OAK BROOK, Ill. – A common weight-loss surgery for obese adolescents and young adults is found to have harmful effects on bones, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “Childhood obesity is on the rise and weight-loss surgery is the most effective way to reduce weight and improve cardiometabolic comorbidities,” said the study’s lead investigator, Miriam A. Bredella, M.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and vice chair for Faculty Affairs and Clinical Operations, Department of Radiology ...

PeerJ, the award-winning Open Access publisher, has announced the launch of the Open Advances series of journals, part of its ongoing commitment to democratizing scientific communication. The series will foster an equitable approach that empowers researchers worldwide to contribute valuable insights towards solving global challenges. The journals will be fully Open Access but will not charge authors a fee to publish.  The Open Advances series is a transformative endeavor that cements PeerJ's commitment to openness, innovation, ...

June 13, 2023 – Enrollment in the Medicare Advantage program – which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their health care through plans administered by private insurance companies – has been growing so rapidly that it has recently surpassed enrollment in traditional Medicare. A new analysis by USC researchers warns that overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans now exceed 20 percent or $75 billion annually, underscoring the urgent need for reform. Researchers with the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics found that the millions of beneficiaries in traditional Medicare who have switched to Medicare ...

Philadelphia, June 13, 2023 – Cognitive deficits accompany mood disorders and other psychiatric conditions, often with debilitating effects. Limited treatments currently exist, but studies in animals and humans have pointed to drugs such as the laxative prucalopride that activate serotonin receptors as a potential therapeutic for the symptoms. It has remained unclear, however, how the medication affects resting brain activity. Now, a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, published by Elsevier, examines the drug’s effects in healthy human adults. Serotonin receptors and the 5-HT4-type receptors in particular are found in areas ...

Positive parenting—as reported by children and teenagers— protects young people from the deleterious effects of stressors like financial hardship or serious illness, according to a study. Jamie Hanson and colleagues examined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data along with survey data for 482 participants in an ongoing study, the Healthy Brain Network, who were between the ages of 10–17 at the time of data collection. Previous work has found associations between stress and small hippocampal volumes as well as between stress and behavioral problems—associations confirmed ...

The universe is big, and it’s getting bigger. To study dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of our universe, scientists are using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to map more than 40 million galaxies, quasars, and stars. Today, the collaboration publicly released its first batch of data, with nearly 2 million objects for researchers to explore. The 80-terabyte data set comes from 2,480 exposures taken over six months during the experiment’s “survey validation” phase in 2020 and 2021. In this period ...

Human activities have a significant impact on natural waters, aquatic biodiversity and the quality of drinking water resources. For Professor Mathieu Lapointe of the Department of Construction Engineering at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), it is possible to treat certain types of wastewater—not currently treated—globally using more sustainable and affordable in situ methods.  In a study carried out by Professor Lapointe and published in the Nature journal, the rate of discharge into the environment of certain ...

CHICAGO, IL (June 13, 2023) — Scholastica, a leading academic journal publishing software provider, has announced CRediT Taxonomy support across its products and services in line with ANSI/NISO guidelines. The CRediT Taxonomy, which consists of 14 research contributor roles, helps facilitate transparency around research development processes and ensure proper acknowledgment of all contributors. With the new CRediT implementation, journals using Scholastica's peer review system can request to have CRediT fields added to their submission form, ...

CD8+ T cells, a vital component of the immune system that provides immunity against cancer, have been the focal point of anti-cancer therapies. Recent studies have identified two major subpopulations of these cells present within the tumor—the stem-like cells that do not have anti-tumor activity, and the terminally differentiated CD8+ T cells, which are generated from the stem-like cells and have cytotoxic function on tumor cells. Tumor-draining lymph nodes (TDLNs) have been found to be the primary site for the presence of these cells. However, the molecular mechanisms responsible for the generation of stem-like cells into terminally differentiated ...

Repeat treatment with corticosteroid injections improved vision in people with persistent or recurrent uveitis-related macular edema better than two other therapies, according to results from a clinical trial funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI). Compared with methotrexate or ranibizumab intravitreal (in-the-eye) injections, the corticosteroid treatment achieved greater reductions in retinal swelling and was the only therapy in the study that improved vision. The report was published today in the journal Ophthalmology. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health. “Prior to this study, we didn’t know the best treatment for persistent or recurrent macular edema, a major ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- In collaboration with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, Binghamton University has announced a New Educational and Research Alliance (New ERA) with six historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Alabama A&M University, Central State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie-View A&M University, the University of the District of Columbia and Virginia State University. The groundbreaking partnership is built on the shared missions of education, research and service, aiming to foster holistic, equitable and sustainable collaborations that will shape the future of academia and beyond. The strategic alliances formed through this partnership will ...

How do you study the effects of exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), when it is in everything?! To study the effect of a chemical, toxicologists typically expose animals to various doses of the chemical over a period of time so that they could then study the dose versus effect relationship. Such toxicology studies often employee several types of “blanks” for quality control. Blanks are experiments where the test animals are not given any dose of the chemical being studied (sort of like a placebo in human drug ...

Tulsa, Okla. – A pioneering study conducted by researchers at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) in Tulsa, Okla., has made significant strides in understanding the elusive gut-brain connection, a complex relationship that has long puzzled scientists due to the difficulty of accessing the body's interior. The study, “Parieto-occipital ERP indicators of gut mechanosensation in humans,” appears in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications. The research team successfully had ...

Plant roots play a critical role in taking up, selecting, enriching and retaining a range of different mineral elements thereby supplying distant plant tissues with nutrients while sequestering excessive amounts of metals. To execute such element-specific functions, a range of ion transporters present at roots mediate the uptake, efflux and intracellular compartmentalization of different mineral elements. Most ion transporters show characteristic tissue and cell type-specific localization patterns, which can be altered in response to internal signalling or external cues. To fully ...

A groundbreaking machine-learning study has unmasked the best drug combinations to prevent COVID-19 from coming back after an initial infection. It turns out these combos are not the same for every patient.  Using real-world data from a hospital in China, the UC Riverside-led study found that individual characteristics, including age, weight, and additional illness determine which drug combinations most effectively reduce recurrence rates. This finding has been published in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.  That the data came from China is significant for two reasons. First, when patients are treated for COVID-19 in the U.S, it is ...

In situ bioprinting, which involves 3D printing biocompatible structures and tissues directly within the body, has seen steady progress over the past few years. In a recent study, a team of researchers developed a handheld bioprinter that addresses key limitations of previous designs, i.e., the ability to print multiple materials and control the physicochemical properties of printed tissues. This device will pave the way for a wide variety of applications in regenerative medicine, drug development and testing, and custom orthotics and prosthetics. The emergence of regenerative medicine has resulted ...

Women suffering from the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis temporarily get much better when pregnant. Researchers have now identified the beneficial changes naturally occurring in the immune system during pregnancy. The findings, published in Journal of Neuroinflammation, can show the way to new treatments. Pregnancy is a very special condition from an immunological point of view. The immune system serves to defend us against foreign substances. However, although half of the genetic material of the foetus ...

People who adhere to global Cancer Prevention Recommendations are putting themselves at lower risk of developing the disease, new research confirms. Experts at Newcastle University have reviewed evidence of following the 2018 World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) and American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) lifestyle-based recommendations. The findings, published today in Cancer, revealed that adhering to a healthier lifestyle, including maintaining a healthy body weight and eating little red meat and processed meats such as bacon, helps ...

A research group led by Professor Hideki Fujiwara and Associate Professor Daisuke Sakamaki from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University succeeded, for the first time, in synthesizing a new molecule using a novel combination of dynamic covalent chemistry, in which organic radicals couple and dissociate reversibly, and coordination chemistry, which binds radicals to metal ligands. The study shows that the two types of reactions work without inhibiting each other. “This research was based on a very simple idea of combining two types of reactions,” stated Professor Sakamaki. “However, it was not clear ...

Increased levels of Lipoprotein(a), a variant of ‘bad cholesterol’, in the bloodstream are a risk factor for recurrent coronary heart disease (CHD) in people aged 60 or over, according to the results of a new study which tracked the issue over the course of 16 years. The results, published today in Current Medical Research & Opinion, suggest that current cholesterol-lowering medications may not be effective at reducing the risk of recurrent CHD – such as a heart attack – due to elevated Lp(a). “This finding adds to growing evidence of a relationship between increased Lp(a) and the risk of recurrent CHD,” says lead author Associate Professor ...

Prof. PAN Yang and Associate Researcher LIU Chengyuan, researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have achieved significant progress in detecting intermediates in methane photocatalytic reactions. Their technique, Synchronous Radiation Photoionization Mass Spectrometry (SR-PIMS), allows for in-situ detection of active intermediates. The findings were published in the prestigious chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie International ...

A team led by Academician Prof. GUO Guangcan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in the field of quantum teleportation. The team, which includes Prof. HU Xiaomin, Prof. GUO Yu, Prof. LIU Biheng, and Prof. LI Chuanfeng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC),CAS, was invited to publish a review paper on quantum teleportation in Nature Review Physics. The paper was officially released online on May 24.   As one of the most important protocols in the field ...

A point-to-point long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) over a distance of 1,002 km has been achieved by scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and their collaborators from Tsinghua University, Jinan Institute of Quantum Technology, and Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT), CAS. This milestone not only sets a new world record for non-relay QKD but also provides a solution for high-speed intercity quantum communication. The ...

Posters All poster presentations will take place on Monday, June 12, 2023, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. EDT, or Tuesday, June 13, 2023, from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. EDT at the Baltimore Convention Center, Exhibit Hall E, Level 100.   Abstract 4-M (Monday) Avoiding Clinical Inertia: Comparing Time to Intensification of Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) Receptor Agonists in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Among Clinical Pharmacists versus Providers Clinical pharmacists have a significant impact on medication optimization and reduction ...

Niigata, Japan - The Department of Neurology at Niigata University has developed a new in silico method for evaluating the pathogenicity of missense variants using AlphaFold2 (MOVA). Rare variants in the causative gene of ALS are present in 10-30% of sporadic ALS cases, which highlights the need for accurate and efficient pathogenicity prediction methods. To predict the pathogenicity of the variants, in silico analysis methods are commonly used. In some ALS causal genes, the mutations are concentrated in specific regions, and the accuracy of pathogenicity prediction can be improved by considering the positional information of the variants. ...