Harvard's Growth Lab has released a new report on Lebanon's struggling economy that revisits the origins of the crisis and proposes a comprehensive plan for a swift economic recovery. The research project, led by Professors Ricardo Hausmann, Ugo Panizza, and Carmen Reinhart, provides a clear diagnostic of the ongoing crisis and suggests novel, out-of-the box solutions.  The research highlights the unusual depth of Lebanon’s economic collapse. According to Professor Hausmann, “Lebanon faces a triple financial crisis: its currency has collapsed, its banking system is bankrupt, and the government has defaulted on its debt. The ...

A nearly decade-long study by UCLA researchers found that substance abuse treatment of any kind may help to reduce methamphetamine usage among men who have sex with other men – a population that has been disproportionately impacted by the U.S. methamphetamine crisis in recent years. The findings come from the mSTUDY, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and are published in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment. The study analyzed responses from a group of nearly 300 men in Los Angeles who self-reported ...

Community members across Utah, the Great Basin, and around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario are invited to join people across the country in contributing winter weather observations. The data is collected by scientists for a NASA-funded project that seeks to improve the accuracy of winter weather predictions.   Information collected by community scientists will help researchers from Lynker, DRI, and the University of Nevada, Reno, improve the technology that drives predictions for when precipitation will fall as rain or snow. Currently, satellite technologies struggle to differentiate snow from rain near the freezing point in mountainous ...

TUCSON, Ariz. and LEBANON, N.H., November 29, 2023 — Critical Path Institute’s (C-Path) Translational Therapeutics Accelerator (TRxA) and Celdara Medical today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at identifying and advancing promising new therapeutics in areas of high unmet medical need. Under the terms of this agreement, both organizations look to expand opportunities to provide financial support for the development of early-stage therapeutics by exchanging non-competitive information submitted in academic funding proposals. Launched ...

What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently you’ll see images of light-skinned men. Stable Diffusion’s perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of “a person from Oceania,” for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt. The researchers will present ...

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has joined a global consortium of scientists from federal laboratories, research institutes, academia and industry to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific discovery. The partnership, known as the Trillion Parameter Consortium, or TPC, seeks to grow and improve large-scale generative AI models aimed at tackling complex scientific challenges. These include the development of scalable model architectures and related training strategies, as well as data organization ...

The School of Dentistry of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio has launched the Center for Global and Community Oral Health, designed to bring together various existing outreach and research programs under one umbrella to study and develop solutions to the most pressing dental challenges facing the global population. “Our vision is to transform community and global oral health through education, research and innovation,” said Brij B. Singh, PhD, associate dean of research for the dental ...

An exploratory study has shown that light, regular exercise can improve the cognitive, as well as physical, health of adults with Down syndrome. The Mindsets study, published today [29 November] in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is the first to investigate the effects of physical and cognitive exercise on people with Down syndrome, and it found that short bursts of walking can lead to improved information processing and attention after just eight weeks. The role that exercise can play in cognitive growth represents a breakthrough in thinking about what’s ...

Doctors managing deceased organ donors routinely treat the donors’ bodies with thyroid hormones in a bid to preserve heart function and increase the quantity and quality of hearts and other organs available for transplantation. However, according to a recent clinical trial led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Mid-America Transplant in St. Louis, routine thyroid hormone intervention is not effective at achieving these goals, and may even cause harm. The study is published Nov. 30 in The New England Journal of Medicine. “There have been ...

A recent groundbreaking study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, sheds new light on the coronavirus's behavior, particularly its ability to remain attached under various mechanical stresses and the implications for person-to-person transmission. The paper, titled “Single-molecule force stability of the SARS-CoV-2–ACE2 interface in variants-of-concern,” is the result of a collaborative effort led by scientists from Auburn University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Utrecht University. This research offers an unprecedented molecular-level understanding of the virus and raises ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – A study of post-9/11 veterans shows that those with moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) who have never been deployed have a higher risk of epilepsy than those who have been deployed. The study is published in the November 29, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “We anticipated that deployment would be linked to a higher risk of epilepsy among post-9/11 veterans with TBI given the potential higher risk for a blast or combat ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – For many people with migraine, it can be difficult to find a treatment that is effective and reliable, and information on how medications compare to one another is lacking. A new study draws data from nearly 300,000 people using a smartphone app to help people make decisions about their medications. The study found that certain migraine medications like triptans, ergots and anti-emetics may be two to five times more effective than ibuprofen ...

Every 65 seconds, someone in the United States develops Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating form of dementia that affects 6.2 million Americans. Though it was initially identified almost 120 years ago, Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder with no cure and few treatments. It starts out with minor memory loss that, over time, advances to a mental decline so severe, individuals have difficulty even swallowing. Xiaoting Jia, associate professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical ...

The ARIES-HM3 Randomized Clinical Trial assessed the safety and efficacy of excluding aspirin from the antithrombotic regimen in patients with advanced heart failure who have undergone implantation of a fully magnetically levitated left ventricular assist device (LVAD). “We can now safely say that not giving aspirin is not only safe from a thromboembolic risk profile but results in improved adverse event rate by a significant reduction in non-surgical bleeding which is a well-known complication related to LVAD therapy,” said Mirnela Byku, M.D., Ph.D., MBA, co-author of the study and director of the UNC Durable Mechanical ...

The frilled dog winkle may sound like a complex knot for a tie, but this local sea snail holds clues to our warmer future, including a dire outlook for species that can’t move, adapt, or acclimate as fast as their environment heats up. Strait of Georgia hotspot To figure out how location affects vulnerability to a changing climate, UBC zoology researchers Drs. Fiona Beaty and Chris Harley collected marine snails from the Strait of Georgia, a potential hot spot of climate risk, and the Central Coast, where waters are cooler and warming more slowly. They monitored snails ...

The San Joaquin Valley in California has experienced vast variability in climate extremes, with droughts and floods that were more severe and lasted longer than what has been seen in the modern record, according to a new study of 600 years of tree rings from the valley. The researchers used the tree rings to reconstruct plausible daily records of weather and streamflow scenarios during the 600-year period. This new approach, combining paleo information with synthetic weather generation, may help policymakers and scientists better understand – and anticipate ...

We tend to think of large cities as melting pots – places where people from all sorts of backgrounds can mingle and interact. But according to new research, people in big cities tend to primarily interact with other individuals in the same socioeconomic bracket, whereas people in small cities and rural areas are much more likely to have diverse interactions. Using cellphone data, a collaboration of researchers led by Stanford University determined that most people in big cities have very few opportunities for even brief interactions with those outside their own socioeconomic status. ...

When the COVID-19 pandemic first started, no effective anti-viral drugs were available to fight the disease. However, in record time, so-called monoclonal antibodies were developed as a lifesaving treatment. Now, 3 years later, none of the approved antibodies work effectively against the new SARS-CoV-2 virus variants due to mutations that alter their spike protein. While vaccines protect against severe disease, there is still an urgent need for effective virus-blocking agents for therapeutic or prophylactic use. This is particularly relevant for patients ...

Despite a similar statutory tax rate for multinational corporations (MNCs) across many countries, the effective tax rate that MNCs actually pay differs greatly — as low as 1% of gross income in Luxembourg and as high as 67% in Norway. That’s one conclusion of a study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Javier Garcia-Bernardo of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, Petr Janský of Charles University, Czechia, and Thomas Tørsløv of Danmarks Nationalbank, Denmark. The study comes on the ...

Ancient animals were walking around on bird-like feet over 210 million years ago, according to a study published November 29, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Miengah Abrahams and Emese M. Bordy of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Numerous fossil sites in southern Africa preserve distinctive three-toed footprints that have been named Trisauropodiscus. For many years, researchers have debated what animals might have left these tracks, as well as precisely how many different species (technically called ichnospecies) of Trisauropodiscus there are. In this study, the researchers reassessed the ...

Exercise may reduce postpartum depression, with moderate intensity exercises three to four times a week being especially effective, per meta-analysis ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287650 Article Title: Effectiveness of aerobic exercise in the prevention and treatment of postpartum depression: Meta-analysis and network meta-analysis Author Countries: China Funding: This work was financially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (Grant no. CUG150607). The funders did not play a role ...

Bacterial vaginosis is a common condition in which the natural microbiome of the vagina falls out of balance, sometimes leading to complications in sexual and reproductive health. But exactly how these bacterial populations disrupt vaginal health has remained unclear. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have now found that in bacterial vaginosis, certain bacterial species dismantle protective molecules on the surface of the cells lining the vagina, dysregulating key processes that mediate cell turnover, death and response to surrounding bacteria. The findings, published November 29, 2023 in Science Translational Medicine, may help explain why bacterial ...

The record storm surge in October 2023 caused severe damage to the German Baltic coast. Effective adaptation scenarios to rising sea levels are therefore becoming increasingly urgent. In two recent studies, researchers at Kiel University have modelled both the flooding extent along the Baltic Sea coastal areas and, for the first time, two possible upgrades for current dike lines in high resolution. They modelled various storm surge and sea level rise scenarios. Their results show that, based on the current dike line, neither an increase ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Some viruses move between species. For example, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can spill over from humans to mink, an agricultural species, and then spill back from mink to humans. Spill back is a concern because SARS-CoV-2 can mutate in the mink and come back to humans in a more virulent form. Both spill over and spill back of SARS-CoV-2 have been reported on mink farms in the United States and Europe.  To address these issues, a research team at the University of California, Riverside, has ...

The Horizon Europe DTO-BioFlow project (https://dto-bioflow.eu) has launched an Open Call offering up to 60,000€ for institutions that manage marine biodiversity data, to invite them to contribute to the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO) by making these data available to the public domain through EMODnet Biology, the portal that provides open and free access to interoperable data and data products on temporal and spatial distribution of marine species (angiosperms, benthos, birds, fish, macroalgae, mammals, reptiles, phyto- and zooplankton) from European regional seas. Published officially on Tuesday, October 31st, this single-stage call is open to a wide ...