DURHAM, N.C. – Biomedical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated that one of the most dangerous mutations found in skin cancers might moonlight as a pathway to mending a broken heart. The genetic mutation in the protein BRAF, a part of the MAPK signaling pathway that can promote cell division, is one of the most common and most aggressive found in melanoma patients. In a new study, researchers show that introducing this mutation to rat heart tissue grown in a laboratory can induce growth. Repairing ...

This month, the Ecological Society of America spotlights the challenge posed by invasive alien species in China with the release of a Special Feature, “Management of Biological Invasions in China,” in the latest issue of its journal Ecological Applications. Accelerating rates of biological invasion have led to growing concerns about the destructive impacts of invasive alien species, or IAS, on the environment and human societies. This is especially true in China, which has witnessed a surge in ...

Researchers with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) grew a twisted multilayer crystal structure for the first time and measured the structure’s key properties. The twisted structure could help researchers develop next-generation materials for solar cells, quantum computers, lasers and other devices. “This structure is something that we have not seen before – it was a huge surprise to me,” said Yi Cui, a professor at Stanford and SLAC and paper co-author. “A new quantum electronic property could appear ...

Since the creation of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968, the U.S. government has paid over $51 billion to cover flood losses. Almost half of these payouts went to just 25 counties, among the fastest-growing counties by population. A new paper published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists examines whether insuring people against potential flood losses contributes directly to population growth in flood-prone areas. In “Does the National Flood Insurance Program Drive Migration ...

Fresh research into the physics of vibrating nanobubbles reveals that they do not heat up as much as previously thought. Vibrating nanobubbles have surprising uses as ultrasound contrast agents in cancer diagnosis. They can also be forced to collapse - destroying nearby microscopic contaminants - for waste-water treatment and surface cleaning of delicate microfluidic devices. The stiffness of a nanobubble as it vibrates is strongly related to their internal temperature, and being able to understand ...

With over 2,780 fishing ports and 993 commercial and industrial ports, Japan faces the challenge of safeguarding these important coastal assets from the destructive forces of tsunamis. A promising solution lies in the form of a movable barrier system, where gates rising from the seafloor act as barriers, protecting ports against tsunamis, storm surges and high waves. However, during natural disasters, power outages may disrupt the electricity needed to operate the gate. To address this, researchers led by Professor Hiroshi Takagi from Tokyo Institute of Technology have proposed ...

At the beginning of November, The New York Times ran the headline, “America is using up its groundwater like there’s no tomorrow.” The journalists from the renowned media outlet had published an investigation into the state of groundwater reserves in the United States. They came to the conclusion that the United States is pumping out too much groundwater. But the US isn’t an isolated case. “The rest of the world is also squandering groundwater like there’s no tomorrow,” says Hansjörg Seybold, Senior Scientist in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich. He is coauthor ...

NEW ORLEANS (Jan. 24, 2024) – A research team from LSU LCMC Health Cancer Center has been awarded a $1.5 million grant to eliminate barriers from cervical cancer prevention. The five-year program combines a $1.2 million award from the American Cancer Society and $75,000 a year for five years investment from LSU Health New Orleans. Louisiana has one of the highest cervical cancer death rates in the country. Cervical cancer rates are higher in predominantly African American communities represented in both urban (New Orleans) and rural areas of Louisiana. Black women in Louisiana are diagnosed with and die from cervical cancer at a significantly ...

    Images   The U.S. Army has extended its long-running relationship with the University of Michigan's Automotive Research Center, reaching a new five-year, agreement of up to $100 million to boost work on autonomous vehicle technologies.   This potentially doubles the federal government's financial investment with ARC since the last agreement, reached in 2019. Following its 1994 launch, the ARC has served as a source of technology and first-in-class modeling and simulation for the Army's fleet of vehicles—the largest such fleet in the world.    "We are driving the development of modern mobility systems with our advanced modeling ...

New research shows that atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground could be responsible for releasing subsurface methane into Mars’ atmosphere; knowing when and where to look for methane can help the Curiosity rover search for signs of life. “Understanding Mars’ methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” said John Ortiz, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the research team. “There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, ...

Microorganisms were the first forms of life on our planet. The clues are written in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks by geochemical and morphological traces, such as chemical compounds or structures that these organisms left behind. However, it is still not clear when and where life originated on Earth and when a diversity of species developed in these early microbial communities. Evidence is scarce and often disputed. Now, researchers led by the University of Göttingen and Linnӕus University in Sweden have uncovered key findings about the earliest forms of life. In rock ...

Ann Arbor, January 24, 2024 – New research confirms what public health leaders have been fearing: the significant uptick in the cardiovascular disease (CVD) death rate that began in 2020 has continued. The continuing trend reverses improvements achieved in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce mortalities from heart disease and stroke, the leading causes of death in the United States. The findings are reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier. Investigators from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...

A good shoe can make a huge difference for runners, from career marathoners to couch-to-5K first-timers. But every runner is unique, and a shoe that works for one might trip up another. Outside of trying on a rack of different designs, there’s no quick and easy way to know which shoe best suits a person’s particular running style.  MIT engineers are hoping to change that with a new model that predicts how certain shoe properties will affect a runner’s performance.  The simple model incorporates ...

WASHINGTON — As we transition to a new era in computing, there is a need for new devices that integrate electronic and photonic functionalities at the nanoscale while enhancing the interaction between photons and electrons. In an important step toward fulfilling this need, researchers have developed a new III-V semiconductor nanocavity that confines light at levels below the so-called diffraction limit. “Nanocavities with ultrasmall mode volumes hold great promise for improving a wide range of photonic ...

NEW YORK— The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), a national, nonprofit whose mission is to advance and support healthy aging through biomedical research, is pleased to announce the election of Laura M. Barzilai, JD, LLM, as Chair of the Board of Directors. Stephanie Lederman, EdM, AFAR Executive Director, shares: "The Board of Directors of AFAR unanimously elected Laura Barzilai as Chair in December 2023. For nearly a decade, her contributions as a board member, committee chair, ...

Plants produce a range of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds that influence their interactions with the world around them. In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign investigated how the type and amount of these VOCs change based on different features of tomato plants. The smell of cut grass is one of the defining fragrances of summer. Smells like that are one of the ways plants signal their injury. Because they cannot run away from danger, plants have evolved to communicate with each other using chemical signals. They use VOCs for a ...

The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), a national, nonprofit whose mission is to advance and support healthy aging through biomedical research, is pleased to announce the election of Thomas A. Rando, MD, PhD, as President of the Board of Directors in December 2023. Dr. Rando is currently the Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Biology at UCLA, where he is a professor of Neurology and Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology. Previously, he ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University engineers have created a new lithium battery that can charge in under five minutes – faster than any such battery on the market – while maintaining stable performance over extended cycles of charging and discharging. The breakthrough could alleviate “range anxiety” among drivers who worry electric vehicles cannot travel long distances without a time-consuming recharge. “Range anxiety is a greater barrier to electrification in transportation than any of the other barriers, like cost and capability of batteries, and we have identified a pathway to eliminate it using rational electrode designs,” said Lynden ...

R. Graham Cooks, the Henry B. Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, and his postdoctoral researcher Lingqi Qiu have experimental evidence that the key step in protein formation can occur in droplets of pure water, and have recently published these findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In this key step, amino acids are dehydrated (they lose water) even though they are in a water solution, a paradox that is resolved by the fact that these droplet surfaces are unusually dry and highly ...

Like humans, mice live in complex social groups, fight over territory and mates, and learn when it is safer to avoid certain opponents. After losing even a brief fight, the defeated animals will flee from the mice that hurt them for weeks afterward, a new study shows. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study reveals that such “retreating behavior” is influenced by a distinct area on the underside of the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that controls hunger, sleep, and levels of many hormones. The team had previously found that this special region, called the anterior ventrolateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamus (aVMHvl), ...

Bacterial infections cause millions of deaths each year, with the global threat made worse by the increasing resistance of the microbes to antibiotic treatments. This is due in part to the ability of bacteria to switch genes on and off as they sense environmental changes, including the presence of drugs. Such switching is accomplished through transcription, which converts the DNA in genes into its chemical cousin in mRNA, which guides the building of proteins that make up the microbe’s structure. For this ...

Cryptocurrency is usually “mined” through the blockchain by asking a computer to perform a complicated mathematical problem in exchange for tokens of cryptocurrency. But in research appearing in the journal Chem on January 24, a team of chemists have repurposed this process, asking computers to instead generate the largest network ever created of chemical reactions which may have given rise to prebiotic molecules on early Earth. This work indicates that at least some primitive forms of metabolism might have emerged without the involvement of ...

About The Study: This survey study found a reduced rate of overall fractures but an excess of vertebral fractures among living kidney donors compared with controls after a mean follow-up of 25 years. Treatment of excess vertebral fractures with dietary supplements such as vitamin D3 may reduce the numbers of vertebral fractures and patient morbidity. Authors: Rajiv Kumar, M.B.B.S., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, 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/jamanetworkopen.2023.53005) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this study of 4,360 patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), functional limitations six months after injury were common after sports-related TBI, even mild sports-related TBI. Persisting impairment was evident in the sports-related TBI group despite better recovery compared with non–sports-related TBI on measures of mental health and post-concussion symptoms. These findings caution against taking an overoptimistic view of outcomes after sports-related TBI, even if the initial injury appears mild. Authors: Lindsay Wilson, ...

Researchers at the Universities of Basel and Zurich have discovered the genetic material of the pathogen Treponema pallidum in the bones of people who died in Brazil 2,000 years ago. This is the oldest verified discovery of this pathogen thus far, and it proves that humans were suffering from diseases akin to syphilis – known as treponematoses – long before Columbus’s discovery of America. The new findings, published in the scientific journal Nature, call into question previous theories concerning the spread of syphilis ...