The same bundle of non-living filaments that mussels use to anchor themselves within their environment – to withstand crushing waves, for example – can also be jettisoned on demand. Mussels create this quick-release interface, a new study finds, by way of a neurochemically-mediated junction, where billions of motile cilia hold fast to interlinked biopolymer sheets. "[The study’s] findings could be informative about how nonliving materials can be dynamically interfaced with living tissue, as in the case of detachable biosensors and medical implants," write Guoqing Pan and Bin Li in a related ...

New biosensors have helped reveal the activity of neuropeptides in the brain, researchers report, providing novel tools for studying the release, function, and regulation of these crucial signaling molecules in vivo. According to the study, the approach has the potential to address key questions regarding neuropeptides and their roles in health and disease. In the brain, neuropeptides are key signaling molecules in the body that regulate many critical physiological functions, including digestion, metabolism, sleep, and higher ...

Jessica Kendall-Bar, who received her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology last year from UC Santa Cruz with co-advisors Terrie Williams and Dan Costa, was named a recipient of the prestigious Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists for her research on elephant seal sleep habits while they are at sea. The Science & SciLifeLab Prize is an international prize awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the journal Science to early career scientists for their outstanding thesis research in the life sciences. As ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Every cell in the human body contains the same genetic instructions, encoded in its DNA. However, out of about 30,000 genes, each cell expresses only those genes that it needs to become a nerve cell, immune cell, or any of the other hundreds of cell types in the body.   Each cell’s fate is largely determined by chemical modifications to the proteins that decorate its DNA; these modification in turn control which genes get turned on or off. When cells copy their DNA to divide, however, they lose half of these modifications, leaving the question: How do cells maintain the memory of what kind of cell they are supposed ...

The University of Liverpool’s Department of Chemistry has been awarded a prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize in recognition of its pioneering research and innovation work to address global challenges and benefit society.   The Queen’s Anniversary Prize is the highest national honour in Higher Education. It is awarded in recognition of world-class excellence and achievement to a small selection of UK institutions every two years.   The Department of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool carries out world-leading research that pushes forward the frontiers of ...

Personalized deep-learning models can enable artificial intelligence chatbots that adapt to understand a user’s accent or smart keyboards that continuously update to better predict the next word based on someone’s typing history. This customization requires constant fine-tuning of a machine-learning model with new data.  Because smartphones and other edge devices lack the memory and computational power necessary for this fine-tuning process, user data are typically uploaded to cloud servers where the model is updated. But data ...

Opioid addiction is a pressing public health crisis with far-reaching implications. More than 100,000 deaths a year have been linked to drug overdoses since 2020. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more people died from drug overdoses in 2021 than from firearm and motor vehicle deaths combined. Three-quarters of these overdose deaths were attributable to opioids. A five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse will fund the Virginia Tech Department of Chemical Engineering’s pioneering research to understand how adolescent ...

Those with authoritarian political views are more likely to be concerned about terrorism and border control than a future new health pandemic, new research shows. During the pandemic, rather than a desire for a stronger government with the ability to impose measures to address the pandemic and its consequences, people with authoritarian views rejected this and embraced individual autonomy. Researchers analysed public perceptions of security threats in 2012 and in 2020. They believe COVID-19 belongs to a distinct category of threats of which those with authoritarian views are less ...

The University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science has been awarded a nearly $1.8 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as part of an anticipated four-year, $4.2 million project to support research on the impacts to South Florida’s coastal ecosystems from a multitude of climate change stressors.  The newly funded project, co-led by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) will focus on climate impacts to South Florida’s coastal and marine ecosystems, including the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary ...

TAMPA, Fla. (Nov. 16, 2023) -- A team of engineers and public health experts from the University of South Florida is helping Toamasina, Madagascar, residents reduce their exposure to lead – a major global environmental pollutant that causes more than 1 million premature deaths each year. By combining efforts to replace water pumps and educate city technicians, USF researchers helped decrease the blood lead levels of 87 percent of the children tested during their study. “They were taking old car batteries and melting them down to make check ...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – While many are wary of artificial intelligence and its feared effect of supplanting the human creation of content, one University of Louisville professor is leading an effort to help her colleagues use it in the classroom. Susan Tanner, assistant professor of law at UofL’s Brandeis Law School, has won a teaching grant from the Association of Legal Writing Directors to develop a toolkit that law professors anywhere can use to incorporate generative artificial intelligence (genAI) into their legal writing curricula. GenAI is technology that can create text, images, videos and other media in response to prompts inputted by a user – otherwise known ...

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have identified two metabolites, substances produced by the body during metabolism, that may help predict which young Latino people are most likely to develop prediabetes, a precursor to developing type 2 diabetes. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in Diabetes Care, is the first large-scale study to look at metabolites as possible predictors of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes in young Latino people. The researchers found that when they added these two metabolites to current prediction models, they could more accurately ...

A new study offers a novel look at the scope of the youth mental health crisis across the United States – in 2019-2020, more than 1 in 10 kids who were brought to the hospital by ambulance had a behavioral health emergency. Out of these behavioral health emergencies, 85 percent were in 12-17-year-olds. Findings were published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. “Our study found that pediatric behavioral health emergencies requiring an ambulance were much too frequent,” said senior author Jennifer Hoffmann, MD, MS, emergency ...

Marine Resource Economics (MRE) is proud to announce the appointment of Sunny Jardine as the journal’s new Editor in Chief, effective January 8, 2024. Jardine is an associate professor and the Rae S. and Bell M. Shimada Endowed Faculty Fellow in Memory of Warren S. Wooster in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington.  Professor Jardine has supported MRE as a long-time associate editor.  In that capacity, she handled papers across a range of marine and resource economics applications.  She brings expertise in commercial fisheries management, conservation planning, the ...

Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center and Columbia University received a five-year, $10.6 million U54 center grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to further study combining the molecular analysis of glioblastoma with MRI. Glioblastoma is a fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor that begins as a growth of cells in the brain or spinal cord. As it grows, it can invade and destroy healthy tissue. There is no cure, but treatments may slow the cancer's growth and reduce symptoms. Glioblastoma is a diverse cancer, which means ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound monitor, in the form of a patch, that can image organs within the body without the need for an ultrasound operator or application of gel. In a new study, the researchers showed that their patch can accurately image the bladder and determine how full it is. This could help patients with bladder or kidney disorders more easily track whether these organs are functioning properly, the researchers say. This approach could also be adapted to monitor other organs within the body by changing the location of the ultrasound array and tuning the frequency ...

About The Study: Pandemic-exposed children (assessment after March 11, 2020) had significantly higher problem solving and fine motor skills at 24 months of age but lower personal-social skills compared with non-exposed children in this study including data from the Ontario Birth Study. At 54 months of age, pandemic-exposed children had significantly higher vocabulary, visual memory, and overall cognitive performance compared with non-exposed children.  Authors: Mark Wade, Ph.D., C.Psych., of the University of Toronto, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website ...

About The Study: This study of 11,000 participants with type 2 diabetes found that food insecurity, housing insecurity, mental health concerns, and the perceived importance of practitioner concordance were associated with a lower likelihood of receiving eye care. Such findings highlight the self-reported barriers to seeking care and the importance of taking steps to promote health equity. Authors: Sophia Y. Wang, M.D., M.S., of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2023.5287) Editor’s ...

A team of pioneering researchers from the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) has made a significant leap forward in the complex world of molecular chemistry. Their focus? Azaarenes, unique molecular puzzle pieces crucial to many everyday products, from eco-friendly agrochemicals to essential medicines. The CABBI team demonstrated an innovative way to modify these molecules, a groundbreaking discovery that holds promise for new industrially relevant chemical reactions and sustainable energy solutions. Central to their ...

Key takeaways UCLA researchers looked at nearly 4,400 hospitals across the U.S., including 864 with high numbers of Black and Hispanic patients. Hospitals serving Black, Hispanic and other racial and ethnic minority patients were significantly less likely than other hospitals to have access to core cancer services like PET/CT scanners, robotic surgery and palliative care. The researchers say further work is need to understand how geographic, linguistic, cultural, cost and discrimination factors affect these cancer care disparities.   Among the nation’s ...

Deep learning — a form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself with limited user input — has radically reshaped the landscape of biomedical research since its emergence in the early 2010s. It’s been particularly impactful in genomics, a field of biology that examines how our DNA is organized into genes and how these genes are activated or deactivated in individual cells. Despite this synergy, genomics researchers wanting to employ this technology are often challenged by the actual coding necessary to analyze vast pools of dense data. Now, ...

A hunger hormone produced in the gut can directly impact a decision-making part of the brain in order to drive an animal’s behaviour, finds a new study by UCL (University College London) researchers. The study in mice, published in Neuron, is the first to show how hunger hormones can directly impact activity of the brain’s hippocampus when an animal is considering food. Lead author Dr Andrew MacAskill (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) said: “We all know our decisions ...

University of Oxford news release Institute of New Economic Thinking   Embargoed until Thursday, 16 November 2023, 16:00 GMT   Is lockdown an effective response to a pandemic, or would it be better to let individuals spontaneously reduce their risk of infection?  Research published today suggests these two highly-debated options lead to similar outcomes.  A ground-breaking economic-pandemic model, created by an international team of researchers, addresses some of the key policy debates of the Covid-19 pandemic but it ...

Medical research has shown promising results regarding the potential of gene therapy to cure genetic conditions such as sickle cell disease and the findings of this study, published in Nature Medicine, offer important new insights into processes happening in the body after treatment. The present study looked at samples from six patients with sickle cell disease who were undergoing gene therapy as part of a major clinical trial at Boston Children’s Hospital. The research brought together an international team of experts, to take a closer look at the genetic changes in the stem cells of patients before and after gene therapy ...

Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses in the world, but current anti-depressants have yet to meet the needs of many patients. Neuroscientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) recently discovered a small molecule that can effectively alleviate stress-induced depressive symptoms in mice by preventing aversive memory formation with a lower dosage, offering a new direction for developing anti-depressants in the future. “Depression affects millions of individuals worldwide, necessitating more effective treatments. Conventional methods, such as drug therapy with delayed onset of action and psychotherapy, have limitations in yielding satisfactory ...