HOUSTON – (Nov. 21, 2023) – The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) awarded Rice University with $2.5 million spanning over five years as part of its Driving Change initiative designed to connect research universities that are working to build inclusive learning environments for students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). “I’m honored and grateful to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that Rice University was selected for the Driving Change initiative,” said Amy Dittmar, Howard R. Hughes Provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “Rice has laid the groundwork for student ...

A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups. In this proof-of-concept study, physicians reviewed patient notes — some written by actual medical doctors while others were created by the new AI program — and the physicians identified the correct author only 49% of the time. A team of 19 researchers from NVIDIA and the University of Florida said ...

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. Researchers at Michigan State University may have discovered why visceral pain is so common in people who have experienced inflammation in their guts, including patients with irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. Working with mouse models, MSU physiologists showed that nervous system cells known as glia can sensitize nearby neurons, causing them to send pain signals more easily than they did prior to inflammation. “The glia drop the threshold for activating a neuron,” said MSU Research Foundation Professor Brian Gulbransen, whose research team authored the new report in the ...

A team of University of Toronto Engineering researchers, led by Professor Timothy Chan, is leveraging machine learning to optimize the macronutrient content of pooled human donor milk recipes.   The researchers introduce their data-driven optimization model in a new paper published in Manufacturing and Systems Operations Management.  Chan and his team worked with Mount Sinai Hospital’s Rogers Hixon Ontario Human Milk Bank — which provides donor milk to preterm and sick babies who are hospitalized across Ontario — as well as Dr. Debbie O’Connor, a professor at the Temerty ...

Contact: Morgan Sherburne, morganls@umich.edu  Images ANN ARBOR—If you look at massive galaxies teeming with stars, you might be forgiven in thinking they are star factories, churning out brilliant balls of gas. But actually, less evolved dwarf galaxies have bigger regions of star factories, with higher rates of star formation. Now, University of Michigan researchers have discovered the reason underlying this: These galaxies enjoy a 10-million-year delay in blowing out the gas cluttering up their environments. Star-forming regions are able to hang on to their gas and dust, allowing more stars to coalesce ...

A new study highlights the vital contribution of ‘virtual schools’ for children in care and recommends ten ways to improve their educational outcomes. The research, by the University of Exeter and the National Association of Virtual School Heads (NAVSH), shows strong disparities in progress and attainment for children in care depending on where they live. They found these differences are not driven by neighbourhood deprivation but by patchy distribution of school places, confused funding policies and variable regulation. As a result, some virtual schools have difficulty ...

“[...] little work [has been] published on the effect of parental age in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a common model organism for aging studies.” BUFFALO, NY- November 16, 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 21, entitled, “Parental age effect on the longevity and healthspan in Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans.” Several studies have investigated the effect of parental age on biological ...

MADISON, Wis., - Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies that could be critical tools to combat climate change have developed in line with other technologies from the last century. However, according to new studies led by Gregory Nemet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, these technologies need to develop faster to meet policy targets aimed at limiting global warming. As policymakers, researchers and climate activists from around the world prepare to meet for the UN Climate Change Conference beginning on ...

Associate Professor of physics Benjamin Jones has received a $341,571 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue his successful traineeship program at The University of Texas at Arlington. The program exposes undergraduate students to opportunities in particle and nuclear physics, which offer key components in many diverse careers, such as nuclear medicine, radiation therapy, archaeology, precision management and astrophysics. UTA’s Nuclear Research Experiences for Minority Students (NREMST) started in 2021 with the goal of immersing students from historically underrepresented populations in nuclear physics. “We know that many students ...

A major new research project will explore the impact of transformational changes to mental health treatment in South America.   Community-based care for people with psychosocial disabilities began in the region in the 1960s and 1970s, when a minority of people were moved from large and isolated psychiatric hospitals to  residential alternatives in the community.   This policy was promoted by the World Health Organization and the Pan America Health Organization and is considered a defining element of the modernisation of mental health systems. But in current analysis of this process the ethical, social and political tensions associated ...

Scientists have discovered that bacteria can create something like memories about when to form strategies that can cause dangerous infections in people, such as resistance to antibiotics and bacterial swarms when millions of bacteria come together on a single surface. The discovery — which has potential applications for preventing and combatting bacterial infections and addressing antibiotic-resistant bacteria — relates to a common chemical element bacterial cells can use to form and pass along these memories to their progeny over later generations. Researchers ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Forest modeling by Oregon State University scientists shows that a site’s productivity – an indicator of how fast trees grow and how much biomass they accumulate – is the main factor that determines which time period between timber harvests allows for maximum above-ground carbon sequestration. The findings, published in the journal Forests, are important for Pacific Northwest forest managers seeking to strike an optimal balance between harvesting and carbon sequestration, an important tool in the fight against climate change. The study by Catherine Carlisle, Temesgen Hailemariam ...

People who speak two languages may be better at shifting their attention from one thing to another compared to those who speak one, according to a study published this month in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.  The study examined differences between bilingual and monolingual individuals when it comes to attentional control and ignoring information that isn’t important at the time, said its authors Grace deMeurisse, a University of Florida Ph.D. candidate studying linguistics, and Edith Kaan, ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – November 21, 2023) Findings from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital are moving the field of cancer immunotherapy one step closer to treating brain and solid tumors. Scientists at St. Jude validated a cellular immunotherapy target called 78-kDa glucose-regulated protein (GRP78) in proof-of-principle experiments. The group also discovered a resistance mechanism whereby some tumors trick the cancer-killing immune cells into expressing GRP78, thereby turning off the immune cells or causing them to be killed, too. The research, which has implications for developing immunotherapy for the broad range of difficult-to-treat ...

TORONTO, Nov. 21, 2023 – Faced with images that break the expected pattern, like a do not enter sign where a stop sign is expected, how does the brain react and learn compared to being shown images which match what was predicted? That was the question a team, including York University, set out to answer. A long-standing theory suggests the brain learns a predictive model of the world and its internal predictions are updated when incoming sensory data proves them wrong. However, what the researchers found surprised them, says York Faculty of Science Associate Professor Joel Zylberberg, co-corresponding author of the newly published paper. “Testing ...

A new analysis sheds light on the molecular processes involved when a carnivorous species of fungus known as Arthrobotrys oligospora senses, traps and consumes a worm. Hung-Che Lin of Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and colleagues present these findings November 21st in the open access journal PLOS Biology. A. oligospora usually derives its nutrients from decaying organic matter, but starvation and the presence of nearby worms can prompt it to form traps to capture and consume worms. A. oligospora is just one of many species of fungi that can trap and eat very small animals. Prior research has illuminated some of the biology behind this ...

In Germany, taxing sugar-sweetened beverages could prevent or postpone cases of type 2 diabetes, extend healthy lifespans and save up to €16.0 billion in societal costs over the next 20 years, according to a new study led by Karl Emmert-Fees of the Technical University of Munich, published November 21st in the open access journal PLOS Medicine. The World Health Organization has recommended that governments worldwide lessen the social and economic burden of cardiometabolic disease by taxing sugar-sweetened beverages. These taxes either reduce consumption by increasing the price, such as the one peso per liter ...

A simulation study conducted by a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) demonstrates that a soft drink tax in Germany would have significant positive effects. In all of the simulated variants evaluated, less sugar was consumed and the rate of illness dropped. This would be a way to reduce costs to the national economy and alleviate the burden on the health care system. There is, however, a difference between taxes aimed at reducing soft drink consumption and taxes aimed at bringing about changes in product formulation. Sugary beverages increase the risk of obesity and illnesses such as diabetes. Several countries have therefore introduced taxes on soft drinks. In Germany ...

An analysis of 5.8 million authors across all scientific disciplines shows that the gender gap is closing, but there is still a long distance to go. The new research by John Ioannidis of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICs) at Stanford University, US, and colleagues, publishes November 21st in the open access journal PLOS Biology. There is a strong gender gap in science which manifests itself in many ways. One of the most prominent ones is the relative representation of men and women among the scientists whose work receive the most attention in the ...

A set of fossils recovered in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, has brought an extra layer of complexity to the study of the evolutionary history of silesaurids, a family of dinosauriforms (dinosaurs and their close relatives) that lived in the Triassic period between 247 million and 208 million years ago. In an article published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, researchers affiliated with institutions in Brazil and the United States show that even with the new fossil assemblage ...

NEW YORK – November 20, 2023 – The Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), in conjunction with the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2023 conference, CRF's annual scientific symposium, announced today the launch of the CRF Scientific Excellence Top 10 (SET-10), a new global annual ranking recognizing academic contributions to interventional cardiovascular medicine. The SET-10 initiative, aligning with CRF's commitment to advancing the field, aims to recognize and celebrate the extraordinary contributions made by medical and academic ...

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023, CLEVELAND: Cleveland Clinic researchers analyzed genes and brain tissue of patients with Alzheimer’s and found that differences in brain immunometabolism – the interactions between the immune system and the ways cells create energy – may contribute to women’s increased risk for the disease and its severity.  The findings, published in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, offer important insight into developing sex-specific treatment and prevention options for Alzheimer’s disease, the sixth-leading ...

Hearing loss affects more than 60 percent of adults aged 70 and older in the United States and is known to be related to an increased risk of dementia. The reason for this association is not fully understood. To better understand the connection, a team of University of California San Diego and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute researchers employed hearing tests and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to determine whether hearing impairment is associated with differences in specific brain regions. In the November 21, 2023 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers reported that individuals enrolled in this observational ...

University of Sussex researchers have developed a more energy-efficient alternative to transmit data that could potentially replace Bluetooth in mobile phones and other tech devices. With more and more of us owning smart phones and wearable tech, researchers at the University of Sussex have found a more efficient way of connecting our devices and improving battery life. Applied to wearable devices, it could even see us unlocking doors by touch or exchanging phone numbers by shaking hands. Professor Robert Prance and Professor Daniel ...

Day by day, we communicate with our office colleagues to accomplish tasks that are necessary to function. The more than 200 different types of cells in our bodies do the same thing, but the way they communicate with each other isn't as simple as sending an email.  Researchers like Ioannis Zervantonakis are still trying to understand how these cells actually communicate with each other. The assistant professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering recently received a National Institute of General Medical Sciences Maximizing Investigators' Research Award, and his project ...