WPI Researchers have developed a material to remove urea from water and potentially convert it into hydrogen gas. By building these materials of nickel and cobalt atoms with carefully tailored electronic structures, the group has unlocked the potential to enable these transition metal oxides and hydroxides to selectively oxidize urea in an electrochemical reaction. The study, led by Xiaowei Teng, the James H. Manning professor of Chemical Engineering at WPI, was recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters and highlighted in the publication’s supplementary front cover.  The ...

Consider the faba bean, also known as the fava bean or broad bean.  The bright-green legume has been enjoyed as a diet staple for thousands of years in Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean. Just one cup of faba beans has 13 grams of protein — making it a better protein source than most other legumes — along with plenty of fiber, potassium, and iron. Plus, it’s a good cover crop that helps improve soil health, slow erosion, and control pests, disease, and weeds.  But you don’t often see it in the fields or on the menus in Virginia. That’s why College of Agriculture and Life ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Many electric vehicles are powered by batteries that contain cobalt — a metal that carries high financial, environmental, and social costs. MIT researchers have now designed a battery material that could offer a more sustainable way to power electric cars. The new lithium-ion battery includes a cathode based on organic materials, instead of cobalt or nickel (another metal often used in lithium-ion batteries). In a new study, the researchers showed that this material, which could be produced at much lower cost than cobalt-containing batteries, can conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. The new battery also has comparable storage ...

Epidermal microorganisms, vital in nutrient exchange between hosts and environments, have now been shown to play a key role in host toxicity through community changes. This research highlights how changes in the community of skin-based microbes correlate more significantly with earthworm toxicity than those in intestinal microorganisms, especially under combined soil contaminations. A new study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eehl.2023.11.001) published in the journal Eco-Environment & Health, researchers from Zhejiang University revealed the crucial role of epidermal microorganisms in influencing earthworm toxicity under environmental stress, notably in conditions ...

The collaboration between scientists, farmers and managers is crucial to improve the protection of the little bustard, an endangered steppe-land bird in Spain due to human activity. The reduction of natural habitats, the increase in irrigation and the urbanization of the land have led to having less surface areas that guarantee the survival of this vulnerable species. An article published in the journal Biological Conservation reveals how cooperation between different actors is key to finding answers and avoiding the decline of the most threatened populations of the little bustard. The study, a pioneer example of adaptative conservation, ...