Acylceramides and protein-bound ceramides are vital for the formation of the oral barrier in mice, similar to their role in skin, protecting from infection. The skin is the body’s first line of defense against the environment, particularly against pathogens, chemicals, and allergens. It is now known that a class of biological molecules called acylceramides and their metabolites, protein-bound ceramides, are essential to the formation of this barrier. The outermost tissues of the mouth are closely related to the skin and have similar functions—an oral barrier. However, little ...

Washington, DC—Our planet’s water could have originated from interactions between the hydrogen-rich atmospheres and magma oceans of the planetary embryos that comprised Earth’s formative years, according to new work from Carnegie Science’s Anat Shahar and UCLA’s Edward Young and Hilke Schlichting. Their findings, which could explain the origins of Earth’s signature features, are published in Nature. For decades, what researchers knew about planet formation was based ...

About The Study: In this randomized clinical trial, postoperative follow-up for patients undergoing breast reconstruction and gynecologic oncology surgery using smartphone app–assisted monitoring led to improved quality of recovery and equal satisfaction with care compared with conventional in-person follow-up. Authors: Claire Temple-Oberle, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 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/jamasurg.2023.0616) Editor’s ...

Substance use disorder affects 20 million Americans, and more than 100,000 people died from a drug overdose in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the medication methadone has the strongest evidence-based effectiveness to prevent relapse, about half of patients drop out of their treatment within one year of initiation. The solution could lie in taking a simple “sugar pill” or placebo along with the methadone, according to a randomized clinical trial led by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In a randomized ...

Liver cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death and the sixth most common cancer type worldwide. Major risk factors include environmental and metabolic stressors, such as obesity, viral hepatitis and steatohepatitis (fatty and inflamed liver). These stressors damage the liver by killing hepatocytes, the major cell type in the liver. The cell death then triggers an inflammatory response which signals the liver to generate a new batch of hepatocytes. But this sudden push towards cellular proliferation also increases the risk of tumor formation. In ...

A clinical trial that breaks new ground with its dramatically streamlined design and unusually broad eligibility criteria is now opening and available to patients with stage 4 or recurrent non-small cell lung cancer at cancer treatment clinics all across the United States.  The S2302 Pragmatica-Lung trial, developed and led by the SWOG Cancer Research Network, a clinical trials group funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is designed to be easier for institutions to open and run and with few limits on eligibility, making it available to a larger group of patients with advanced non-small cell lung ...

Yin-Yang theory is an ancient Chinese philosophy in which Yin-Yang forces are interdependent and work in opposition to each other to create balance. Recently, inspired by this ancient theory, a research team led by Prof. GUO Xin and Prof. LI Can from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has revealed the origin of the stability of Dion–Jacobson (DJ) phase two-dimensional (2D) perovskite materials. Their findings were published in Joule on April 12. DJ 2D perovskites, a class of organic–inorganic ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Human skin is home to millions of microbes. One of these microbes, Staphylococcus aureus, is an opportunistic pathogen that can invade patches of skin affected by eczema, also known as atopic dermatitis. In a new study, researchers at MIT and other institutions have discovered that this microbe can rapidly evolve within a single person’s microbiome. They found that in people with eczema, S. aureus tends to evolve to a variant with a mutation in a specific gene that helps it grow faster on the skin. This study marks ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA [April 12, 2023] — The NCCN 2023 Annual Conference took place in-person in Orlando and virtually, with a particular focus on human connection. That connection was underscored with more than 2,000 registrants from across the continuum of cancer care, including approximately 1,000 who returned in-person for the first time since 2019. Educational sessions highlighted the importance of ensuring care meets the latest standards while also rejecting a one-size-fits-all approach. “At NCCN, we don’t shy away from difficult discussions; we want our conference attendees to take away the message that ...

Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, today announced that it has successfully discovered a potent, selective, and orally bioavailable small molecule inhibitor of CDK8 for the treatment of cancer using a structure-based generative chemistry approach enabled by the Chemistry42 multi-modal generative reinforcement learning platform. The research was published in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, a leading journal in medicinal chemistry. As members of the CDK family, CDK8 and its paralog protein CDK19 play critical roles in regulating transcription of ...

Have you ever wondered why some insects like cockroaches prefer to stay or decrease movement in darkness? Some may tell you it’s called photophobia, a habit deeply coded in their genes. A further question would be whether we can correct this habit of cockroaches, that is, moving in the darkness just as they move in bright backgrounds. Scientists from Osaka University may have answered this question with a positive answer. They solved this question by converting a cockroach into a cyborg. They published this research in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.                  ...

SAN ANTONIO — April 12, 2023—Southwest Research Institute will contribute to a new NASA institute to improve understanding and enable rapid certification of metal parts created using advanced additive manufacturing (AM) techniques. The Institute for Model-based Qualification & Certification of Additive Manufacturing (IMQCAM) will work to improve computer models of additively manufactured metal parts and expand their utility in spaceflight applications. Additive manufacturing uses 3D printing or rapid prototyping to build ...

Physicians and scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) will join oncology experts and members of the global cancer research community to present the latest advances in cancer during the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting on April 14-19 in Orlando, Florida. MSK experts will present significant research and will be available to comment on topics including cancer disparities, analytical tools for precision medicine, genomic biomarkers, tumor biology, immunology and more. Deb Schrag, MD, MPH, will offer insights ...

Roland Martin, MD, a world-class neurologist and investigator, is the winner of the 2023 John Dystel Prize for MS Research. He is being honored for advancing our understanding of immune mechanisms underlying multiple sclerosis and translating them to develop innovative strategies to treat the disease. Martin uncovered how key MS susceptibility genes are involved in launching immune attacks on the nervous system and identified specific components of nerve-insulating myelin that are targeted by those attacks. His team has developed an experimental therapy designed to make ...

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the fourth most common cancer and accounts for 11% of the cancer burden in Thailand in 2020, with over 21,000 new CRC cases annually, and stage III and IV CRC account for up to 70%–80% of overall CRC cases, according to the Society of Colorectal Surgeons of Thailand. This report indicates Thailand has a high percentage of respondents (62.1%) who feel they lack CRC information to assess their risk, far higher than global average of 51.5%. In addition, 48.2% of Thais say that cost concerns are holding them back from CRC screening, way higher than global average of ...

First study to do apples-to-apples comparison of residential treatment use among Medicaid enrollees across several states Nine states represent 14.9 million people (20% of all Medicaid enrollees) CHICAGO --- Approximately 7 million adults in the U.S. are living with opioid use disorder (OUD). Yet a new Northwestern Medicine study that measured residential treatment use among Medicaid enrollees across nine states found only 7% of enrollees with OUD received residential treatment, an integral part of the recovery process ...

Researchers from NC State University and Texas A&M University published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines membership fee shipping programs and the effect on consumers’ purchase behaviors and company net revenue. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “The Effectiveness of Membership-Based Free Shipping: An Empirical Investigation of Consumers’ Purchase Behaviors and Revenue Contribution” and is authored by Fangfei Guo and Yan Liu. What is the top reason 50% of customers abandon items in online shopping carts? Why do e-commerce brands incur an annual revenue loss of about ...

Whether wriggling your toes or lifting groceries, muscles in your body smoothly expand and contract. Some polymers can do the same thing — acting like artificial muscles — but only when stimulated by dangerously high voltages. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a series of thin, elastic films that respond to substantially lower electrical charges. The materials represent a step toward artificial muscles that could someday operate safely in medical devices. Artificial muscles could become key components of movable soft robotic implants and functional artificial organs. Electroactive elastomers, such as bottlebrush polymers, are attractive ...

Developing and testing new treatments or vaccines for humans almost always requires animal trials, but these experiments can sometimes take years to complete and can raise ethical concerns about the animals’ treatment. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed a new testing platform that encapsulates B cells — some of the most important components of the immune system — into miniature “organoids” to make vaccine screening quicker and greatly reduce the number of animals needed. Vaccines ...

Single-use hard plastics are all around us: utensils, party decorations and food containers, to name a few examples. These items pile up in landfills, and many biodegradable versions stick around for months, requiring industrial composting systems to fully degrade. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering have created a sturdy, lightweight material that disintegrates on-demand — and they made it from sugar and wood-derived powders. Watch a video about the material here. Sturdy, degradable materials made from plants and other non-petroleum sources have come ...

Early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease requires reliable and cost-effective screening methods. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now discovered that a type of sugar molecule in blood is associated with the level of tau, a protein that plays a critical role in the development of severe dementia. The study, which is published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, can pave the way for a simple screening procedure able to predict onset ten years in advance. “The role of glycans, ...

The ancestors of modern mammals managed to evolve into one of the most successful animal lineages – the key was to start out small and simple, a new study reveals. In many vertebrate groups, such as fishes and reptiles, the skull and lower jaw of animals with a backbone are composed of numerous bones. This was also the case in the earliest ancestors of modern mammals over 300 million years ago. However, during evolution the number of skull bones was successively reduced in early mammals around 150 to 100 million years ago.   Publishing their findings today ...

In 1918, the American chemist Irving Langmuir published a paper examining the behavior of gas molecules sticking to a solid surface. Guided by the results of careful experiments, as well as his theory that solids offer discrete sites for the gas molecules to fill, he worked out a series of equations that describe how much gas will stick, given the pressure. Now, about a hundred years later, an “AI scientist” developed by researchers at IBM Research, Samsung AI, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has reproduced a key part of Langmuir’s Nobel Prize-winning work. The system—artificial intelligence ...

Researchers of the Genome Dynamics Project team at Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science ·revealed new mechanism controlling cellular proliferation in response to serum, which triggers growth of resting cells.   One of the key pathways for cellular growth is the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) –mTOR (mechanistic/mammalian target of rapamycin) pathway. mTOR regulates the cellular response to nutrient availability. Dysregulation of the mTOR signaling pathway is intimately involved in many human diseases, especially the multitude of different human cancers. This ...

Since the 1950s, humanity has produced an estimated 8.3bn tons of plastic, adding a further 380m tons to this amount each year. Only 9% of this gets recycled. The inevitable result is that plastic is everywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the summit of Everest – and notoriously, inside the tissues of humans and other organisms. The long-term effects of ingested plastic on people aren’t yet known. But in rodents, ingested microplastics can impair the function of the liver, intestines, and exocrine and reproductive organs. Especially ...