A new compound developed at the University of Illinois Chicago potentially could offer an alternative to injections for the millions of people who suffer from an eye condition that causes blindness. Wet age-related macular degeneration causes vision loss due to the uncontrolled growth and leakage of blood vessels in the back of the eye. A new paper in Cell Reports Medicine led by UIC researcher Yulia Komarova finds that a small-molecule inhibitor can reverse damage from AMD and promote regenerative and healing processes.  The drug can also be delivered via eyedrops — an improvement over current ...

Graduate Suraj Sudera created an AI powered grill to cook the perfect steak. His love of engineering led him to create the device called Perfecta™ He founded Birmingham based start-up SEERGRILLS which applies AI and advanced technologies to improve cooking.   An Aston University engineering graduate has created the world’s first AI powered grill. Suraj Sudera has created a cooking device called Perfecta™ which cooks the perfect steak in 90 seconds. Suraj graduated from Aston University in 2015 with a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and ...

INDIANAPOLIS— A breast cancer researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center received a five-year, $2.2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to examine how certain immune cells support metastatic breast cancer development—and how to stop it. Cells called macrophages usually perform essential tasks as part of the immune system, but breast cancer cells can hijack them to protect cancer cells and help them grow. When this happens, they become tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs). “Our goal is to interrupt that communication process between those two cell ...

SAN DIEGO, October 3, 2023 — Using previously taken diagnostic computed tomography (CT) scans in place of CT simulation scans to plan simple palliative radiation treatments can substantially reduce the time some people spend waiting for urgent treatment, improving the patient experience, a new study suggests. Patients who may benefit from this expedited process typically are experiencing pain or other debilitating symptoms, such as an airway blockage. Relying upon existing, recent scans instead of taking new ones reduced the time these patients spent at a cancer treatment center, from nearly five hours to under 30 minutes, ...

New findings may take scientists a step closer to understanding what causes SUDEP—Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy—a rare but fatal complication of epilepsy.  There are about 3,000 deaths from SUDEP each year in the U.S. The biggest risk factor is epilepsy that is not well controlled with medication or surgery, but the exact cause of SUDEP is not known. However, increasing evidence suggests that loss of breathing, or apnea, that persists after a seizure is a major cause of SUDEP.  In the new study, University of Iowa neuroscientists found that stimulating a specific ...

Using laboratory-grown cells from humans and genetically engineered mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have evidence that modifying a specific protein in immune white blood cells known as CD8+ T cells can make the cells more robust, potentially opening the door for better use of people’s own immune system T cells to fight cancer. The findings were published Oct. 3 in the journal JCI-Insight. “Maximizing the effectiveness of T-cell-based therapies remains a critical challenge,” says David Kass, M.D., Abraham and Virginia Weiss Professor of Cardiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of ...

Crop modification can be traced to the beginning of agriculture and human civilization. Native Americans, for example, developed corn from a wild grass called teosinte more than 7,000 years ago. Methods to increase crop resiliency and sustainability have evolved, and improved, over time. Biotechnology, or the use of biology to develop new products and organisms, is an application that holds great promise for impactful changes to the agricultural systems. Through this method, the DNA in plant cells is modified — for instance ...

Washington, D.C. – Registration is open for the 34th National Science Bowl® (NSB), hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. Thousands of students compete in the contest annually as it has grown into one of the largest academic math and science competitions in the country. Teams – four or five students and a teacher who serves as a coach – can sign up to participate in the NSB by registering with the coordinator for their regional competition. Details can be found on the NSB registration page. The competition is divided into two categories: high school and middle school. Regional competitions typically last one or two days ...

Individual neighbourhoods will be intimately involved in providing local solutions to collective problems. One measure will be distributed renewable energy production — energy produced at local levels, either by solar technology, wind or other methods, will push cities to achieve their net-zero targets. However, even these power-generating neighbourhoods will remain vulnerable to power outages resulting from natural disasters such as hurricanes, fires or floods. And all of these are likely to become increasingly common due to the effects of climate change. ...

The increasingly urgent climate crisis has led to a boom in commercial tree plantations in an attempt to offset excess carbon emissions. However, authors of a peer-reviewed opinion paper publishing October 3 in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution argue that these carbon-offset plantations might come with costs for biodiversity and other ecosystem functions. Instead, the authors say we should prioritize conserving and restoring intact ecosystems. “Despite the broad range of ecosystem functions and services provided ...

CINCINNATI—Until the COVID-19 pandemic exploded, few people outside of research labs and intensive care units had heard of a cytokine storm. But once this dangerous form of infection-triggered runaway inflammation started claiming lives by the thousands, a legion of scientists jumped into the hunt for ways to calm these storms. Now, a study led by immunobiology experts at Cincinnati Children’s, offers important new details on how two elements of our body’s immune system clash with each other to prompt a chain of reactions that can release deadly floods of cell-killing, organ-damaging ...

About The Study: The results of this meta-analysis indicate that adherence to continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) was associated with a reduced major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular event recurrence risk, suggesting that treatment adherence is a key factor in secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with obstructive sleep apnea. Authors: Ferran Barbé, M.D., of the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Respiratorias (CIBERES) in Madrid, is the corresponding author. To access the ...

Spending on mental health services for children and adolescents has risen by more than one-quarter since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing to rise even as the use of telehealth plateaued, according to a new RAND Corporation study.   Spending on mental health for people aged 19 and younger rose by 26% from March 2020 to August 2022 among a large group whose families have employer-provided insurance. During the same period, use of mental health services increased by 22%.   The study found that use of telehealth for pediatric patients increased more than 30-fold during the early months of the pandemic and remained ...

Key takeaways  A tool for evaluating the overall cost of a surgical procedure, called a scorecard, helps reduce costs of surgical procedures between 5% and 20% without adversely affecting clinical outcomes.   Further implementation of scorecards may move surgeons toward energy-efficient operating rooms, which are the largest hospital producer of emissions and waste.    CHICAGO (October 3, 2023): Surgical scorecards, a tool that gives direct feedback ...

About The Study: After comparing mental health care service utilization and spending rates for children and youths with commercial insurance across three periods from January 2019 through August 2022, this study found differences between periods as well as different rates of change within each period for both visit types (in-person and telehealth), even after accounting for state and patient sex. Utilization and spending increased over the entire timeframe. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorders, and adjustment disorder accounted for most visits and spending in all phases. Authors: Mariah ...

About The Study: This study found an increasing trend in psychotropic medication dispensation among Swedish children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes from 2006 to 2019, persistently higher than those without type 1 diabetes. These findings call for further in-depth investigations into the benefits and risks of psychotropic medications within this population and highlight the importance of integrating pediatric diabetes care and mental health care for early detection of psychological needs and careful monitoring of medication use. Authors: Shengxin ...

WILMINGTON, Del. (October 3, 2023) – Many children and adolescent girls diagnosed with an ovarian mass may be able to avoid ovary removal and its lifelong consequences with the use of a consensus-based risk stratification algorithm. Algorithm use helps doctors gauge the patient’s risk of a malignancy and guides preoperative decision making, according to a new multi-institutional study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Researchers at 11 U.S. children’s hospitals ...

Device can manipulate which organ is driving a disease to study its downstream effects   Can serve as intermediate step between animal studies and clinical trials to test new drugs ‘We wanted to make it as easy as using a smartphone’ Imagine a device smaller than a toddler’s shoebox that can simulate any human disease in multiple organs or test new drugs without ever entering — or harming — the body.  Scientists at Northwestern University have developed this new technology — called Lattice — to study interactions between up to eight unique organ tissue cultures (cells from a human ...

New Discoveries in the Development of Alzheimer's Disease in a Study led by Professor Michael Glickman and Dr. Inbal Maniv from the Faculty of Biology at the Technion were Published in Nature Communications. Alzheimer's disease was named after the German researcher Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who first described it in 1906. The disease is characterized by the degeneration and death of nerve cells, processes that lead to a progressive impairment of cognitive abilities. It occurs typically in adults over the age of 65, but a small percentage of all Alzheimer's patients are hereditary cases that affect younger ...

The ability to have access to the Internet or use a mobile phone anywhere in the world is taken more and more for granted, but the brightness of Internet and telecommunications satellites that enable global communications networks could pose problems for ground-based astronomy. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign aerospace engineer Siegfried Eggl coordinated an international study confirming recently deployed satellites are as bright as stars seen by the unaided eye. “From our observations, we learned that AST Space Mobile’s BlueWalker 3—a constellation prototype satellite featuring a ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A new artificial intelligence (AI) model combines imaging information with clinical patient data to improve diagnostic performance on chest X-rays, according to a study published in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Clinicians consider both imaging and non-imaging data when diagnosing diseases. However, current AI-based approaches are tailored to solve tasks with only one type of data at a time. Transformer-based neural networks, a relatively new class of AI models, have the ability to combine imaging and ...

A two-phase NIH grant will fund research into a new CRISPR-based gene therapy platform that will target genetic brain diseases like Angelman syndrome and H1-4 (HIST1H1E) syndrome. A roughly $40 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant awarded to Yale School of Medicine will support the development of a gene-editing platform technology capable of reaching the human brain. The innovative new genome-editing technology, which was developed from the first phase from NIH Common Fund Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) program, could potentially lead to treatments or cures for many neurogenetic diseases. Neurogenetic disorders ...

When scientists viewed the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest galaxies, they were shocked. The young galaxies appeared too bright, too massive and too mature to have formed so soon after the Big Bang. It would be like an infant growing into an adult within just a couple years. The startling discovery even caused some physicists to question the standard model of cosmology, wondering whether or not it should be upended. Using new simulations, a Northwestern University-led ...

Van Andel Institute’s Nick Burton, Ph.D., has earned a five-year, nearly $2.9 million New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health Common Fund to find new ways to fix or prevent insulin resistance, a key driver of Type 2 diabetes.   Although manageable with treatment, there currently is no way to repair the underlying mechanisms that cause the disease. Furthermore, it remains unclear why some people are more prone to Type 2 diabetes while others are resistant. To find a solution, Burton ...

SAN ANTONIO — October 3, 2023 —A new study led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Planetary Scientist and Associate Vice President Dr. Alan Stern posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are similar enough to suggest a common origin. The SwRI study suggests that these “building blocks” could guide further work on planetesimal formational models. Stern presented these findings this week ...