One of the things that makes developing effective treatments for Parkinson’s disease so challenging is its complexity. While some forms are caused by genetics, others have environmental factors, and patients can show a wide range of symptoms of varying severity.  Diagnosis of Parkinson’s is also currently made very late, after the disease may have been in the brain for a decade or more.  In a paper published in The Lancet Neurology, a group of scientists  argue that this complexity demands a new way of classifying the disease for research purposes, one based not on clinical diagnosis but biology. The authors have called their biological model ...

A new large, national study of collegiate student-athletes in the United States dispels a long-held belief about concussions, finding that women and men recover from sport-related head injuries within the same time frame.                                              Women and men’s recovery patterns ...

Waymark, the Medicaid provider enablement company, today published a peer-reviewed study in Nature’s Scientific Reports comparing the performance of Waymark SignalTM, the company’s proprietary machine learning technology, to conventional Medicaid risk models. The study found that Waymark Signal was 90 percent accurate in predicting avoidable emergency room (ER) and hospital utilization for patients receiving Medicaid — stronger performance than leading Medicaid risk models in the field.   Waymark ...

Owls are fascinating creatures that can fly silently through some of the quietest places. Their wings make no noise while flying, enabling them to accurately locate their prey using their exceptional hearing ability while remaining undetected. This unique ability depends on many factors and has long been a hot research subject. Studies have found associations between the ability to fly silently and the presence of micro-fringes in owl wings. These trailing-edge (TE) fringes play a crucial role in suppressing the noise produced by wing ...

Web 3.0 is an internet paradigm that is based around blockchain technology, an advanced database mechanism. Compared to Web 2.0, the current internet paradigm, Web 3.0 provides some added advantages, such as transparency and decentralized control structures. This is because Web 3.0 is designed to work over trustless and permissionless networks. Unfortunately, owing to certain technical difficulties, the implementation of Web 3.0 media streaming requires modifications to the service architecture of existing media streaming services. These difficulties include the degradation ...

Aviation has grown considerably in recent decades and accounts for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and some 4 percent of all climate change impacts annually. While aviation is an important contributor to climate change and other environmental problems, electrification is one option for reducing these environmental impacts. The first electric aircraft are already in operation today and are mainly small planes used for pilot training and short flights in the immediate area. This is the type of plane that was studied in the life cycle assessment. “In the short-term future, battery-powered electric aircraft will probably mostly be used for shorter ...

While exposure to a single substance like DDT has been shown to create inherited disease susceptibility, a recent study in animals found exposure to multiple different toxicants across generations can amplify those health problems. In the study, published in the journal Environmental Epigenetics, an initial generation of pregnant rats was exposed to a common fungicide, then their progeny to jet fuel and the following generation to DDT. When those rats were then bred out to a fifth unexposed generation, the incidence of obesity as well as kidney and prostate diseases in those animals were compounded, ...

Research Highlights: Positive, warm relationships between caregiver and child were associated with higher odds of attaining ideal heart health at multiple points across a 20-year span of adulthood. Meanwhile, experiencing childhood adversity such as abuse was associated with a lower chance of reaching optimal cardiovascular health in adulthood. Lower annual income as an adult — $35,000 or less — may confound the health effects of childhood adversity. Embargoed until 4 a.m. CT/5 a.m. ET Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2024 DALLAS, Jan. 23, 2024 — Throughout adulthood, ...

The fastest growing type of offset on the global carbon market subsidizes the distribution of efficient cookstoves in developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but a new study finds that the credits overestimate the stoves’ carbon savings by a factor of 10. The overestimation undermines efforts to counteract carbon emissions to slow climate change, since companies use these offsets to meet climate targets and to sell products labeled as “carbon neutral” instead of making real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It also undermines ...

Scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) in Madrid have found that one of the most potent genetic risk factors for Alzheimer disease, apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4), is also associated with an increased risk of developing subclinical atherosclerosis in middle age. The study also demonstrates protection against subclinical atherosclerosis in people carrying the variant APOE2, which protects against Alzheimer disease. The study, coordinated by Dr. Marta Cortés Canteli and CNIC General Director Dr. Valentín Fuster, sheds light on the role of APOE in the development of cardiovascular diseases ...

The ‘ten electron’ rule provides guidance for the design of single-atom alloy catalysts for targeted chemical reactions. A collaborative team across four universities have discovered a very simple rule to design single-atom alloy catalysts for chemical reactions. The ‘ten electron rule’ helps scientists identify promising catalysts for their experiments very rapidly. Instead of extensive trial and error experiments of computationally demanding computer simulations, catalysts’ composition can be proposed simply looking at the periodic table. Single-atom alloys are a class of catalysts made of two metals: a few atoms of reactive metal, ...

Previous research has established that childhood experience with abuse, neglect, and substance use in the home can worsen a person’s heart health throughout their life. New research, however, now shows that receiving warmth from a caregiver during childhood protects cardiovascular health later in life, according to a study led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine and The Ohio State University Wexler Medical Center. The findings, published online January 23, 2024 in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, are the first to frame adversity and protective ...

Worldwide, 40 percent of all children with cancer die from their disease*. In countries like Germany, which are among the global leaders in healthcare, 20 percent of all children with cancer do not survive their disease. "Particularly in low-income countries, there is a lack of resources for training experts, for example specialized pathologists, and thus a lack of precise diagnostics to successfully treat children and adolescents," emphasizes Stefan Pfister, director at the Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ), department head ...

Despite being a renewable energy source, the use of biofuel is controversial, as growing few, highly productive crops for fuel can lead to biodiversity loss in the cropping systems where biomass is produced. A cropping system refers to the crops, their sequence, and the management practices on a given field. Now, researchers in the US have compared ant communities in different types of bioenergy cropping systems to better understand how these systems shape biotic communities and their functions. The results were published in Frontiers ...

The global consumption of pharmaceuticals is growing rapidly every year, reaching 4 billion doses in 2020. As more and more pharmaceuticals are metabolized by the human body and enter sewage and wastewater treatment plants, the amount and types of trace substances found in them are also increasing. When these trace substances enter rivers and oceans and are used as water sources, they can have harmful effects on the environment and human health, including carcinogenesis and endocrine disruption. Therefore, technologies are needed to quickly ...

If the world is warming, why are our winters getting colder? Indeed, East Asia and North America have experienced frequent extreme weather events since the 2000s that defy average climate change projections. Many experts have blamed Arctic warming and a weakening jet stream due to declining Arctic sea ice, but climate model experiments have not adequately demonstrated their validity. The massive power outage in Texas in February 2021 was caused by an unusual cold snap, and climate models are needed to accurately predict the risk of extreme weather events in order to prevent massive socioeconomic damage. In particular, climate technology leaders have ...

High-power, high-energy ultrafast fiber lasers are indispensable tools in various fields, from basic and applied science research to industrial processing. However, due to thermal effects, nonlinear effects, there is always a limit to the power/energy expansion of a single fiber laser amplifier. Coherent Beam Combination (CBC) technology is an effective strategy to break through the limits of a single fiber laser amplifier and further achieve power/energy scaling. Under the conditions of mutual coherence and stable phase relationship, multiple laser beams can be superimposed and mutually interfere with each other. This approach allows for an ...

In standard cosmological models, the formation of cosmological structures begins with the emergence of small structures, which subsequently undergo hierarchical merging, leading to the formation of larger systems. As the Universe ages, massive galaxy groups and clusters, being the largest systems, tend to increase in mass and reach a more dynamically relaxed state. The motions of satellite galaxies around these groups and clusters provide valuable insights into their assembly status. The observations of such motion offer crucial clues about the age of the Universe. By using public data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a research team led by Prof. GUO ...

Super-resolution (SR) fluorescence microscopy, through the use of fluorescent probes and specific excitation and emission procedures, surpasses the diffraction limit of resolution (200~300 nm) that was once a barrier. Most SR techniques are heavily reliant on image calculations and processing to retrieve SR information. However, factors such as fluorophores photophysics, sample's chemical environment, and optical setup situations can cause noise and distortions in raw images, potentially impacting the final ...

Integral imaging (II) display is one of the most promising near-eye displays (NEDs) due to its compact volume, full parallax, convenient full-color display, and, more importantly, true-3D and more realistic depth perception from eliminating the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). However, II displays based on the conventional optical architecture, such as microlens arrays, are limited in resolution, field of view, depth of field, etc. As micro-displays have increasingly higher pixel densities, conventional optical architecture is inadequate in ...

A UC San Francisco-led study has for the first time identified genetic variants that predict whether patients will respond to treatment for preterm birth, a condition that affects one in 10 infants born in the United States.  The findings are critical because no medication is available in the U.S. to treat preterm birth.  Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pulled the only approved therapy to help prevent this condition, a synthetic form of progesterone sold under the brand name Makena, from the market, citing ineffectiveness.  The new research found that pregnant individuals with high levels of mutations in certain genes ...

People suffering from Long COVID or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis /Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) could benefit from a coordinated treatment strategy, a new University of Otago study has found. The pilot study, published in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, has confirmed what researchers have suspected for some time: the two conditions are closely related. Lead author Emeritus Professor Warren Tate says the research - the first comparative molecular study of the immune cell proteins of both conditions - “strongly affirms” the link between the two. “This means information from study of the pathophysiology ...

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.   “Reaching our overall funding goal – in full and on time – is a major milestone in developing a sustainable open ...

Attending an NHS Health Check appointment — a preventative screening programme offered for free in the UK — is associated with both a decreased risk of dying and a decreased risk of several diseases, including dementia and liver cirrhosis. The results, published in BMC Medicine, suggest that the NHS Health Check and other similar preventative programmes can be effective at reducing a population’s overall risk of long-term disease. The NHS Health Check is a preventative screening programme designed to identify individuals at risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease. Healthy ...

Knocking back energy drinks is linked to poor quality sleep and insomnia among college students, finds a large Norwegian study published in the open access journal BMJ Open. And the higher the frequency of consumption, the fewer hours of nightly shut eye the students clocked up. But even just the occasional can—1-3 times a month—is linked to a heightened risk of disturbed sleep, the findings indicate. Energy drinks contain an average caffeine content of 150 mg per litre as well as sugar, vitamins, minerals and amino acids in varying quantities, note the researchers. Marketed as mental and physical pick-me-ups, ...