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Medicine15 Dec 2023

New method paves the way for new antibiotics

“Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem, and being able to help solve it is really great,” says Amanda Holstad Singleton, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Singleton is the lead author of a study that shows how a combination of two new substances effectively kills methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). These substances have been developed at NTNU and may become a completely new antibiotic that is effective against a wide group of bacteria. “It's ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Frontiers for Young Minds and CERN ‘SPARK’ big questions in health technology

Frontiers for Young Minds, the award-winning, open-access scientific journal for kids, has published the first articles in a new collection in collaboration with CERN, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research. The collection, entitled SPARK-ing big questions: what is the future of health technology?, addresses key questions on how ground-breaking health technologies and science can improve human health for future generations. The articles are written by researchers who attended the SPARKS! Serendipity Forum at CERN in 2022, an event for scientific and ...

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Environment15 Dec 2023

Role of cleaning fishes in conserving biodiversity distinguished with FLAD Science Award Atlantic 2023

José Ricardo Paula, researcher at the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre, Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), will receive 300.000 euros in funding in three years to develop a project that aims to improve the understanding of the role of cleaning mutualisms in the conservation of Atlantic biodiversity, using emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. In the global ocean, there are several fish species, known as cleaners, that specialize in providing ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

GYA and 30 Young Academies and Associations release statement suggesting actionable steps to connect fundamental science with sustainable development

GYA and 30 Young Academies and Associations release statement suggesting actionable steps to connect fundamental science with sustainable development during Closing Ceremony of IYBSSD meeting In a collective statement endorsed by 30 Young Academies and Associations, the Global Young Academy (GYA) underscored the pivotal role of fundamental science in achieving the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The statement (link here) was delivered during the closing ceremony of the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD) at CERN in Switzerland on 15 December 2023. The joint statement acknowledges the historical ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Brief teacher training better prepares medical students for patient education & communication

(Boston)—Teaching is an integral communication skill central to the practice of medicine. The art of teaching extends beyond disseminating information. The skill directly translates to health provider-patient communication, the success of which is positively correlated with improved patient outcomes. “Teaching is a large part of medicine - patient education is critical to providing high quality patient centered care. Education helps patients understand the 'why' and 'what' of their treatments and allows them to be better participants in their ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Local Philadelphia area business owner recognized as national champion for health equity

DALLAS, December 15, 2023 — Devon Mitchell, an American Heart Association local volunteer and franchise owner at Anytime Fitness in Delaware, is the 2023 National Leaders of Impact™ Winner. Mitchell, one of the 295 leaders in cities across the country, worked to improve heart health in his community while raising funds to fuel the mission of the Association. The Leaders of Impact campaign pairs community leaders in a head-to-head competition to support the health equity work of the American ...

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Physics15 Dec 2023

Childhood sedentariness causes elevated cholesterol but light physical activity may neutralize it

Increased sedentary time from childhood through young adulthood significantly increased cholesterol levels in a new follow-up study. However, the results also showed that light physical activity (LPA) may completely reverse the adverse process. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) may also reduce cholesterol levels, but its effect is diminished by body fat. The study was conducted in collaboration between the University of Bristol in the UK, the University of Exeter in the UK, and the University of Eastern ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

From PIC to probe

Similarly as for electronics, photonic circuits can be miniaturized onto a chip, leading to a so-called photonic integrated circuit (PIC). Although these developments are more recent than for electronics, this field is rapidly evolving. One of the main issues, however, is to turn such a PIC into a functional device. This requires optical packaging and coupling strategies to bring light into and to get light out of the PIC. For example, for optical communication a connection needs to be made with optical fibers, which then transport the light ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

Prone to abandoning New Year’s resolutions? Bayes’ research suggests blaming money worries rather than being time-poor

People who abandon New Year’s resolutions or other commitments can maintain the respect of their peers by blaming external factors such as lack of money, new research suggests. Studies have found that people were more likely to be seen as having good self-control despite abandoning a commitment to live a healthier life if they claimed they did not have the money for a gym membership or expensive new cooking equipment. People who instead claimed they didn’t have the time to exercise or to replace a takeaway ...

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Environment15 Dec 2023

Third Pole environment researchers study the risk of glacial lake Outbursts in the Third Pole

The Third Pole, which spans the Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Tianshan Mountain ranges, is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Warming temperatures and altered rainfall patterns have caused over 10,000 glaciers in the region to retreat over the past three decades, facilitating the formation of thousands of glacial lakes. Though they appear harmless, these water bodies have a tremendous destructive potential, particularly due to their ability to cause glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). When triggered ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Data scientists unveil AI framework to identify new indications for existing drugs

Scientists at Klick Applied Sciences have created an artificial intelligence framework that can rapidly identify new use cases for existing therapeutics, according to findings presented Friday at the NeurIPS conference that could greatly improve the drug repurposing process and transform the pharmaceutical industry. The team debuted their algorithm, called LOVENet, a Large Optimized Vector Embeddings Network which integrates two cutting-edge AI technologies: large language model (LLM), and structured knowledge graph technology, which mathematically represents the relationships between drugs and diseases to offer a fresh ...

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Environment15 Dec 2023

Strategies to limit redox electrolyte-enhanced carbon-based supercapacitor self-discharge

The efficient storage of clean energy is a critical component to achieving carbon neutrality. Capacitors are devices that store energy by separating positive and negative electrical charge, and supercapacitors (SC) are capacitors that can store and release large amounts of energy. A specialized supercapacitor, called a redox electrolyte-enhanced SC (RE-SC), places liquid redox electrolytes, a source of ions that can be electrically charged, next to a carbon-based electrical conductor, or electrode, to achieve high energy storage density and power output. Despite this increase in performance, RE-SCs suffer from self-discharge of stored energy, limiting their practicality. ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

US adults eat a meal’s worth of calories of snacks in a day

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Snacks constitute almost a quarter of a day’s calories in U.S. adults and account for about one-third of daily added sugar, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzing data from surveys of over 20,000 people found that Americans averaged about 400 to 500 calories in snacks a day – often more than what they consumed at breakfast – that offered little nutritional value. Though dietitians are very aware of Americans’ propensity to snack, “the magnitude of the impact ...

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Environment15 Dec 2023

Revolutionary seaweed and carbonated water based hydrogel for treating skin wounds

Acting as the main interface between the internal and the external world, the skin is the largest and most important organ of the human body. It is frequently exposed to many types of physical injuries or wounds, including cuts, scrapes, scratches, infections, and ulcers. Unfortunately, as one ages, the skin becomes more frail and less capable of healing itself without help. With many countries experiencing a rapid rise in the aging population, the demand for treating such skin wounds has created a greater need for accessible and effective wound ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Exploring the effects of vascularization strategies on brain organoids

Cerebral organoids are three-dimensional, in vitro cultured brains that mimic the activities of the human brain. They have emerged as invaluable tools to comprehend evolution, disease pathogenesis, and neurodevelopmental processes. However, the development of these organoids is still in nascent stages with several limitations that hinder their broad applications. A major obstacle is the absence of a functional vasculature that can restrict the size of organoids, trigger cell death, and prevent cell differentiation in the organoids. To address ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

Trip or treat?

NEWS RELEASE EMBARGOED UNTIL FRI, DEC. 15 – 5:00 A.M. Eastern Contact Colleen McDonald - Sr. Consultant, Earned Media 414.801.3146 | cmcdonald@mcw.edu Trip or Treat? Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin make strides in designing non-hallucinogenic psychedelic treatments that may accelerate research on mental health benefits; research findings published in Nature Communications. Milwaukee, Wis. – Dec. 15, 2023 – There is nothing magic about the recent increase ...

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Technology15 Dec 2023

Computational model captures the elusive transition states of chemical reactions

CAMBRIDGE, MA — During a chemical reaction, molecules gain energy until they reach what’s known as the transition state — a point of no return from which the reaction must proceed. This state is so fleeting that it’s nearly impossible to observe it experimentally. The structures of these transition states can be calculated using techniques based on quantum chemistry, but that process is extremely time-consuming. A team of MIT researchers has now developed an alternative approach, based on machine learning, that can calculate ...

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Social Science15 Dec 2023

Parents underestimate the importance of guided play in education, finds US study

Child psychologists have long known that play is essential for children’s cognitive development because it boosts their social, physical, and emotional skills. But beginning in the 21st century, specialists repeatedly sounded the alarm that ‘play is under siege’ for US children. Kids were playing less, and – it was feared – with a lesser quality. But are today’s parents sufficiently aware of the importance of letting their children play? Yes, found a team of researchers who tested this through a survey of the opinions of 1,172 US parents. Their results showed that today’s ...

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Engineering15 Dec 2023

Responsible stewardship over ultrathin materials research

To an everyday consumer, the best gadgets on the market have the highest speed, the largest memory, and the longest battery life. Chasing this demand, the forefront of research often only considers these tangible performance metrics when innovating and designing next-generation electronics. In the wake of this technological stampede, the long-term environmental impacts lie obscured and neglected under the dust. Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) hope to be the catalyst for sustainability-driven science. Assistant Professor Ang Yee Sin from the Science, Mathematics ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

Large sequence models for sequential decision-making

Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability in another important field, sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability, etc. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

New red galaxies turn out to be already known blue galaxies

Not all discoveries turn out to be actual new discoveries. This was the case for the extremely red objects (EROs) found in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data. Analysis shows that they are very similar to blue-excess dust obscured galaxies (BluDOGs) already reported in Subaru Telescope data. Quasars, some of the brightest objects in the Universe, are driven by a supermassive black hole with a mass that can reach more than a billion times that of the Sun. These objects are the focus of much research, but how ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

HKUST researchers report the high-res structure of a cyanobacterial virus

A research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has outlined the high-resolution structure of a little-known virus, improving our understanding of viral infection, which could pave the way for more accurate predictions of climate change. With the help of an advanced technique involving cryo-electron microscopy, they managed to capture images of the virus – the cyanophage P-SCSP1u – at near-atomic resolution in its native form and examined it to see how its different parts fit together. This helped show how different proteins work in the virus and how they interact to make the virus ...

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Science15 Dec 2023

Advanced GNSS technique enhances accuracy in landslide monitoring

In a new study published on 13 November 2023, in the journal Satellite Navigation, researchers from Chang’an University have developed a novel approach using the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique combined with a cumulative sum control chart (CUSUM) method. This method enables the analysis of reference station stability and compensates for deformation at monitoring stations. In the study conducted at the Tengqing landslide in Liupanshui, Guizhou Province, Southwest China, an innovative method was applied, showcasing a significant leap in landslide monitoring using GNSS PPP technology. ...

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Medicine15 Dec 2023

Risk of death reduces after COVID-19 vaccine but protection wanes after six months – study

The risk of death from COVID-19 decreases significantly after vaccination but this protection diminishes after six months, providing evidence for continued booster doses, a new study has found. Researchers from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) analysed more than 10 million cases of COVID-19 in adults between May 2020 and February 2022. Their findings are published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM). The Case Fatality Risk (CFR) - the proportion of cases that resulted in death - was cross-referenced with vaccination ...

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Physics15 Dec 2023

The breakthrough is a step towards the development of next-generation magnetic devices that control light

In a significant advancement in optical technology, researchers from Tohoku University and Toyohashi University of Technology have developed a new method for creating transparent magnetic materials using laser heating. This breakthrough, recently published in the journal Optical Materials, presents a novel approach to integrating magneto-optical materials with optical devices, a long-standing challenge in the field. "The key to this achievement lies in creating 'Cerium-substituted Yttrium Iron Garnet (Ce:YIG)', ...

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