NEW YORK – September 17, 2024 – The Blavatnik Family Foundation and The New York Academy of Sciences today announced the three Laureates and six Finalists of the 2024 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists. The Awards honor outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions across New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.   The Blavatnik Regional Awards jury, consisting of distinguished scientists and engineers, selected one Laureate in each category who will receive a $30,000 unrestricted prize and two Finalists in each category who will be awarded $10,000 ...

People selectively underestimate how rich the world’s richest people are, according to a study. Increasing income inequality in many countries is driven by steep gains among the top 1% of earners. In the United States, support for policies that would redistribute wealth has not increased since the 1970s, even as the share of incomes held by the top 1% of Americans jumped from 10% to 19%. Barnabas Szaszi and colleagues conducted four studies to explore how well people understand the wealth held by others. In one study, 990 US residents ...

A study finds that ChatGPT expresses cultural values resembling people in English-speaking and Protestant European countries. Large language models, including ChatGPT, are trained on data that overrepresent certain countries and cultures, raising the possibility that the output from these models may be culturally biased. René F Kizilcec and colleagues asked five different versions of OpenAI’s GPT to answer 10 questions drawn from the World Values Survey, an established measure of cultural values used for decades to collect data from countries around the world. The ten questions place respondents ...

A study of political speeches, social media posts from politicians, and Reddit discussions among everyday users finds a higher prevalence of abstract, moralized, and power-centric language in national versus local politics. Political dialogue and debate in the United States has largely shifted from the local to the national in recent years, in part due to the decline of local news media. However, national discussions lack the concrete common ground that comes from shared place-based knowledge. Danica Dillion and colleagues studied how this shift is affecting ...

A study uses body-worn camera footage as a source of data on police-community interactions. Nicholas Camp and colleagues analyzed transcripts from 615 police stops made in California by Oakland Police Department police officers before and after a procedural justice training, which focused on officer communication in routine traffic stops. The training included findings by the authors in a previous study that showed officers used more respectful language with White drivers than with Black drivers during traffic stops. The training ...

Historically, South Carolina has had some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence, or IPV, in the U.S. IPV encompasses any physical or sexual violence, stalking and psychological aggression by a current or previous partner or spouse. “There is an epidemic of intimate partner violence in South Carolina,” said Leslie A. Lenert, M.D., associate provost of Data Science and Informatics and director of the Biomedical Informatics Center at the Medical University of South Carolina. To address that epidemic, Lenert partnered with clinical psychologist Alyssa A. Rheingold, Ph.D., family physician Vanessa Diaz, M.D., and health services ...

Infrastructures often suffer severe damage due to geotechnical hazards of both natural kinds such as floods or earthquakes and man-made ones like underground construction work and excavations. The fields of civil engineering and disaster risk management have extensively studied methods to prevent these risks and are still looking for more effective ways of avoiding large-scale deformations associated with said hazards. The advent of computer-aided simulations has provided researchers with particle-based methods such as moving particle ...

ADHD is a developmental condition of brain with symptoms such as inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity. People with ADHD lack the ability of self-control and experience anxiety, depression, academic failure, and low self-confidence. These symptoms can be alleviated by a holistic approach such as mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. These practices encourage patients to pay attention to the present moment with purpose and without judgment. However, these practices involving meditation require sitting in certain postures which can be challenging for patients with high ADHD tendency. To address this, ...

Digital Science, a technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, is pleased to announce that Indiana University has selected Symplectic Elements as its new faculty activity management and reporting system. This strategic decision marks a significant advancement toward the university’s goals of streamlining the management and reporting of the work and accomplishments of its faculty. Indiana University is internationally known for outstanding research and its world-class degree programs, from business and health to STEM and the arts at its flagship campus in Bloomington, the expanding ...

LOS ANGELES — City of Hope®, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the U.S. and ranked among the nation’s top 5 cancer centers by U.S. News & World Report, has received a historic $150 million gift from entrepreneurs and philanthropists A. Emmet Stephenson Jr. and his daughter Tessa Stephenson Brand to immediately fund pancreatic cancer research.   The centerpiece of this gift is the $1 million Stephenson Prize, one of the largest ...

Thanks to nanoscale devices as small as human cells, researchers can create groundbreaking material properties, leading to smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient electronics. However, to fully unlock the potential of nanotechnology, addressing noise is crucial. A research team at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, has taken a significant step toward unraveling fundamental constraints on noise, paving the way for future nanoelectronics. Nanotechnology is rapidly advancing, capturing ...

A reaction that puzzled scientists for 50 years has now been explained by researchers at Umeå University. Rapid structural snapshots captured how graphite transforms into graphite oxide during electrochemical oxidation, revealing intermediate structures that appear and disappear over time. The researchers describe this as a new type of oscillating reaction. Oscillating chemical reactions are fascinating to watch and important for developing an understanding of how complex systems work, both in chemistry and in nature. Classical visual examples of such reactions show how the colors of a solution change back and forth, cycling ...

Homing is an animal’s ability to navigate towards an original location, such as a breeding spot or foraging territory. Salmon and racing pigeons are famous for homing, but similar behaviors occur in groups as diverse as bees, frogs, rats, and sea turtles. There, homing individuals are known or suspected to rely on landmarks, the Earth’s magnetic field, or the sky’s pattern of polarized light to find their way back. Another group known to display homing are cave-dwelling mysid shrimp, also known as possum shrimp for the pouches in which females carry ...

People’s deep connection with the ocean – their “marine identity” – can help us reset society’s relationship with the seas, new research led by Dr Pamela Buchan, from the University of Exeter, suggests. A diverse, international group of marine researchers and practitioners met to discuss marine identity – based on testimony and photos from multiple countries. The group included Diz Glithero of the Canadian Ocean Literacy Coalition, Dr Emma McKinley of Cardiff University who helped deliver the workshop, and others from across Europe, Africa, Indonesia, North America, and Australasia. They found many common themes, including traditions ...

New evidence shows that extended estrogen suppression treatment using an aromatase inhibitors for hormone receptor-positive postmenopausal breast cancer is safe; it does not increase the risk of coronary artery calcification, a sign of active coronary atherosclerosis, as some prior studies had indicated. An article in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, published by Elsevier, details the findings from a retrospective, cross-sectional observational study that investigated the association between the duration of aromatase inhibitor treatment and the severity of coronary artery calcification in postoperative breast cancer patients. Coronary ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Injectable weight loss drugs are popular right now but can be hard to get because they are in short supply or too expensive without insurance. The result is that some people are skipping the doctor’s office and reaching out to potentially unreliable sources such as unlicensed online pharmacies or telehealth sites, which could expose patients to risks. A new national survey from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center reveals 1 in 4 (25%) of 1,006 adults surveyed would consider using an injectable weight loss medication without consulting their doctor. The reasons ...

Medication to reduce ovarian scarring helps extends overall health of reproductive system Freezing eggs only addresses age-related infertility, not ovarian hormone loss. New treatment would ‘fix the root of the issue’ Findings also have implications for developing treatments for ovarian cancer CHICAGO --- A woman’s ovaries are like a factory where eggs grow and produce hormones that regulate everything from menstruation and pregnancy to bone density and mood. As she and her factory age, production dwindles, and by the time she hits menopause ...

Osaka, Japan – While the link between diabetes and periodontal disease is known, the impact of diabetes treatment on periodontal health is less well understood. Recent research published in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism demonstrates that periodontal inflammation can be positively affected just by receiving intensive diabetes treatment. It is widely believed that there is an interrelationship between diabetes and periodontal disease. While it has been shown that treatment of periodontal disease improves blood ...

University of Arizona researchers have developed a new biological sensing method that can detect substances at the zeptomolar level – an astonishingly miniscule amount. This level of sensing, immediately useful for drug testing and other research, has the potential to make new drug discoveries possible. Eventually, the advance could lead to portable sensors that can detect environmental toxins or chemical weapons, monitor food quality or screen for cancer.  A paper describing the results was published in the journal Nature Communications on Aug. 28. Judith Su, associate professor of biomedical engineering and optical ...

The most endangered plant species in the Mariana Islands, the legume tree Serianthes nelsonii, faces persistent threats in its recovery. These have been identified as a short lifespan of habitat seedlings and rapid death of saplings transplanted from conservation nurseries. The Plant Physiology Laboratory at the University of Guam addressed this conundrum by improving growth and survival of Serianthes seedlings through strategically placed mirrors beneath deeply shaded seedlings to increase available ambient light. The resulting paper has been published ...

About this study: A new review is the first to reveal the extent of human exposure to food contact chemicals (FCC), with 3,601 chemicals used in food packaging and other food contact articles having been found in human bodies. The authors say this review also highlights significant gaps in biomonitoring and toxicity data. --- In a new study, published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, scientists describe the widespread human exposure to food contact chemicals (FCCs). The research reveals which chemicals ...

Key takeaways The cumulative adversity index for people quantifies numerous measures of hardship, such as poverty and stress to understand health and longevity over the individual’s lifespan. A similar tool could help scientists who study and want to conserve animal populations by identifying the most influential stressors to mitigate. UCLA biologists have created the first cumulative adversity index for yellow-bellied marmots. They found that as in humans, adversity early on had lifelong consequences and reduced their life expectancy. Adversity early in life can have permanent health consequences for people — even if their circumstances improve dramatically later on. ...

In IVF treatment, embryos are traditionally transferred in the uterus three days after fertilization. Due to improvements in laboratory techniques, this is now also possible after five days. It was assumed that this increases the chance of a successful pregnancy. A study by Radboud university medical center and Amsterdam UMC shows that the day of transfer does not influence the success rate of the IVF trajectory. One out of thirty children in the Netherlands is conceived via in vitro fertilization, or IVF for short. In this procedure, ...

Embargoed access to the paper and contact details for authors are available in Notes to Editors at the end of the release. The Lancet: More than 39 million deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections estimated between now and 2050, suggests first global analysis First in-depth analysis of global health impacts of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) over time reveals trends from 1990 to 2021 and estimates potential impacts to 2050 for 204 countries and territories. More than one million people died from AMR globally each year between 1990 and 2021. Over the period, AMR deaths among children aged under five declined by 50% while those among people aged 70 ...

The Arctic Weather Satellite (AWS) of the European Space Agency (ESA) was sent on its journey to a polar orbit 600 km above the Earth on August 16, 2024. On board: four low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF in Freiburg. They are essential components of the passive microwave radiometer with which the AWS measures temperature and humidity in the Arctic more precisely than ever before. This should contribute to a better understanding of both the Arctic and the climate change that is particularly visible in it. If the mission is successful, ...