In wave-making research recently published in Marine and Coastal Fisheries, a team of researchers, led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has quantified the rate at which great hammerhead sharks are eating Atlantic tarpon hooked by anglers at Bahia Honda, Florida—one of the prime tarpon fishing spots in the Florida Keys. Called the “depredation rate,” the team found that 15.3% of tarpon that were hooked by anglers and fought for more than five minutes were eaten while still on the line. But the researchers also show that this is not necessarily a sign that the ecosystem is out of balance. To the contrary, increased reports ...

Charles Darwin proposed that life could have emerged in a “warm little pond” with the right cocktail of chemicals and energy. A study from the University of Washington, published this month in Communications Earth & Environment, reports that a shallow “soda lake” in western Canada shows promise for matching those requirements. The findings provide new support that life could have emerged from lakes on the early Earth, roughly 4 billion years ago. Scientists have known that under ...

The exponential demand for high computing power is far exceeding the capabilities of current electronic systems; however, engineers at the University of Pittsburgh are shining a light on new solutions.  Nathan Youngblood, principal investigator and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, received a $552,166 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a $449,240 award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through its Young Investigator Program (YIP) to continue his pioneering work in phase-change materials and optical computing.  “Dr. ...

Milano, January 22nd 2024 – It is only a few centimeters in size and can be held between two fingers, but in the micro-channels carved inside it, it’s hidden a three-dimensional and highly faithful model of a biliary tract cancer called cholangiocarcinoma, complete with its tumor microenvironment. This 3D model is built starting from a sample of patient’s cancer cells and thus it represents a patient-specific "organ-on-chip": a technology made possible only through a multidisciplinary approach that merges biomedicine, physics and engineering. The innovative prototype is the result ...

More than 11 million people in the United States take anticoagulation or antiplatelet medications, such as heparin or aspirin, to treat serious conditions like heart attack and stroke. However, these medications also put patients at risk of life-threatening bleeding in the case of injury or during surgery. To improve strategies for reducing blood loss, a team led by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, developed a porous material that maximizes blood absorption and effectively activates clotting mechanisms, even in patients on anticoagulation or ...

New biomarkers with improved diagnostic performance for early detection of lupus nephritis have been discovered in the University of Houston lab of Chandra Mohan, a pioneer in lupus research. Early identification of renal involvement in lupus and prompt treatment are essential in reducing the pain, suffering and eventual mortality it causes.    Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), commonly called lupus, is an autoimmune disease that occurs when the body attacks its own tissues and organs. Inflammation from the disease can impact many different parts of the body including joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain and heart. Lupus nephritis is one ...

Motion capture technology has applications in a wide range of fields, including entertainment, medicine, and sports, to name a few. But what if the measurements these systems were based on were rooted in social practices and biased assumptions, leading to errors that become ingrained over time? This question is at the heart of new research co-authored by Mona Sloane, an assistant professor of data science and media studies at the University of Virginia.   Sloane and her co-authors — Abigal Jacobs, an assistant ...

Genetic changes or mutations can cause hereditary kidney disease, which can eventually lead to dialysis or the need for kidney transplantation. Identifying the cause of inherited kidney disease is the first step in identifying a treatment. With that goal in mind, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have discovered a new genetic cause of inherited kidney disease. The findings were recently published in Kidney International. According to Anthony J. Bleyer, M.D., ...

MIT neuroscientists have found that the brain’s sensitivity to rewarding experiences — a critical factor in motivation and attention — can be shaped by socioeconomic conditions. In a study of 12 to 14-year-olds whose socioeconomic status (SES) varied widely, the researchers found that children from lower SES backgrounds showed less sensitivity to reward than those from more affluent backgrounds. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the research team measured brain activity as the children played a guessing game in which they earned extra money for each correct ...

During the past decade, there has been significant development of new sulfur containing compounds that are used in various industries, including pharmaceuticals and agricultural products. Sulfoximines, sulfonimidoyl fluorides and sulfonimidamides are types of sulfur-containing chemical compounds that have wide-ranging potential as therapeutic drugs. However, the synthesis process for these compounds is complex and has several limitations. In a new article published in Nature Chemistry, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers describe their ...

We are tasking our computers with processing ever-increasing amounts of data to speed up drug discovery, improve weather and climate predictions, train artificial intelligence, and much more. To keep up with this demand, we need faster, more energy-efficient computer memory than ever before.  Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that a new material may make phase-change memory—which relies on switching between high and low resistance states to create the ones and zeroes of computer data—an improved option for future AI and data-centric systems. ...

Joint research led by Ayaka Matsumoto and Yuichi Iino of the University of Tokyo demonstrated that temporal decrease in salt concentration leads to the activation of the neck motor neuron of roundworms only in a specific phase of its activity. The activation adjusts the roundworm's trajectory toward higher salt concentrations. The finding pinpoints the neural mechanism by which roundworms integrate sensory and motor information, a first step toward understanding the neural mechanisms of navigation in more complex animals. The findings were published in the journal Proceedings ...

“Stability and wealth of nations and our civilisation depends on the stability of critical Earth system functions that operate beyond national borders. At the same time, human activities push harder and harder on the planetary boundaries of these pivotal systems. From the Amazon rainforest to the Greenland ice masses, there are rising risks of triggering irreversible and unmanageable shifts in Earth system functioning. As these shifts affect people across the globe, we argue that tipping elements should be ...

EMBARGOED: NOT FOR RELEASE UNTIL 3:00 P.M. U.S. EASTERN TIME ON JANUARY 22, 2024 Scientists and engineers have been pushing for the past decade to leverage an elusive ferroelectric material called hafnium oxide, or hafnia, to usher in the next generation of computing memory. A team of researchers including the University of Rochester’s Sobhit Singh published a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study outlining progress toward making bulk ferroelectric and antiferroelectric hafnia available for use in a variety of applications. In a specific crystal phase, hafnia exhibits ferroelectric properties—that is, electric polarization that can be changed in one direction ...

State-of-the-art neural networks heavily rely on linear operations, such as matrix-vector multiplications and convolutions. While dedicated processors like GPUs and TPUs exist for these operations, they have limitations in terms of power consumption and bandwidth. Optics is better suited for such operations because of its inherent parallelism, large bandwidth, and computation speed. Diffractive deep neural networks (D2NN), also known as diffractive networks, constitute an emerging optical computing architecture. ...

Winston Salem, NC – January 22, 2024 - The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, part of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, has been selected to lead the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM) Consortium. The project - a $40 million, five year-long award from the Defense Health Agency (DHA) - will focus on taking regenerative medicine solutions for battlefield injuries to the next level, and ultimately to the general public. Regenerative medicine is a science that takes advantage of the body's natural abilities to restore or replace damaged tissue and organs. WFIRM has managed two prior AFIRM consortia since ...

A decade that began with a global shutdown is a third of the way done. Its finale — a major deadline for reducing U.S. carbon emissions to slow climate change — approaches at the usual clip. With the decade’s halfway mark in view, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) awarded seven new vouchers to companies and national laboratories working to develop and commercialize clean nuclear energy projects. Nuclear energy is considered central to efforts to minimize carbon emissions and still reliably meet rising ...

Rutgers researchers can predict which patients will benefit from a popular prostate cancer drug – and have devised a strategy that may make the treatment work longer. “This work should help doctors know which patients’ prostate cancers will and won’t respond to the androgen deprivation therapy enzalutamide, which can slow prostate cancer growth by disrupting androgen receptor signaling,” said Antonina Mitrofanova, associate professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics, associate dean for research at the Rutgers School of Health Professions, researcher at Rutgers Cancer ...

Lettuce and other leafy green vegetables are part of a healthy, balanced diet — even for astronauts on a mission. It’s been more than three years since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration made space-grown lettuce an item on the menu for astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Alongside their space diet staples of flour tortillas and powdered coffee, astronauts can munch on a salad, grown from control chambers aboard the ISS that account for the ideal temperature, amount of water and light ...

Toronto, ON – While there has been much public scrutiny and research on police interactions and violence towards sexual minorities in the United States, there is a gap in the current literature on how sexual minorities fare with law enforcement contact in Canada. A new study published in the Annals of Epidemiology aims to fill this research gap by examining the relationship between sexual orientation and experiences with police contact, including intrusion and harassment from the police, in Canada. Among a sample of 940 adolescents and young adults across Canada, the study found that the prevalence of police contact was highest among persons ...

CLEVELAND -- Joseph Welles Henderson, MD, of University Hospitals has been named an InterStim™ Center of Excellence by Medtronic (NYSE: MDT), the world’s largest medical device manufacturer. The designation is awarded to caregivers who have demonstrated particular expertise in the use of the InterStim™ system to treat overactive bladder, as well as non-obstructive urinary retention and chronic fecal incontinence. Dr. Henderson is an OBGYN and urologist, and specializes in female pelvic medicine and reconstruction ...

SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 22, 2024 — A ribbon of brain tissue called cortical gray matter grows thinner in people who go on to develop dementia, and this appears to be an accurate biomarker of the disease five to 10 years before symptoms appear, researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (also called UT Health San Antonio) reported. The researchers, working with colleagues from The University of California, Davis, and Boston University, conducted an MRI brain imaging study published ...

Qiang Zeng, Associate Professor, Computer Science, received funding for the project:  "Towards Lifetime Supply Chain Security for Internet of Things: Testing an Update Before Trusting It." The global Internet of Things (IoT) market size is expected to rise substantially by 2029. IoT devices are manufactured by various companies around the world, and thus, should not be trusted by default. Zeng aims to ensure lifetime supply chain security of IoT devices. To attain this objective, he is proposing to test an IoT device and every firmware update through ...

Md Tanvir Arafin, Assistant Professor, Cybersecurity Engineering, received funding for the project: "Securing Chiplet-based Semiconductor Manufacturing from Untrusted Supply Chains." Monolithic integrated circuit (IC) design is reaching the physical limit to accommodate the ever-increasing demand of cramming more transistors in a chip. To address this, novel design primitives that move from monolithic design practices to heterogeneous integration of IC primitives in a 2.5 or 3D structure have emerged. ...

Low back pain is a major cause of disability around the globe, with more than 570 million people affected. In the United States alone, health care spending on low back pain was $134.5 billion between 1996 and 2016, and costs are increasing.   "The good news is that most episodes of back pain recover, and this is the case even if you have already had back pain for a couple of months," University of South Australia Professor Lorimer Moseley says.   "The bad news is that once you have had back pain for more than a few months, the chance ...