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 ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – For the first time, teachers in a nationwide study have told researchers what strategies they think work best to deal with student violence against educators.   Teachers rated suspending or expelling students as the least effective way of addressing violence, despite the popularity of “zero tolerance” policies in many school districts.   Instead, teachers rated prevention policies, such as counseling for troubled students and improving school climate, as the best strategy for dealing with violence.   “Teachers ...

In the area of cloud computing, i.e. on-demand access to IT resources via the internet, so-called trusted execution environments (TEEs) play a major role. They are designed to ensure that the data on the virtual work environments (virtual machines) is secure and cannot be manipulated or stolen. Researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz Centre for Information Security and Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) have now discovered a security vulnerability in AMD processors that allows attackers to penetrate virtual work environments based on the trusted computing technologies AMD SEV-ES and AMD SEV-SNP. This is achieved by resetting data changes in the buffer memory (cache), which gives ...

Philadelphia, November 14, 2023 – Cooking and recipe demonstrations encourage healthy eating and adoption of unfamiliar foods by class participants. The research brief shared in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, demonstrates that valuable input by peer educators can be obtained through a hybrid home-use testing method. The process of recipe development involves sensory evaluation about the appearance, aroma, taste, texture, and flavor of the food. Although a controlled laboratory setting is the gold standard for evaluation because of consistent preparation and presentation of food, bringing peer educators to a ...

New Rochelle, NY, November 13, 2023—A new review article in the peer-reviewed journal Human Gene Therapy summarizes the significant milestones in the development of gene therapy medicinal products that have facilitated the treatment of a significant number of rare diseases. The article also describes the challenges in the progress of gene therapy for rare diseases. Click here to read the article now. Juan Bueren, from Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientalies y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT), ...

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a daily dose of two medications meant to prevent HIV infection in high-risk people, has changed public health dramatically in recent years. Yet, adolescents and young adults, one high-risk group, have shown slower uptake in using this prevention method. Despite accounting for around 20 percent of new HIV infections, adolescents and young adults between the ages of 13 and 24 are still largely not being prescribed PrEP. Research has described physician intentions to prescribe PrEP to at-risk young people, but no studies until now have focused on factors that may affect actual prescribing of this evidence-based ...

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently instituted the Dan M. Frangopol Medal for Life-Cycle Engineering of Civil Structures in recognition of the Lehigh Engineering professor’s contributions as a pioneering researcher and educator and leading authority in the fields of life-cycle civil engineering and life-cycle cost optimization. The award pays tribute to Frangopol, the inaugural Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering ...

Dr. Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s (ASP) 2023 recipient of its most prestigious award. ASP’s Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal honors Rieke, a Regents Professor of astronomy and Elizabeth Roemer Endowed Chair, Steward Observatory, at the University of Arizona. Rieke’s award and achievements was recognized at the ASP Awards Gala on Saturday, Nov. 11, in Redwood City, California. Groundbreaking Contributions Rieke’s research has focused on infrared observations of ...

The one thing everyone knows about black holes is that absolutely everything nearby gets sucked into them. Almost everything, it turns out. “Even though black holes are defined as objects from which nothing can escape, one of the astonishing predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that black holes can actually lose energy,” says astrophysicist Eliot Quataert, Princeton’s Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation. “They ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new study led by chemists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign brings fresh insight into the development of semiconductor materials that can do things their traditional silicon counterparts cannot – harness the power of chirality, a non-superimposable mirror image. Chirality is one of nature’s strategies used to build complexity into structures, with the DNA double helix perhaps being the most recognized example – two molecule chains connected by a molecular “backbone” ...

Preterm birth predicts lifelong health outcomes Worsening preterm birth rates in the U.S. represent a ‘key metric to target to improve overall societal health’ Study identifies key differences among Asian and Hispanic subgroups Minority stress could contribute to inequities that begin at birth between populations in the U.S. CHICAGO --- Preterm birth rates are an important marker in assessing a country’s overall health. And the United States isn’t fairing very well. Individuals born in the U.S. had an overall higher rate (9.7%) of giving birth prematurely compared to U.S. immigrants (9%), a new Northwestern Medicine ...

When we see what others do, our brain sees not what we see, but what we expect When we engage in social interactions, like shaking hands or having a conversation, our observation of other people’s actions is crucial. But what exactly happens in our brain during this process: how do the different brain regions talk to each other? Researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience provide an intriguing answer: our perception of what others do depends more on what we expect to happen than previously believed.  For some time, researchers have been trying to understand how our brains process other people’s ...