December 11, 2023, Mountain View, CA -- The SETI Institute announced today the establishment of a new postdoctoral research fellowship program funded by its transformative bequest from Qualcomm Co-founder, Franklin Antonio.  The first two fellowships are being announced in conjunction with the American Geophysical Union Conference (AGU) being held this week in San Francisco.  The Baruch S. Blumberg Postdoctoral Fellowship for Astrobiology and the William J. Welch Postdoctoral Fellowship for SETI and Technosignatures ...

URBANA, Ill. — Natural resource management decisions in protected areas impact more than the wildlife and landscapes they’re charged to conserve. They also affect neighbors, who could otherwise hunt, build, or recreate as they choose on their own land. For decades, community members primarily voiced their opinions through brief and impersonal public comment periods. But an initiative led by environmental social scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is putting a new spin on neighborly communication.  “Historically, public land management ...

Philadelphia, December 11, 2023 – Advancements in the care of premature babies are leading to improved survival rates. However, the incidence of neonatal diseases with life-long consequences such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is increasing. A novel study has implicated granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) in both BPD and ROP, making it a promising therapeutic candidate. The results appear in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier. BPD, also called chronic lung disease of immaturity, afflicts approximately one third of all extremely ...

Statt at public bodies can be “overwhelmed” by having to implement human rights laws into the working of their organisation when staff are in “awe” of legislation, a new study warns. When laws are viewed as sacrosanct control over interpretation and implementation can be seen as the responsibility of a privileged few, according to the research. This leads to staff placing greater weight on implementation through processes. Laws are seen as so specialist staff feel they do not have the perceived required knowledge and expertise and cannot be trusted to implement them. Those who see equality and human rights law as malleable believe they should ...

Cola. A drink forever associated with the Christmas season. And also, for many, a liquid that can help clear a blocked oesophagus. Something that may be a bit more likely at this time of year.  However, research from Amsterdam UMC, published today in the BMJ Christmas Issue, shows that this is not worth wasting the sugary stuff.   "Emergency physician Elise Tiebie, the driving force behind this project, saw online that this was really a rumour, from tip websites to Wikipedia as well as an anecdote in a British newspaper about paramedics saving a life by using cola. I've even heard doctors recommending it,” says Arjan Bredenoord, Professor of Gastroenterology at ...

Jacques Morcos, MD, a renowned neurosurgeon from University of Miami Health System, will join UTHealth Houston as the new chair of the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, effective today. Morcos will also serve as co-director of UTHealth Houston Neurosciences alongside Louise McCullough, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Neurology, and will be appointed as the Nancy, Clive and Pierce Runnells Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience. Nitin Tandon, MD, former chair ad interim of the neurosurgery department, ...

In March of 2020, India’s government announced a strict lockdown with just four hours notice, including a ban on the informal and traditional food outlets that 80 to 90 percent of Indians rely on for their main source of food. In a new paper, “Applying the six-dimensional food security framework to examine a fresh fruit and vegetable program implemented by self-help groups during the COVID-19 lockdown in India,” published in the journal World Development, researchers from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT looked at the effects of a government-backed women’s self-help group program in the state of Odisha, India and how it impacted the six ...

Materials with enhanced structure derived from crustaceans and seaweed could be part of a next-generation answer to the challenge of replacing petroleum-based plastic films, according to new research from North Carolina State University. Combining chitosan, a biopolymer that makes crab shells hard, with agarose, a biopolymer extracted from seaweed that is used to make gels, creates unique biopolymer composite films with enhanced strength. The films are also biodegradable, have antibacterial properties, repel water and are transparent. The findings could eventually lead to sustainable packaging films for food ...

MIT researchers have used 3D printing to produce self-heating microfluidic devices, demonstrating a technique which could someday be used to rapidly create cheap, yet accurate, tools to detect a host of diseases.  Microfluidics, miniaturized machines that manipulate fluids and facilitate chemical reactions, can be used to detect disease in tiny samples of blood or fluids. At-home test kits for Covid-19, for example, incorporate a simple type of microfluidic.  But many microfluidic applications require chemical reactions that must be performed at specific temperatures. These more complex microfluidic devices, which are typically manufactured in a clean ...

Milan, December 11, 2023 - Taking a significant step forward in superconductivity research, the discovery could pave the way for sustainable technologies and contribute to a more environmentally friendly future. The study just published in Nature Communications by researchers from Politecnico di Milano, Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg and Sapienza University of Rome sheds light on one of the many mysteries of high-critical-temperature copper-based superconductors: even at temperatures above the critical temperature, they are special, behaving like "strange" metals. This means that their electrical resistance ...

ARLINGTON, VA and DALLAS, December 11, 2023 — The American Diabetes Association® and the American Heart Association® have awarded grants to 10 community organizations to help people living with Type 2 diabetes lower their risk for cardiovascular diseases like heart attack, heart failure and stroke.  The community grants are part of the leading health non-profits’ joint Know Diabetes by Heart™ initiative which seeks to reduce cardiovascular events and deaths among people living with Type 2 diabetes. The grants will help organizations in California, Florida, Georgia, ...

A Stanford Medicine-led, international study of hundreds of samples from patients with Hodgkin lymphoma has shown that levels of tumor DNA circulating in their blood can identify who is responding well to treatment and others who are likely to experience a disease recurrence — potentially letting some patients who are predicted to have favorable outcomes forgo lengthy treatment.  Surprisingly, the study also revealed that Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes, can be divided into two groups, each with distinct genetic changes and slightly different prognoses. These changes hint ...

The current emoji library doesn’t accurately represent the “tree of life” and the breadth of biodiversity seen in nature according to an analysis presented December 11 in the journal iScience. A team of conservation biologists categorized emojis related to nature and animals and mapped them onto the phylogenetic tree of life. They found that animals are well represented by the current emoji catalog, whereas plants, fungi, and microorganisms are poorly represented. Within the animal kingdom, vertebrates were overrepresented while arthropods were underrepresented with respect to their actual biodiversity. The researchers argue that creating a more diverse and representative ...

About The Study: High body mass index (BMI) in late adolescence was associated with early chronic kidney disease in young adulthood in this study that included 593,000 adolescents. The risk was also present in seemingly healthy individuals with high-normal BMI and before 30 years of age, and a greater risk was seen among those with severe obesity. These findings underscore the importance of mitigating adolescent obesity rates and managing risk factors for kidney disease in adolescents with high BMI.  Authors: Gilad Twig, M.D., Ph.D., of the Israel Defense Forces, Medical Corps, Tel Hashomer, Ramat Gan, Israel, is the corresponding author. To ...

Embargoed for release: Monday, December 11, 11:00 AM ET Key points: In a study of 3.5 million pregnancies across four countries between 2009 and 2021, researchers observed no elevated risk of major congenital malformations, including major cardiac malformations, among infants born to pregnant women with pre-gestational type 2 diabetes who took second-line non-insulin antidiabetic medications compared with those who took insulin. The researchers observed an increase in use of second-line non-insulin antidiabetic ...

  The Organoid Group (Hubrecht Institute) and the Rare Cancers Genomics Team (IARC/WHO) found a way to grow samples of different types of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) in the lab. While generating their new model, the researchers discovered that some pulmonary NETs need the protein EGF to be able to grow. These types of tumors may therefore be treatable using inhibitors of the EGF receptor. The results were published in Cancer Cell on 11 December 2023.   Neuroendocrine tumors Neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are relatively ...

BOSTON – Physician-investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) compared a chatbot’s probabilistic reasoning to that of human clinicians. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, suggest that artificial intelligence could serve as useful clinical decision support tools for physicians. “Humans struggle with probabilistic reasoning, the practice of making decisions based on calculating odds,” said the study’s corresponding author Adam Rodman, MD, an internal medicine physician and investigator in ...

People who have been subject to abuse are more likely to experience physical and mental health effects than previously thought, according to a new study.   In a global review and meta-analysis of evidence published in Nature Medicine today, researchers have found that there are elevated risks between intimate partner violence or childhood sexual abuse, and some health conditions including major depressive disorder, maternal miscarriage for partners, and alcohol misuse and self-harm among children.   Globally, one in three ever-partnered women have experienced ...

McGill University researchers have made a breakthrough in diagnostic technology, inventing a ‘lab on a chip’ that can be 3D-printed in just 30 minutes. The chip has the potential to make on-the-spot testing widely accessible.   As part of a recent study, the results of which were published in the journal Advanced Materials, the McGill team developed capillaric chips that act as miniature laboratories. Unlike other computer microprocessors, these chips are single-use and require no external power source—a simple paper strip suffices. They function through capillary action – ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, December 11, 2023 – Fairy circles, a nearly hexagonal pattern of bare-soil circular gaps in grasslands, initially observed in Namibia and later in other parts of the world, have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. Theories for their appearance range from spatial self-organization induced by scale-dependent water-vegetation feedback to pre-existing patterns of termite nests. Prof. Ehud Meron of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has been studying the Namibian fairy circles as a case study for understanding how ecosystems respond to water stress. He believes that all theories ...

WASHINGTON (Dec. 11, 2023)--A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus provides a better understanding of how the brain responds to injuries. Researchers at the George Washington University discovered that a protein called Snail plays a key role in coordinating the response of brain cells after an injury.   The study shows that after an injury to the central nervous system (CNS) a group of localized cells start to produce Snail, a transcription factor or protein that has been implicated in the repair process.The GW researchers show that changing how much Snail is produced can significantly affect whether the injury starts ...

About The Study: In participants with obesity or overweight, withdrawing tirzepatide led to substantial regain of lost weight, whereas continued treatment maintained and augmented initial weight reduction in this randomized clinical trial that included 670 adults.   Authors: Louis J. Aronne, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, 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/jama.2023.24945) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict ...

Lymphatic fluid from surgical drains, which is usually tossed in the trash, is a treasure in the hands of University of Pittsburgh and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis researchers who found that this liquid could inform more precise treatments for patients with head and neck cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV). The new study, published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, shows for the first time that HPV DNA in lymphatic fluid collected ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- LOINC® and Health Data Standards at Regenstrief Institute has received a $4.4 million grant from the Regenstrief Foundation to support expansion of work on a global initiative to categorize and standardize social determinants of health (SDOH) information into electronic health records (EHRs), an ambitious project to integrate social needs data into clinical care to more effectively address health inequities. The unequal distribution of income, food, safety and access to healthcare are recognized as root causes of health disparities. But, currently, data on these factors are rarely well documented within a patient’s ...

Frontline nurses who learned the Transcendental Meditation® (TM®) technique during the COVID-19 pandemic showed rapid and significant improvements in flourishing, PTSD, anxiety, and burnout over 3 months compared to controls, according to a study published today in the Journal of Nursing Administration. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of Transcendental Meditation on nurses’ multidimensional well-being, conceptualized as the presence of flourishing and the absence of PTSD, anxiety, and burnout. A total of 104 nurses in three Florida hospitals participated. ...