A new AI tool that could help doctors assess the early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s more quickly and efficiently, has been developed by researchers at the University of Sheffield.   The system, known as CognoSpeak, uses a virtual agent displayed on a screen to engage a patient in a conversation. It asks memory-probing questions inspired by those used in outpatient consultations and conducts cognitive tests, such as picture descriptions and verbal fluency tests.   The tool then uses artificial intelligence and speech technology to analyse language and speech patterns to look for signs of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other memory ...

  New York, NY (June 28, 2023)–Striving to improve organ transplant survival rates, internationally renowned researchers in immunology and bioengineering at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received $15.1 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to lead a novel, five-year multi-center research program that will explore trained immunity—the innate immune system’s ability to remember infections and other insults—as a target for preventing organ transplant rejection. Each ...

One of humankind’s most precious fertilizers is slipping away. Phosphorus, which today comes mostly from nonrenewable reserves of phosphate rock, typically winds up in municipal waste streams. In the best cases, wastewater treatment plants sequester about 90% of that phosphorus in “sludge” and decompose that sludge into something known as digestate. Engineers hope to establish a more sustainable cycle for reusing phosphorus, but toxic compounds in digestate limit the possibility of recycling it as fertilizer — it’s hard to recover phosphorus from solid waste like digestate. “Existing ...

An analysis on the positive effects of exercise on blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes shows that while all exercise helps, certain activities – and their timing – are extremely good for people’s health. The study, published in The American Journal of Medicine, provides a comprehensive but straightforward summary of the benefits of exercise on controlling blood glucose levels in people with Type 2 diabetes. “The challenge with this is that most, if not all, people know exercise is good for them but they don’t know the best approach,” said Steven Malin, an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at the Rutgers ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Mary-Ann Bjornsti, Ph.D., professor and former chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, begins her term July 1 as president of the largest coalition of biological and biomedical research associations in the United States, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, also known as FASEB. Bjornsti, the Newman H. Waters Chair of Clinical Pharmacology, has served as associate director for Translational Research at the O’Neal ...

June 28, 2023—Population Council experts and our partners at Women Deliver (WD2023) in Kigali, Rwanda will share how we can collectively build evidence-based solutions to achieve gender equality and equity. The Council will lead the Girls Deliver: Pre-Conference on Adolescent Girls and key high-profile events on the sidelines of WD2030 to advance global discourse of the linkages between gender equality with pressing issues such as adolescents, education, and climate.  “The Council is thrilled to collaborate with youth, global activist, feminist, political, and research leaders to cultivate an ecosystem ...

A new drug, investigated by Amsterdam UMC together with colleagues around the world, is effective as a treatment against ulcerative colitis. With the clinical trial demonstrating a doubling in the rates of remission, to up to 50%, in certain groups. The results of this clinical trial are, today, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.   Around the world, it is estimated that millions live with ulcerative colitis, a condition that is only growing in prevalence. Geert D’Haens, lead author and Professor of Gastroenterology at Amsterdam UMC, says “there is still a high unmet need for safe and effective treatments for ulcerative colitis. This new medicine meets this ...

A team of researchers led by Dr. Marcus Conrad from Helmholtz Munich discovered a novel anti-cancer drug, called icFSP1, which sensitizes cancer cells to ferroptosis. Ferroptosis is characterized by the iron-dependent oxidative destruction of cellular membranes, which is counteracted by ferroptosis suppressor protein-1 (FSP1), one of the guardians of ferroptosis. Although FSP1 has been considered as an attractive drug target for cancer therapy, in vivo efficacious FSP1 inhibitors have been lacking. To this end, the team carefully evaluated hits from a screen of around ten thousand small molecule compounds and identified icFSP1 as a new in vivo effective drug. Importantly, the team ...

Neutrons look inside working solid-state battery to discover its key to success   Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory were the first to use neutron reflectometry to peer inside a working solid-state battery and monitor its electrochemistry. They discovered that its excellent performance results from an extremely thin layer, across which charged lithium atoms quickly flow as they move from anode to cathode and blend into a solid electrolyte. “We want better batteries,” said ORNL’s Andrew Westover, who co-led a study published in ACS Energy Letters with James Browning at the lab’s Spallation Neutron ...

A new survey shows that the largely Indigenous population of Greenland is highly aware that the climate is changing, and far more likely than people in other Arctic nations to say they are personally affected. Yet, many do not blame human influences—especially those living traditional subsistence lifestyles most directly hit by the impacts of rapidly wasting ice and radical changes in weather. The study appears this week in the journal Nature Climate Change. "Greenland is off the charts when it comes to the proportion of people who are seeing and personally experiencing the effects of climate change. But there is a big mismatch between ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – NASA has awarded a $799,954 Phase II STTR contract to AnalySwift LLC, a Purdue University-affiliated commercial software provider. The company will develop DATC, or Design tool for Advanced Tailorable Composites, and launch it at the end of the two-year contract. Allan Wood, AnalySwift president and CEO, said advancements in simulation capabilities have not always kept pace with those in manufacturing techniques. He said DATC will significantly improve NASA’s capabilities to design and analyze aerospace structures made from advanced tailorable composites. “DATC will be used to design next-generation aerospace structures, such as hybrid/blended ...

Gene editing and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been topics of significant debate in recent years. A new study from the Alliance for Science, an initiative based at the Boyce Thompson Institute, has revealed a positive shift in public sentiment towards one aspect of agricultural biotechnology, showing that gene editing consistently receives higher favorability ratings than GMOs in both social and traditional English-language media.  The study was published after analyzing data from a five-year period between January 2018 and December 2022. The data provides valuable insights for the scientific community and professionals in science communication.  "Our ...

The Russian writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy may have been onto something when he wrote the opening line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A recent study published in Psychological Science and led by a scholar now at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, suggests that when it comes to their brains processing information, people who are not lonely are all alike, but every lonely person processes the world in their own, idiosyncratic way. Copious research shows that loneliness is detrimental to well-being ...

Changes to the flow of the Labrador Current along the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador to Nova Scotia are leading to sudden warmings or drops in the oxygen levels of the waters in several regions including the St. Lawrence Gulf and Estuary. This change has dire consequences for marine ecosystems and fisheries. To better predict what could happen in the future, researchers from McGill University set out to answer the question: what controls the pathway of the Labrador Current? The Labrador Current supplies cold, oxygen rich waters The Labrador Current is a cold water current in the North Atlantic Ocean that flows south along the coast of Newfoundland ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts that athletes get from contact sports. However, the definitive diagnosis of the disease can be made only after death through an autopsy. New research criteria for identifying who may be more likely to develop the disease proved accurate in distinguishing a group who would have changes in brain volume and cognitive skills years later, according to a study published in the June 28, ...

HOUSTON ― A blood-based test developed by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center can efficiently predict an individual’s risk of dying from lung cancer when combined with a personalized risk model. According to new data published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, a blood-based four-protein panel (4MP), when combined with a lung cancer risk model (PLCOm2012), can better identify those at high risk of dying from lung cancer than the current U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) criteria. These findings build upon previous MD Anderson research demonstrating the ...

HOUSTON – (June 28, 2023) – Engineers from Rice University and the University of Maryland have created full-motion video technology that could potentially be used to make cameras that peer through fog, smoke, driving rain, murky water, skin, bone and other media that reflect scattered light and obscure objects from view. “Imaging through scattering media is the ‘holy grail problem’ in optical imaging at this point,” said Rice’s Ashok Veeraraghavan, co-corresponding author of an open-access study published today in Science Advances. ...

Scientists have wondered what happens to the organic and inorganic carbon that Earth’s Pacific Plate carries with it as it slides into the planet’s interior along the volcano-studded Ring of Fire. A new study suggests a notable amount of such subducted carbon returns to the atmosphere rather than traveling deep into Earth’s mantle.  The finding can improve long-term projections about Earth’s climate. A study led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute scientist has shown that volcanoes of the Aleutian-Alaska Arc return more subducted slab carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide than previously thought. This occurs ...

Glioblastoma is the most aggressive form of brain cancer. Despite decades of major efforts and clinical trials, the tumor’s survival rate has remained stagnant. For years, scientists understood the cells in these tumors as static and relatively fixed. But recent studies have uncovered that glioblastomas contain active cells moving in complex patterns known as “oncostreams”, which determine how aggressively the tumors grow. Research led by Michigan Medicine and the University of Michigan, published in Science Advances, suggests that glioblastoma ...

Dog breeds differ in pain sensitivity, but these differences don’t always match up with the beliefs people – including veterinarians – hold about breed-specific pain sensitivity. The results appear in a new study from North Carolina State University, which also found that a dog’s temperament (specifically in the way they interact with strangers) may influence the way veterinarians view breed pain sensitivity. “Veterinarians have a fairly strong consensus in their ratings of pain sensitivity ...

A new analysis of nearly 60 million Facebook posts investigates how users’ interest in posts evolves over time, suggesting that the amount of controversy generated by a post is strongly linked to the speed with which it reaches a broad audience—regardless of the specific topic being discussed. Gabriele Etta of Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 28, 2023. This study adds to mounting research examining the influence ...

A meditation that guides people to practice unconditional kindness to themselves and others helps people with a history of depression recall specific personal memories, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Amanda Lathan and Barbara Dritschel of the University of St. Andrews, UK. Autobiographic memory is essential to human functioning in areas such as self-concept, emotion regulation and problem-solving. Research has suggested that, among the cognitive processes disrupted by depression, the retrieval of autobiographical memory is often impaired. In the new ...

Intranasal insulin treatment might boost cognition in people with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's Disease, according to meta-analysis of 29 studies across multiple disorders ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286887 Article Title: Outcomes and clinical implications of intranasal insulin on cognition in humans: A systematic review and meta-analysis Author Countries: Canada Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

In animal assisted therapy, horses may aid the treatment of patients with substance use disorders by boosting mood and quality of life ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286867 Article Title: An evaluation of the effect of equine-facilitated psychotherapy on patients with substance use disorders Author Countries: Czech Republic Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Embargoed until 2 p.m. ET, Wednesday June 28, 2023 COLUMBUS, Ohio – Imagine strapping on a virtual reality headset and “walking” through a long-gone neighborhood in your city – seeing the streets and buildings as they appeared decades ago. That’s a very real possibility now that researchers have developed a method to create 3D digital models of historic neighborhoods using machine learning and historic Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. But the digital models will be more than just a novelty – they will give researchers a resource to conduct studies that would have been nearly ...