KINGSTON, September 13, 2023 – A group of international astronomers, including researchers from Queen’s University, has identified two potential polar ring galaxies, according to results published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Queen’s researchers Nathan Deg and Kristine Spekkens (Physics, Engineering Physics & Astronomy) led the analysis of data obtained using a telescope owned and operated by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Looking at ...

A new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B used environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding to analyze fish and zooplankton communities. The study found that the movement of water between freshwater bodies, or freshwater connectivity, can transport eDNA. This highlights the potential of eDNA to provide a comprehensive view of freshwater biodiversity.  Aquatic ecosystems are connected by waterways, which allow fish, plants, and other organisms to move from one place to another. This connectivity is important for the resilience of aquatic populations, but it can also make it difficult ...

Fires that raged in the days following the 1 September 1923 magnitude 7.9 Kantō earthquake killed roughly 90% of the 105,000 people who perished in and around Tokyo, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in history—comparable to the number of people killed in the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The story of the conflagration, not well-known outside of Japan, holds important lessons for earthquake scientists, emergency response teams and city planners, according to a new paper published ...

A new study by researchers from the University of Bath (UK) and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico) shows that flowering plants escaped relatively unscathed from the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Whilst they suffered some species loss, the devastating event helped flowering plants become the dominant type of plant today. There have been several mass extinctions in the Earth’s history, the most famous caused by an asteroid hit 66 million years ago, which has steered the course of life on Earth profoundly. The ...

*Note- this is an early release from the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) meeting in Hamburg, October 2-6. Please credit the meeting if you use this story* New research to be presented at this year’s Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Hamburg, Germany (2-6 October) shows that, following a heart attack, there have been falls in the death rates of both people without diabetes and those with type 2 diabetes, but not those with type 1 diabetes. The study is by Dr Linn ...

The University of Alberta (U of A), a globally recognized leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, along with Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute), are breaking new ground with the launch of "Artificial Intelligence Everywhere," a new online introductory course accessible to all U of A undergraduates. The course is the cornerstone for an in-development AI certification, which will be one of the first in Canada. The course equips students across all disciplines with essential AI literacy skills. With AI permeating sectors from health care to finance, this initiative bridges the AI skills ...

Lene Andersen, MSW, has been living with rheumatoid arthritis and disability since childhood. Her personal experience with limited mobility and the challenges faced in accessing mammography screening in Toronto, Ontario, has fueled her determination to advocate for change. Her story is featured in an upcoming themed issue of the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences on the topic of specialized populations, published by Elsevier. In this personal narrative, Lene, an advocate and accessibility consultant, teamed up with Natasha Batchelor, MHSc, MRT(R), a medical imaging technologist from the York region in Ontario with expertise in creating an accessible mammography ...

The eye is a highly complex organ, composed of intricate structures combining several types of specialized tissues. Under normal conditions, these structures work seamlessly together to provide clear images of the world around us as well as maintain intraocular pressure. However, when ocular diseases set in, the biomechanical properties of eye components change, disrupting their normal functioning. Most importantly, the alternations in biomechanical properties of the eye often lead to significant ocular diseases and vision loss. In order to study, diagnose, and monitor ocular diseases, it is, therefore, ...

https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.15212/AMM-2023-0023 Announcing a new publication for Acta Materia Medica journal.  Activation of simulator of interferon genes (STING), which induces the production of proinflammatory factors and immune effector cell activation, is considered a promising strategy for enhanced anti-cancer intervention. However, several obstacles prevent STING signaling in solid tumors, such as delivered molecules’ rapid degradation, restriction to tumor sites, insufficient intracellular concentrations, and low responsivity. ...

NJIT biology professor Eric Fortune and a team of scientists, known as “Team Waponi”, have reached the final stage of the five-year, $10M XPRIZE Rainforest Competition. In June, Fortune and 13 other team members traveled to the rainforests of Singapore to compete in the semi-finals of the global competition, which challenged teams to develop and demonstrate new technologies for mapping the vast biodiversity of the world's tropical forests. The team’s biodiversity sampling device, called “Limelight”, has captured exactly that so far — securing them a spot among six finalists to advance from the field of 13 teams, while earning ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are taking fast charging for electric vehicles, or EVs, to new extremes. A team of battery scientists recently developed a lithium-ion battery material that not only recharges 80% of its capacity in 10 minutes but keeps that ability for 1,500 charging cycles.   When a battery operates or recharges, ions move between electrodes through a medium called the electrolyte. ORNL’s Zhijia Du led a team who developed new formulations of lithium salts with carbonate solvents to form an electrolyte that maintains better ion flow over time and performs well when high current heats up the battery ...

September 12, 2023 — Since the 1980s, we have known that neurological soft signs (NSS) can distinguish people with schizophrenia from psychiatrically healthy individuals. NSS are subtle neurological impairments that principally manifest as decreased sensory integration (trouble receiving and responding to information transmitted to the brain through the senses) and difficulties with balance, rapid successive movements, and right–left orientation.  NSS doesn't always cause impairment of daily living, but identifying them could improve the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia and enhance understanding of the ...

East Hanover, NJ – September 12, 2023 – Carly Wender, PhD, associate research scientist in the Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research at Kessler Foundation received a three-year $725,499 grant from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for her study, “A Novel Combinatory Approach to Maximize Functional Recovery of Learning and Memory in Multiple Sclerosis.” Cognitive impairment is a common symptom in individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) that can be particularly ...

While life expectancy rates for older Americans are rising, nearly 40% of adults report living with a digestive disease of some kind. “Many people don’t realize that these conditions are very common in ambulatory care,” said Michigan Medicine gastroenterologist Shirley Ann Cohen-Mekelburg, M.D., who specializes in conditions like inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. “Ultimately, this creates an excess in health care spending in the United States. Not only are these conditions debilitating for the millions of people living with them, ...

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has awarded the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a five-year, $13 million grant to bring together experts from multiple disciplines across five research institutions to create better vaccines against current as well as emerging coronaviruses.  The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has infected 280 million people and caused more than five million deaths worldwide since late 2019. While considerable progress has been made to develop interventions (i.e., monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, vaccines) to treat and prevent COVID-19, ...

In the ever-perilous autoimmune disease world of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE or lupus), up to 60% of adult patients and 80% of children will develop lupus nephritis (LN), and up to half of those will move on to end-stage renal disease. LN occurs when the immune system wrongly attacks the kidneys, preventing them from doing their job, i.e., cleaning blood, balancing body fluids and controlling hormones that impact blood pressure.  Unfortunately, the most precise way to diagnose LN hasn’t been ...

“The molecular mechanisms that mediate enhanced dysfunction of white matter parenchymal arterioles when vascular dysfunction and ADNC coincide remain elusive.” BUFFALO, NY- September 12, 2023 – A new editorial paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 16, entitled, “Microvascular contributions to white matter injury in Alzheimer’s disease.” In their new editorial, researchers Zsolt Bagi, ...

Since its inception in 2021, the African BioGenome Project (AfricaBP), has made significant gains towards its ambitious goal of sequencing 100,000 endemic African species within the next 10 years. Recently, AfricaBP reported the successful implementation of the Open Institute in the journal Nature Biotechnology (https://rdcu.be/dlXYT), a pioneering biodiversity genomics and bioinformatics knowledge exchange programme. The AfricaBP Open Institute’s framework will establish openly accessible workshops across Africa, crafted in close collaborations with local African Institutions. ...

The Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) is offering science journalists the opportunity for a paid three-month "Journalist in Residence“ program starting in April 2024. Applications are open until Oct. 31, 2023. The Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg – in the immediate vicinity of Vienna – is a Ph.D.-granting research institute. Opened in 2009, the Institute is dedicated to basic research in the natural sciences, mathematics and computer sciences. It has a total of 1000 employees and 75 different research ...

An article published in NPJ Aging, a Springer Nature journal, reveals that natural production of auto-antibodies increases with age and that infection by SARS-CoV-2 can exacerbate production of auto-antibodies relating to auto-immune diseases, helping to explain why aging increases the chances of developing severe COVID-19. The study also discovered some of the factors that associate the severe form of the disease with blood clotting disorders such as thrombosis. “These findings open the door to a better ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – In the summer of 2018, graduate student Hunter Dean from the Medical Scientist Training Program came to Yuhua Song, Ph.D., with a research idea. He wanted to pursue his doctoral research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in Alzheimer’s disease — under the joint mentorship of Song, who had never worked in Alzheimer’s, and Erik Roberson, M.D., Ph.D., an Alzheimer’s expert in the UAB Department of Neurology and the Center for Neurodegeneration and Experimental Therapeutics, or CNET. That collaboration brought Song, a professor in the UAB Department of ...

Today, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®)—an alliance of leading cancer centers—presented new recommendations for screening and addressing health-related social needs (HRSN) in people with cancer during a policy summit in Washington, D.C. The event included a keynote address from Ellen Lukens, Deputy Administrator and Director, The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), and other speakers representing a diverse group of patient advocates, providers, and policymakers. The new recommendations for measuring and addressing HRSNs were ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — September 12, 2023 — More than 40% of Americans say nursing homes are unsafe and 7 in 10 say they would be uncomfortable ever having to be admitted to one even if they needed such care, while more than six in 10 (61%) feel similarly anxious about the prospect of admitting family members, according to the latest survey from West Health and Gallup.     Safety was a particular area of perceived concern; 41% of respondents say nursing homes are not safe, 26% say they are, and about a third say they don’t know. Notably, the survey found that people over 35 were much ...

An abstract unveiling a new mouse model for brain arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) developed by UTHealth Houston researchers has been selected for a poster presentation at the second annual National Institutes of Health (NIH) Investigator Meeting for Interoception Research in November. Eunsu Park, PhD, assistant professor in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, will present the abstract at the meeting, hosted by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on Nov. ...

Perovskite solar cells should be subjected to a combination of stress tests simultaneously to best predict how they will function outdoors, according to researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Solar cells must endure a set of harsh conditions—often with variable combinations of changing stress factors—to judge their stability, but most researchers conduct these tests indoors with a few fixed stressing conditions. While these tests provide some necessary insight, understanding which stressor applied during indoor tests provided predictive correlations ...