A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance – which was recently announced in the journal Nature – uses bacteria to combine natural enzymatic reactions with a new-to-nature reaction called the “carbene transfer reaction.” This work could also one day help reduce industrial emissions because it offers sustainable ...

In a new study in Nature Machine Intelligence*, researchers Bojian Yin and Sander Bohté from the HBP partner Dutch National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) demonstrate a significant step towards artificial intelligence that can be used in local devices like smartphones and in VR-like applications, while protecting privacy. They show how brain-like neurons combined with novel learning methods enable training fast and energy-efficient spiking neural networks on a large scale. Potential applications range from wearable AI to speech recognition and Augmented Reality.  While modern artificial neural ...

What cell types are found in which human tissue, and where? Which genes are active in the individual cells, and which proteins are found there? Answers to these questions and more are to be provided by a specialised atlas – in particular how the different tissues form during embryonic development and what causes diseases. In creating this atlas, researchers aim to map not only tissue directly isolated from humans, but also structures called organoids. These are three-dimensional clumps of tissue that are cultivated in the laboratory and develop in a way similar ...

JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology and JMIR Publications are thrilled to announce and welcome Dr Ece Uzun as Editor-in-Chief for JMIR Bioinformatics and Biotechnology.  Dr. Uzun is currently the Director of Clinical Bioinformatics and Associate Director of Clinical Cancer Informatics and Data Science (CCIDS) at Lifespan and an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University Alpert Medical School.  She has a B.S in Chemical Engineering and M.Sc in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. She completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in 2010 and focused ...

Professor Nicolas Doucet and his team at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) made a major breakthrough earlier this year in the field of evolutionary conservation of molecular dynamics in enzymes. Their work, published in the journal Structure, points to potential applications in health, including the development of new drugs to treat serious diseases such as cancer or to counter antibiotic resistance.  As a researcher specializing in protein dynamics, Professor Doucet is captivated by things that are invisible to the naked eye, yet full of mysteries and essential to all forms of life. He studies proteins ...

Because we don’t have crystal balls to show us how the world used to look, scientists must rely on preserved artifacts and specimens to provide the details. Below are some recent papers published in ACS journals that have unearthed insights from historic items and provided suggestions for protecting relics. Reporters can request free access to these papers by emailing newsroom@acs.org. “Two Pathways for the Degradation of Orpiment Pigment (As2S3) Found in Paintings” Journal of the American Chemical Society April 14, 2023 Oil paintings created before the 19th century often ...

Globally, air pollution is a major public health hazard. A key air pollutant linked to health risks is ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5), which consists of minute particles, sized less than or equal to 2.5 μm, suspended in the air. According to the WHO, annual PM2.5 levels should not exceed 5 μg/m3. However, the current PM2.5 levels in China far exceed this standard and are responsible for approximately 1.4 million PM2.5-related excess deaths annually. Even as the country steadily works towards reducing ...

(Boston)—The quality of surgery can drastically influence both short- and long-term postoperative outcomes and is a crucial consideration in studies that assess surgical outcomes. One approach for developing accurate quality measures is benchmarking, a quality-improvement process in which the best possible outcomes are identified to serve as a point of reference against which performance can be compared. Surgery for gallbladder cancer (GBC) is a technically challenging surgical procedure and requires considerable expertise ...

It’s often risky to introduce new products to the market. In fact, statistics show that between 40 to 90 percent of new products fail. A key component of product adoption is consumer psychology. While there are a few theories that attempt to explain why certain people are not likely to accept novelties, a new study takes a slightly different approach. Florida Atlantic University and collaborators developed and introduced a new mathematical innovation model, grounded in psychology, to provide both qualitative and quantitative predictions of adoption trends for new products. The objective of the study ...

The experience of the jihadist terrorist attacks that plagued Western Europe between 2015 and 2017 shows that perceived threats from ethnic and religious minorities affect the tone of public discourse about immigration and the support for radical right parties, according to a new study which uses German data, including more than 10mln tweets. In that period, terrorist attacks and instances of crime involving minorities made immigration a more salient issue for voters, explain Bocconi scholars Francesco Giavazzi (Bocconi University, Milan) and Gaia Rubera (Bocconi ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (May 8, 2023)—As the population continues to age, there is greater focus on bone health and minimizing fractures to maintain mobility. A new study suggests that various types of hormone therapies not only increase lumbar spine bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal women but also protect against bone loss, even after hormones have been discontinued. Study results are published online in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). Osteoporosis is a common debilitating condition, ...

Pacemakers and other implantable devices that restore normal heart rhythms have saved millions of lives. In some patients, a pacemaker or implantable cardioverter defibrillator modified for “cardiac resynchronization therapy,” or CRT, can dramatically improve heart failure by synchronizing the heart’s pumping function. Unfortunately, many people don’t respond to CRT and of those who do, some don’t realize its full potential — including increased exercise capacity and staying out of the hospital. CRT can save or change many more lives, says Miaomiao Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School ...

Collaborative research at the University of Cincinnati has developed a new probe to better study cells that has already led to new knowledge about certain cellular processes. UC’s Jiajie Diao, PhD, and Yujie Sun, PhD, are lead authors on new research published May 4 in ACS Sensors. Focus on endolysosomes The team’s research focused on organelles, or specialized structures that perform various jobs inside cells, called endolysosomes. Lysosomes are organelles that act as the “recycling center” of the cell, reusing ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a complex model to improve how quickly first responders – such as police and EMTs – reach the scene of vehicle accidents. In computational testing, the model outperformed the existing techniques for getting first responders to accident sites quickly. “The goal was to figure out the most efficient way to get first responders to an accident,” says Leila Hajibabai, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor in NC State’s Edward P. Fitts Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “Where should first responders be based ...

Thalassemia (thal-uh-SEE-me-uh) is an inherited blood disorder that affects about 300 million people worldwide. Treatments for moderate to severe thalassemia include frequent blood transfusions, chelation therapy to remove excess iron from the blood, and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). In line with the theme of this year's International Thalassemia Day – "Be Aware. Share. Care: Strengthening Education to Bridge the Thalassemia Care Gap", BGI Genomics will co-host an event with the Shenzhen Municipal Health Commission for thalassemia patients and their family members on May 6, 2023, in Shenzhen, China, providing tips on ...

The University of Minnesota Twin Cities announced that it will receive a $20 million grant over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to lead a new National Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.  Researchers at the AI Institute for Climate-Land Interactions, Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy (AI-CLIMATE) aim to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to create more climate-smart practices that will absorb and store carbon while simultaneously boosting the economy in the agriculture and forestry industries. The new ...

DALLAS, May 8 2023 — Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 killer of new moms.[1]  The American Heart Association, through the new campaign, “My health is our health”/ “Mi salud es nuestra salud” is raising awareness among Hispanic/ Latina moms, especially during pregnancy, about the importance of managing their blood pressure. On average, about one in every 16 Hispanic women aged 20 and older have coronary heart disease, the most common type of heart disease.[2] Hispanic/Latina mothers hold a special place in their homes when it comes to family decisions. They are considered the head of the family for their key role in raising children and ...

Recognizing and separating enantiomers is a difficult task for chemical engineers — one might say it gives them a bit of a headache. Enantiomers are molecules with virtually identical compositions that mirror one another, like a left and right hand. In chemistry, this property is called chirality. Despite the similarities in their makeup, so-called left- and right-handed enantiomers often exhibit very different properties. Sometimes a drug has an enantiomer that causes undesirable effects. For example, certain drugs have one enantiomer that can cause a headache, ...

HOUSTON – (May 8, 2023) – Many birth defects and spontaneous abortions occur during the embryonic development stage known as neurulation, yet we have very little insight into how this critical developmental process unfolds in humans. The Rice University lab of Aryeh Warmflash has received a five-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to optimize and develop experimental cell models that can shed light on the self-organizing processes by which ectodermal ...

University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have developed a groundbreaking new diagnostic technique that will allow for faster and more accurate detection of neurodegenerative diseases. The method will likely open a door for earlier treatment and mitigation of various diseases that affect humans, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and similar diseases that affect animals, such as chronic wasting disease (CWD). Their new study is published in Nano Letters, a premier journal in the field of nanotechnology published by the American Chemical Society. “This paper mainly ...

HOUSTON – (May 8, 2023) – For newborns with congenital hypothyroidism, early diagnosis spells the difference between a normal, healthy life and lifelong disability. After learning about the heavy toll the disease takes on children born in parts of the world where testing is limited or absent, a team of Rice University students came together to develop a low-cost screening tool that can detect abnormally high thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels indicative of dysfunction. The point-of-care, paper-based test developed ...

Statement Highlights: Health research that considers Asian Americans as a single race and ethnic group may result in over- or under-estimating the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease among people of diverse Asian American subgroups, by geographic region of descent. Together, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes are the leading causes of death and disease in Asian American adults, however, rates vary widely among subgroups. For example, the latest data on the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in Asian American adults, ages 45-84, reveals a range of Type ...

Humans inherited genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our noses, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The new Communications Biology study finds that a particular gene, which leads to a taller nose (from top to bottom), may have been the product of natural selection as ancient humans adapted to colder climates after leaving Africa. Co-corresponding author Dr Kaustubh Adhikari (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment and The Open University) said: “In the last 15 years, since the Neanderthal genome ...

A recent clinical trial showed that the drug combination of cemiplimab plus platinum chemotherapy can prolong survival in patients with advanced lung cancer when compared with placebo plus platinum chemotherapy. Now an analysis published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, indicates that cemiplimab plus platinum chemotherapy also affects quality of life compared to chemotherapy alone. The multinational phase 3 EMPOWER-Lung 3 trial had shown that the addition ...

Chicago (May 2, 2023) — Researchers created organoids from cancer cells to reduce the need for trial and error in identifying effective cancer treatments in one of many cancer studies scheduled for presentation this week at Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2023. Below are summaries of three studies scheduled for DDW, their embargo times and presentation times at the meeting in Chicago May 6-9. Personalized drug screening in patient-derived organoids of biliary tract cancer and its clinical application Chemotherapy is often the only treatment option for biliary tract cancer, which is usually found at a late stage, making it one of the most lethal ...