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 ...

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 ...