A high blood caffeine level might curb the amount of body fat a person carries and their risk of type 2 diabetes, suggests research published in the open access journal BMJ Medicine. In light of their findings, the potential role of calorie free caffeinated drinks for lowering the risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes is probably now worth exploring, say the researchers. Previously published research indicates that drinking 3-5 daily cups of coffee, a rich source of caffeine, is associated with a lower risk ...

Health information on M(onkey)pox, posted on the social media platform TikTok, is often inaccurate, incomplete, and of poor quality, finds a recent analysis of relevant videos, published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health. The findings highlight the potential risks of using social media for health information, particularly during public health emergencies, warn the researchers. Mpox, formerly called monkeypox, usually describes fever, swollen lymph glands (lymphadenopathy), and painful skin pustules all over the body ...

New research by the Human Brain Project has found that in the brains of patients with epilepsy, changes in large scale neuronal activations can be detected in the brain’s resting state activity, even when no seizure is ongoing. The non-invasive approach could lead to a new method to aid epilepsy diagnostics. Diagnosing epilepsy can be problematic for patients, who sometimes have to wear helmets and electrodes for prolonged periods of time waiting for an epileptic episode to happen, so that the clinicians can document it with EEG. Alternatively, the seizure is artificially induced, causing discomfort. The new ...

A new study has found evidence of cheesemaking, using milk from multiple animals in Late Neolithic Poland. The research suggests that early farmers reduced the lactose content in milk by making it into cheese or other dairy products like yoghurt, and used dairy products from a number of different animals, such as cows, sheep or goats. Lactose intolerance was a common condition in almost everyone in Europe during the Neolithic and until the Late Bronze Age when the genetic mutation became widespread, enabling adults to produce lactase, the enzyme which breaks down lactose in the body. Researchers looked at the practice of dairy processing ...

Community health workers can make a great difference in increasing the number of pregnant women who receive life-saving preventive antimalarial treatment, according to a study conducted in four sub-Saharan African countries and led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation. The findings, published in The Lancet Global Health, will help to guide malaria control strategies in pregnant women and improve maternal and infant health in malaria-endemic ...

Robots can be useful as mental wellbeing coaches in the workplace – but perception of their effectiveness depends in large part on what the robot looks like. Researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study in a tech consultancy firm using two different robot wellbeing coaches, where 26 employees participated in weekly robot-led wellbeing sessions for four weeks. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions, and scripts for the sessions, the robots’ physical appearance affected how participants interacted with it. Participants who did their wellbeing exercises with a toy-like robot said that they felt more of a connection ...

Wildlife documentaries miss an opportunity to highlight the diversity of nature by focusing too much on mammals and birds, according to a new study. In a new study published in People and Nature, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that while the production of wildlife documentaries has exploded over recent decades, they portray a biased view of the natural world around us. Our natural world is under threat, from habitat and biodiversity loss, to high extinction rates. At the same time, there is a growing disconnect between people and nature, with children’s opportunities to experience the natural world diminishing. Now more ...

Electrification is seen as having an important role to play in the fossil-free aviation of tomorrow. But electric aviation is battling a trade-off dilemma: the more energy-efficient an electric aircraft is, the noisier it gets. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a propeller design optimisation method that paves the way for quiet, efficient electric aviation. In recent years, electrification has been described as having an important role in reducing emissions from future aviation. Due to the challenges posed by longer ranges, interest is chiefly focused on electric propeller planes covering shorter distances. Propellers connected to ...

A new demographic survey of authorship in the American Journal of Archaeology (AJA) reveals that people of color have been largely underrepresented among the scholars published in the journal. The results of the survey, which also found that authors who are the children of people without advanced degrees were also underrepresented in the journal’s pages, are published in the paper “Demographic Dynamics of Publishing in the American Journal of Archaeology.” The study was conducted ...

During the pandemic, medical doctors and researchers noticed that children and adolescents infected with COVID-19 became less ill than adults. A possible explanation for this is that children already had a prior level of immunity to COVID-19 provided by memory T cells generated by common colds. After studying unique blood samples from children taken before the pandemic, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now identified memory T cells that react to cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Four coronaviruses cause common colds A possible explanation for this immunity in children is that they already had colds caused by one of the four coronaviruses ...

Houston Methodist scientists reversed infertility in sterile mice by reducing high-circulating cholesterol with a bacterial protein, showing further evidence that links high cholesterol to female infertility. This is a promising development, with one in every five women of childbearing age in the U.S. unable to get pregnant after trying for a year.   “We are working with a protein, called serum opacity factor, with unique characteristics,” said Corina Rosales, Ph.D., assistant research professor of molecular biology in medicine with the Houston Methodist ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 14, 2023) — The lung transplant team at UK HealthCare’s Transplant Center recently celebrated a major milestone, performing the 500th lung transplant since the lung transplant program was founded in 1991. “This is an impressive milestone, and our whole staff — physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, nurse coordinators, pharmacists, nutritionists, social workers, therapists and support staff — should be very proud of their success,” said Sravanthi Nandavaram, M.D., medical director of the Lung Transplant Program. ...

Since the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging in the 1990s, the reliance on neuroimaging has skyrocketed as researchers investigate how fMRI data from the brain at rest, and anatomical brain structure itself, can be used to predict individual traits, such as depression, cognitive decline, and brain disorders. Brain imaging has the potential to reveal the neural underpinnings of many traits, from disorders like depression and chronic widespread pain to why one person has a better memory than another, and why some people’s memories are resilient as they age. But how reliable brain imaging is for detecting traits has been a subject of wide debate. Prior research ...

The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star – among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly detectable stars known – was one of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022. Webb shows the star, WR 124, in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Massive stars race through their lifecycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers. Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, ...

Researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine and colleagues have identified a small molecule that may help treat people with epilepsy whose condition has become resistant to the benzodiazepine drugs usually used in managing seizures. The research, conducted in laboratory cells and rodents, was published online March 7 in Cell Reports Medicine. Uncontrolled epilepsy can lead to frequent and prolonged seizures lasting five minutes or more that can cause brain cell damage and even death. The condition affects an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. Epilepsy occurs ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Globally, wildfires are becoming more frequent and destructive, generating a significant amount of smoke that can be transported thousands of miles, driving the need for more accurate air pollution forecasts. A team of Penn State researchers developed a deep learning model that provides improved predictions of air quality in wildfire-prone areas and can differentiate between wildfires and non-wildfires. “As climate change continues to cause ecological changes and challenges, it is likely that wildfire ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 2002, an area of ice about the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke away from Antarctica as the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed. A new study of the conditions that led to the collapse may reveal warning signs to watch for future Antarctic ice shelf retreat, according to a Penn State-led team of scientists. “The collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is generally thought of as an independent event,” said Shujie Wang, assistant professor of geography at Penn State. “Our ...

“In breast cancer, MTAP downregulation activates ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) which in turn leads to formation of putrescine which promotes tumor migration, invasion and angiogenesis [15].”  BUFFALO, NY- March 14, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on March 11, 2023, entitled, “Genomic landscape of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) patients with methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) loss.” Homozygous deletion of methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) upregulates de novo synthesis ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has selected Tim Michalski to lead its Engineering Division as the Engineering Division Manager. In this role, Michalski oversees all aspects of the management and operation of the Engineering Division. The division includes more than 200 staff members and supports the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility and the lab’s growing project portfolio. “I am proud to name Tim as our newest Engineering Division Manager,” said Jefferson Lab Director Stuart Henderson. “Tim has ...

In late 2021, Salvatore Torquato, on sabbatical from Princeton’s Department of Chemistry, reached across the aisle as it were and invited a young astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study to apply the tools of statistical mechanics to his own work on the distribution of galaxies. The astrophysicist, Oliver Philcox, now a postdoc at the Simons Foundation, was intrigued. A year-long collaboration ensued. The questions at the heart of their unusual partnership were straightforward: can the statistical descriptors Torquato has worked with throughout his career find application in unlikely places like cosmology, and can they accurately characterize the complexity in the distribution ...

Imagine you are a doctor managing the emergency room of a large hospital. You suddenly get a call reporting a mass shooting at a nearby concert. In 20 minutes, you will be responsible for triaging more than 200 patients with a range of injuries. You do not have enough staff or resources and the hospital policies are not designed for a situation this dire. “When people respond to emergencies, many decisions they face are quite predictable. They’re trained on them, and there’s policy,” said UMass Lowell’s Neil Shortland, associate professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies. “But every now and then, they get stuck with a really ...

When astronauts begin to build a permanent base on the moon, as NASA plans to do in the coming years, they’ll need help. Robots could potentially do the heavy lifting by laying cables, deploying solar panels, erecting communications towers, and building habitats. But if each robot is designed for a specific action or task, a moon base could become overrun by a zoo of machines, each with its own unique parts and protocols. To avoid a bottleneck of bots, a team of MIT engineers is designing a kit of universal ...

A common and widely used chemical may be fueling the rise of the world’s fastest growing brain condition – Parkinson’s disease. For the past 100 years, trichloroethylene (TCE) has been used to decaffeinate coffee, degrease metal, and dry clean clothes. It contaminates the Marine Corps base Camp Lejeune, 15 toxic Superfund sites in Silicon Valley, and up to one-third of groundwater in the U.S.  TCE causes cancer, is linked to miscarriages and congenital heart disease, and is associated ...

Brigham researchers studying how and why certain cell types proliferate in the gut found that xanthine, which is found in coffee, tea and chocolate, may play a role in Th17 differentiation   Insights may help investigators better understand gut health and the development of conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease The gut is home to a cast of microbes that influence health and disease. Some types of microorganisms are thought to contribute to the development of inflammatory conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but the exact cascade of events that leads from microbes to immune cells to disease remains ...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – Global death rates from aortic diseases have steadily increased over the past two decades. Studies show up to 8% of individuals will develop an aortic aneurysm during their lifetime, higher than rates of colon and lung cancer combined, and over 80% of ruptured aortic aneurysms cause sudden death.  To save lives and improve outcomes for patients with aortic disease of all kinds, Ochsner Health is excited to announce the establishment of The Ochsner Aortic Center. Outfitted with cutting-edge imaging technology that allows medical staff to make faster, easier, and safer decisions, this dedicated, comprehensive aortic center is now the ...