ITHACA, N.Y. -- Tumor cells are known to be fickle sleeper agents, often lying dormant in distant tissues for years before reactivating and forming metastasis. Numerous factors have been studied to understand why the activation occurs, from cells and molecules to other components in the so-called tissue microenvironment. Now, an interdisciplinary Cornell team has identified a new mechanism regulating tumor growth in the skeleton, the primary site of breast cancer metastasis: mineralization of the bone matrix, a fibrous mesh of organic and inorganic components that determines the unique biochemical and biomechanical properties of our skeleton. The ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — She’s heading to The Hill! Alexandra Phillips, science communication and policy officer at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), goes to Washington, D.C., this month to begin a yearlong congressional fellowship, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The first-ever AAAS Legislative Branch Fellow in Climate Science, Phillips hopes to use her own ocean science background to help inform policy and shed light on emerging climate-related ...

Social media helped contribute to the UPND’s impressive victory in the 2021 Zambia elections, new analysis shows.   The party’s online messaging resonated more with users compared to their rivals, helping to portray Hakainde Hichilema as an electorally viable alternative to President Edgar Lungu from the PF. Both parties invested heavily in social media.   The study shows the election was not won online. Instead, social media helped to facilitate the flow of information across a heavily controlled media ecosystem in which face-to-face communication remained key.   While President Edgar Lungu ...

Results from a new study conducted by a team of researchers at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and published in the August issue of Health Affairs, show that a substantial portion—nearly half—of low-value care received by Medicare beneficiaries happens outside of their health systems.    The study also revealed that factors such as ...

Consumers should have more visual information about terms and conditions when making purchases online, experts have said. Making information more accessible and transparent helps improve understanding and memory, a new study shows. Researchers have found people are more interested in and more likely to read legalities if they were given this information after their purchase. Pre-purchase reading times were only about half as long as post-purchase reading times, evidencing the lack of attention and interest in disclosures pre-purchase. Shifting the obligation for companies to give more information after purchase could help to alleviate the current information apathy. Asking people ...

WASHINGTON, D.C.  — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $37 million in funding for 52 projects to 44 institutions to build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented in DOE’s Office of Science portfolio, including Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and Emerging Research Institutions (ERIs). Through the Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative, the Office of Science is supporting mutually beneficial relationships between MSIs/ERIs and partnering institutions to perform basic research in applied mathematics, biology, chemistry, ...

Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet     @Annalsofim    Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent.      ----------------------------   1. ...

Lawrence Pfeffer, PhD, Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, recently was awarded $2.56 million from the National Cancer Institute over the next five years to identify and target molecular pathways that will enhance glioblastoma’s sensitivity to currently approved drug therapies. Dr. Pfeffer has spent the better part of 20 years trying to improve treatments for glioblastoma, the most common malignancy of the brain and the most lethal. ...

DURHAM , N.C. -- Two out of five homes worldwide have at least one smart device that is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Soon, that new smart TV or robot vacuum you’ve been considering for your home will come with a label that helps you gauge whether the device is secure and protected from bad actors trying to spy on you or sell your data. In July, the White House announced plans to roll out voluntary labeling for internet-connected devices like refrigerators, thermostats and baby monitors that meet certain cybersecurity standards, such as requiring data de-identification and automatic security ...

Defects often limit the performance of devices such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The mechanisms by which defects annihilate charge carriers are well understood in materials that emit light at red or green wavelengths, but an explanation has been lacking for such loss in shorter-wavelength (blue or ultraviolet) emitters.  Researchers in the Department of Materials at UC Santa Barbara, however, recently uncovered the crucial role of the Auger-Meitner effect, a mechanism that allows an electron to lose energy by kicking another electron up to a higher-energy state. “It is well known that defects or ...

ST. LOUIS - Research from Saint Louis University School of Medicine finds that among patients 65 and older, a diagnosis of anxiety was significantly associated with an increased risk of dementia diagnosis, and benzodiazepine exposure was associated with a 28% increased risk of dementia. However, when benzodiazepines were prescribed to patients with an anxiety disorder, there was no significant association between these medications and incident dementia. The study, “Anxiety Disorders, Benzodiazepine Prescription ...

The decision by a global bioethics association to hold its 2024 congress in Qatar, a nation with laws against LGBTQ+ people, provoked controversy, including objections from some of its own members. The outcry motivated the organization’s president and colleagues to draft an ethics framework to guide future site selection. The framework, published today in The American Journal of Bioethics, might also help global organizations make decisions about ethically appropriate conference sites. [The paper is available in PDF by request.] “Many organizations around the world are addressing these questions,” ...

A team of researchers led by Brent Sumerlin, the George B. Butler Professor in the University of Florida Department of Chemistry, has made a breakthrough with the potential to transform how we recycle plastics. Their innovative approach to working with polymers has led them to develop a new method for recycling that promises to lower the energy requirement without sacrificing the quality of the plastic. It’s no secret that the U.S. and the Earth at large have a pressing plastic problem. Despite a meteoric rise in usage over the past few decades, only about 10% of our plastic currently ends up getting recycled. “Our work is a response ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [August 7, 2023] — New research in the August 2023 issue of JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network evaluates how an important analysis on local-regionally advanced colon cancer adjuvant chemotherapy impacted prescribing patterns. The IDEA collaboration included more than 12,000 patients with Stage III colon cancer across 6 randomized phase 3 trials in a planned pooled analysis, to determine how three or six months of post-surgery chemotherapy—either a combination of capecitabine/oxaliplatin (CAPOX) or fluorouracil/leucovorin/oxaliplatin ...

DALLAS, August 7, 2023 — Nancy Brown, chief executive officer of the American Heart Association, has again been recognized for elite leadership in the 26th annual listing of The NonProfit Times Power & Influence Top 50. For more than three decades, The NonProfit Times has been a leading trade publication providing news, information and insight into nonprofit management. Brown, who is now appearing for the 8th time on this list, was recognized specifically for her leadership as a champion for equitable health. The NonProfit ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $4.7 million in funding for five new research projects in computational biology. These projects will develop new software and analytical tools to manage the growing quantities of genomics and other data stemming from the study of microbes and other biological systems. “The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Genomic Science program is at the forefront of using genome-enabled approaches to identify the basic principles that drive biological systems underlying functional processes of organisms,” said Todd Anderson, DOE Acting Associate Director for BER. “To gain ...

HOUSTON – (Aug.7, 2023) – The spinal cord is harder to access and study than even the brain. The challenges posed by its mobility and anatomical structure have made understanding exactly how it functions difficult. Rice University engineers will work with collaborators to optimize an array of nanoelectronic threads, or NETs ⎯ already used successfully for gathering high-fidelity, long-term data from neurons in the brain ⎯ for use in the spine, supported by a $6.25 million, four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health. In addition to neuronal activity recordings, NET probes can provide tunable, localized stimulation of adjacent neurons. Rice ...

HOUSTON, Aug. 7, 2023 – The Baker Hughes Foundation announced a $100,000 grant to the University of Houston Energy Transition Institute (ETI) to support environmental justice research and workforce development programs. The institute, which focuses on the creation and use of reliable, affordable, environmentally responsible energy for all through a just and equity-driven pathway, is looking forward to using the grant to amplify its mission. “Thanks to the generous support of the Baker Hughes Foundation, the UH ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Geoscientists have long thought that water – along with shallow magma stored in Earth’s crust – drives volcanoes to erupt. Now, thanks to newly developed research tools at Cornell, scientists have learned that gaseous carbon dioxide can trigger explosive eruptions. A new model suggests that basaltic volcanoes, typically located on the interior of tectonic plates, are fed by a deep magma within the mantle, stored about 20 to 30 kilometers below Earth’s surface. The research, which offers a clearer picture of our planet’s deep internal dynamics and composition, with ...

Researchers at Kobe University discovered an entirely new and unexpected mechanism by which the immune system can get rid of cells lacking molecules that identify them as part of the self in mice. The finding, published in PNAS, has possible implications for cancer treatment. The immune system comprises many types of cells that work together to fight off diseases. Two important types are dendritic cells and T cells. Dendritic cells are located in strategic positions throughout the body including the gut and skin, as well as in the lymph nodes, sample their environment and present small components derived from these samples on their ...

Social learning is typically thought to be most beneficial when the environments in which individuals live change quite slowly – they can safely learn tried and tested information from one another and it does not go out of date quickly. Innovating brand-new information, on the other hand, is thought to be useful in dynamic and rapidly changing environments. Researchers Madeleine Ammar, Laurel Fogarty and Anne Kandler at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology developed an agent-based simulation model of the evolution ...

Researchers at Uppsala university have developed a new method to find mutations in brain tumors in children. They could also show that the mutations identified by them changes how cancer cells respond to a cancer drug. These findings could lead to better diagnostics and more individualized treatment of children with brain tumors. The study is published in the journal PNAS.   Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children. It usually develops in the cerebellum and even if modern treatment has improved the prognosis so that over 70% live more than five years, not all patients ...

Outbreaks of polycystic echicnococcosis, a life-threatening zoonotic disease, are driven by regional climate changes, according to a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation. The findings, published in PNAS, provide evidence of the impact of climate on neglected tropical diseases in the Amazon region, with implications for other zoonoses. Polycystic echinococcosis (PE) is a neglected life-threatening zoonosis caused by an intestinal worm (Echinococcus vogeli) ...

Groundbreaking new research has uncovered a potential route to developing the first ever drug treatments for vascular dementia, that directly target a cause of the condition. The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [1] has shed light on how high blood pressure causes changes to arteries in the brain, a process that leads to the devastating condition.   High blood pressure is a main cause of vascular dementia, a condition characterised by poor blood flow to the brain. The reduced blood supply starves brain cells of nutrients and over time they become damaged ...

Engineers have developed nanoscale tattoos—dots and wires that adhere to live cells—in a breakthrough that puts researchers one step closer to tracking the health of individual cells. The new technology allows for the first time the placement of optical elements or electronics on live cells with tattoo-like arrays that stick on cells while  flexing and conforming to the cells’wet and fluid outer structure. “If you imagine where this is all going in the future, we would like to have sensors to remotely monitor and ...