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 ...

An uptick in fevers detected among children at more than two dozen hospitals in North America during COVID-19 highlights the question whether there are normally more autoinflammatory disorders such as recurrent fevers among children going overlooked in non-pandemic times, according to a new study by researchers including a CDI physician-scientist. The paper “Increase in pediatric recurrent fever evaluations during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in North America” was published by Frontiers in Pediatrics on Aug. 3, and includes Sivia Lapidus, M.D., pediatric rheumatologist, Joseph M. Sanzari Children’s ...

For roughly 80% of breast cancer survivors, treatment doesn’t end with surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Instead, for the next five to 10 years, doctors recommend that they take medication to block sex hormones, which can fuel tumor growth and spark recurrence. The drugs, no doubt, are life-saving: they’ve been shown to cut risk of cancer recurrence by as much as half in patients with hormone receptor-positive tumors (HR+)—the most common form of breast cancer. Yet despite their promised benefits, 40% of patients stop taking them early and a third take them less frequently than directed. New CU ...

WASHINGTON, August 29, 2023 – With their intricate arrangements and dynamic functionalities, proteins perform a plethora of biological tasks by employing unique arrangements of simple building blocks where geometry is key. Translating this nearly limitless library of arrangements into their respective functions could let researchers design custom proteins for specific uses. In Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing, Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology combined attention neural networks, often referred to as transformers, with graph neural ...

We’ve long known that hosts malfunction without their microbiome—whether they are missing key microbial species or are completely microbe free. This malfunctioning is usually explained by the need for microbes to perform unique and beneficial functions, but evolutionary ecologist Tobin Hammer of the University of California, Irvine, is questioning that narrative. In a peer-reviewed opinion article publishing August 29 in the journal Trends in Microbiology, Hammer argues that, in some cases, microbes might not actually be helping their hosts; instead, microbe-free hosts might malfunction because they have evolved an addiction to their microbes. ...

Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas have developed a fabric-based wearable device that “taps” a user’s wrist with pressurized air, silently helping them navigate to their destination. The study, published August 29 in the journal Device, demonstrated that users correctly interpreted which direction the device was telling them to go an average of 87% of the time. Since the wearable embeds most of its control system within the fabric itself, using air instead of electronics, it can be built lighter and more compact than existing designs. “We envision this device will be used by individuals who need or desire information to be transmitted ...

About The Study: The results of this study of 61,000 mother-child dyads suggest that postnatal selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment was associated with a reduced risk of postnatal depression–associated maternal mental health problems and child externalizing behaviors across early childhood years. These findings suggest that postnatal SSRI treatment may bring benefits in the long term to women with postnatal depression and their offspring. Authors: Chaoyu Liu, M.D., Ph.D., of King’s College in London, is the corresponding author.   To access the ...

About The Study: In this study of primary care patients in a state with legal recreational cannabis use, cannabis use disorder (CUD) was common among patients who used cannabis. Moderate to severe CUD was more prevalent among patients who reported any nonmedical use. These results underscore the importance of assessing patient cannabis use and CUD symptoms in medical settings.  Authors: Gwen T. Lapham, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.S.W., of the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, is the corresponding author.   To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this ...

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 11:00 A.M. EDT ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 29, 2023 Social media’s effects on propagating misinformation among the lay public are widely debated, but a new paper from JAMA suggests physicians using social media are revolutionizing medical education. La Jolla, Calif. (August 29, 2023) —  Ever wonder what your doctor is doing on social media? A new study published in JAMA led by John W. Ayers, Ph.D., from the Qualcomm Institute within the University of California San Diego, finds some physicians are harnessing the reach ...

New research led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London has found that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment for postnatal depression is associated with improvements in child behaviour up to five years after childbirth. Up to 15% of women experience postnatal depression which has been shown to be associated with poor outcomes for mothers’ and their children. Researchers at King’s IoPPN, in collaboration with the University of Oslo, analysed data from ...