How long can trees tolerate drought before the forest dies? Researchers from UC Davis can now predict which forests could survive despite future drought. Their new method links precipitation to tree growth, and it can help people decide where to put their resources as climate change affects patterns of snow and rainfall that impact the health of forests. “If a forest is doing OK, but in the future we know it’s likely to get only half the average rainfall it used to get, we can calculate the likelihood ...

As part of an innovative prison reform program, the Oregon State Penitentiary created a healing garden on its grounds to provide some respite from the concrete and resemble the outside world. One incarcerated man who had spent most of the past two decades in solitary confinement described going to the garden as, “the first time I walked on grass in 20 years.”  “Many of us have found beauty in weeds and flowers growing through the cracks in the pavement,” he told UC San Francisco researchers, who helped institute and then evaluated the reforms. “There is both beauty and inspiration in knowing that we, ...

Quantifying Counterfactual Military History probes whether historic battles and military interventions could have turned out quite differently Oxford, U.K., 30 August 2023 – Statistical methods can evaluate whether pivotal military events, like the Battle of Jutland, American involvement in the Vietnam war or the nuclear arms race, could’ve turned out otherwise, according to a new book. Military historical narratives and statistical modelling bring fresh perspectives to the fore in ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Recently, when customers began complaining that their vehicles with driver-assistance technologies were “phantom braking” or slamming on the brakes without any visible obstacles present, researchers at Michigan State University wanted to learn more about this phenomenon — why it happens and how to stop it. “Frequent phantom braking incidents can erode confidence in autonomous driving technologies,” said Qiben Yan, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering. “If riders perceive the technology as unpredictable or unreliable, they’ll be less likely to embrace it.” Autonomous vehicles have a vision system, ...

Late preterm infants, or infants born between 34 and 36-6/7 weeks gestation, are the majority of infants born preterm, and are at greater risk for academic delays compared to full term infants. Certain factors, including a low level of maternal education, prenatal tobacco use, twins/multiple gestation and male sex increased the risk for deficits in math and reading by kindergarten for late preterm infants, a new study finds. However, sensitive parenting and preschool enrollment are two possible ways to counter the risk of being born late preterm, and to promote academic resilience. “Our findings highlight an opportunity for pediatric providers to offer prevention strategies ...

A multidisciplinary team lead by University of Texas at Arlington mathematics Assistant Professor Souvik Roy is on a mission to improve medical imaging using a new technique called quantitative photoacoustic tomography (QPAT).A multidisciplinary team lead by University of Texas at Arlington mathematics Assistant Professor Souvik Roy is on a mission to improve medical imaging using a new technique called quantitative photoacoustic tomography (QPAT). QPAT is an imaging modality that combines ultrasound, which is an imaging technique that uses sound waves to image features inside ...

Astronomers have uncovered a link between Neptune's shifting cloud abundance and the 11-year solar cycle, in which the waxing and waning of the Sun's entangled magnetic fields drives solar activity. This discovery is based on three decades of Neptune observations captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as data from the Lick Observatory in California. The link between Neptune and solar activity is surprising to planetary scientists because Neptune is our solar system's farthest major planet and receives sunlight with about 0.1% ...

A University of Massachusetts Amherst biomedical engineer has used a nanogel-based carrier designed in his lab to deliver a drug exclusively to the liver of obese mice, effectively reversing their diet-induced disease. “The treated mice completely lost their gained weight, and we did not see any untoward side effects,” says S. Thai Thayumanavan, distinguished professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. “Considering 100 million Americans have obesity and related cardiometabolic disorders, we became pretty excited about this work.”  Efforts ...

UC Davis MIND Institute Director Leonard Abbeduto is calling for a major shift in the way research into autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities is conducted. He co-authored a paper titled “Toward Equity in Research on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities” that was the basis for a special issue of the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. The issue was published today.   Abbeduto, a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, argues that researchers ...

New research shows that wild swings from severe drought to heavy rains are becoming more common with climate change in many parts of the world and that feedback loops from the land itself are likely contributing to the trend. The research looked at four decades of meteorological and hydrological data on a global level and found seven regional hotspots around the world where the trend was getting worse: eastern North America, Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, southern Australia, southern Africa, and southern South America. “We are especially concerned with the sudden shift from drought to flood,” said coauthor Zong-Liang Yang, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin Jackson ...

A few days ago, the federal government took the controversial decision to make the acquisition and possession of small amounts of cannabis exempt from punishment. Provided the German parliament approves the draft bill, the “Cannabis Act” will come into force next year. While some consider this move to be long overdue, others continue to warn strongly against the health risks of cannabis use. The Jena researchers and their colleagues are now taking a different look at cannabis – at the traditional medicinal ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $24 million in funding for three collaborative projects in quantum network research. Scientific research infrastructure linked with quantum networks is needed to realize distributed quantum computers. These quantum computers could simulate complex scientific processes inaccessible to computational platforms of today, integrate quantum sensors that promise measurements of unprecedented precision, and address previously inaccessible scientific questions of importance. “Advances in quantum networking are enabling effective interconnections ...

Developmental and epileptic encephalopathy (DEE) refers to a group of neurodevelopmental conditions characterized by developmental delay, cognitive impairment, and seizures in children. In 2016, the first case linking variants in both the copies of UBA5 gene to DEE44 was reported. Since then, twelve distinct missense variants in the UBA5 gene have been identified in 25 patients. A recent study by Dr. Hugo J. Bellen and his team at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI) at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of ...

INDIANAPOLIS—An Indiana University School of Medicine statewide project in collaboration with Indiana University Health was recently funded to support people living with dementia as well as their family care partners find more support and resources, thanks to a new $686,000 grant from the National Institute on Aging IMPACT Collaboratory. The Aging Brain Care Virtual program will be the first study to test dementia collaborative care in Indiana University Health primary care. The project will utilize the ...

WACO, Texas (Aug. 29, 2023) – Hot flashes are one of the most concerning and most reported symptoms among menopausal women and breast cancer survivors. Currently, paroxetine is a FDA-approved non-hormonal drug used for the treatment of hot flashes. In an article published this month in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers at Baylor University tested the efficacy of paroxetine by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of six clinical trials, finding that the benefits of paroxetine in the treatment of hot flashes to be comparable to that of the placebo response. The study included information ...

Media Contacts: Emily Gowdey-Backus, director of media relations Nancy Cicco, assistant director of media relations   More than a dozen medical studies from around the globe show women suffer worse outcomes when diagnosed with and treated for cardiac issues – the No. 1 killer in the world according to the Centers for Disease Control.   The discrepancy, as summarized by UMass Lowell biomedical and nutritional sciences Associate Professor Mahdi O. Garelnabi of the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences and colleagues from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Lebanese American ...

MISSOULA – Researchers at the University of Montana and their partners are nearing human trials for vaccines to prevent fentanyl and heroin drug overdoses. The vaccines would protect people struggling with drug addiction or those at risk of accidental overdose. According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 106,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths were reported in 2021. Of those, 71,000 can be attributed to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Researcher Jay Evans directs the UM Center for Translational Medicine, which is ...

Researchers at the Babraham Institute are proposing an alternative link between diet and ageing based on studies in yeast. Dr Jon Houseley and his team have published their experiments, showing that healthy ageing is achievable through dietary change without restriction by potentially optimising diet, and that ill-health is not an inevitable part of the ageing process. Scientists have long known that caloric restriction - intentionally consuming far less calories than normal without becoming malnourished - improves health in later life and may even extend life. However, studies in mice show that caloric restriction really needs to be maintained ...

Here’s a climate solution we can all get behind: don’t kill elephants. Or poach gorillas – or wipe out tapirs, hornbills, or other large-bodied wildlife that eat fruit and disperse large seeds. That’s because a new paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that overhunting of these species makes forests less able to store or sequester carbon. The authors describe their results in the journal PLOS Biology. The authors found that many of the mammals and birds targeted by illegal and commercial hunting are fruit eaters that disperse large seeds from tree ...

Surgery of the thyroid and parathyroid glands is most challenging, even to expert surgeons. These relatively small structures located in the neck are in contact with each other and share certain features, including color and tactile feel, making it difficult to visually identify them. “In procedures to remove the thyroid, for example, inadvertent parathyroid removal occurs in up to 25% of cases. When removing parathyroid glands, a common cause of unsuccessful procedures is the failure to localize and resect the diseased parathyroid tissue, as thyroid nodules and lymph nodes can be mistakenly identified as parathyroid tissue,” said co-corresponding author Dr. James Suliburk, ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 29, 2023) Personal devices feed our sight and hearing virtually unlimited streams of information while leaving our sense of touch mostly … untouched. A wearable, textile-based device developed by Rice University engineers could help declutter, enhance — and, in the case of impairments — compensate for deficiencies in visual and auditory inputs by tapping this underused sensory resource. “Technology has been slow to co-opt haptics or communication based on the sense of touch,” said Barclay Jumet, a mechanical engineering PhD student who is the lead author on a study published in Device. “Of the ...

AI-powered triage platform could aid future viral outbreak response New Haven, Conn. —A team of researchers from Yale University and other institutions globally has developed an innovative patient triage platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that the researchers say is capable of predicting patient disease severity and length of hospitalization during a viral outbreak. The platform, which leverages machine learning and metabolomics data, is intended to improve patient management and help health care providers allocate resources more efficiently during severe viral outbreaks that can quickly overwhelm local health care systems. Metabolomics ...

Smoking and firearms are among the leading causes of avoidable premature death in the United States. In 2021, 480,000 deaths in the U.S. were attributable to tobacco and more than 40,000 to firearms – both are legal yet lethal. A new study from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine, and collaborators, now reveals geographically distinct areas of the highest death rates in the U.S. related to cigarettes as well as firearms, including both assault and suicide over two decades.  Results, published online ahead of print in the peer-reviewed journal Preventive Medicine, show all three measures – smoking, firearm-related assault and firearm-related ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Staff and scientific users at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility need all kinds of electronics to do their jobs, including computers, smartphones, printers and more. But instead of buying just any laptop off the shelf, the lab takes care to buy devices that meet sustainability standards when possible. During a virtual ceremony on July 27, the Global Electronics Council presented Jefferson Lab with a 2023 EPEAT Purchaser Award for buying sustainable electronics in fiscal year 2022. These devices meet ...

When infants are involved in agonistic conflicts, male crested macaques (Macaca nigra) are more likely to respond to screams from their own offspring. This is the conclusion of a recent study led by behavioural ecologist Professor Anja Widdig from Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig as part of the Macaca Nigra Project (MNP). The researchers studied the behaviour of crested macaques in the Tangkoko Nature Reserve on Sulawesi, Indonesia, over a 24-month period (2008 to 2010). A special issue of the “International ...