RESTON, Va. — The first widescale assessment of methylmercury in adult amphibians in the U.S. to date shows that, in amphibians, this toxic compound is common, widespread and, at least for some, can reach very high levels. The study, “Broad-scale Assessment of Methylmercury in Adult Amphibians,” which published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, brought together scientists from around the country to test more than 3,200 amphibians representing 14 species from 26 populations. “Amphibians ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Online privacy policies may not only be difficult to find but nonexistent, according to Penn State researchers who crawled millions of websites and found that only one-third of online organizations made their privacy policy available for review. “Privacy Lost and Found: An Investigation at Scale of Web Privacy Policy Availability,” a paper authored by students and faculty from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), detailed an analysis of the online privacy policy landscape and studied the unavailability of privacy policies on company domains. It received the Best Student Paper ...

The ability to dynamically track the movement of cells is essential for modeling cellular interactions as they form organs such as the heart. But current microscope technology isn’t up to the task of capturing those movements. Juhyun Lee, associate professor in the Bioengineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, recently received a five-year, $1.94 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a 4D high-resolution imaging system to quantify cell tracking. Traditional microscopes allow users to zoom in to view an individual cell. However, doing so obscures that cell’s relationship ...

Screen readers, which convert digital text to audio, can make computers more accessible to many disabled users — including those who are blind, low vision or dyslexic. Yet slideshow software, such as Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides, isn’t designed to make screen reader output coherent. Such programs typically rely on Z-order — which follows the way objects are layered on a slide — when a screen reader navigates through the contents. Since the Z-order doesn’t adequately convey how a slide is laid out in two-dimensional space, slideshow software can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. A team led by researchers ...

Three-quarters of Colorado prisons are likely to experience a natural disaster in the coming years, but due to aging infrastructure and outdated policies, many are ill-equipped to keep residents safe, suggests new CU Boulder research. The study, published in the journal Natural Hazards Review, comes on the heels of one of the hottest summers on record and as U.S. lawmakers are calling for an investigation into a rash of what are believed to be heat-related deaths in the nation’s prisons. In other research, including interviews and focus groups with 35 formerly incarcerated Coloradans, the researchers found that most had already suffered from climate-related hazards, experiencing ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 30 October 2023 Annals of Internal Medicine Tip Sheet @Annalsofim Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also ...

A recent study found some of the oldest animals in the world living in a place you wouldn’t expect: fishes in the Arizona desert. Researchers found the second genus of animal ever for which three or more species have known lifespans greater than 100 years, which could open the doors to aging studies across disciplines, such as gerontology and senescence (aging) among vertebrates.  The study centers around a series of fish species within the Ictiobus genus, known as buffalofishes. Minnesota has native populations of each of the three species studied: bigmouth buffalo, smallmouth buffalo and black buffalo. The importance of this research is underscored ...

As the impacts of climate change grow, society and people struggle to adapt to the challenges of the new reality. Change, however, is difficult, and adapting to new ways of life or new ways of doing business often requires a change in culture.  To determine how culture and society adapt to a changing climate, a team of researchers from the University of Maine and the University of Vermont (UVM) have conducted the first-ever study of cultural adaptation to climate change. Using the science of cultural evolution to examine data on which crops farmers plant across the U.S., their work can help inspire more effective policy solutions to survive in ...

From monitoring concentrations of greenhouse gases to detecting COVID in the breath, laser systems known as frequency combs can identify specific molecules as simple as carbon dioxide and as complex as monoclonal antibodies with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity. Amazing as they are, however, frequency combs have been limited in how fast they can capture a high-speed process such as hypersonic propulsion or the folding of proteins into their final three-dimensional shapes. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Historically, most children in the United States who needed to be hospitalized were treated at general hospitals that treat both children and adults. But the number of hospitals providing inpatient care for children has decreased over the last decade, and many of them struggled to keep up with the demand for children’s care during a viral infection surge in the fall of 2022. Now children are much more likely to be treated at children’s hospitals that are concentrated into fewer locations, according to a new study led by UNC School of Medicine researchers. “The ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain. How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised learning.” This type of machine learning, originally developed as a way to create more efficient models for computer vision, allows computational models to learn about visual scenes based solely on the similarities and differences between them, with no ...

The largest brain autopsy study of women who had experienced intimate partner violence reveals substantial vascular and white matter damage in the brain, but no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease recognized among male contact sports athletes who sustain repeated head trauma. The international collaboration, led by a team from the Brain Injury Research Center of Mount Sinai in collaboration with the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, appears in the most recent issue of Acta Neuropathologica. Importantly, ...

URBANA, Ill. – Over the past decades, Brazil has become the world’s leading soybean producer, as well as the leading consumer of pesticides. Despite concerns about potential public health consequences, little is known about the effects of pesticide exposure in the general population. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with the University of Denver and University of Wisconsin-Madison looks at how soy expansion and increased pesticide use in Brazil’s Cerrado and Amazon biomes correlate with increased childhood cancer mortality. “The Brazilian Amazon region is undergoing a transition ...

Deforestation in the Amazon causes land surfaces up to 100 kilometres away to get warmer, according to a new study.   The research, by a team of British and Brazilian scientists, led by Dr Edward Butt at the University of Leeds, suggests that tropical forests play a critical role in cooling the land surface - and that effect can play out over considerable distances.  It is known that when tropical forests are cleared, the climate in the immediate vicinity gets warmer.   In this latest study, the researchers wanted to know if deforestation in the Amazon was resulting in climate warming further afield, and the study examined the impact of forest loss on sites up to ...

Abu Dhabi, UAE, October 2023: A team of scientists, led by Post-Doctoral Associate Marieh Al-Handawi and Professor of Chemistry Panče Naumov from NYU Abu Dhabi’s Smart Materials Lab and NYU Abu Dhabi Institute’s Center for Smart Engineering Materials (CSEM) has revealed the mechanism a desert plant native to the United Arab Emirates uses to capture moisture from the desert air in order to survive. The identification of this unique mechanism, in which the plant excretes salts to extract and condense water onto the surface of its leaves, has the potential to inspire ...

The Royal Canadian Institute for Science (RCIScience) awards the 2023 Sandford Fleming Medal for Excellence in Science Communication to independent science writer Terry Collins and the William Edmond Logan Award to the team behind CBC Radio's national weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. A knowledge translator for over 27 years, Terry Collins' reporting has been picked up by journalists in Canada and worldwide, awakening public interest in and deepening understanding of diverse sciences, fostering political will and mobilizing resources for change.  Nominator Dr. Peter A. Singer, former Special Advisor to the Director-General of the World Health Organization, ...

SEATTLE – Leroy Hood, MD, PhD, co-founder of Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) and a pioneer in systems biology, and Rebecca Lambert, founder and CEO of NED Biosystems, Inc. (NED), a public benefit corporation that is developing the first oral “systems treatment” for cancer, have entered into a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on a clinical trial to show how cancer’s onset may be reversed. NED’s cancer treatment, NED-170, takes a systems approach that combines repurposed, oral agents that are well documented in humans to affect critical cancer disease-driver processes at doses that lack customary toxicity and side effects. “A ...

Around 11,500 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC tracks cervical cancer rates by age, race, and ethnicity, but not by disability type. A 2022 study found that women with disabilities may encounter multiple social and economic barriers to accessing reproductive health care, and a lack of timely access to cervical cancer screening may lead to delayed diagnosis and treatment for cervical cancer.   According to research by Mason PhD in Public Health ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $11.4 million for six projects in quantum information science (QIS) with relevance to fusion and plasma science. The Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program supports fundamental research to expand the understanding of matter at very high temperatures and densities and to build the scientific foundation needed to develop a fusion energy source. The QIS portfolio within FES supports research opportunities outlined in the 2018 Fusion Energy Sciences Roundtable on Quantum Information Science report. It includes science and technology thrusts where QIS might have a transformative impact on FES ...

A team of scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology will expand its work after receiving a large grant from the National Science Foundation to make chemistry more accessible for students who rely on American Sign Language interpreters in class. Christina Goudreau Collison, professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science; Jennifer Swartzenberg, senior lecturer in the National Technical Institute for the Deaf’s Department of Science and Mathematics; Lea Michel, professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science; and Pepsi Holmquist, visiting assistant professor in NTID’s Department of Science and Mathematics, have been awarded nearly $380,000 ...

While there are a number of studies demonstrating that dog therapy programs can improve a person’s social and emotional wellbeing, many typically have a disproportionate number of female participants. Recent research led by Dr. John-Tyler Binfet, an Associate Professor in UBC Okanagan’s School of Education and Director of Building Academic Retention through K9s (BARK), evaluated if there are gender differences in wellbeing by setting up separate dog therapy sessions for those who identified as female, male and gender diverse participants. Dr. Binfet has conducted numerous studies on the benefits of canine therapy, but to his knowledge, ...

Improving treatments for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), an aggressive tumor with very poor prognosis and limited therapeutic targets, has been challenging. Responding to this need for better treatments, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have investigated potential vulnerabilities in TNBC that could lead to novel therapies and improved outcomes for this devastating condition. The team reports in The Journal of Clinical Investigation that in diverse TNBC animal models, targeting protein eIF4A with the ...

Rett syndrome is a rare devastating neurological disorder that primarily affects young girls and manifests as an impaired ability to walk and talk, along with characteristic ‘hand-wringing’ movements, seizures, and cognitive disability. This incurable condition results from mutations in the methyl-CpG binding protein 2 (MECP2) gene that impairs the role of the MeCP2 protein in regulating the activity of many genes in brain cells. A new MECP2 gene variant (G118E) was recently characterized by a research team led by Dr. Huda Zoghbi, a distinguished service professor at Baylor College of Medicine and the founding director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological ...

WASHINGTON—Optica Publishing Group today published the first issue of its newest peer-reviewed, Gold Open Access journal, Optica Quantum.  Optica Quantum joins Optica Publishing Group’s diverse portfolio of 19 peer-reviewed journals and provides a home for high-impact research in quantum information science and technology (QIST), enabled by optics and photonics. Editor-in-Chief Michael G. Raymer of the University of Oregon, USA, leads the editorial board, comprised of outstanding researchers from around the world who are active in quantum science and technology. “Discoveries in QIST have the potential to change the world ...

Brigham Young University researcher Jeff Bednar is now a part-time ghost hunter. And while the business professor doesn’t have night vision cameras or ultrasensitive recording equipment, he’s found a bunch of ghosts — including several on his own campus. The ghosts Bednar and University of Illinois colleague Jacob Brown are hunting sound similar to the ghosts you’ve heard of — they linger long after they’ve left this life and hover over their previous haunts — but they’re not necessarily the kind of ghosts that show up around Halloween. They’re called organizational ghosts: admired former ...