Investigators found and catalogued mysterious RNA circles that are linked to brain cell identity Findings show that circular RNA is produced by brain cells damaged in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease Circular RNA production from one Parkinson’s gene DNAJC6 was abnormal even prior to symptom onset Researchers are gaining new insights into neurological diseases by studying circular RNAs (circRNAs) in brain cells. A new study by investigators from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General ...

A new study published in a Nature Partner Journal, npj Microgravity, finds an engineered compound given to mice aboard the International Space Station (ISS) largely prevented the bone loss associated with time spent in space. The study, led by a transdisciplinary team of professors at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, highlight a promising therapy to mitigate extreme bone loss from long-duration space travel as well as musculoskeletal ...

Javier Ramón Azcón, an ICREA research professor and the leader of the Biosensors for Bioengineering group at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), has been granted an "ERC Proof of Concept Grant." This prestigious grant is awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) and aims to explore the commercial and societal potential of research projects that have been previously funded by the ERC. Recipients use this type of funding to verify the practical viability of scientific concepts, explore business opportunities or prepare patent applications. Ramón's project has been named "Uniink" and centers ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – As smoke from Canada's historic wildfires triggers poor air quality alerts across the country, many parents worry about the impact on their child’s health, a new national poll suggests. Two-thirds of parents say over the past two years they have experienced at least one day with poor or unhealthy air quality in their area, according to the University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. In response to poor air quality alerts, most parents kept their windows closed and limited ...

It's no longer just about stopping, but how we can live with climate change. To figure this out, we must delve into our cultures, as highlighted in a special issue of The Royal Society. A study by the Complexity Science Hub points out how our history could help guide the way. Currently, we are grappling with a global crisis convergence. Various types of threats intersect, intertwine, and test our collective resilience, from climate change and economic inequality to political polarization. Although the scale and global reach of these challenges present new hurdles, these threats have been faced and, sometimes, overcome in the past. Societies today ...

All animals have an internal clock called a circadian clock, which is regulated by cues from their environment — but animals in zoos can be exposed to very different cues from animals in the wild. Since all animals’ circadian clocks are linked to their behavior and physiology, this could be significant to their welfare, which is crucial to maintaining captive populations of animals at high risk of extinction in the wild, like giant pandas. Scientists set out to understand how the ‘jet lag’ of living ...

Developed in 2011, MXene is a two-dimensional nanomaterial with alternating metal and carbon layers, which has high electrical conductivity and can be combined with various metal compounds, making it a material that can be utilized in various industries such as semiconductors, electronic devices, and sensors. To properly utilize MXene, it is important to know the type and amount of molecules covered on the surface, and if the molecules covered on the surface are fluorine, the electrical conductivity of decreases and the efficiency of electromagnetic wave shielding decreases. However, since it is only 1 nm (nanometer - billionth of a meter) thick, ...

Researchers from the University of Waterloo completed the first-ever assessment of a Canadian hospital to reveal its total environmental footprint and specific carbon emission hotspots. Studying a hospital in British Columbia during its 2019 fiscal year, the researchers identified energy and water use and purchasing of medical products as the hospital’s primary hotspots, accounting for over half of the yearly footprint, totalling 3500-5000 tons of CO2 equivalent. One hospital bed is roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of five Canadian households.  The new method brings an unprecedented level of comprehensiveness and detail to hospital ...

The early treatment of obesity in children is effective in both the short and long term, researchers from Karolinska Institutet report in a study published in The International Journal of Obesity. The researchers followed over 170 young children in Sweden who had received treatment for diagnosed obesity. The children were recruited to the randomised controlled study when they were between four and six years old via children’s clinics in Region Stockholm.  The children and their parents were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: standard treatment, parental support group, or parental support group with follow-up telephone ...

In a sign that exposure to certain endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be playing a role in cancers of the breast, ovary, skin and uterus, researchers have found that people who developed those cancers have significantly higher levels of these chemicals in their bodies. While it does not prove that exposure to chemicals like PFAS (per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances) and phenols (including BPA) led to these cancer diagnoses, it is a strong signal that they may be playing a role and should be studied further. The study showed that particularly for women, higher ...

Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat presents evidence and theories around collapse and extinction, while locating the responsibility of museums in our changing world   Stressors like climate trauma, corporate deceit and political incompetence signal the threat of societal collapse, a new book asserts. This claim lays the foundation for exploring arguments of ‘collapsology’ in new work by Robert R. Janes Ph.D., Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat. The book also contends with the unique role that can be played by museums during a mounting climate crisis. “Social ...

(18 September 2023, Athens, Greece) A novel study has shown that Senolytics, a new class of drugs, have the potential to prevent the transfer of senescence*, a key mechanism of ageing, and the associated physical and cognitive impairments in recipients of older donor organs. 1 The pioneering research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, opens promising avenues for expanding the organ donor pool and enhancing patient outcomes. By transplanting older donor organs into younger ...

Barcelona, Spain: If doctors in hospital emergency departments are trained to carry out ultrasound on patients with suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT), they can nearly halve the time the patients spend in these departments.   Dr Ossi Hannula, an emergency medicine specialist at the Wellbeing Services County of Central Finland, Jyväskylä, Finland, who presented the findings at the European Emergency Medicine Congress today (Monday), said his findings could help to reduce overcrowding in emergency departments ...

Imagine coming-to, jaws gripping the top of a swaying blade of grass, unaware of how you got there. That's the reality for ants infected with the lancet liver fluke, a tiny parasitic flatworm. Liver flukes have a complicated, almost insanely conceived life cycle, which begins with the hijacking of the ant’s brain. The unsuspecting ant climbs up and clamps its powerful jaws onto the top of a blade of grass, making it more likely to be eaten by grazers such as cattle and deer. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant ...

(17 September 2023, Athens, Greece) New research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, demonstrates that neonatal* kidney transplantation can offer a ‘game-changing’ solution to the pressing organ shortage crisis. 1 To assess the feasibility of neonatal organ donation, researchers analysed neonatal mortality in the United States and the long-term development of these kidneys after transplantation as well as the ethical and social considerations surrounding the procedure. 1 The study revealed that out of the 21,000 infants who lost their lives ...

(17 September 2023, Athens, Greece) Islet transplantation significantly reduces the risk of transplantation failure and enhances life expectancy in individuals with type 1 diabetes who undergo kidney transplantation, a new study has revealed. 1 This breakthrough research, presented today at the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) Congress 2023, compared the long-term outcomes of patients with type 1 diabetes who underwent kidney transplantation and received an islet transplantation*, with patients who underwent kidney transplantation and then managed their diabetes with insulin ...

In a recent article published in Volume 3 of the journal Psychoradiology, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University have unveiled the groundbreaking "Attention-CensNet" (A-CensNet), a fusion model that predicts cognitive scores by amalgamating movie-watching functional magnetic resonance imaging (mfMRI) and eye-tracking data. In this model, participants serve as nodes, mfMRI data are translated into node features, and eye-tracking details forge the connections between participants, creating graph edges. By employing ...

Fatty liver disease is a condition characterised by a build-up of fat in the liver and is the most common chronic liver disease that affects over one billion people. Over time, this can lead to complications including cirrhosis, liver failure, liver cancer, and heart health issues. The disease is now known as metabolic (dysfunction) associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD). This is because the disease is now understood to be linked to metabolic factors, such as obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. MAFLD is a multisystem disorder with a heterogeneous disease course and outcomes. This means that it can affect multiple organs, and the course of the disease can vary from person ...

Most artificially intelligent systems are based on neural networks, algorithms inspired by biological neurons found in the brain. These networks can consist of multiple layers, with inputs coming in one side and outputs going out of the other. The outputs can be used to make automatic decisions, for example, in driverless cars. Attacks to mislead a neural network can involve exploiting vulnerabilities in the input layers, but typically only the initial input layer is considered when engineering a defense. For the first time, researchers augmented a neural network’s inner layers with a process involving random noise to improve its resilience. Artificial intelligence (AI) ...

Scientists have used genomics to reveal distinct sexual networks for syphilis transmission, defined geographically or by sexual preference, among a background of wider circulation in England. They also show a presence of drug resistance in the majority of cases. By grouping closely related strains of the bacterium that causes syphilis – Treponema pallidum –, researchers demonstrate how a large number of cases are linked together. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)* sequenced ...

Images Highlights: The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, is investing in machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to accelerate the speed of research and development in nuclear science. Michigan State University researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, are leading five of these new grant projects.   These projects aim to enhance the breadth of FRIB’s activities, covering nuclear physics experiments and theory, as well as particle accelerator operations.   FRIB is a DOE-SC user facility, meaning that these advances will serve ...

The University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center announced today that it has earned a National Cancer Institute “Comprehensive” Cancer Center designation, the highest level of recognition awarded by the NCI. Markey is the first and only center in Kentucky to achieve this designation, and the next-closest Comprehensive Cancer Center is nearly 200 miles from Lexington. There are currently only 72 NCI-Designated Cancer Centers in the country, and 56 of those are Comprehensive Cancer Centers.  As the federal government’s principal ...

Ratings on platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor can greatly impact high-priced New York City restaurants that service tourists, but have less of an effect on restaurants frequented by “locals” outside of tourist areas, according to new Cornell research. “In neighborhoods frequented by ‘locals,’ the advent and expansion of internet-based ratings platforms did not result in greater disparities in restaurant sales despite how ubiquitous they are and how frequently we anecdotally use them,” said Jason Greenberg, associate ...

The feel of a cat’s fur can reveal some information, but seeing the feline provides critical details: is it a housecat or a lion? While the sound of fire crackling may be ambiguous, its scent confirms the burning wood. Our senses synergize to give a comprehensive understanding, particularly when individual signals are subtle. The collective sum of biological inputs can be greater than their individual contributions. Robots tend to follow more straightforward addition, but Penn State researchers have now harnessed the biological concept for application in artificial intelligence (AI) to develop ...

Genetically speaking, we are individuals different from each other because of slight variations in our DNA sequences – so-called genetic variants – some of which have dramatic effects we can see and comprehend, from the color of our eyes to our risk for developing schizophrenia – a debilitating psychiatric condition affecting many millions worldwide. For several years, scientists have studied the entire genomes of thousands of people – called genome-wide association studies, or GWAS – to find approximately 5,000 genetic variants associated with schizophrenia. Now, ...