In a new study, participants tended to judge faces appearing against backgrounds featuring houseplants or bookcases as more trustworthy and competent than faces with a living space or a novelty image behind them. Gender and facial expression also appeared to influence judgments. Research led by Paddy Ross, Abi Cook  and Meg Thompson at Durham University, UK is publishing in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 27, 2023. Prior research has demonstrated that first impressions can make a real difference in people’s lives; for example, ...

People who are less socioeconomically advantaged have lower life expectancies, with a number of possible underlying mechanisms, such as less ability to spend on healthcare or the psychological effects of economic inequality. Prior research also shows that many households struggle to financially prepare for old age. However, few researchers have explored whether forward-thinking financial decision making is itself associated with lower risk of death. To address this potential link, Gladstone and Hundtofte analyzed data spanning a 22-year period for 11,478 older people living in the US and ...

Male and female Olympic shooters perform equally well when targets are stationary, though men have the edge for moving targets, per analysis of 2021 Tokyo Olympics which trialed mixed-gender events. #### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0291017 Article Title: Do women and men compete equally on a level playing field? An empirical investigation into the 2021 Olympic shooting competitions Author Countries: USA, Spain Funding: The authors received no specific ...

In February, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the Turkey-Syria border, followed by one nearly as large nine hours later. Shallow faults less than 18 miles beneath the surface buckled and ruptured, causing violent focused quakes that leveled thousands of buildings and killed tens of thousands. Similar shallow faults ruptured about 1,000 years ago in the Puget Lowlands in western Washington, according to new University of Arizona-led research. Tree rings helped pinpoint that the seismic event occurred in late A.D. 923 or ...

Tuberculosis is old—ancient even. The infectious bacterial disease that plagued Old Testament Israelites and took down pharaohs was eventually stunted by vaccinations, antibiotics, and public health measures like isolation, but it hasn’t been cured yet. More than a million people around the world still die from TB every year. Now, a Boston University-led research team has found a way to tweak immune cells to better fight the disease and—with the right backing and funding—they say it could ...

Two nationally recognized experts in cloning and stem cell science from the University of Houston, Wa Xian and Frank McKeon, are reporting that five lung stem cell variants dominate the lungs of patients with advanced cystic fibrosis (CF), and that these variants drive key aspects of CF pathology including inflammation, fibrosis and mucin secretion.      Cystic fibrosis is an inherited and progressive disease that causes long-lasting lung infections and limits the ability to breathe. It is caused by a defect in a gene called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator ...

WASHINGTON (September 27, 2023) - New research led by the George Washington University finds that current mitigation efforts to combat distrust online may not be effective because organizations and governments tackling distrust are only targeting one topic and only one geographical scale. The study shows that online distrust has become a ‘glocal’ phenomenon, meaning that it is spreading with different topics lumped together and mixing both local and global interests.  “The key takeaway here is that distrust ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – While many studies have investigated the neuroscience behind how an animal learns to achieve a goal, such as obtaining water when thirsty, none have understood how animals choose between several competing needs – until now. A Cornell University-led study, published Sept. 27 in the journal Nature, used advanced techniques developed by researchers to track the brain’s dopamine reward system and found – for the first time ­– this system flexibly retunes toward the most important goal when faced with multiple competing needs. In the study, when a lonely and thirsty male zebra finch encountered a female, his thirst waned and ...

Dr. Vanessa Bellat, an assistant professor of chemistry in radiology and an affiliate of the Molecular Imaging Innovations Institute (MI3) at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded a $2 million, four-year R37 MERIT grant from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. She will be developing a new therapeutic approach using nanofibers that selectively deliver drugs to the lungs to treat metastatic tumors and testing it in preclinical models. These fibers are made from peptide chains (building blocks that make up proteins) and have a unique 2-dimensional single ...

Protecting large areas of land from human activity can help stem the tide of biodiversity loss, especially for vertebrates like amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds, according to a new study in Nature. In particular, vertebrate population declines were five times slower in conservation areas compared to animals living in areas not protected from development or conversion to agricultural use. “Protected areas take us from a situation in which biodiversity is ebbing away to one where populations are at least close to stable,” said Luke Frishkoff, coauthor of the study and assistant professor of biology at The University of Texas at Arlington. ...

An international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks. At the European XFEL X-ray laser, the researchers have created a much more precise pulse generator based on the element scandium, which enables an accuracy of one second in 300 billion years – that is about a thousand times more precise than the current standard atomic clock based on caesium. The team presents its success in the journal Nature. Atomic clocks are currently the world’s ...

HOUSTON – (Sept. 27, 2023) Rice University computer scientists have won two grants from the National Science Foundation to explore new information processing technologies and applications that combine seamlessly co-designed hardware and software to allow for more effective and efficient data stream analysis using pattern matching. Initiated by a Rice seed grant, the projects address the limitations of current computing infrastructure’s ability to process complex, unstructured data streams. A $1.2 million award will ...

MEMPHIS, Tenn., Sept. 27, 2023 –  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® and Domino’s®, the largest pizza company in the world, today unveiled The Domino’s Village, a multi-million dollar housing facility for patients and their families. The six-story building that provides more than 307,000 square feet of residential and recreational space was funded by Domino’s as part of a 10-year, historic $100 million commitment to St. ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (09/27/2023) — Kristen Mark, PhD, with the University of Minnesota Medical School, received a $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to enhance the quality of life for individuals with disabilities in Tanzania through a new project. The research team will train future healthcare providers like nurses, doctors and midwives with the skills and confidence to offer comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare services for people with disabilities. “Through doing this research, we will improve the lives of people with disabilities in Tanzania and build in-country capacity ...

Hepatic fibrosis occurs when scar tissue replaces damaged cells in the liver. Over time, accumulating scarring distorts the liver, interferes with its blood supply and may progressively lead to worsening consequences, from cirrhosis to liver failure to liver cancer. In advanced cases, the only treatment is an organ transplant.     In a new paper, published online in the journal Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, a team of scientists led by corresponding authors David A. Brenner, ...

Scientists have long understood that parts of cells, called organelles, evolved to have certain shapes and sizes because their forms are closely related to how they function. Now, Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a bacteria-based tool to test whether, as the axiom goes, form follows function. The tool, which researchers say may someday have practical applications in treating illness, works by precisely targeting and dismantling the outer membrane surrounding organelles, and is being made freely available to other scientists. In an interesting twist, say the researchers, the tool may also be able to dismantle aggregated proteins in cells that ...

  Media contacts:   Abby Manishor amanishor@burness.com  Allison Eatough aeatough@umd.edu   EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL   Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 12:01am ET     New Study Finds Children of Color and from Low-Income Families Are Exposed to More Toxic Chemicals and Experience Greater Harm Landmark research review is the first to examine disparities in neurotoxic exposures and the harmful effects of those exposures on children by race, ethnicity, and economic status WASHINGTON, D.C., September 27, 2023—Children from families with low incomes and families of color are exposed to more neurotoxic ...

About The Study: Depressive symptoms were greater in locales and times with diminished community mobility in this survey study with 192,000 respondents. Strategies to understand the potential public health consequences of pandemic responses are needed.  Authors: Roy H. Perlis, M.D., M.Sc., of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is the corresponding author.   To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.34945) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In a study of 619 high-risk young adults in Ontario, Canada, individuals using cannabis frequently pre-legalization showed significant reductions in use and consequences over time, reflecting an aging out pattern. Small increases in use among participants with no pre-legalization use were observed over time, but without parallel changes in cannabis-related consequences. The results did not reveal substantive adverse near-term outcomes across the legalization period, although a within-participants design cannot rule out the possibility of alternative trajectories in the absence of legalization.  Authors: Amanda Doggett, ...

In recent months, several media outlets have investigated an Oregon law that decriminalized possession of small amounts of controlled substances, including heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, for some persons.  The articles have included information suggesting that the law may be responsible for continued increases in overdose deaths. Today, new research led by NYU Grossman School of Medicine published online in JAMA Psychiatry suggests that in Oregon and Washington, two states that implemented drug decriminalization policies ...

Stanford Medicine investigators and their colleagues sifted through a jumble of genes implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders and identified dozens of disparate troublemakers with similar effects. Because the method they used sorts defective genes by their function — or in this case, their dysfunction — the approach is likely to accelerate drug development for neurodevelopmental disorders. Studies have implicated at least 500 genes in such disorders. But scientists have no idea exactly how defects in most of these genes impair brain function. The ...

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that explores the properties and interactions of iparticles at very small scale, such as atoms and molecules. This has led to the development of new technologies that are more powerful and efficient compared to their conventional counterparts, causing breakthroughs in areas such as computing, communication, and energy.   At the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), researchers at the Quantum Systems Unit have collaborated with scientists from the University ...

The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, made famous by the first picture of a black hole shadow, has yielded another first: the jet shooting out from the black hole has been confirmed to wobble, providing direct proof that the black hole is spinning. Super massive black holes, monsters up to billions of times heavier than the Sun that eat everything around them including light, are difficult to study because no information can escape from within. Theoretically, there are very few properties that we can even hope to measure. One property that might possibly be observed is spin, but due to the difficulties involved there have been no direct ...

The nearby radio galaxy M87, located 55 million light-years from the Earth and harboring a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun, exhibits an oscillating jet that swings up and down with an amplitude of about 10 degrees, confirming the black hole's spin. The study, which was headed by Chinese researcher Dr. CUI Yuzhu and published in Nature on Sept. 27, was conducted by an international team using a global network of radio telescopes. Through extensive analysis of telescope data from 2000­–2022, the research team revealed a recurring 11-year cycle in the precessional motion of the jet base, as predicted ...

Engineers at MIT and in China are aiming to turn seawater into drinking water with a completely passive device that is inspired by the ocean, and powered by the sun.  In a paper appearing today in the journal Joule, the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.  The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger “thermohaline” circulation of the ocean. This circulation, ...