BOSTON – The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved an estimated 20 million lives. However, while current COVID-19 vaccines provide protection against developing severe disease, they do little to prevent infection and transmission. Findings published in the journal Nature by physician-scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and colleagues suggest that it may be possible to improve protection against COVID-19 by delivering the vaccine directly to the respiratory tract— the primary site of entry in SARS-CoV-2 infection. “The ...

In the fatal world of opioid use disorder (OUD), pharmacotherapy, or using a prescribed medication to treat drug dependence, has emerged as the gold standard of treatment. Among the trio of FDA-approved medications to treat OUD, buprenorphine is the newest highly effective drug that can suppress and reduce cravings for opioids. It is also the first medication that physicians can prescribe without requiring a special waiver from the DEA, enabling outpatient use and substantially increasing treatment accessibility.  Despite its widespread usage, with 1 million buprenorphine prescriptions filled in 2018, it is not without side effects. When taken sublingually (under ...

Thursday Dec. 14, 2023, Toronto – Does thinking about faith make religious people more likely to take leaps? A new study lead by York University’s Faculty of Health says yes, finding that participants were more likely to take risks when thinking about God as a benevolent protector.   “While the theoretical link between a belief in God and risk taking has been around for a while, the methods previous studies employed to test this weren’t the strongest, based on current best ...

Dr. Aditya Bardia, a renowned breast medical oncologist and physician scientist who specializes in developing novel targeted and personalized therapies, has joined the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center where he will assume several leadership roles across the institution. These will include the directorship of the Breast Cancer Clinical and Research Programs and the position of assistant chief of Translational Research in the division of hematology/oncology, department of medicine. He will also be named director of Translational Research Integration and co-director ...

Research published today in Nature sheds light on a small part of the so-called “dark genome” — the 98 per cent of the human genome whose biological function is largely not known.  In the study, an international multidisciplinary team reported the first high-resolution images and structural details of a genetic element known as LINE-1 (video here), which inserts itself into the human genome and is implicated in diseases such as cancer, autoimmune disorders and neurodegeneration, and even aging. The work provides a target for ...

Quantum information scientists are always on the hunt for winning combinations of materials, materials that can be manipulated at the molecular level to reliably store and transmit information. Following a recent proof-of-principle demonstration, researchers are adding a new combination of compounds to the quantum materials roster. In a study reported in ACS Photonics, researchers combined two nanosized structures — one made of diamond and one of lithium niobate — onto a single chip. They then sent light from the diamond ...

In the frigid seas halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, two types of animals browse the palatable vegetation of a high-tundra archipelago, munching on thick moss, cropped grasses and low-lying shrubs. New research from a group led by Matteo Petit Bon from the Quinney College of Natural Resources is working to untangle the ecosystem impacts that two major players — geese and reindeer — have on a changing and vulnerable Arctic system. Reindeer have been year-round residents on the islands of Svalbard for thousands of years, but at one point were almost completely gone. Svalbard ...

Hurricanes and other extreme weather events often affect disadvantaged communities more severely, and extended power outages are some of the most harmful effects. Concerns over the intensification of hurricanes has led to new environmental justice policies that aim to mitigate the unequal impacts of major storms. Now, policy experts and engineers are directing their attention toward illuminating the causes. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology sought to investigate whether socioeconomically vulnerable households experienced longer power outage durations after extreme weather events. The team analyzed data from the top eight major Atlantic hurricanes between 2017 ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has created the Center for AI @PNNL to coordinate the pioneering research of hundreds of scientists working on a range of projects focused on science, security and energy resilience.   Researchers at PNNL were among the first to dive into artificial intelligence decades ago. But AI has surged in the past year with the ready availability of generative AI, which allows almost anyone to produce sophisticated—though sometimes errant—text and images with just a small amount of data. At the same time, AI is a vital tool for ...

USD$200,000 awarded to tackle today’s pressing consumer technology demands Utilizing smart optical sensors for IoT Providing more realistic virtual and augmented realities WASHINGTON – The Optica Foundation today released more detailed information on information technology research funded by the 2023 Optica Foundation Challenge. Researchers Zaijun Chen, University of Southern California, USA, and Alejandro Velez-Zea, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, both proposed novel approaches to addressing the flow of data and information in consumer-centric technologies. “The ...

Certain facial features—like downturned lips and a heavy brow—are known to make someone appear untrustworthy to others, even though these do not indicate a person’s actual character. Such facial biases influence our everyday social interactions as well as high-stakes decisions, including who we hire, or elect to political office. But a new study by Columbia researchers shows that the effects of these judgments can be mitigated. The study outlines the results of four experiments that the authors conducted with 1,400 volunteers. Through those experiments, the researchers found that when real-world defendants have facial features that appear untrustworthy, they are more likely ...

Photolithography involves manipulating light to precisely etch features onto a surface, and is commonly used to fabricate computer chips and optical devices like lenses. But tiny deviations during the manufacturing process often cause these devices to fall short of their designers’ intentions. To help close this design-to-manufacturing gap, researchers from MIT and the Chinese University of Hong Kong used machine learning to build a digital simulator that mimics a specific photolithography manufacturing process. Their technique utilizes real data gathered from the photolithography system, so it can more ...

Arctic seals have evolved many adaptations to cope with their frosty environment—one that you might not immediately think of is the bones in their nasal cavity. Arctic seals have more convoluted nasal passages than seal species that live in milder environments, and researchers report December 14 in the Biophysical Journal that these structures help the seals more efficiently retain heat and moisture as they breathe in and out. “Thanks to this elaborate structure in their nasal cavities, Arctic seals lose less heat through nasal heat exchange than subtropical seals when both are exposed to the same ...

Aging poses a number of challenges to the body’s well-being, one of the most important being an increased susceptibility to multiple diseases, including urinary tract infections (UTIs). The connection between aging and more prevalent UTIs is not well understood, but now researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have found an explanation. The researchers show in the journal Developmental Cell that, compared to the younger counterpart, the aging urinary tract in animal models changes how it functions at the cellular level in ways that seem to favor the establishment ...

People who live in neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty and unemployment are less likely to fill their heart-failure drug prescriptions than those living in wealthier areas, a new study shows. The findings not only add to understanding geographic and economic disparities in heart disease care, but also point to new ways to address barriers for patients taking these lifesaving drugs. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the study explored prescription pickup patterns among patients with systolic heart failure, a chronic, life-threatening ...

Cats tend to dictate games of fetch with their owners and most cats who play fetch learned to do so without explicit training, according to a survey of 924 cat owners published in Scientific Reports. The findings also highlight the variety of objects that cats prefer to fetch, including hair ties and bottle parts. Jemma Forman, Elizabeth Renner and David Leavens surveyed cat owners who reported fetching behaviours in 1,154 cats that they currently or previously owned. Owners reported how fetching first occurred, how often it occurs ...

A multidisciplinary study published in Nature has elucidated the structure of the machinery responsible for writing much of our “dark genome” — the 98 percent of our DNA that has largely unknown biological function. These results may spur entirely novel treatments for autoimmune diseases, cancer and neurodegeneration. An international team of scientists from Rutgers and more than a dozen other institutions, including both academia and industry, have published the first high-resolution images and structural details of avirus-like element known as LINE-1. They describe it as “an ancient genetic parasite” that is one of the most common parts of human DNA (video ...

About The Study: In this study of 6,247 patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, patients living in neighborhoods with lower neighborhood-level socioeconomic status had significantly higher odds of nonadherence to guideline-directed medical therapy. These findings highlight the importance of considering neighborhood-level disparities when developing approaches to improve medication adherence.  Authors: Amrita Mukhopadhyay, M.D., of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York, is the corresponding ...

About The Study: The natural history of sleep disturbances was associated with both resolved and incident emotional and behavioral difficulties in this study of 17,000 preschool-aged children. Routine screening and precise intervention for sleep disturbances may benefit the psychosocial well-being of this population.  Authors: Fan Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., and Guanghai Wang, Ph.D., of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, are the corresponding authors.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media ...

Immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy has become an important therapeutic treatment option in some patients with metastatic breast cancer. Which patients will benefit the most, however, remains unclear; current biomarkers such as PD-L1 that are used to predict response are mediocre at best. Vanderbilt researchers led a clinical trial combining atezolizumab, an immunotherapy, in combination with chemotherapy in patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer to both evaluate the efficacy of the treatment combination and to understand biomarkers of response ...

Researchers from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators have uncovered the coding principle underlying self-centered (egocentric) representation in spatial perception. The study was published in Neuron on Dec. 14.  Our understanding of the intricate spatial perception mechanisms in the human brain has recently advanced with the discovery that self-centered perception of external items is closely integrated with our world-centered understanding of the world, which is the brain's internal "GPS" system. Given ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D images of the human tongue have revealed that the surface of our tongues are unique to each of us, new findings suggest. The results offer an unprecedented insight into the biological make-up of our tongue’s surface and how our sense of taste and touch differ from person to person. The research has huge potential for discovering individual food preferences, developing healthy food alternatives and early diagnosis of oral cancers in the future, experts say. The human tongue is a highly sophisticated and ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identify the T cells that, when activated, are pathogenic in a subset of idiopathic inflammatory myopathies Tokyo, Japan – Inflammation is an important part of the body’s defenses, eliminating threats and repairing damage. When the immune system is overactivated, though, it can turn from friend to foe. Now, researchers from Japan have identified the culprit responsible for one type of harmful inflammation that occurs in certain muscular disorders. In a study published last month in the Journal of Autoimmunity, ...

The Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman has been awarded the International Ostrowski Prize in Higher Mathematics 2023. The Ostrowski Prize is worth 100,000 Swiss Francs and named after Alexander M. Ostrowski, a professor of mathematics who taught at the University of Basel. Jacob Tsimerman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto (Canada), received the Ostrowski Prize 2023 in recognition of his work at the interface of transcendence theory, analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry, including recent breakthroughs on the André-Oort and Griffiths conjectures. Shimura varieties are algebraic varieties of great ...

Blue light from LED lamps and consumer electronics can mess with your sleep because it disrupts production of the natural sleep hormone melatonin. Tinted glasses or displays in night mode can mask, but don’t remove, a portion of the disruptive wavelengths. But now, researchers report in ACS Omega that they have designed more “human-centric” LEDs that could potentially enhance drowsiness or alertness on command. Humans have evolved over millennia to be active during the day and to rest at night; we’ve depended on the sun to regulate our sleep/wake cycle. But many people ...