Vanderbilt University Medical Center received a $13 million Department of Defense grant to lead a multisite clinical trial that will evaluate repurposed FDA-approved drugs as treatment options for patients with Rett syndrome.  Affecting 1 in 10,000 females at birth, and males even more rarely, Rett syndrome is a rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that affects brain development.  “It robs affected individuals of the ability to use their hands or speak and causes problems with mobility, as well as a number of other issues,” said Jeffrey Neul, Annette Schaffer Eskind Professor, ...

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announces today that St. Jude Home Care LLC, a home health agency for the hospital’s patients, earned dual certifications in both pediatrics and home health from Community Health Accreditation Partners (CHAP), an independent, non-profit, accrediting body for home and community-based healthcare organizations. St. Jude Home Care LLC is the nation’s first agency to achieve that distinction. CHAP is the only organization in the U.S. that grants a discrete pediatric certification ...

Australian scientists have pinpointed likely ‘cells-of-origin’, the source cells that can grow into breast cancer, in women carrying a faulty BRCA2 gene who are at high risk of developing the disease. The WEHI-led study also showed these cells have potential to be targeted with an existing cancer drug to delay tumour growth, in findings that may lead to future preventive treatments for the disease. At a glance Women with faulty BRCA2 genes are at a substantially higher risk of developing breast ...

House fires, road crashes and emergency rescues – they’re all part of the job for Aussie firefighters. And in such physically demanding roles, maintaining a high level of fitness and movement quality is essential.   Now, new research from health and fitness experts at the University of South Australia shows that professional firefighters have reduced movement quality as they age, which could put them at greater risk of injury.   Conducted by UniSA masters researcher, Alex Redshaw, in partnership with the South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS), the findings indicate that firefighters over the age of 50 generally have lower movement ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The image spoke for itself.  University at Buffalo computer scientist and deepfake expert Siwei Lyu created a photo collage out of the hundreds of faces that his detection algorithms had incorrectly classified as fake — and the new composition clearly had a predominantly darker skin tone. “A detection algorithm’s accuracy should be statistically independent from factors like race,” Lyu says, “but obviously many existing algorithms, including our own, inherit a bias.” Lyu, PhD, co-director of the UB Center for Information Integrity, and his team have now developed what they believe are the ...

In a collaboration between the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and Carilion Clinic, researchers learned that by preserving large superficial leg veins intended for coronary bypass grafting in a mixture of the anticoagulant heparin and blood, rather than heparin and saline, the veins were better protected from cell and tissue damage. Their findings, published in January in the Journal of Vascular Research, could inform surgical practices and enhance the long-term success of vein grafts in coronary bypass surgeries. “Ultimately, we're putting healthier blood vessels ...

You may not know it, but cows share information every time they burp, moo, and chew that speaks volumes about their health and welfare.  Through the work of researchers in Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, we may soon know more about what cows are “telling” us and be able to use that information to improve their well-being. James Chen, an animal data sciences researcher and assistant professor in the School of Animal Sciences is using a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Department ...

By Greg Koller COLLEGE PARK, Md.— Allen Fawcett — an energy expert and economist who has played a leading role in formulating and coordinating U.S. climate policy — is the new director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute. Fawcett joined the Environmental Protection Agency in 2003 and, since 2012, served as the chief of EPA’s Climate Economics Branch, which advances the science of climate economics to inform policy. From 2010 to 2011, Fawcett took leave from EPA to serve as the deputy associate director for energy ...

Parents who have a child with cancer are more likely to attempt suicide during the first years after diagnosis, according to a new study conducted by Qianwei Liu of Southern Medical University, China, and colleagues, published January 16th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. Receiving a cancer diagnosis for a child is an incredibly stressful and distressing experience for parents. These parents, especially mothers, face an increased risk of psychiatric disorders, but little is known about the risk of suicide. In the new study, researchers looked at the number of suicide attempts ...

New study from the University of Sheffield identifies a novel mechanism employed by breast cancer cells to survive in the challenging environment within tumours The findings provide a new insight into a previously unknown mechanism of cancer cell survival and may offer a new target for developing therapies The research found breast cancer cells take advantage of nutrients in the extracellular matrix in times of nutrient starvation Energy starved breast cancer cells ingest and consume their surroundings to overcome starvation, a new study has found.  The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Sheffield and published today (Tuesday 16 January ...

Researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and their collaborators have been working on how to harness the power of the estimated 549 million Wifi hotspots worldwide, resulting in a project that used anonymized data gathered from free Wi-Fi to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on Hanoi’s wet markets during the first stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the paper “Using free Wi-Fi to assess impact of COVID-19 pandemic on traditional wet markets in Hanoi” published in December 2023 in the scientific journal Food Security, the researchers analyzed and interpreted mobile device tracking ...

As researchers around the world work to develop viable alternatives to fossil fuels, the prospect of nuclear fusion—harnessing the same energy-generating reactions that power the sun—has grown increasingly attractive to private equity firms. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Energy launched a partnership with investors in the private sector to accelerate the development of fusion energy, in part through the development of a fusion pilot plant, or FPP, in the United States. The FPP and ITER—the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor, currently being ...

Hiding in the shadows, euglenoids are a fascinating group of single-celled protists that are neither plant nor animal. Plants photosynthesize, and animals eat. Euglenoids do both. Spiraling along the murky bottoms of shallow fresh-water ponds with their long flagella, they eat organic goop, while also using their chloroplasts to convert CO2 and water with light into sugars. Because of this in-between status, euglenoids have been placed close to the very base of the eukaryotic branch on the tree-of-life that includes ...

WASHINGTON - A mouse study designed to shed light on memory loss in people who experience repeated head impacts, such as athletes, suggests the condition could potentially be reversed. The research in mice finds that amnesia and poor memory following head injury is due to inadequate reactivation of neurons involved in forming memories. The study, conducted by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is reported January 16, 2024, in the Journal of Neuroscience. Importantly for diagnostic and treatment purposes, the researchers found that the memory loss attributed to head injury was not a permanent pathological event driven by ...

New research led by the University of Oxford indicates that human domestication of crops can alter the communities of microorganisms that are associated with plants. Intriguingly, independent domestication events were found to have similar impacts on the plant microbiome. The results have been published today in Current Biology. Lead researcher Dr Riccardo Soldan (Department of Biology, University of Oxford) said: 'Our study provides evidence that regardless of where and how domestication took place, domesticated ...

“Identification and validation of novel and targetable metabolic weaknesses in AML is ongoing.” BUFFALO, NY- January 16, 2024 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on December 1, 2023, entitled, “Reductive carboxylation of glutamine as a potential target in acute myeloid leukemia.” In this new editorial, researchers Alessia Roma, Lawrence D. Goodridge and Paul A. Spagnuolo from the University of Guelph discuss acute myeloid leukemia (AML) — an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Openly gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men were more likely than those who conceal their sexual orientation to seek care for mpox during a global outbreak of the disease last year that disproportionately affected their community, researchers from Cornell University and the University of Toronto found. It wasn’t necessarily concern over being “outed” that kept some sexual minority men from seeking care for the disease, formerly known as monkeypox. According to the researchers, it was an information gap, partially attributable to separation from community due to identity concealment. “The resource knowledge and community-connected ...

2023 has just been confirmed as the hottest year on record, with global average temperatures exceeding pre-industrial conditions by 1.48°C, as stated by the Copernicus Programme of the European Union. Climate scientists from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Computación (BSC-CNS), based on the BSC decadal forecast system, were capable of predicting a year ago that 2023 had a high probability of being the warmest year on record. After the record-smashing conditions in 2023, the imminent question is how the year 2024 and the following years will ...

The inner workings of the human brain are a gradually unraveling mystery and Dr. Richard Naud of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Medicine has led a highly compelling new study that brings us closer to answering these big questions. The study’s results have important implications for theories of learning and working memory and could potentially help lead to future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) since AI developers and programmers watch the work of Dr. Naud and other leading neuroscientists. Published in Nature Computational Science, the study tackles the many-layered mystery ...

Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, received funding for the project: "Cyber Sentinel: Safeguarding Autonomous Vehicle Supply Chains against Backdoors in Hardware."   Pudukotai Dinakarrao is working with University of Virginia researchers who aim to deploy a backdoor attack mitigation and avoidance approach for vehicles.   Haiying Shen, Associate Professor, Computer Science; Associate Professor, Electrical and ...

1. A NIMS research team has demonstrated that the transverse thermoelectric conversion (i.e., energy conversion between charge and heat currents that flow orthogonally to each other) can be greatly enhanced by applying magnetic fields or utilizing magnetism. In addition, the team developed a thermoelectric permanent magnet—a new functional material capable of thermoelectric cooling and power generation—by combining permanent magnets and thermoelectric materials into a hybrid structure. These results may guide in achieving thermal ...

To prevent aircraft stalls, engineers have long studied the flow of air over airfoils such as airplane wings to detect the angles when flow separation occurs. Recently, a team of researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University including Xi-Jun Yuan and Zi-Qiao Chen investigated the use of quantum computing in connection with machine learning as a more accurate way of solving such problems. Their research was published Nov. 21 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal. The use of a quantum support vector machine rather than a classical support vector machine increased the accuracy of classification of flow separation from 81.8% ...

The scientific community has long been enamored of the potential for soft bioelectronic devices, but has faced hurdles in identifying materials that are biocompatible and have all of the necessary characteristics to operate effectively. Researchers have now taken a step in the right direction, modifying an existing biocompatible material so that it conducts electricity efficiently in wet environments and can send and receive ionic signals from biological media. “We’re talking about ...

Key takeaways  Decreasing trend in opioid prescriptions: There was a notable nationwide reduction in opioid prescriptions after surgery from 2013 to 2017, reflecting a shift in the medical community's approach to pain management.  Social determinants affect opioid prescription rates: At the county level, lower median population age, higher education levels, insufficient sleep, higher health care costs, fewer mental health providers, and higher uninsured rates are linked to higher opioid prescription rates.  No ...

Staphylococcus aureus (SA) is an extremely common bacterial infection; about 30% of people have colonies of SA living in their nose. SA is often harmless, but it is also a leading cause of hospital-acquired and community-associated infections. A vaccine for SA would be a game-changer for public health, but for decades, all vaccine candidates for SA have failed in clinical trials despite successful preclinical studies in mice. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have finally explained why. In a new study, published January ...