Plastic waste breaks down over time into microplastics (<0.1 μm). Microplastics smaller than 20 μm cannot be removed in currently operating water treatment plants and must be agglomerated to a larger size and then removed. Iron (Fe) or aluminum (Al) based flocculants are used for this purpose, but they are not the ultimate solution as they remain in the water and cause severe toxicity to humans, requiring a separate treatment process. Dr. Jae-Woo Choi of the Center for Water Cycle Research at ...

ORLANDO, Fla. (October 20, 2023) – Body image issues, social media, gender biases and coaching styles may be causing young athletes to quit sports, according to research presented by Nemours Children’s Health at the 2023 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference & Exhibition. Previous studies have found that 70% of children quit sports by age 13, and by age 14 girls quit at twice the rate of boys. “Youth sports participation sets up children for a lifetime of healthy habits. Kids who participate ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (October 20, 2023) – Researchers from Nemours Children’s Health will present findings from a range of studies, and Nemours physician Steven Selbst, MD, will receive the Jim Seidel Distinguished Service Award for emergency medicine contributions at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference & Exhibition, Oct. 20 – 24 in Washington, DC. “Nemours’ vision is to go well beyond medicine – to help children everywhere stay healthy and grow into healthy adults,” ...

Media contacts: Lisa Black, lblack@aap.org; or Adam Alexander, aalexander@aap.org    Toddler “formulas” that are promoted as nutritious drinks for the older infant or preschooler are generally unnecessary and nutritionally incomplete, and the marketing practices that promote them are questionable, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.  The AAP has published a new clinical report, “Older Infant-Young Child ‘Formulas,’ ” that reviews the growing array of drinks aimed at children ages 6-36 months and observes ...

Ed Sheeran convinced a jury this year that he didn’t rip off Marvin Gaye’s `Let’s Get It On.’ By way of contrast, Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke earlier failed to establish that `Blurred Lines’ wasn’t a copy of Gaye’s `Got to Give It Up.’ Could automated algorithms bring a new objectivity to music copyright infringement decisions, limiting the number, scale and expense of court cases? Musicologist Dr Patrick Savage of the University of Auckland researched the topic in collaboration with Yuchen Yuan of Keio University, ...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract categorized into ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Currently, aminosalicylates, glucocorticoids, immunomodulating drugs, and biological agents are common strategies for the treatment of IBD. The efficacy of these therapies is limited, however, and they are frequently associated with multiple adverse effects.   Recently, Life Metabolism published a study entitled “7-Dehydrocholesterol protects against circadian disruption and experimental colitis: potential role of RORα/γ”, which shows that gut microbiota-derived metabolite ...

The cosmetics industry is turning towards natural alternatives to chemical agents used in products to pave way towards a more sustainable future. Researchers are searching for nature-derived active ingredients for skincare products through extensive bioprospecting research. In this regard, cyanobacteria, with their remarkable metabolic capacity, are a promising source of such agents. Having existed on Earth for nearly 3.5 billion years, these photosynthetic organisms have adapted to various environmental ...

Consistently sleeping less than five hours a night might raise the risk of developing depressive symptoms, according to a new genetic study led by UCL (University College London) researchers. Historically, poor sleep has been seen as a side effect of mental ill health, but this study found that the link between sleep and mental illness is more complex. The study, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, analysed data from people with an average age of 65 and found short sleep was associated with the onset of depressive symptoms. Lead author Odessa S. Hamilton (UCL Institute of Epidemiology ...

Dzemila Sero, now Migelien Gerritzen Fellow at the Rijksmuseum and former postdoc at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, together with a team of researchers from the Rijksmuseum, Leiden and Cambridge University, examined the terracotta sculpture Study for a Hovering Putto attributed to Laurent Delvaux (1696 - 1778) and housed in the Rijksmuseum permanent collection. The methodology and findings were published open access in Science Advances in a paper with title "Artist profiling using micro-CT scanning of a Rijksmuseum terracotta sculpture". To acquire preserved impressions on the sculpture, researchers ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Michigan conducted a phase I pilot study to assess the feasibility of using potato starch as a dietary intervention to modify the gut microbiome in bone marrow transplant patients. The study, which appears in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first part of a two-phase ongoing clinical trial evaluating the effect of modifying the microbiome on the incidence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a major complication that develops in up to half ...

Artificial intelligence (AI)—of ChatGPT fame—is increasingly used in medicine to improve diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and to avoid unnecessary screening for patients. But AI medical devices could also harm patients and worsen health inequities if they are not designed, tested, and used with care, according to an international task force that included a University of Rochester Medical Center bioethicist. Jonathan Herington, PhD, was a member of the AI Task Force of the Society for Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging, which laid out recommendations on how to ethically develop and use AI medical devices in two papers published ...

Pregnant people who gained more than the now-recommended amount of weight had a higher risk of death from heart disease or diabetes in the decades that followed, according to new analysis of 50 years of data published in The Lancet and led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The group studied a large national data set that stretched from when a person gave birth through the next five decades, assessing mortality rates to show the potential long-term effects of weight gain in pregnancy. Higher risk of death was found for all weight groups studied — including those defined ...

A first-of-its kind hormone replacement therapy that more closely replicates the natural circadian and ultradian rhythms of our hormones has shown to improve symptoms in patients with adrenal conditions. Results from the University of Bristol-led clinical trial are published today [20 October] in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Low levels of a key hormone called ‘cortisol’ is typically a result of conditions such as Addison's and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. The hormone regulates a range of vital processes, ...

URBANA, Ill. – Married couples and long-term romantic partners typically engage in a variety of behaviors that sustain and nourish the relationship. These actions promote higher levels of commitment, which benefits couples’ physical and psychological health. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at how such relationship maintenance behaviors interact with satisfaction and commitment. “Relationship maintenance is a well-established measure of couple behavior. In our study, we measured it with five main categories, ...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a new, never-before-seen feature in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The high-speed jet stream, which spans more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. The discovery of this jet is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how Webb is uniquely capable of tracking those features. “This is something that totally surprised us,” said Ricardo Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, lead author on the paper ...

ABSTRACTS: LBA71, 1088MO, 95MO, LBA48, 1082O, 1085O, LBA34, 243MO MADRID ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights provides a glimpse into recent basic, translational and clinical cancer research from MD Anderson experts. This special edition features upcoming oral presentations by MD Anderson researchers at the 2023 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress focused on clinical advances across a variety of cancer types. Highlights include a combination strategy for EGFR-mutant metastatic lung cancer, updated results for a Phase ...

ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before.  But as MIT engineers say in a new study, similarity isn’t enough if you want to truly innovate in engineering tasks.  “Deep generative models (DGMs) are ...

October 19, 2023 Startup workers flee for bigger, more established companies during pandemic Findings reveal vulnerability of early-stage firms in downturns Toronto - The world may have felt like it had stopped in the pandemic’s first weeks. But a “flight to safety” was underway at a popular digital job platform catering to the startup sector. Digging into the data for nearly 180,000 users from AngelList Talent (now called Wellfound), the biggest online recruitment platform for private and entrepreneurial companies, researchers have found that U.S. job hunters turned away from smaller, early-stage companies in favour of positions at bigger, more established firms. Just ...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell Tech has announced a total of more than $10 million in gifts and grants from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, to support arXiv, a free distribution service and open-access archive for scholarly articles. The funding will allow the growing repository with more than 2 million articles to migrate to the cloud and modernize its code to ensure reliability, fault tolerance and accessibility for researchers. “I am deeply grateful for this tremendous support from both the Simons Foundation ...

In a finding that helps elucidate how molten salts in advanced nuclear reactors might behave, scientists have shown how electrons interacting with the ions of the molten salt can form three states with different properties. Understanding these states can help predict the impact of radiation on the performance of salt-fueled reactors. The researchers, from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Iowa, computationally simulated the introduction of an excess electron into molten zinc chloride salt to see what would happen. They found three possible scenarios. In one, the electron becomes part of a molecular radical that ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A study led by researchers in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside, has found that in communities of color in Inland Southern California, historical, cultural, and social traumas induce fear and mistrust in public health and medical, scientific, and governmental institutions, which, in turn, influence these communities’ hesitation to get tested and vaccinated for COVID-19.  The study, published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, underscores the need for community-based health interventions that consider structural and social determinants of health ...

The beauty service microbusiness industry in the United States — such as the small, independently-owned nail salons found across the country — is huge, with more than $62 billion in annual sales. However, most of the workers who provide these highly sought services are Asian female immigrants who earn very low wages. These workers face numerous workplace health challenges stemming from the chemicals they use, repetitive movements with handheld tools and awkward body posturing. They also are reluctant to bring attention to these conditions due to factors such as possible immigration-related trauma, lack of English proficiency, ...

Recognizing the many milestones it has reached in recent months, Strategies to Prevent Spillover, or STOP Spillover, a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by Tufts University, has announced that the interim leadership team that was put in place in March 2023 will take on a permanent role for the next two years of the project. Hellen Amuguni, an associate professor in the Department of Infectious Disease and Global Health at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, is the new project director. The co-deputy directors are Felicia Nutter, director of the International Veterinary ...

HOUSTON ― A team of researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has developed a new method for using extracellular vesicles to enhance responses to immunotherapy in glioblastoma, potentially opening the door for wider use of engineered messenger RNA (mRNA) for cancer therapy. The study was published today in Nature Communications. Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Betty Kim, M.D., Ph.D., and Wen Jiang, M.D., Ph.D.,developed a novel method for loading mRNA into extracellular vesicles, small structures created by cells to transport biomolecules and nucleic acids within ...

UMass Chan and UMass Lowell’s point-of-care technology initiative awarded $8.9 million renewal UMass Chan Medical School and UMass Lowell have received an $8.9 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for renewed support of their initiative to advance the development of home-based and point-of-care health technologies. The program aims to jumpstart new tools to address heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders, especially in underserved populations. The Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies ...