Nature photographers posting to social media are helping improve biodiversity conservation mapping in South Asia, and the method could go global. Dr Shawan Chowdhury from UQ’s School of the Environment led an international team which scoured images on Facebook nature photography groups in Bangladesh, to add to the existing Global Biodiversity Information Facility database. “We found 44,000 photos of almost 1,000 animal species, including many birds and insects, 288 of which are considered threatened in Bangladesh,” Dr Chowdhury said. “This has vastly improved ...

SINGAPORE, 17 November 2023 – Keeping blood pressure in check could save lives among Asian adults with type 2 diabetes, suggests a sizable new study of more than 80,000 patients in Singapore. But how low should it go? A new study led by Duke-NUS Medical School—published in the Journal of the American Heart Association—examined how different blood pressure levels related to risk of dying from heart disease in Asian adults with type 2 diabetes. It found that the lowest risk was at a systolic (top number) blood pressure of 120-129 mmHg. Risk sharply increased ...

November 14, 2023 –  IPM South Africa NPC, an affiliate of the Population Council, has been issued a 15-month Transition to Scale Phase 2 award from Grand Challenges Canada to support the market introduction of the dapivirine vaginal ring  (DapiRing™) for women in Southern and East Africa.   The DapiRing is a user-controlled vaginal ring that reduces the risk of HIV infection in women during vaginal sex. The ring is made of flexible silicone and can be ...

Peer reviewed - systematic review - humans Air filtration systems do not reduce the risk of picking up viral infections, according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new study published today reveals that technologies designed to make social interactions safer in indoor spaces are not effective in the real world. The team studied technologies including air filtration, germicidal lights and ionisers. They looked at all the available evidence but found little to support hopes that these technologies can make air safe from respiratory or gastrointestinal infections. Prof Paul Hunter, from UEA’s Norwich Medical ...

Addiction is perhaps the most and least visible of public health crises in the United States. Tens of millions of Americans are addicted to illicit drugs, alcohol, tobacco and other substances including opioids, with both immediate and long-term harm to not just themselves, but also family, friends and society. At the same time, many of those affected deny or hide their addictions. Most do not seek help. A 2021 national survey on drug use and health by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), ...

Disasters are growing more frequent, severe, and unpredictable, yet our nation lacks a sustainable model for preparedness. Dr. Freeman's presentation will address the advancement of science, practice, and education in the pursuit of a coordinated and scalable approach to preparedness. To be presented on Day 3 during the Society for Disaster Medicine and Public Health Inc. Annual Meeting which will be held between December 4-6, in Washington, DC. END ...

A new study ‒ that has examined all cardiac arrests occurring during or soon after surgery in more than 300 UK hospitals over a one-year period ‒ has identified that this extremely dangerous and often fatal event occurs in 3 per 10,000 surgeries requiring anaesthesia. The study - the 7th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (NAP7) published in Anaesthesia (the journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) – included data from all NHS hospitals and some in the independent sector and received ...

University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Centre for Forensic Science PhD candidate Harry Fursman is working on two fronts to prevent harm to people who use drugs: He is testing a new handheld device for rapidly and accurately identifying drug specimens and conducting ongoing chemical analysis of used syringes. Drugs that are contaminated or substituted with an unexpected substance are a leading cause of death among people who use drugs. In Sydney last week one person died and two people were taken to hospital due to heroin overdoses, after using what ...

Four years ago, UC Santa Cruz’s Jason Eshraghian developed a Python library that combines neuroscience with artificial intelligence to create spiking neural networks, a machine learning method that takes inspiration from the brain’s ability to efficiently process data. Now, his open source code library, called “snnTorch,” has surpassed 100,000 downloads and is used in a wide variety of projects, from NASA satellite tracking efforts to semiconductor companies optimizing chips for AI.   A new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE documents the coding ...

The winners of the Applied Microbiology International Horizon Awards were announced at the prestigious Environmental Microbiology lecture 2023, held at BMA House in London on November 16. The prizes, awarded by Applied Microbiology International, celebrate the brightest minds in the field and promote the research, group, projects, products and individuals who continue to help shape the future of applied microbiology. Dr Christopher Stewart of Newcastle University in the UK was named as this year’s winner of the WH Pierce Prize, which is presented to a scientist who has used microbiology to make a significant contribution to One Health advancements. The primary ...

Glenview, Illinois – Published monthly, the journal CHEST® features peer-reviewed, cutting-edge original research in chest medicine: Pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine and related disciplines. Journal topics include asthma, chest infections, COPD, critical care, diffuse lung disease, education and clinical practice, pulmonary vascular disease, sleep, thoracic oncology and the humanities. The November issue of the  CHEST  journal contains 48 articles, including clinically relevant research, reviews, case series, commentary and more. Each month, the journal also offers complementary resources, including visual ...

In 1973, physicist Phil Anderson hypothesized that the quantum spin liquid, or QSL, state existed on some triangular lattices, but he lacked the tools to delve deeper. Fifty years later, a team led by researchers associated with the Quantum Science Center headquartered at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has confirmed the presence of QSL behavior in a new material with this structure, KYbSe2.   QSLs — an unusual state of matter controlled by interactions among entangled, or intrinsically linked, magnetic atoms called spins — excel at stabilizing quantum mechanical activity in KYbSe2 and other delafossites. These materials are prized for ...

A promising new cancer therapy also appears extremely potent against one of the world’s most devastating infectious diseases: tuberculosis (TB). Scientists at Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) found the therapy dramatically reduces TB growth, even for bacteria that are drug-resistant. The findings, reported in the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, were made in novel cellular models featuring TB-infected human cells that can help accelerate screening of potential TB drugs and therapies like this one. The therapy evaluated in this study combines two ...

Computer Science Professors Christos Papadimitriou and Mihalis Yannakakis received the John von Neumann Theory Prize for their research in computational complexity theory that explores the boundaries of efficiently solving decision and optimization problems crucial to operations research and management sciences. The recipients were presented with the prize at the 2023 INFORMS Annual Meeting in October in Phoenix, AZ. The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) first awarded the prize in 1975 to honor a body of work that has proven its lasting value in operations research and management sciences. ...

Algae living within the soft tissue of coral supply much of the energy needed by their hosts, and some symbiotic algae help coral withstand warmer water better than others. In a recently published study led by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, researchers found that there was a tradeoff for corals dominated by the thermally sensitive algae—they have higher growth, but only in cooler water.  “As the ocean continues to warm, understanding how symbionts and environmental factors affect coral growth and health will help predict reef futures and inform conservation interventions where coral stocks are selected ...

Some patients with myelodysplastic syndromes, like acute myeloid leukemia, benefit from a chemotherapy drug called decitabine that stunts cancer growth. But many others are resistant to decatibine’s effects or become resistant over time. Wilmot Cancer Institute researchers have uncovered a “genomic tug of war” in animal studies that could influence how well certain patients—or certain cancers—respond to decitabine. In a study published in the journal Development, ...

The question of disembodied consciousness or the afterlife has received much scientific scrutiny over the last several years. One line of research involves so-called "channelers" or mediums who claim to receive and communicate information that they believe comes from some other being or dimension of reality that differs from everyday reality. Now, an international team of scientists has critically examined these claims. New research published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration asked 15 pre-vetted channelers to access the same "nonphysical being or spirit" source and answer a structured set of 10 questions from the scientific team. The statistical ...

Over the last four decades, insulin manufacturers have extended their periods of market exclusivity on brand-name insulin products by employing several strategies, including filing additional patents on their products after FDA approval and obtaining many patents on delivery devices for their insulin products. That is the conclusion of a new analysis of FDA and patent records carried out by William Feldman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, USA, and colleagues, and published November 16th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. Insulin is the primary, life-saving treatment for type 1 and some type 2 diabetes but remains costly in the US even ...

Swedish people with the lowest incomes utilize primary and outpatient care on par with those with the highest incomes despite having significantly higher mortality rates, according to a new study published November 16th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by Pär Flodin of Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, and colleagues. Socioeconomic differences in healthcare utilization have persisted in modern welfare states even with universal healthcare. In recent decades, Sweden has witnessed a rise in income inequalities, accompanied by shifts in the sociodemographic composition of the population ...

A new study published this week in Science challenges the notion that only humans are capable of forming strong and strategic cooperative relationships and sharing resources across non-family groups. Researchers from Harvard University and the German Primate Center examined the pro-social behavior of bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of humanity’s closest living relatives, finding that their cooperation extends beyond one’s own group to societal cooperation with different groups. Studying humans' two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, can help reconstruct ancestral human traits like cooperation and conflict. Despite living in similar ...

Cells contain molecular machinery that targets and disposes of unwanted proteins to maintain homeostasis. Scientists think that with the help of “matchmaker” molecules called molecular glue degraders, this machinery could be hijacked to control proteins involved in diseases like cancer. But only a few of these glue degraders have been discovered so far—and mostly by chance. Zuzanna Kozicka, as a Ph.D. student at Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, embarked on a deliberate search for these glues with her team and identified a novel class of molecular glue degraders with more than 40 chemically diverse members. Kozicka, who is now a postdoctoral ...

Researchers have developed a solid-state electrocaloric cooling device that can generate a 20 kelvin temperature difference with high efficiency, according to a new study. The findings show that electrocaloric cooling can compete with other solid-state cooling strategies and offer a promising alternative to environmentally unfriendly vapor compression cooling. Cooling devices, including air-conditioning and heat pump systems, are estimated to consume roughly 20% of global electricity. Most of these systems operate through vapor-compression technologies, which are relatively inefficient and require environmentally harmful fluorinated refrigerants. Cooling through solid-state electrocaloric ...

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 ...