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Medicine18 Dec 2023

New survey: 79% of survey respondents overlook their health needs during the holidays; find the holidays more stressful than tax season

Survey Highlights: A majority of Americans (51%) say it takes them weeks to feel less stressed after the holidays, with more than a quarter of moms reporting it takes them a month or more to recover. 71% of respondents say that their biggest regret after the holidays is that they did not take the time to relax and enjoy the season. Overall, respondents (63%) claimed that the holiday season is more stressful than tax season. Eating healthy (69%), exercising regularly (64%), and getting enough sleep (56%) are the top three things that respondents have trouble prioritizing during the holiday season. 79% of people surveyed agree that, during the holidays, they are so focused on creating special ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Public opinion polls may not be as straightforward as you think

Public opinion polls are often considered "the will of the people" but a new study on the role of polls in South Korea shows that they may not always be that transparent. "Using polls to gauge what people think about politics is not as simple as it sounds, as there are multiple mediating factors between what people think and how their views may be represented in the media," says co-author Sunmin Kim, an assistant professor of sociology at Dartmouth. "Our research shows more broadly, how in a democracy, measuring what people think or want can be a highly haphazard and unpredictable process based on the ways public opinion poll ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Study assesses GPT-4’s potential to perpetuate racial, gender biases in clinical decision making

A team of Brigham researchers analyzed GPT-4’s performance in four clinical decision support scenarios: generating clinical vignettes, diagnostic reasoning, clinical plan generation and subjective patient assessments. When prompted to generate clinical vignettes for medical education, GPT-4 failed to model the demographic diversity of medical conditions, exaggerating known demographic prevalence differences in 89% of diseases. When evaluating patient perception, GPT-4 produced significantly different responses by gender or race/ethnicity for 23% of cases. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have the potential to assist in ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Apes remember friends they haven’t seen for decades

Apes recognize photos of groupmates they haven’t seen for more than 25 years and respond even more enthusiastically to pictures of their friends, a new study finds. The work, which demonstrates the longest-lasting social memory ever documented outside of humans, and underscores how human culture evolved from the common ancestors we share with apes, our closest relatives, was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Chimpanzees and bonobos recognize individuals even though they haven’t seen them for ...

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Environment18 Dec 2023

Scientists might be using a flawed strategy to predict how species will fare under climate change

EMBARGO LIFTS DEC. 18, 2023, AT 3:00 PM U.S. EASTERN TIME As the world heats up, and the climate shifts, life will migrate, adapt or go extinct. For decades, scientists have deployed a specific method to predict how a species will fare during this time of great change. But according to new research, that method might be producing results that are misleading or wrong. University of Arizona researchers and their team members at the U.S. Forest Service and Brown University found that the method – commonly referred to as space-for-time substitution – failed to accurately predict how a widespread tree of the Western U.S. called the ...

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Physics18 Dec 2023

Mesopotamian bricks unveil the strength of Earth’s ancient magnetic field

Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describes how changes in the Earth’s magnetic field imprinted on iron oxide grains within ancient clay bricks, and how scientists were able to reconstruct these changes from the names of the kings inscribed on the bricks. The team hopes that using this “archaeomagnetism,” which looks for signatures ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Move over dolphins. Chimps and bonobos can recognize long-lost friends and family — for decades

Researchers led by a University of California, Berkeley, comparative psychologist have found that great apes and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, can recognize groupmates they haven't seen in over two decades — evidence of what’s believed to be the longest-lasting nonhuman memory ever recorded. The findings also bolster the theory that long-term memory in humans, chimpanzees and bonobos likely comes from our shared common ancestor that lived between 6 million and 9 million years ago. The team used infrared eye-tracking cameras to record where bonobos and chimps gazed when they were shown side-by-side images of other bonobos ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

First observation of how water molecules move near a metal electrode

A collaborative team of experimental and computational physical chemists from South Korea and the United States have made an important discovery in the field of electrochemistry, shedding light on the movement of water molecules near metal electrodes. This research holds profound implications for the advancement of next-generation batteries utilizing aqueous electrolytes. In the nanoscale realm, chemists typically utilize laser light to illuminate molecules and measure spectroscopic properties to visualize molecules. However, studying the behavior of ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Harnessing nanotechnology to understand tumor behavior

A study conducted by pre-PhD researcher Pablo S. Valera and recently published in PNAS demonstrates the potential of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to explore metabolites secreted by cancer cells in cancer research. The study, which has been led by Ikerbasque Research Professors Luis Liz-Marzán (from CIC biomaGUNE) and Arkaitz Carracedo (of CIC bioGUNE) and in which other researchers from both centers, also members of the Networking Biomedical Research Centre (CIBER), have participated as well, provides valuable information to guide more specific experiments to reveal ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Exercise-induced Pgc-1α expression inhibits fat accumulation in aged skeletal muscles

Myosteatosis, or aging-related fat accumulation in skeletal muscles, is a leading cause of declines in muscle strength and quality of life in elderly adults. Older adults who are sedentary and develop accumulated fat in the skeletal muscle are often prescribed exercise by their doctors to combat the condition. If scientists were to develop a new therapy, such as medications, to combat myosteatosis, they would need to replicate the mechanism by which exercise might reduce fat accumulation in muscles. Fibro-adipogenic ...

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Space18 Dec 2023

NASA’s Webb rings in holidays with ringed planet Uranus

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently trained its sights on unusual and enigmatic Uranus, an ice giant that spins on its side. Webb captured this dynamic world with rings, moons, storms, and other atmospheric features – including a seasonal polar cap. The image expands upon a two-color version released earlier this year, adding additional wavelength coverage for a more detailed look. With its exquisite sensitivity, Webb captured Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Memory research: Breathing in sleep impacts memory processes

How are memories consolidated during sleep? In 2021, researchers led by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, leader of the Emmy Noether junior research group at LMU’s Department of Psychology, had already shown there was a direct relationship between the emergence of certain sleep-related brain activity patterns and the reactivation of memory contents during sleep. However, it was still unclear whether these rhythms are orchestrated by a central pacemaker. So the researchers joined up with scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University of Oxford to reanalyze the data. Their results have identified ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Alexander Zholents recognized with 2023 Dieter Möhl Award

Zholents was honored for his work on the theory of optical stochastic cooling. Alexander Zholents, a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and distinguished fellow in the Accelerator Systems division is one of the recipients of this year’s Dieter Möhl Award. The award is presented by CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. It is in tribute to the late Dieter Möhl, a pioneer in the realm of particle beam cooling. The awards celebrate both early career and lifetime achievements in the field of beam cooling and its applications. “I am deeply honored to receive this award,” said Zholents. ​“The ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Unraveling predisposition in bilateral Wilms tumor

(Memphis, Tenn.—December 18, 2023) Children with bilateral Wilms tumor have a tumor in each of their kidneys — a condition that strongly suggests an underlying genetic or epigenetic predisposition driving the disease. Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital gathered a large cohort of bilateral Wilms tumor samples and conducted analyses to assess which factors contribute to predisposition comprehensively. The work has implications for counseling patient families, guiding treatment decisions and informing the design of future clinical trials. The study was published today in Nature Communications. Having tumors in ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Feelings of impatience evolve over time, study says

A new study answers a timely question: What is the hardest part of waiting? Consumers do plenty of it—online, in line, in traffic, or for deliveries. And now we know it’s the final phase that’s most problematic for them. In this season of joyful—and not-so-joyful—anticipation, the research has deep implications for marketers and psychological insights for us all, says Annabelle Roberts, coauthor and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. The paper shows: It’s better for companies to communicate possible delays early in the wait; It’s better for ...

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Science18 Dec 2023

Little bacterium may make big impact on rare-earth processing

ITHACA, N.Y. - A tiny, hard-working bacterium – which weighs one-trillionth of a gram – may soon have a large influence on processing rare earth elements in an eco-friendly way. In a new study, Cornell University scientists show that genetically engineering this bacterium could improve the efficiency for the purification of elements found in smartphones, computers, electric cars and wind turbines, and could even boost global economic supply chains. Vibrio natriegens, the bacterium, offers a sustainable ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

AI generates proteins with exceptional binding strengths

A new study Dec. 18 in Nature reports an AI-driven advance in biotechnology with implications for drug development, disease detection, and environmental monitoring. Scientists at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine used software to create protein molecules that bind with exceptionally high affinity and specificity to a variety of challenging biomarkers, including human hormones. Notably, the scientists achieved the highest interaction strength ever reported between a computer-generated biomolecule and its target. Senior author David Baker, professor of biochemistry at UW Medicine, ...

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Technology18 Dec 2023

Artificial intelligence can predict events in people's lives

Artificial intelligence developed to model written language can be utilized to predict events in people's lives. A research project from DTU, University of Copenhagen, ITU, and Northeastern University in the US shows that if you use large amounts of data about people's lives and train so-called 'transformer models', which (like ChatGPT) are used to process language, they can systematically organize the data and predict what will happen in a person's life and even estimate the time of death. In a new scientific article, 'Using Sequences of Life-events to Predict Human Lives', published ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Einstein receives $10.9 million grant to validate remote cognitive testing for Alzheimer’s and other dementias

December 18, 2023—(BRONX NY)—Neurologists often diagnose Alzheimer’s disease after evaluating patients during lengthy, in-person office visits. This poses a significant challenge for many groups, particularly people with limited access to specialized care, including people from historically marginalized groups and people living in rural areas. Albert Einstein College of Medicine has received a five-year, $10.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study whether remote neuropsychological testing can substitute for in-person office visits when assessing whether people have Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias. “In-person ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

The antibiotic resistance war (video)

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18, 2023 — There’s a microscopic battle happening right before our eyes, involving the critical issue of antibiotic resistance. Witness the historical development of antibiotics, from penicillin's accidental discovery to the ongoing battle against superbugs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCR5wFWSGlA Reactions is a video series produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. Subscribe to Reactions at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on Twitter @ACSReactions. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

AI's memory-forming mechanism found to be strikingly similar to that of the brain

An interdisciplinary team consisting of researchers from the Center for Cognition and Sociality and the Data Science Group within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) revealed a striking similarity between the memory processing of artificial intelligence (AI) models and the hippocampus of the human brain. This new finding provides a novel perspective on memory consolidation, which is a process that transforms short-term memories into long-term ones, in AI systems. In the race towards developing ...

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Environment18 Dec 2023

15th annual horizon scan identifies 15 most pressing issues for conservation, including invertebrate decline and changing marine ecosystems

Since 2009, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative has coordinated an annual horizon scan, a well-established method for predicting which threats, changes, and technologies will have the biggest impact on biological conservation in the following year. This year, the 15th horizon scan included 31 scientists, practitioners, and policymakers who developed a list of 96 issues, which they eventually narrowed down to the fifteen most novel and impactful. Their findings, publishing in the journal Trends in Evolution & Ecology ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Toothbrushing tied to lower rates of pneumonia among hospitalized patients

Toothbrushing also associated with lower rates of ICU mortality, shorter duration of mechanical ventilation, and shorter ICU length of stay Researchers say toothbrushing could be a cheap but effective way to help lower rates of hospital-acquired pneumonia Researchers have found an inexpensive tool that may help reduce rates of pneumonia for hospitalized patients—and it comes with bristles on one end. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute ...

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Environment18 Dec 2023

Ecosystem benefits to humanity expected to decline by 9% by 2100

As climate change redistributes terrestrial ecosystems across the globe, the world’s natural capital is expected to decrease, causing a 9% loss of ecosystem services by 2100. That’s according to a study of natural capital published today in the journal Nature led by scientists at the University of California, Davis, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Breathable air, clean water, healthy forests and biodiversity all contribute to people’s well-being in ways that ...

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Medicine18 Dec 2023

Public benefit programs and differential associations with child maltreatment by race and ethnicity

About The Study: The results of this study raise concerns that benefit programs may add relative advantages for white children compared with Black and Hispanic children and contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in child protective services investigations. States’ eligibility criteria and distribution practices should be examined to promote equitable effects on adverse child outcomes. Authors: Henry T. Puls, M.D., of Children’s Mercy Kansas City, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website ...

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