Texas is a huge state. And with that size comes soil diversity, supply chain delays, climate differences, material and labor costs and many other things to consider when evaluating the budget for a highway project. To account for all of these variables, a University of Texas at Arlington researcher is building a price estimation and visualization tool for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) through a $200,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant. Mohsen Shandashti, associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, is leading a team to develop that tool, which ...

Renia Gkountiou won the title of Female Innovator for 2023 She was nominated for her role in helping SMEs use and develop 3D printing She is based at the Advanced Prototyping Facility which increases businesses’ awareness of 3D printing opportunities.   An Aston University engineer has been recognised at the 2023 Innovation Awards. Renia Gkountiou who is as an engineer and technician within the University’s Advanced Prototyping Facility project won the title of Female Innovator for 2023. She was nominated by professionals in her field for her role helping small to medium size businesses use ...

The reception at John Cadbury House brought together more than 70 business leaders and other senior figures from across the city and region The Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, was guest speaker at the event Professor Aleks Subic shared the University’s vision and ambitions for the future. Aston University celebrated the official opening of its new Birmingham city centre headquarters and the launch of its 2030 strategy at a reception at John Cadbury House on Thursday 2 November.  The event, hosted by the University’s Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive, Professor Aleks Subic, brought together more ...

People feel more positive about planting trees and protecting rainforests as a means of combating climate change than they do about employing technological solutions, according to a new research paper in Global Environmental Change. A survey of more than a million social media posts suggests that people feel more positive about Nature's ability to solve climate change than human technology, according to new research published in the journal Global Environmental Change. Researchers analysing 1.5 million posts on X (formerly Twitter) using the latest artificial intelligence-driven language models found expressions of “disgust” ...

An international research team involving Dr. Olga Kocharovskaya , a distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, has taken a major step toward development of a new generation of atomic clocks with mind-blowing potential affecting fundamental science and various industries, from nuclear physics to satellite navigation and telecommunications. The team’s work, led by Argonne National Laboratory senior physicist Dr. Yuri Shvyd'ko, for the first time resonantly excited the scandium-45 nuclear isomer with the world's brightest X-ray pulses at the European XFEl (EuXFEL) X-ray ...

WINSTON-SALEM, NC – November 3, 2023 - The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) is thrilled to announce the successful renewal of its Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant, titled "Enabling Technologies and New REU Approaches to Engineer Complex Tissues" will continue to offer diverse cohorts of undergraduate students unique research, education, and professional development opportunities in the multidisciplinary field of regenerative medicine (RM) over ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (11/03/2023) — Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) is a rare kidney disorder that affects children and adults, and can lead to kidney failure. New findings from a team led by the University of Minnesota Medical School show patients with FSGS who were treated with the medication sparsentan experienced improved kidney function—making it a potential new treatment option for the disorder. The research, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests sparsentan may provide kidney protection by significantly reducing excess protein in urine — known as proteinuria, a proven indicator of kidney damage.  “FSGS ...

NEW YORK, NY--A newly developed prediction model may be able to calculate the risk of opioid relapse among individuals in the early stages of medication treatment—as early as three weeks into therapy.  “Medication treatment for opioid use disorder, contrary to popular belief, is very effective and likely to succeed if patients achieve early treatment success,” says Sean X. Luo, MD, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, who ...

People who endured childhood adversity, like abuse or neglect, were more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 in adulthood, a new University of Pittsburgh study found. Specifically, higher self-reported childhood adversity was linked to 12-25% higher odds of COVID-19 hospitalization and mortality. While age, sex, ethnicity, health, and sociodemographic factors have been related to such outcomes throughout the pandemic, this was the first study finding a link between these COVID-19  outcomes ...

The USA is likely to see consistent job growth from the transition to net zero, but the gains will be unevenly distributed, shows a new analysis. The analysis, conducted by Imperial College London researchers and published today in Nature Climate Change, shows that some states will need new policies to ensure a ‘just’ transition. The USA, alongside many countries, is planning for a low-carbon future, where energy production releases little to no carbon dioxide and what is released is removed from the atmosphere, creating net-zero carbon emissions. This has been backed by new policies, including the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes large investment ...

RICHMOND, Va. (Nov. 3, 2023) — If pharmacists had a larger role in prescribing medications to control blood pressure, they could prevent more than 15 million heart attacks, nearly 8 million strokes and more than 4 million cases each of angina and heart failure in the U.S. over 30 years, according to a new Virginia Commonwealth University-led study. The study, “Cost-Effectiveness of Pharmacist Prescribing for Managing Hypertension in the United States,” which published Friday in JAMA Network Open, details how ...

Differences in health care expenditures between Black and white adults vary substantially with the local level of racial and economic integration, and tend to be low or nonexistent in highly integrated communities, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For their study, the researchers compared health care expenditures for a nationally representative sample of Black and white adults in census tracts across the United States. They found that, at the same level of health, health ...

About The Study: A novel multicomponent intervention designed to target several barriers that prevent eligible patients from completing key steps toward receiving a kidney transplant did not significantly increase the rate of completed steps in this randomized clinical trial that included 20,375 patients from 26 chronic kidney disease programs. Improving access to transplantation remains a global priority that requires substantial effort.  Authors: Amit X. Garg, M.D., Ph.D., of McMaster ...

Researchers in Germany and the USA have produced the first theoretical demonstration that the magnetic state of an atomically thin material, α-RuCl3, can be controlled solely by placing it into an optical cavity. Crucially, the cavity vacuum fluctuations alone are sufficient to change the material’s magnetic order from a zigzag antiferromagnet into a ferromagnet. The team’s work has been published in npj Computational Materials. A recent theme in material physics research has been the use of intense laser light to modify the properties ...

Developing new ways to break and reform chemical bonds is one of the main tasks of basic chemical research. “When a bond in a charged molecule is broken, the result is often a chemically ‘aggressive’ fragment, which we call a reactive fragment. These fragments are difficult to control using established methods of chemical synthesis. You can think of them as untamed beasts that attack anything in their path. In a mass spectrometer, there are many ways to break certain bonds and generate fragments,” says Dr Warneke, describing the processes in mass spectrometers. According ...

(Boston)—Carryl P. Navalta, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a two-year, $476,194 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for his research, “Project EDUCATE” (Education to Deliver and Utilize Child and Adolescent Treatment Effectively).   Project EDUCATE will identify and train mental health counseling students. The student trainees will be placed in community-based facilities in the greater Boston area that serve medically underserved children, adolescents and young adults with diverse race or ethnicity, culture, language and service needs.   “The ...

SAN ANTONIO — November 3, 2023 —New images captured by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft confirmed that the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh is a binary, two asteroids that orbit a common center of mass. The SwRI-led mission will now fly by 11 asteroids in its 12-year mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Dinkinesh was meant to be the first asteroid that Lucy flew by but ended up being the first two. “Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” said Lucy Principal Investigator Dr. Hal Levison, of SwRI’s ...

Philadelphia, PA (November 3, 2023) — The results of numerous high-impact clinical trials that could affect kidney-related medical care will be presented in-person at ASN Kidney Week 2023 November 1–November 5. In patients with IgA nephropathy, the IgA protein accumulates and damages the filtering part of the kidney, or glomerulus. Endothelin and angiotensin II contribute to the pathogenesis of this condition through different pathways. The phase 3 PROTECT trial compared sparsentan, a dual endothelin and angiotensin II receptor blocker, with irbesartan, an angiotensin II ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A species of exotic tick arrived in Ohio in 2021 in such huge numbers that their feeding frenzy on a southeastern farm left three cattle dead of what researchers believe was severe blood loss. The scientists from The Ohio State University have reported in the Journal of Medical Entomology on the state’s first known established population of Asian longhorned ticks, and are now conducting research focused on monitoring and managing these pests. So far, these ticks are not deemed to be a threat to human health. They tend to favor large livestock ...

By analyzing data from the Harvard Implicit Association Test—a widely accepted measure of a person’s attitudes toward people based on characteristics like race, gender, and sexuality—researchers find that healthcare professionals, and in particular nurses, are more biased against transgender people than are people who are not healthcare professionals. A questionnaire administered before and after the test shows that healthcare professionals are less likely to know transgender people personally and that nurses are more likely to conflate sex and gender identity. These results are reported November 3 in the journal Heliyon. The Implicit Association Test works by asking participants ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 414,000 respondents to the 2021 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey suggest that e-cigarette use remained common during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among young adults ages 18 to 24 (18% prevalence). Notably, 71.5% of individuals ages 18 to 20 who reported current e-cigarette use had never used combustible cigarettes. These results underscore the rationale for the implementation and enforcement of public health policies tailored to young adults.  Authors: Michael J. Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins ...

A survey from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that 40 percent of parents who worked remotely during the pandemic reported higher parenting stress compared with only 27 percent of parents who worked onsite. Results revealed a gender difference – fathers who worked from home were twice as likely to report that parenting was stressful all or most of the time compared to fathers who worked onsite. Parenting stress for mothers who worked at home was slightly higher, but it did not reach statistical significance. The study found no differences ...

About The Study: In this study of a nationally representative sample of 7,062 non-Hispanic Black or white adults, health care spending for Black adults in the U.S. was equal to or less than that of white adults, but only in areas of racial and economic equity and equitable insurance access. The results underscore the continuing need to recognize place as a contributor to race-based differences in health care spending.  Authors: Lorraine T. Dean, Sc.D., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, 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/jamahealthforum.2023.3798) Editor’s ...

Findings revealed a gender difference ‘Might be a reflection of societal expectations that men should prioritize work obligations over family needs’ Study authors offer tips for parents, employers to mitigate stress of remote work CHICAGO --- Forty percent of parents who worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic reported higher parenting stress compared with only 27 percent of parents who worked onsite, reports a new survey from scientists at Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital ...

Researchers at the IBB-UAB have developed the most comprehensive database available to date to help understand the basis of protein aggregation, a phenomenon associated with ageing and several pathologies. The new resource, A3D-MOBD, brings together the proteomes of twelve of the most studied model organisms which cover distant biological clades and contains over half a million predictions of protein regions with a propensity to form aggregates. The A3D-MOBD was developed by the Protein Folding and Computational Diseases Group at the Institut de Biotecnologia i de Biomedicina of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (IBB-UAB), which is directed by Biochemistry and ...