Key Takeaways: Study finds non-tiered customer loyalty programs create a more sustainable customer base. Non-tiered customer loyalty programs are not as likely to generate increases in spending per transaction or accelerate transactions. CATONSVILLE, MD, June 7, 2021 - Customer loyalty programs have been around for decades and are used to help businesses, marketers and sellers build a sustainable relationship with their customers. But do they work? A recent study sought to find out and researchers learned that while yes, customer loyalty programs do work, perhaps not in ways most may assume. There are two basic ...

LA JOLLA--(June 7, 2021) Type 1 diabetes, which arises when the pancreas doesn't create enough insulin to control levels of glucose in the blood, is a disease that currently has no cure and is difficult for most patients to manage. Scientists at the Salk Institute are developing a promising approach for treating it: using stem cells to create insulin-producing cells (called beta cells) that could replace nonfunctional pancreatic cells. In a study published on June 7, 2021, in the journal Nature Communications, the investigators reported that they have developed a new way to create beta cells that is much more efficient than previous methods. Additionally, when these beta cells were tested in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes, ...

WHAT: New findings published in JAMA Neurology suggest there is no difference in cognitive outcomes at age 2 among children of healthy women and children of women with epilepsy who took antiseizure medication during pregnancy. The findings are part of the large research project Maternal Outcomes and Neurodevelopmental Effects of Antiepileptic Drugs (MONEAD), which is a prospective, long-term study looking at outcomes in pregnant women with epilepsy and their children. The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. ...

Youth brain activation data from the largest longitudinal neuroimaging study to date provides valuable new information on the cognitive processes and brain systems that underlie adolescent development and might contribute to mental and physical health challenges in adulthood. The study published today online in END ...

Artificial intelligence natural language computer applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated, raising the possibility that they could assume a greater role in health care, including interacting with patients. But before these applications enter the clinic, their potential and pitfalls need thoughtful exploration, states a new article in NPJ Digital Medicine. The authors are Diane M. Korngiebel, a Hastings Center research scholar, and Sean D. Mooney, chief research information officer at University of Washington Medicine. "There is compelling promise and serious hype in AI applications that generate natural language" Korngiebel and Mooney write, referring to OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) ...

LEBANON, NH - Previous work by a team of researchers led by Steven N. Fiering, PhD, Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy researcher at Dartmouth's and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center and Nicole Steinmetz, PhD, Jacobs School of Engineering and Moores Cancer Center, University of California San Diego, showed that a plant virus that does not infect mammals, cowpea mosaic plant virus (CPMV), when injected into cancerous tumors, strongly stimulated the immune system to attack and often eliminate the tumor. However, very little was understood about immune recognition of plant viruses and how and why CPMV is exceptionally immuno-stimulating. In a new study, the team identifies ...

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), also known as gun violence restraining orders, are civil court orders that grant temporary restrictions on purchasing and possessing firearms for individuals determined by a civil court judge to be at extreme risk of committing violence against themselves or others. A new study examined ERPO use in Oregon in the first 15 months after it was adopted. The study found that while ERPOs are commonly considered as a tool to remove guns from dangerous individuals, they should also be considered as a tool to prevent gun purchases by dangerous individuals. The study was conducted by researchers at Michigan State University (MSU), Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University. It appears in ...

The threat of antibiotic resistance rises as bacteria continue to evolve to foil even the most powerful modern drug treatments. By 2050, antibiotic resistant-bacteria threaten to claim more than 10 million lives as existing therapies prove ineffective. Bacteriophage, or "phage," have become a new source of hope against growing antibiotic resistance. Ignored for decades by western science, phages have become the subject of increasing research attention due to their capability to infect and kill bacterial threats. A new project led by University of California San Diego Biological Sciences graduate ...

To investigate factors that can jeopardize pregnancy success in cattle, researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil used a kind of chip to mimic the environment of the endometrium, the tissue that lines the inside of the uterus.  The study was conducted by biologist Tiago Henrique Camara de Bem, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of São Paulo's School of Animal Science and Food Engineering (FZEA-USP), in collaboration with four researchers at the University of Leeds in the UK. Their findings are reported in an article in the journal Endocrinology. The researchers focused on analyzing alterations in levels of insulin and glucose in maternal ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- About 60 percent of drugs on the market have hydrophobic molecules as their active ingredients. These drugs, which are not soluble in water, can be difficult to formulate into tablets because they need to be broken down into very small crystals in order to be absorbed by the human body. A team of MIT chemical engineers has now devised a simpler process for incorporating hydrophobic drugs into tablets or other drug formulations such as capsules and thin films. Their technique, which involves creating an emulsion of the drug and then crystallizing it, allows for a more powerful dose to be loaded per tablet. "This is very important because if we can achieve high drug loading, it means that we can ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - As soon as an ear of corn is taken off its stalk or a potato is pulled from the ground, it travels anywhere from a few miles to across continents and sometimes undergoes processes that transform it into the food we consume. These miles and processes contribute to what's known as the food value chain (FVC), along which, as one might expect, the value of the product increases. However, most of the research and attention thus far paid to FVCs occurs at the ends of the chain - inside the farm gate and at the consumer's plate. Less is understood about all of the other links in the FVC, in part due to a lack of ...

Oncotarget published "Landscape of somatic mutations in breast cancer: new opportunities for targeted therapies in Saudi Arabian patients" which reported that the association between genetic polymorphisms in tumor suppressor genes and the risk of BCa has been studied in many ethnic populations with conflicting conclusions while Arab females and Saudi Arabian studies are still lacking. The authors screened a cohort of Saudi BCa patients by NGS using a bespoke gene panel to clarify the genetic landscape of this population, correlating and assessing genetic ...

In the quest for healthy aging and longer lifespan, Danish researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have collaborated with Swedish researchers at Karolinska Institutet to explore the anti-aging effects of football and team handball training in women. In a current study published in Scientific Reports, the researchers investigated the effects of lifelong regular exercise on two of the central hallmarks of aging combined and showed that football and team handball have a positive effect on telomere length and mitochondrial function in women. "Our legacy consists of DNA that is packed in chromosomes. When cells divide, the inheritance is copied, but with each cell division the ends of the DNA threads get shorter. The so-called telomeres are shortened, which causes us to age. ...

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is the leading modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular diseases and premature death worldwide. And key to treating patients with conditions ranging from chest pain to stroke is understanding the intricacies of how the cells around arteries and other blood vessels work to control blood pressure. While the importance of metals like potassium and calcium in this process are known, a new discovery about a critical and underappreciated role of another metal - zinc - offers a potential new pathway for therapies to treat hypertension. The study results were published recently in Nature Communications. All the body's functions depend on arteries channeling oxygen-rich ...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt and end lives around the world, and public health officials worldwide have recognized vaccines as the critical tools required for controlling the COVID-19 death toll and achieving a return to normal life. Several vaccines against COVID-19 are already in use, but the limited supplies of these vaccines and the possibility of safety and efficacy issues of the existing vaccines mean that it is important for scientists to develop more (and even better) vaccines. In fact, as of February 2021, 69 different vaccines are in various phases of clinical development. One type of vaccine that could prove quite useful is the inactivated vaccine, which contains an inactivated form of the virus. The inactivated virus cannot harm the recipient, but ...

A new study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions predicts massive range declines of Africa's great apes - gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos - due to the impacts of climate change, land-use changes and human population growth. For their analysis, the authors compiled information on African ape occurrence held in the IUCN SSC A.P.E.S. database, a repository that includes a remarkable amount of information on population status, threats and conservation for several hundred sites, collected over 20 years. The first-of-its-kind study quantifies the joint effects of climate, land-use, and human population changes across African ape ranges for the year ...

Oncotarget published "Effect of cell microenvironment on the drug sensitivity of hepatocellular cancer cells" which reported that this study aimed to investigate whether Hepatocellular Cancer (HCC) cells cultured in more native conditions have an altered phenotype and drug sensitivity compared to those cultured in standard conditions. Six HCC cell lines were cultured in "standard" or more "native" conditions. HCC cells cultured in native conditions had slower doubling times, increased HK2 and GLUT, lower PHDA and ATP levels, and mutations in mitochondrial DNA. From 90 comparisons of drug sensitivity, increased resistance ...

Oncotarget published "Mutually exclusive lymphangiogenesis or perineural infiltration in human skin squamous-cell carcinoma" which reported that although tumor-associated lymphangiogenesis correlates with metastasis and poor prognosis in several cancers, it also supports T cell infiltration into the tumor and predicts favorable outcome to immunotherapy. Using quantitative multiplex immunohistochemistry, the authors analyzed skin squamous-cell carcinoma (sSCC) sections from 36 patients. CD8 T cell infiltration showed great differences between patients, whereby these ...

ADELPHI, Md. -- Army researchers developed a pioneering framework that provides a baseline for the development of collaborative multi-agent systems. The framework is detailed in the survey paper Survey of recent multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms utilizing centralized training, which is featured in the SPIE Digital Library. Researchers said the work will support research in reinforcement learning approaches for developing collaborative multi-agent systems such as teams of robots that could work side-by-side with future Soldiers. "We propose that the underlying information sharing mechanism plays a critical role in centralized learning for multi-agent systems, ...

WASHINGTON -- For more than 25 years, Burmese pythons have been living and breeding in the Florida Everglades where they prey on native wildlife and disrupt the region's delicate ecosystems. A new study shows that infrared cameras could make it easier to spot these invasive snakes in the Florida foliage, providing a new tool in the effort to remove them. In the Optical Society (OSA) journal Applied Optics, researchers led by Dr. Kyle Renshaw from the University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics report that a near infrared camera helped people detect Burmese pythons at distances up to 1.3 times farther away than was possible using a traditional visible-wavelength ...

AMES, Iowa - Scientists have invested great time and effort into making connections between a plant's genotype, or its genetic makeup, and its phenotype, or the plant's observable traits. Understanding a plant's genome helps plant biologists predict how that plant will perform in the real world, which can be useful for breeding crop varieties that will produce high yields or resist stress. But environmental conditions play a role as well. Plants with the same genotype will perform differently when grown in different environments. A new study led by an Iowa State University scientist uses advanced data analytics to help scientists understand ...

A study conducted by a group of Brazilian researchers contributes to a deeper understanding of the molecular basis for schizophrenia, and potentially to the development of more specific and effective treatments for the disease. The medications currently available on the market act generically on the brain and can have severe adverse side effects. Treatment of post-mortem samples from the hippocampus of schizophrenic patients with an NMDA receptor antagonist pointed to biological processes associated with the disease that are specific to neurons and oligodendrocytes. NMDA receptors are neurotransmitter receptors located in the postsynaptic ...

In those with fatty liver disease, a person's fat goes to their liver instead of their fat tissue, either because of an absence of fat depots, which is seen in the rare genetic disease lipodystrophy, or because the depots are too full, which is seen in people with obesity. One third of these people will go on to develop nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH - an advanced form of fatty liver disease brought on by progressive inflammation and scarring in the organ. In 2002, Michigan Medicine endocrinologist Elif Oral, M.D., who had just moved from the National Institutes of Health at the time, published her discovery that patients with severe lipodystrophy lack leptin, a hormone that helps curb appetite and control weight gain. When given ...

BOSTON - Automated emails and letters that provide personalized feedback related to cafeteria purchases at work may help employees make healthier food choices. That's the conclusion of a new study that was led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is published in END ...

RUDN University chemists and their colleagues from Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk Institute of Organic Chemistry and The State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR have obtained a new class of compounds that inhibit the replication of the deadly Hantaan virus that affects blood vessels and internal organs of humans. The resulting substances were 5 times more effective than existing antiviral drugs. The results have been published Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters. The Hantaan virus causes acute haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS). The disease ...