When it comes to height, our fate is sealed along with our growth plates—cartilage near the ends of bones that hardens as a child develops. Research publishing April 14 in the journal Cell Genomics shows that cells in these plates determine the length and shape of our bones and can hint at our stature. The study identified potential "height genes" and found that genetic changes affecting cartilage cell maturation may strongly influence adult height. "The study is really understanding ...

Associate Professor Jonathan Boreyko leads a team at Virginia Tech that has built a strong portfolio of work with ice and water, exploring the possibilities for de-icing planes, building novel water harvesting devices, and creating snow globes out of bubbles. This familiarity with water has given the team a strong sense of its behavior in different states, leading to a new project that shows how ice quenches heat in comparison to water. The findings were published in Chem on April 14. Mojtaba Edalatpour and master’s student Camryn ...

Chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, HIV infection, and mental illness may be greatly undertreated in the U.S. jail and prison population, suggests a new study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. For their analysis, the researchers used national health survey data covering 2018 to 2020 to estimate rates of chronic conditions among recently incarcerated people, and a commercial prescription database to estimate the distribution of medication treatments to the jail and prison population. Their analysis suggests ...

About The Study: In a study of matched pairs of counties that reopened with in-person versus virtual instruction at the secondary school level in the 2020 to 2021 academic year, counties with in-person school instructional models early in the COVID-19 pandemic experienced increases in county-level COVID-19 incidence at six and eight weeks after in-person reopening, compared with counties with virtual instructional models.  Authors: Meredith Matone, Dr.P.H., of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of survival outcomes for 1,618 U.S. counties suggest that greater representation of Black primary care physicians (PCPs) in the PCP workforce is associated with improved survival-related outcomes for Black individuals, although there was a dearth of U.S. counties with at least one Black PCP during each study time point. Investments to build a more representative PCP workforce nationally may be important for improving population health.  Authors: John E. Snyder, M.D., M.S., M.P.H., and Rachel D. Upton, Ph.D., of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Maryland, are the corresponding ...

About The Study: In this study of 81,755 Medical College Admission Test examinees, American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic students reported lower parental educational levels, greater educational and financial barriers, and greater discouragement from pre-health advisers than white students. These barriers may deter groups underrepresented in medicine from applying to and matriculating at medical school.  Authors: Jessica Faiz, M.D., M.S.H.P.M., of the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and UCLA in Los Angeles, is the corresponding ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) experts have been challenged to help a new space mission to investigate Earth’s place in the universe. The Ariel Data Challenge 2023, which launches on 14 April, is inviting AI and machine learning experts from industry and academia to help astronomers understand planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.  Dr Ingo Waldmann, Associate Professor in Astrophysics, UCL (University College London) and Ariel Data Challenge lead said:  “AI has revolutionised many fields of science and industry in the past years. The field of exoplanets has fully arrived in the era of big-data and cutting edge AI is needed to break ...

The researchers of the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities of Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia, Europe) developed the DigiAudit platform to monitor and analyse energy use and indoor climate indicators of buildings and large real estate portfolios in real time. Thinnect, an Estonian IoT start-up company, will help sell the solution and market it worldwide.  We can only reach zero-emission buildings when we have reliable data The European Union has set a target for all buildings to be zero-emission, or near-zero energy, by 2050. However, there is no reliable data on the energy consumption of many buildings, so it is not possible to monitor the condition ...

Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Turku, and Tampere University have developed an artificial intelligence-based method for virtual staining of histopathological tissue samples as a part of the Nordic ABCAP consortium. Chemical staining has been the cornerstone of studying histopathology for more than a century and is widely applied in, for example, cancer diagnostics. “Chemical staining makes the morphology of the almost transparent, low-contrast tissue sections visible. Without it, analysing tissue morphology is almost impossible for human vision. Chemical staining is irreversible, and in most ...

Québec City, April 14, 2023 - Fuchs' endothelial corneal dystrophy, a degenerative eye disease, causes progressive vision loss that can induce blindness. It is the leading cause of corneal transplantation, but the scarcity of grafts hinders its treatment. A research team from Université Laval and Université de Montréal has identified a way to slow the disease and even avoid transplantation if diagnosed at an early stage.  In people with the disease, the endothelial cells at the back of the cornea die more quickly than in healthy people. "Everyone loses them at a slow rate, slow enough to make it to the end of our lives ...

A new study published in the journal PeerJ by Robert W. Boessenecker (CofC), Brian L. Beatty (NYIT), and Jonathan H. Geisler (NYIT) reports a wealth of new fossils of the early toothed baleen whale Coronodon from Oligocene (23-30 million years old) rock layers near Charleston, South Carolina. These include five new skulls, representing two new species: Coronodon planifrons and Coronodon newtonorum, and young juveniles of Coronodon havensteini – first named from a single skull by this team in 2017. Coronodon is one of the most primitive members ...

While the wheel does not need to be reinvented, there are benefits to the development of new nano-wheels, according to a multi-institute research team based in China. The group fabricated a novel family of metallic compounds, each of which exhibit unique properties desirable for next-generation technologies, such as advanced sensors.   Their findings were made available online on March 12 in Polyoxometalates.   “Polymetallic complexes are of great interest not only for their appealing molecular structure but also ...

There is a need for new drugs. For example, many of the antibiotics that we have been using for a long time are becoming less effective. Chemists and pharmaceutical scientists are frantically searching for new active substances, especially those that can penetrate cell membranes, as these are the only ones that patients can take orally in the form of a tablet or syrup. Only these active ingredients pass through the intestinal wall in the small intestine and enter the bloodstream to reach the affected area in the body. For active ingredients that cannot penetrate the cell membrane, physicians have no choice but to inject them directly into ...

Cancers are notoriously known for their high mortality rate and increasing incidence worldwide. Among them, lung cancer is arguably one of the most devastating ones. According to the World Cancer Research Fund International, lung cancer was the second most common cancer around the world in 2020, with more than 2.2 million new cases and 1.8 million deaths.   However, lung cancer, like other cancers, is easier to treat if caught earlier. “The reported 1-year survival rate for stage V is just 15% to 19% compared with 81% to 85% for stage I, which means that the early ...

Chemotherapy is associated with an increased risk of treatment-related heart damage, including heart failure and cerebrovascular disease, for many patients. But a new meta-analysis, presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Advancing the Cardiovascular Care of the Oncology Patient 2023 conference, finds that Black patients or patients of African ancestry have 71% higher odds of cardiotoxicity following cancer treatment compared to White patients. Cardiotoxicity is any heart damage stemming from cancer treatment or drugs, including ...

WASHINGTON—On World Quantum Day, Optica Publishing Group announced it will begin publishing a new journal in September 2023 dedicated to highly selective results in quantum information science and technology (QIST).  The new journal, Optica Quantum, joins the Society’s portfolio of the most-cited journals in optics and photonics and will provide the community with articles of the same exceptional standards for quality, novelty, and significance as its parent journal, Optica. The concept of quantum light serves as a foundation for many quantum technologies and ongoing ...

The alnus ambrosia beetle Xylosandrus germanus, also known as the black stem borer, was accidentally introduced by humans from its native east Asia to North America and Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. X. germanus is a so-called ambrosia beetle, which means that it farms its own food: a specialized fungal symbiont which it ‘sows’ and tends inside the galleries that it digs inside wood. It is a destructive invasive pest, known to attack more than 200 species from 51 families of broadleaf and conifer trees. While it prefers to colonize dead ...

The demand for precious metals and rare earths is expected to continue increasing in the future. Due to limited production areas, recycling from precision equipment and recovering from seawater and hot spring water are needed to ensure a stable supply. A research group led by Professor Masayuki Azuma and Associate Professor Yoshihiro Ojima of the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Engineering has successfully developed an adsorbent material that can selectively recover rare earth elements (REEs) using environmentally friendly and inexpensive baker’s yeast and trimetaphosphate, which is used as a food additive. The research group conducted experiments using ...

**Note: the release below is from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID 2023, Copenhagen, 15-18 April). Please credit the conference if you use this story** Did the recent mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) outbreak end because of “network immunity”?  That’s the theory being put forward by Belgian researchers at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April). 2022 saw a global outbreak of mpox, a viral ...

Peer-reviewed / Observational study / People The Lancet Public Health: Hearing aids may protect against a higher risk of dementia associated with hearing loss, study suggests Study of 437,704 people suggests those experiencing hearing loss and not using hearing aids may have a higher risk of dementia than people without hearing loss. Those using hearing aids did not appear to be at an increased risk of dementia. After adjusting for other factors, study analysis suggests a 1.7% risk of dementia in people with hearing loss who are not using hearing aids, compared to 1.2% among those without hearing loss ...

*Note: this is a joint press release from the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) and The Lancet Infectious Diseases.  Please credit both the congress and the journal in your stories* Since September, 2022, bivalent mRNA vaccines – which contain elements from both the original wild type COVID strain and an updated component from the omicron strain – have replaced older style monovalent boosters in the USA, Israel, and other countries. These vaccines were designed to help improve vaccine-induced immunity against the omicron variant and subsequent subvariants. A new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases and ...

Adding fuel to The University of Texas at Austin’s startup engine, alumnus William “Billy” Freed, BBA ’81, and his family have given $1 million to the Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center in the McCombs School of Business. The gift establishes the Freed Family Entrepreneurship Excellence Fund and endows the Freed Family Pitch Competition, previously called DisrupTexas. Freed’s wife Cheryl, BA ’82, JD ’84; sons Tyler, BS ’17, and Russell, BBA ’21; and daughter-in-law Leslie Lugrin Freed, BS ’17, ...

How can Marvel movie character Ant-Man produce such strong energy out of his small body? The secret lies in the “transistors” on his suit that amplify weak signals for processing. Transistors that amplify electrical signals in the conventional way lose heat energy and limit the speed of signal transfer, which degrades performance. What if it were possible to overcome such limitation and make a high-performance suit that is light and small but without loss of heat energy?   A POSTECH team of Professor Kyoung-Duck Park and Yeonjeong Koo from the Department of Physics and a team from ...

PITTSBURGH, April 13, 2023 – In a paper published today in Molecular Psychiatry, a team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with researchers in Italy described shared patterns of sleep disturbances and irregularities in daily rhythms of rest and activity across patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, or SSD. By using wrist monitors that measured activity and rest as proxies of wakefulness and sleep, researchers found that individuals with SSD who resided in psychiatric hospitals and those who manage their condition in outpatient settings had erratic sleep patterns, dysregulated transitions between sleep ...

A stop smoking mobile app that senses where and when you might be triggered to light up could help people quit – according to University of East Anglia research. Quit Sense is the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) stop smoking app which detects when people are entering a location they used to smoke in. It then provides support to help manage people’s specific smoking triggers in that location. Funding for the Quit Sense app has come from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Medical Research Council. A study published today shows how the new ...