CAR T cell therapy, a powerful type of immunotherapy, has begun to revolutionize cancer treatment. Pioneered at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), the therapy involves engineering a patient’s T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells. These CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells are then multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer. New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single ...

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors Angela Kou (Physics), Pinshane Huang (MatSE), Wolfgang Pfaff (Physics) and Andre Schleife (MatSE) have received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant for their project “Identifying the origin and lossy defects in Josephson junctions”. The two-year, nearly $1 million grant aims to take a materials science approach to address the detrimental defects of Josephson junctions in superconducting qubits. The current state of quantum computing is called the noisy intermediate-scale quantum ...

South San Francisco, CA (November 14, 2023) – Mirvie, a company pioneering the prediction of life-threatening pregnancy complications months in advance, today announced the completion of enrollment of its landmark 10,000 person research study for pregnancy health, in collaboration with leading experts in obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine. “This monumental effort represents a new chapter for pregnancy health,” said Maneesh Jain, CEO and co-founder of Mirvie. “Today, we face a massive crisis in maternal health, and innovative solutions are desperately needed. The audacious scale of this generalizable study – involving over 10,000 individuals – ...

A new study using data from the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) instrument on the International Space Station has found evidence for nearby, young sources of cosmic ray electrons, contributing to a greater understanding of how the galaxy functions as a whole.  The study included more than seven million data points representing particles arriving at CALET’s detector since 2015, and CALET’s ability to detect electrons at the highest energies is unique. As a result, the data includes more electrons at high energies than any previous work. That makes the statistical analysis of the data more robust and lends support to the conclusion that there are one or more local ...

Cybercrime—computer hacking, social engineering, intellectual property theft, electronic fraud, online interpersonal violence, identity theft, and Internet-facilitated sexual victimization—is a leading threat to national security, with millions of victims in both the United States and around the world, and billions of dollars being spent to combat it. Criminology and related disciplines are just beginning to understand cybercrime and how best to deter and prevent it—or at least reduce its harms. ...

November 14, 2023 — A special supplemental issue of Medical Care, sponsored by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, supports the growing recognition that economic factors often affect health outcomes, patient decision-making, and equity in health care. Medical Care, the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association, is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  The scope of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) was expanded to include economic outcomes in the 2019 reauthorization ...

“Our findings may help to understand the role of alcohol-associated biological aging in the development of age-related diseases such as CVD and cancer.” BUFFALO, NY- November 14, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 20, entitled, “Alcohol consumption and epigenetic age acceleration across human adulthood.” The alcohol-associated biological aging remains to be studied across adulthood. In their new study, ...

Investigator Ming Li, PhD, has dedicated his career to understanding the intricate workings of the immune system — both in general and for the critical role it plays in cancer. Study by study, his lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is sharing new insights into the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in immune regulation — a type of knowledge-building that scientists call “basic science” or “discovery science.” But Dr. Li is equally focused ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 14, 2023) — One University of Kentucky researcher has helped solve a 60-year-old mystery about one of the body’s most vital organs: The heart. Kenneth S. Campbell, Ph.D., the director of translational research in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in the UK College of Medicine, helped map out an important part of the heart on a molecular level. The study titled “Cryo-EM structure of the human cardiac myosin filament” was published online in the prestigious journal Nature earlier this month. The heart is made up of billions of cells. Each cell contains thousands ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the world continues to warm, Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing pace, but the loss of sea ice may lead to more snowfall over the ice sheets, partially offsetting contributions to sea level rise, according to Penn State scientists. The researchers analyzed the impacts of decreased sea ice in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica and found the ice-free ocean surface leads to more moisture in the atmosphere and heavier snowfalls on the ice sheet, the team reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. While the additional snowfall is not enough to offset the impacts of melting ice, including it in climate ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This year’s cold and flu season is bringing good news for honey bees: Penn State researchers have found that the deadly deformed wing virus (DMV) may have evolved to be less deadly in at least one U.S. forest. The findings could have implications for preventing or treating the virus in managed colonies, researchers said. The study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, compared rates and severity of DWV in wild honey bees from ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Existing fiber optic cables used for high-speed internet and telecommunications, in combination with machine learning, may be able to help scientists track ground hazards in Pittsburgh. The National Science Foundation awarded a $937,000 grant to a team of Penn State and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers to further develop the low-cost monitoring approach. The effort, which is led by Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State, relies on prior research that shows hazards such as flooding, landslides, sinkholes and leaking pipes can be monitored at a fraction of the cost of existing methods. The distributed acoustic sensing ...

Data from a NASA mission to map dark matter around galaxy clusters has been saved by a new recovery system designed by scientists at the University of Sydney. The system allowed the retrieval of gigabytes of information, even after communication failed and the balloon-based telescope was damaged in the landing process. In April, the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) was launched from Wānaka Airport, New Zealand, suspended under a helium-filled balloon the size of a sports stadium on top of the Earth’s ...

Naturalized species, which are not native but have established themselves in new locations, have the potential to spread even further to suitable habitats in many parts of the world, reports a new study by Henry Häkkinen, Dave Hodgson and Regan Early at the University of Exeter, UK, publishing November 14th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. Understanding and predicting where introduced species will spread is one of the key conservation and ecological challenges of the 21st century. However, we know little about what causes one species to spread rapidly, while another species remains in small, isolated populations for years. In ...

Twitter users in areas affected by major hurricanes discussed climate change much more frequently right after the hurricane, according to a study published November 23, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Maddalena Torricelli from the City University of London, UK, and colleagues. There’s evidence that people’s attitude towards climate change is influenced by extreme weather. To better understand how hurricanes might affect public discussion around climate change, Torricelli and colleagues analyzed 65 million Twitter posts (prior to the platform’s rebranding to “X”) related ...

A plentiful source available for carbon-free electric power in New England states is hydroelectric dams across the border in Canada. But getting that power into the Northeast has hit political headwinds. Ryan Calder, assistant professor of environmental health and policy in the Public Health Program within the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, is the principal investigator in a $650,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for research on how divides might be bridged in order to accelerate decarbonization of New England’s ...

This summer marked the Earth’s hottest on record. The Roanoke Valley was no exception to the heat, with news reports naming 2023 as the region’s second-hottest summer. But the rising temperatures were particularly stifling for some neighborhoods in Roanoke —  those impacted by harmful urban planning practices. Theodore Lim, assistant professor of urban affairs and planning in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, has been working with the City of Roanoke to address the underlying issues that led to the Urban Island Heat Effect. The phenomenon happens in cities when ...

Frailty is a common condition in older populations that increases the risk of adverse health outcomes and mortality. Inflammation, associated with other aging-related conditions, has been proposed as one possible underlying mechanism for frailty. It was previously unclear if anti-inflammatory medications like canakinumab can also reduce risk of frailty. Researchers led by a team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, tested if canakinumab affected frailty incidence in adults with atherosclerosis. The investigators performed post-hoc analysis on a dataset from the Canakinumab Anti-Inflammatory Thrombosis Outcomes Study ...

In front of a mud brick house, a woman started a fire. Using wood harvested from a grove of nearby acacia and river bushwillow trees, she arranged kindling and then layered over larger pieces culled from the fast-growing trees. When the fire was hot enough, she set a pot over the center to boil water for beans, a vital food source that will take hours to cook. This daily ritual — enacted by many of the 1.5 million refugees displaced in Uganda — raises critical questions about how countries, communities, and humanitarian actors can efficiently and effectively provide safety and food for ...

ROCKVILLE, Md.— New findings show that the medication known as Wegovy® (semaglutide) can reduce existing heart disease in patients with obesity by 20%, according to a study co-authored by past presidents of The Obesity Society (TOS) and published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "The SELECT trial is the first study showing that prescription of an anti-obesity medication in people with overweight or obesity and existing cardiovascular disease can be life-saving,” said co-author and TOS Past President Robert F. Kushner, MD, FTOS, professor, Departments ...

At this year’s American College of Rheumatology (ACR) annual meeting, Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) presented a number of important studies focused on reproductive health for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, and other rheumatic diseases, including issues related to fertility, sexual function, use of contraception and HPV vaccination. What follows are some highlights from the meeting: Association of Menstrual Cycles and Disease Flare Activity in Women with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and Rheumatoid Arthritis In this study, researchers surveyed female rheumatology ...

A new study out this week in the journal Social Science and Medicine proposes that social, gendered variables may better explain observed sex disparities in adverse drug events than sex-based biology.  Adverse drug events refer to harmful side effects resulting from the use of a drug.  A 1.5-2 times higher rate of adverse drug events in women compared to men has long been observed, and addressing this disparity has been an enduring priority of women’s health advocates, medical researchers, and institutions such as the National Institutes of Health.  Advocates ...

November 14, 2023, Mountain View, CA - Dr. Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, was appointed as a 2023 Fellow by the California Academy of Sciences (Cal Academy). Recognized for his exceptional contributions to the natural sciences, Marchis joins a distinguished group of scientists, including other notable SETI Institute Fellows of Cal Academy, such as Dr. Jill Tarter, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, Dr. Seth Shostak, and Trustee Andrew Fraknoi. “As an astronomer, I am constantly amazed by the vastness and complexity of the universe,” ...

HOUSTON ― The James P. Allison Institute at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center hosted its inaugural scientific symposium on Nov. 10 at the TMC3 Collaborative Building in the Texas Medical Center’s Helix Park. The event brought together more than 400 leading scientists, including three Nobel laureates, from multiple disciplines to share groundbreaking immunotherapy and immunobiology research. “Our inaugural symposium is an important milestone representing significant progress for the Allison Institute since we launched last year, and we’re energized by the exceptional science shared by our members and colleagues,” ...

The team that built Frontier set out to break the exascale barrier, but the supercomputer’s record-breaking didn’t stop there. “The exascale number marks a major milestone itself, but it also marks the beginning of a new chapter in high-speed computing,” said Feiyi Wang, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer scientist who leads research into artificial intelligence and analytics. “We don’t have to wait for the next generation of computing anymore. We can have it here today.” Frontier claimed the title of fastest computer in the world by running at ...