DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers at Duke University have implemented a quantum-based method to observe a quantum effect in the way light-absorbing molecules interact with incoming photons. Known as a conical intersection, the effect puts limitations on the paths molecules can take to change between different configurations. The observation method makes use of a quantum simulator, developed from research in quantum computing, and addresses a long-standing, fundamental question in chemistry critical to processes such as photosynthesis, vision and photocatalysis. It is also an example of ...

Before heading to work each day, most people have spent the night dreaming. Studies show that on any given morning, about 40 percent of the working population recalls their dreams. New research from the University of Notre Dame shows that when dreams are first recalled, people often draw connections between their dreams and waking lives, and the connections they draw alter how they think, feel and act at work. “A Spillover Model of Dreams and Work Behavior: How Dream Meaning Ascription Promotes Awe and Employee Resilience” is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Journal from lead author Casher Belinda, assistant professor ...

In the innovation economy, individuals with STEM PhDs are a critical source of human capital, with nearly 60 percent of PhDs in STEM fields— such as engineering, chemistry and biology—being employed outside of universities. These  students are increasingly contributing to commercial science through patenting. New research from MIT Sloan School of Management and Copenhagen Business School investigated the training of these PhD students to better understand the pipeline and preparation of new inventors.    Conducted by Fiona Murray, MIT Sloan professor and associate dean for Innovation and Inclusion, ...

Four new innovators recently joined Chain Reaction Innovations (CRI), the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory, as part of the program’s seventh cohort.  Each innovator will collaborate with a host scientist at Argonne while embedded full-time at the laboratory. Innovators plan to develop clean energy startups that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase U.S. competitiveness in emerging energy technologies. The ...

An international research team including the University of Göttingen has described seven previously unknown species of leaf insects, also known as walking leaves. The insects belong to the stick and leaf insect order, which are known for their unusual appearance: they look confusingly similar to parts of plants such as twigs, bark or – in the case of leaf insects – leaves. This sophisticated camouflage provides excellent protection from predators as well as presenting a challenge to researchers. Genetic analysis enabled the researchers to discover “cryptic species”, which cannot be distinguished by their external appearance alone. The findings are not only ...

Contact: Maria Ober, 617-224-8963, mpober@bu.edu Preparing Clinicians for the International Anti-LGBTQI+ Crisis Medical community should build systems that are responsive to this population (Boston)—Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and additional sexual and gender minority (LGBTQI+) people in every region of the world face marginalization and oppression. At least 67 countries ban sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex. According to a report from the ...

FINDINGS A UCLA-led study found treatments that reduce the risk of being diagnosed with a cancer recurrence based on rising prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels after radiotherapy, commonly referred to as biochemical recurrence, do not necessarily improve a patient’s long-term overall survival. The team of investigators found that while biochemical recurrence was associated with a higher risk of death, it still did not meet the criteria to be a reliable surrogate endpoint for overall survival. As defined by the FDA, a clinical outcome directly measures whether people in a trial feel or function better, or live ...

National news coverage from the two largest broadcast outlets, CNN and Fox News, not only reflects growing political polarization in America, but in a recent publication, researchers at Virginia Tech have shown that partisan and inflammatory broadcast coverage has increased over time and can exacerbate growing divides in the new public square of social media. Collaborative insights Eugenia Rho is assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science with a background in political science and a passion for ...

Fat is a normal and necessary part of the body. Fat cells store and release energy, as well as play significant roles in hormonal regulation and immunity. In recent decades, a concerning rise in metabolic illnesses – such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and diabetes – has focused scientific attention on the biology and chemistry of fat, resulting in a wealth of information about how fat cells work. But fat cells and their metabolic activities are only part of the story. Fat-filled lipid droplets, tiny spheres ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) earned a Power of Associations Gold Award from the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) for its successful Trainee Professional Development Award (TPDA) program. ASAE’s Power of Association awards celebrate and promote the invaluable contributions that associations make within the U.S. and globally through catalytic initiatives focused on professional advancement, global development, diversity and inclusion practices, advocacy, and community support and engagement.  In operation since 2015, the TPDA program recognizes undergraduate and graduate ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- The mosquito-borne infectious disease malaria resulted in about 241 million clinical episodes and 627,000 deaths in 2020. In young children and pregnant women living in areas where the disease is endemic, a major cause of death is Plasmodium falciparum, the most virulent, prevalent, and deadly human malaria parasite. Scientists are keen to understand the mechanisms that regulate gene expression through the different stages of P. falciparum’s lifecycle because such knowledge can ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code for higher performance. There are many different programming ...

Aug. 28, 2023 Images ANN ARBOR—University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the same cellular mechanism involved in a form of cystic fibrosis is also implicated in a form of a rare disease called cystinosis. The mechanism cleans up mutated proteins. In cystinosis, a genetic disease, this allows cystine crystals to build up in the cell. This disrupts the cell, and eventually, tissues and ultimately organs, particularly the kidneys and the eyes. The problem begins when the lysosome, an organelle within the cell, is unable to ...

“Every successful medicine has its origin story. And research like this is the soil from which new drugs are born,” says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Vakoc. For six years, Vakoc’s lab has been on a mission to transform sarcoma cells into regularly functioning tissue cells. Sarcomas are cancers that form in connective tissues like muscle. Treatment often involves chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation—procedures that are especially tough on kids. If doctors could transform cancer cells into healthy cells, it would offer patients a whole new treatment option—one that could spare them and their families a great deal of ...

The Dansgaard-Oeschger events are rapid Northern-Hemisphere temperature jumps of up to 15°C in Greenland that repeatedly occurred within a few decades during the last ice age. “These events are the archetype of abrupt climate changes and further increasing our understanding of them is crucial for more reliable assessments of the risk and possible impacts of future large-scale climate tipping events”, says Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Technical University of Munich, one of the authors of the study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS. In the ...

A major red tide event occurred in waters off Southern California in the spring of 2020, resulting in dazzling displays of bioluminescence along the coast. The spectacle was caused by exceedingly high densities of Lingulodinium polyedra (L. polyedra), a plankton species renowned for its ability to emit a neon blue glow. While the red tide captured the public’s attention and made global headlines, the event was also a harmful algal bloom. Toxins were detected at the height of the bloom that had the potential to harm marine life, and dissolved oxygen levels dropped to near-zero as the extreme biomass of the red tide decomposed. This lack of oxygen led to fish die-offs ...

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 27 Aug 2023: Intravascular imaging-guided percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is associated with a lower rate of target lesion failure compared with angiography-guided PCI, according to late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2023.1   Numerous randomised trials have compared intravascular imaging-guided PCI with angiography-guided PCI. However, most of these prior trials have used intravascular ultrasound (IVUS). Optical coherence ...

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 27 Aug 2023: Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is as effective and safe as conventional thermal ablation for the treatment of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (AF), according to late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2023.1   ESC guidelines recommend catheter ablation after failure of drug therapy in patients with paroxysmal AF.2 Conventional ablation technology uses thermal energy (either heat/radiofrequency energy or cold/cryothermal energy) to ablate the tissue. Unlike thermal ablation, PFA uses high energy electrical pulses to destroy tissue by a process called electroporation. Preclinical ...

Mazin To Study Ab Initio Engineering Of Doped-Covalent-Bond Superconductors  Igor Mazin, Professor of Practice for Advanced Studies in Theoretical Physics, Quantum Materials Center, Physics and Astronomy, is set to receive funding for the project: "Collaborative research: Ab Initio Engineering of Doped-Covalent-Bond Superconductors."  This EAGER award will support a joint computational and theoretical effort to guide the search for practical superconducting materials.   Superconductors carry electrical current without any resistance when cooled down below a certain material-dependent ...

Marasco Bridging Chemistry & AI-Empowered Imaging For Secure & Trustworthy Human Identity Verification  Emanuela Marasco, Assistant Professor, Center for Secure Information Systems, received funding for the project: "EAGER: SaTC: Sweaty Digits: Bridging Chemistry and AI-Empowered Imaging for Secure and Trustworthy Human Identity Verification."  Marasco seeks to characterize a person's extrinsic and intrinsic features for a more accurate representation of their identity by exploiting selected compounds ...

COS Researchers Transitioning Training Dataset Labeling Tool To Support Discoveries In Earth Science & Heliophysics  Chaowei Yang, Professor, Director, NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center, Geography and Geoinformation Science, and Jie Zhang, Professor, Physics and Astronomy, received funding for the project: "Transitioning a Training Dataset Labeling Tool (TDLT) to Support Discoveries in Earth Science and Heliophysics."  The researchers are creating a generalizable training dataset labeling tool for both Earth and heliophysics by ...

For years, scholars, advocates and journalists have highlighted the ongoing racism and segregation in the housing market, yet a segment of the housing market — government-subsidized housing — has been overlooked, until now. A new study from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and other institutions is the first in decades to investigate racial inequality in the subsidized housing market. Using restricted 2017 American Housing Survey data provided by the U.S. Department ...

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 27 Aug 2023: A randomised trial involving all hospitals in London, UK, has found no difference in survival at 30 days in patients with resuscitated cardiac arrest in the community who were taken by ambulance to a cardiac arrest centre compared with those delivered to the geographically closest emergency department. That’s the finding of late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2023.1 The study also found no overall difference in neurological outcomes at discharge and at three months between groups.   Sudden ...

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 27 Aug 2023: Acoramidis improves outcomes in patients with transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) compared with placebo, according to late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2023.1   ATTR-CM is a rare, progressive, and fatal disease characterised by the accumulation of misfolded transthyretin protein in the heart. It causes an infiltrative, restrictive cardiomyopathy resulting in clinical heart failure, usually with preserved ejection fraction. Previously, the ATTR-ACT trial of tafamidis in ATTR-CM demonstrated ...

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 27 Aug 2023: Women with breast cancer are set to be enrolled in a clinical trial examining the ability of behavioural and psychological interventions to reduce the heart damage from anti-cancer therapies. The innovative CARDIOCARE project is being conducted by a consortium of European partners including the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).   The latest updates from the project will be discussed on the ESC TV stage during ESC Congress,1 with further information provided in the Exchange ...