Children with autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders in India can be successfully identified by community healthcare workers using a low-cost app, a study has found. The results, published today (Friday 14 July) in Autism, could open the door to help millions of children with autism spectrum conditions to get earlier screening quickly and inexpensively, leading to life-changing support. Researchers from India, the UK and US tested the app with 131 two- to seven-year-olds living in low-resource neighbourhoods of Delhi, India. The tests were carried out at the homes of the children, by non-specialist ...

13 July 2023 The Geological Society of America Release no. 23-26 Contact: Justin Samuel +1-303-357-1026 jsamuel@geosociety.org   For Immediate Release Geological Society of America Announces 2023–2024 Officers and Councilors Boulder, Colo., USA: Christopher (Chuck) M. Bailey, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, takes over the role of president of The Geological Society of America as of 1 July 2023. The incoming president-elect is Carmala N. Garzione, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. Rounding ...

The Colorado River, which provides drinking water to tens of millions of people and irrigation water to more than 5 million acres of farmland, has dropped by one-third in recent years. Arizona recently limited housing construction in the Phoenix area based on projections that groundwater will be unable to meet growing demand. The University of Arizona has received $4 million for phase one of a project to improve water security and water reuse methods in the arid southwestern United States. Phase two will be awarded an ...

Dozens of sessions at the Ecological Society of America’s upcoming Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, Aug. 6-11, will feature research on the ecology of the geographic and environmental region surrounding the conference venue: the Pacific Northwest and Cascadia Bioregion, which encompass a vast area stretching from northern California to southern Alaska. The Pacific Northwest’s temperate rainforests are home to old-growth conifers and multiple threatened and endangered species. Its diverse marine and coastal environments host whales, puffins and vibrant kelp forests. The annual salmon runs in the region’s ...

University of Texas at Dallas scientists have discovered a previously unknown “housekeeping” process in kidney cells that ejects unwanted content, resulting in cells that rejuvenate themselves and remain functioning and healthy. The self-renewal process, which is fundamentally different from how other bodily tissues are thought to regenerate, helps explain how, barring injury or disease, the kidneys can remain healthy for a lifetime. The researchers described the mechanism in a study published April 17 in Nature Nanotechnology. Unlike ...

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Catherine Royer, Constellation Chair Professor of Bioinformatics and Biocomputation at the Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) and professor of biological sciences, has received a grant of over $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to investigate enzymes from organisms living in deep sea environments. “Ultimately, I hope to better understand how these enzymes function under the high pressure that is present in the deep sea,” said Royer. “They also thrive in high or low temperatures. Biomolecules from the surface do not have the ability to survive these extreme ...

MIDDLETOWN, Pa. — An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Penn State is part of a project that recently received a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Engines Development Award. The award will fund the development of the Pennsylvania Industrial Hemp Engine (PAIHE), which will support the manufacture and deployment of bio-based products for application in green building construction, packaging, fabrics, renewable energy and land remediation. Launched by NSF’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation ...

Stars beam brightly out of the darkness of space thanks to fusion, atoms melding together and releasing energy. But what if there’s another way to power a star? A team of three astrophysicists — Katherine Freese at The University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with Cosmin Ilie and Jillian Paulin ’23 at Colgate University — analyzed images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and found three bright objects that might be “dark stars,” theoretical objects much bigger and brighter than our sun, powered by particles of dark matter annihilating. If confirmed, dark stars could reveal the nature ...

The percentage of infants from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experiencing hypothermia upon operating room (OR) arrival and at any point during the operation decreased from 48.7% to 6.4% and 67.5% to 37.4%, respectively, after implementation of a multidisciplinary quality improvement project at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. The project and its success were featured in the journal Pediatric Quality and Safety. About one-third of infants admitted to children’s hospitals’ NICUs require surgery and ...

Argonne is shaping the future of clean and reliable energy solutions. Research into nuclear energy is gaining attention as a critical piece of the solution to climate change. As part of this trend, nuclear engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have received three new funding awards from the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) initiative. These awards recognize the valuable contributions of Argonne’s world-class nuclear engineers and facilities in this field. Among ...

TUCSON, Ariz., July 13, 2023 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a leading global nonprofit committed to expediting drug development through the acceleration of regulatory-endorsed solutions, today announced a newly formalized Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Vivpro, an industry-leading provider of a revolutionary biointelligence software platform and innovative services. The partnership will enhance C-Path’s core competencies in accelerating drug development, by utilizing advanced data analytics and deep machine learning insights offered by Vivpro to further revolutionize ...

TUCSON, Ariz., July 12, 2023 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path) announced today that the Coordination of Rare Diseases based at Sanford Research (CoRDS), in partnership with Cure MITO, will contribute its mitochondrial disorders data from its international patient registry to the C-Path-managed Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform (RDCA-DAP®). RDCA-DAP provides a centralized and standardized infrastructure to support and accelerate rare disease characterization targeted to accelerate clinical drug development. Additionally, the platform advances best practices to support the rigorous conduct of natural history ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Scripps Research announced today that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has renewed funding for its Translational Institute to continue its work enrolling and engaging participants in the All of Us Research Program. The initial funding of $54 million will support Scripps Research Translational Institute’s work with a nationwide consortium to help build one of the largest, most diverse health research resources of its kind. The project is expected to last five years, with anticipated total funding ...

Astronomers at the University of Sydney have shown that a small, faint star is the coldest on record to produce emission at radio wavelength. The ‘ultracool brown dwarf’ examined in the study is a ball of gas simmering at about 425 degrees centigrade – cooler than a typical campfire – without burning nuclear fuel. By contrast, the surface temperature of the Sun, a nuclear inferno, is about 5600 degrees. While not the coldest star ever found, it is the coolest so far analysed using radio astronomy. The findings are published today in The Astrophysical Journal. Lead author and PhD student in the School of Physics, Kovi Rose, said: “It’s very rare ...

SAN ANTONIO (July 13, 2023) — An artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio accurately counts brain lesions on MRI scans within seconds. Once it is adapted to the clinic, the AI tool should help neuroradiologists to evaluate patients’ brain diseases at earlier stages. “Certain kinds of brain lesions are tremendously difficult to quantify without AI,” said researcher Mohamad Habes, PhD, of the health science center’s Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative ...

Peter Keyel, an associate professor in Texas Tech University’s Department of Biological Sciences, has received an Innovative Project Award from the American Heart Association to study atherosclerosis, the condition that causes arteries to thicken and can trigger a variety of devastating health complications. Statistics indicate diseases linked to atherosclerosis are the leading cause of death in the U.S. with as many as half of Americans between the ages of 45 and 84 having the condition but being unaware of its slow progression and ...

A new theoretical study provides a framework for understanding nonlocality, a feature that quantum networks must possess to perform operations inaccessible to standard communications technology. By clarifying the concept, researchers determined the conditions necessary to create systems with strong, quantum correlations. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, adapts techniques from quantum computing theory to create a new classification scheme for quantum nonlocality. This not only allowed the researchers to unify ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, July 13, 2023                          Contact: Jillian McKoy, jpmckoy@bu.edu Michael Saunders, msaunder@bu.edu ## Youth of Color Turn to TikTok for Diet, Fitness Information A new study found that social media platforms, particularly TikTok and Instagram, are ideal spaces to educate and guide US youth of color on healthy weight management and ultimately reduce racial inequities in obesity. Nearly 1 in 4 adolescents in the United States experienced obesity from 2017 to ...

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has achieved a milestone in quantum technologies, demonstrating for the first time the control of quantum randomness. The team of researchers focused on a unique feature of quantum physics known as "vacuum fluctuations". You might think of a vacuum as a completely empty space without matter or light. However, ...

 Researchers at North Carolina State University used a CRISPR gene-editing system to breed poplar trees with reduced levels of lignin, the major barrier to sustainable production of wood fibers, while improving their wood properties. The findings – published in the journal Science – hold promise to make fiber production for everything from paper to diapers greener, cheaper and more efficient. Led by NC State CRISPR pioneer Rodolphe Barrangou and tree geneticist Jack Wang, a team of researchers used predictive modeling to set goals of lowering lignin levels, increasing the carbohydrate to lignin (C/L) ratio, and increasing the ratio of two important ...

In this special issue of Science, nine pieces – including Perspectives, Policy Forums, and Reviews – highlight recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and how they’re being used to answer novel questions in topics ranging from human health to animal behavior. However, the recent widespread adoption of AI in these areas is not without unique ethical concerns and policy challenges. “By looking to the forefront of how AI is being used in science and society, many grand challenges and benefits appear,” writes Gemma Alderton, deputy editor at Science.   AI-predicted ...

Despite the importance of wood fibers to meet the growing demand for renewable tissue, paper, packaging, textile, and other fiber products, wood fiber production has been less efficient and productive than researchers have hoped. Now, CRISPR editing has enabled scientists to design wood in which lignin – which must be cleaved and dissolved so fiber production can take place – is more suitable for fiber production. “The edited wood alleviates a major fiber-production bottleneck … and could bring unprecedented operational efficiencies, bioeconomic ...

The use of ChatGPT – a chatbot that can generate human-like text – raises productivity in professional writing tasks and reduces productivity inequality in those who use it, according to a new study involving over 400 college-educated professionals. Although the findings reveal direct and immediate effects of ChatGPT on worker productivity, study authors Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang note that longer-term impacts on complex labor market dynamics, which will likely arise as firms and workers adapt to ChatGPT, remain unknown. “Overall, the arrival of ChatGPT ushers ...

A high percentage of people from Latin America are infected with the parasite that causes Chagas disease. This is the conclusion of an analysis of nearly 3,000 people from countries where the disease is endemic and who attended the International Health Service at Barcelona’s Hospital Clinic, over a 17-year period. The study, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, was led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by "la Caixa" Foundation. Nearly 7 million people in the world are estimated to be infected ...

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have gained attention for their high power-conversion efficiencies and low-cost solution processing. However, ensuring their stability at high temperatures has been a challenge, as the points of contact between their different layers (“interfaces”) are susceptible to degradation, leading to energy loss and decreased performance. In a new study, researchers have found that they can minimize PSC degradation at high temperatures by using fluorinated aniliniums, a class of compounds used in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and materials science. The study was led ...