The Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) has named its prize winners for 2023. AAS awarded the 2023 Alexander Prize to Amy Simon, Senior Scientist for Planetary Atmospheres Research in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.     Simon won the award for a mid-career scientist who has made and continues to make outstanding contributions that have significantly advanced our knowledge of planetary systems, ...

The Moral Difference between Faces and FaceTime Kyle E. Karches Although telemedicine can be useful in certain situations, physicians should not consider it an adequate substitute for the office visit, writes Karches, an associate professor of health care ethics and internal medicine at St. Louis University. While seeing the potential for telemedicine to improve care for certain patients, he is concerned about what may be lost if telemedicine comes to replace many in-person visits. Telemedicine rules out an embodied encounter between physician and patient, in which the sense of touch has special ...

The new project creates opportunities for researchers from historically underrepresented groups to develop technology that will help us understand the forces behind an expanding universe. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) have been awarded funding for a program that aims to generate insights about the universe while expanding diversity in the high energy physics field. Through the $589,000, three-year grant from DOE’s Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) initiative, ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Exposure to environmental chemicals, including those in common plastic products, has been linked with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, or CVD, the leading cause of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, 17.9 million people died from CVDs in 2019.  Changcheng Zhou, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside, has received an eight-year award of nearly $6.8 million from the Revolutionizing Innovative, Visionary Environmental Health Research (RIVER) program of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, or NIEHS, to investigate how ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 15, 2023) — The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) formally recommend mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and other integrative therapies to manage anxiety and depression symptoms in adults living with cancer. The guideline, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, reviews the effectiveness of integrative therapies such as yoga, relaxation, hypnosis, acupuncture, and music therapy in treating anxiety and depression symptoms during ...

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have just published a study that projects 93 million U.S. adults that are overweight and obese may be suitable for the 2.4 mg dosage of semaglutide, a weight loss medication known under the brand name Wegovy.  They projected based on the known weight loss effects (15% average weight loss) of this therapy that its use could result in 43 million fewer people with obesity, and prevent up to 1.5 million heart attacks, strokes, and other adverse cardiovascular events over 10 years. The study, US Population Eligibility and Estimated Impact of ...

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science have developed a method that uses artificial intelligence to augment how cells are studied and could help scientists better understand and eventually treat disease. Images of organ or tissue samples contain millions of cells. And while analyzing these cells in situ is an important part of biological research, such images make it nearly impossible to identify individual cells, determine their function and understand their organization. A technique called spatial transcriptomics ...

East Hanover, NJ – August 15, 2023 – Kessler Foundation scientists received four grants from the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research, totaling nearly $1.7 million for studies based on a variety of novel approaches aimed at improving the lives of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Researchers will use funds to address identity reconstruction, physical and mental fatigue, and upper limb (UL) function. Helen Genova, PhD, associate director, Center for Autism Research, received $528,824 for her study, “Using my Strengths: Evaluation of a Strength-Based Intervention in Adults with TBl.” ...

Philadelphia, August 15, 2023—In a development that could accelerate the discovery of new diagnostics and treatments, researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a versatile and low-cost technology for targeted sequencing of full-length RNA molecules. The technology, called TEQUILA-seq, is highly cost-effective compared to commercially available solutions for targeted RNA sequencing and can be adapted for different research and clinical purposes. The details were described in a paper in Nature Communications. On the journey ...

Physician-scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine recently conducted a large-scale analysis to assess the impact of a newly introduced equation used to evaluate one’s heart failure risk. The study, published in the Journal of Cardiac Failure, showed that the new and old kidney function equations had comparable values in predicting the risk of heart failure.  Naman Shetty, M.D., a clinical research fellow in the UAB Division of Cardiovascular Disease and ...

BY SUHTLING WONG | AUGUST 15, 2023  A College of Medicine researcher is developing a new antibiotic related to penicillin to treat tuberculosis (TB) and related lung infections. Dr. Kyle Rohde, an infectious disease expert, recently received a $3.4 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to create new antibiotics that target mycobacterial infections caused by pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium abscessus.  TB infected 11 million people in 2021, ranking it 13th as the leading cause of ...

A University of Texas at Arlington researcher is working on the prototype of a golf swing training system that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with portability and can be used at home or on the driving range. Nicholas Gans, a UT Arlington principal research scientist and division head for the UT Arlington Research Institute (UTARI), leads the project, which is funded by a nearly $53,000 grant from the University and Fort Worth-based IGSC.AI LLC. Gans’ initial work is considered a preliminary proof of concept. “We’ll use a camera-based ...

New Cleveland Clinic research shows how mosquito-transmitted viruses – like Zika, West Nile, Yellow Fever and dengue viruses – hijack host cells to promote their own replication and infection. Published in Cell Host and Microbe, a recent study from the laboratory of Michaela Gack, Ph.D., Scientific Director of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida Research & Innovation Center, opens the door to developing new therapeutics for flaviviruses, a class of viruses for which either no or very limited treatments currently exist. This is Dr. Gack’s first research study funded by a prestigious National ...

New York, August 10, 2023 – Researchers at Applied Biological Laboratories Inc. discovered how natural bioactive molecules can effectively relieve cold and flu symptoms by protecting the mucosal barrier function and reducing inflammation during these infections. Together, they call these molecules, which include lysozyme and lactoferrin, the “Mucosal Immune Complex.” The research, led by Nazlie Sadeghi-Latefi, PhD, highlights the importance of supporting mucosal barrier immunity to prevent and treat colds and flu. This work will be presented at the American Chemical Society Fall 2023 Meeting on August 15, 2023. Mucosal ...

One of the most popular strategies to increase energy efficiency and reduce pollution in homes — which are responsible for approximately 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions — is the transitioning from gas to electric stoves. An international team of researchers investigated the health and environmental impacts of a program in Ecuador that put induction stoves in 750,000 households. In the Aug. 15, 2023 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that both greenhouse gas emissions ...

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Aug. 15, 2023 — A potentially game-changing theoretical approach to quantum computing hardware avoids much of the problematic complexity found in current quantum computers. The strategy implements an algorithm in natural quantum interactions to process a variety of real-world problems faster than classical computers or conventional gate-based quantum computers can. “Our finding eliminates many challenging requirements for quantum hardware,” said Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is coauthor of a paper on the approach in the journal Physical Review A. “Natural systems, such as the electronic ...

East Hanover, NJ – August 15, 2023 –  "Understanding Spinal Cord Injury: A Course for Personal Care Assistants" a new interactive online course designed to enhance the training of personal care assistants (PCAs) for individuals with spinal cord injury, was presented today at the Paralyzed Veterans of America Healthcare (PVA) Summit + Expo at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld Hotel in Orlando, FL, by Jeanne Zanca, MPT, PhD, FACRM, assistant director of the Center for Spinal Cord Injury Research at Kessler Foundation, and chair of the Foundation’s Institutional Review ...

Researchers led by Ludovic Bellier at the University of California, Berkeley, US, demonstrate that recognizable versions of classic Pink Floyd rock music can be reconstructed from brain activity that was recorded while patients listened to the song. Published August 15th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study used nonlinear modeling to decode brain activity and reconstruct the song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1”. Encoding models revealed a new cortical subregion in the temporal lobe that underlies rhythm perception, which could be exploited ...

As the chords of Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” filled the surgery suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients undergoing epilepsy surgery. The goal? To capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if they could reconstruct what the patient was hearing. More than a decade later, after detailed analysis of data from 29 such ...

 Diagnosing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is still a daunting challenge because of the degree of complexity involved, requiring highly specialized professionals. Autism is a multifactorial neurodevelopment disorder with widely varying symptoms. In the United States, about 1 in 36 children have been diagnosed with ASD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and yet there are no biochemical markers to identify it with precision. A quantitative diagnostic method is proposed by Brazilian researchers in an article published in ...

BOSTON - Researchers have developed a new algorithm for recovering the 3D refractive index distribution of biological samples that exhibit multiple types of light scattering. The algorithm helps optimize a new imaging approach called intensity diffraction tomography (IDT). Jiabei Zhu from Boston University will present this research at the Optica Imaging Congress. The hybrid meeting will take place 14 – 17 August 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts. “3D quantitative phase imaging (QPI) has superior features for various applications in the field of biomedical imaging. As a label-free technique, QPI ...

As an energy carrier, hydrogen holds the prominent advantages of high gravimetric energy density, high abundance, and zero emission, yet its effective storage and transportation remain a bottleneck problem for the widespread applications of hydrogen energy. To address such an issue, different types of hydrogen storage materials are developed and carefully investigated in the past decades. Among them, magnesium hydride (MgH2) has been considered as one of the most promising hydrogen storage materials because of its high capacity, excellent reversibility, sufficient magnesium reserves, and low cost. However, the poor thermodynamic and kinetic properties ...

Two molecular languages at the origin of life have been successfully recreated and mathematically validated, thanks to pioneering work by Canadian scientists at Université de Montréal. Published this week in the Journal of American Chemical Society, the breakthrough opens new doors for the development of nanotechnologies with applications ranging from biosensing, drug delivery and molecular imaging. Living organisms are made up of billions of nanomachines and nanostructures that communicate to create higher-order entities able to do many essential things, such as moving, thinking, surviving and reproducing. “The key to life’s emergence ...

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest movements of refugees since the Second World War. More than 7.4 million Ukrainians have sought asylum in Europe, almost three times the number of people who found refuge in Europe during Syria’s civil war in 2015 and 2016. To investigate whether and how the willingness of host populations to receive refugees has changed since 2016, an international research team involving ETH Zurich, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University surveyed 33,000 people in 15 European countries. The first wave of the survey took place in February 2016 and the second from May to June ...

In a new study, scientists Stewart Edie of the Smithsonian, Shan Huang of the University of Birmingham and colleagues drastically expanded the list of bivalve species, such as clams, oysters, mussels, scallops and their relatives, that humans are known to harvest and identified the traits that make these species prime targets for harvesting. They also discovered that some of these same traits have also made this group of shellfish less prone to extinction in the past and may protect these shellfish in the future. The authors flagged certain ocean regions, such as the east Atlantic and northeast and southeast Pacific, as areas of special concern for management and conservation. The ...