A new study of mice and lab-grown human colon “organoids” indicates that an experimental drug developed by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers can substantially reduce symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in pre-clinical models. The experimental drug, given orally, inhibits a gut enzyme that is overproduced in people and in animal models of IBD, a disorder estimated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to afflict more than 3 million adult Americans. A report on the new study was published Aug. 9 in Science Translational Medicine. IBD, a disease category that includes Crohn’s ...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe executed a short maneuver on Aug. 3, 2023, that kept the spacecraft on track to hit the aim point for the mission’s sixth Venus flyby on Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. ​ Operating on preprogrammed commands from mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Parker fired its small thrusters for 4.5 seconds, enough to adjust its trajectory by 77 miles and speed up – by 1.4 seconds – its closest approach to Venus. The precise timing and position are critical to that flyby, the sixth of seven approaches in which Parker uses the planet’s gravity to tighten ...

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute have developed an AI system that recognizes and characterizes white and red blood cells in microscopic images of blood samples. The algorithm can help physicians diagnose blood disorders and is available as an open source method for research purposes. Blood disorders are often characterized by altered numbers and aberrant shapes of red and white blood cells. To diagnose the diseases, physicians classically examine blood smears on a slide under a microscope. This type of diagnosis is straightforward, but evaluation by experienced experts is difficult because the changes are sometimes ...

UPTON, NY– Registration is now open for the third Quantum Information Science Career Fair hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s National Quantum Information Science (QIS) Research Centers. The virtual event takes place on Wednesday, Sept. 13. The event aims to make undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and early-career professionals aware of the wide range of QIS careers they can pursue—including technical and scientific roles as well as positions that facilitate research and bring awareness to the field, such as ...

(WASHINGTON, August 10, 2023) – Researchers in Italy have shown for the first time that among children who have undergone a donor stem cell transplant, the presence of diverse species of micro-organisms in the intestinal tract before the transplant resulted in significantly better overall patient survival and fewer complications. The study, published today in the journal Blood, adds to a growing body of research unraveling the role gut health plays in health outcomes. “Our study provides the first evidence of a relationship between pre-transplant microbial diversity in the intestinal tract and post-transplant ...

San Antonio – August 10, 2023 – Southwest Research Institute developed an algorithm to remotely update and repair spacecraft software using less time and data than conventional techniques. The tool not only improves the overall efficiency of satellite software transmissions but also can recover data from failed over-the-air updates and malicious cyberattacks. It works by identifying missing bytes and other errors before deploying a custom “micropatch” to the damaged or missing software. “Instead of updating an entire file or operating system, which is typically required with over-the-air satellite software updates, our ...

New research confirms fracking causes slow, small earthquakes or tremors, whose origin was previously a mystery to scientists. The tremors are produced by the same processes that could create large, damaging earthquakes.  Fracking is the high-pressure injection of fluids underground to extract oil and natural gas. Though it is typically done with wastewater, this study examined data from fracking with liquid carbon dioxide. The process pushes carbon underground and keeps it from trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. By some estimates, carbon dioxide fracking could save as much ...

London, United Kingdom, 10 August 2023 – Four major clinical trial networks based in low resource settings are embarking on an exciting partnership with the Good Clinical Trials Collaborative (“GCTC”) to enhance clinical research in low resource settings. By promoting the unique qualities of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and the evidence they produce, the collaboration aims to support regional research ecosystems to prioritize collaborative, informative and efficient research responses to public health challenges. ADVANcing Clinical Evidence in Infectious Diseases (“ADVANCE-ID”), Africa ...

Washington, D.C. –  Following the first stay-at-home orders issued in the U.S. to curb the spread of COVID-19, gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus, rotavirus and adenovirus all but disappeared from California communities, and remained at very low levels for nearly 2 years. The research is published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Interestingly, these viruses surged back to pre-pandemic levels in late 2022, said Niaz Banaei, M.D., professor of Pathology and Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Stanford University, and Medical Director of Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, Stanford Health Care. “Adenovirus ...

INDIANAPOLIS – As the population of the United States grows older, more and more family members will be called upon to make medical decisions during hospitalizations of those who cannot make decisions for themselves. Good quality, focused, empathetic and timely communication between family members and clinicians is essential for good decision-making. Researcher-clinicians from Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine developed the 30-question Family Inpatient Communication Survey (FICS) to measure the experience of communication with hospital staff from the perspective of family members of seriously ill patients unable ...

Despite the many changes in school culture since the 1960s, a new study reveals that some things never change: life is harder for middle school students who are not attractive and for those who are not athletic.  As children head back to school, the first-of-its-kind longitudinal study by Florida Atlantic University helps to explain why adolescents who lack traits valued by peers are at risk for adjustment difficulties. Results, published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, show that low attractive ...

A vast number of microbes colonizes the human body to form an ecological community known as the microbiota. Microbiota are made up of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea. These microbes are closely associated with the physiology and function of the human body. The gut microbiota has received tremendous research attention with the recent advance in metagenomic sequencing.  Under normal conditions, the gut microbiota is maintained in homeostasis, yet it is readily affected by various environmental factors, including diet and use of ...

The longer a person has type 2 diabetes, the more likely they may be to experience changes in brain structure, a Michigan Medicine study finds. Researchers analyzing data from 51 middle-aged Pima American Indians living with type 2 diabetes used a series of memory and language tests developed by the National Institutes of Health, called the NIH Toolbox Cognitive Battery, as well as MRI, to determine the relationship between diabetes, cognition and makeup of the brain. Brain imaging suggested that study participants with longer durations of type 2 diabetes had decreased mean cortical thickness ...

Developing new materials requires significant time and labor, but some chemists are now hopeful that artificial intelligence (AI) could one day shoulder much of this burden. In a new study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team prompted a popular AI model, ChatGPT, to perform one particularly time-consuming task: searching scientific literature. With that data, they built a second tool, a model to predict experimental results.    Reports from previous studies offer a vast trove of information that chemists need, but finding and parsing the most relevant details can be laborious. ...

Québec City, August 10, 2023 - Scientists at Université Laval and the University of Lethbridge have succeeded in reversing certain cognitive manifestations associated with Alzheimer's disease in an animal model of the disease. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Brain.    "Although this has yet to be demonstrated in humans, we believe that the mechanism we have uncovered constitutes a very interesting therapeutic target, because it not only slows down the progression of the disease but also partially restores certain cognitive functions," ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Platelets, or thrombocytes, are specialized cellular fragments that form blood clots when we get scrapes and traumatic injuries. Viral infections, autoimmune disease, and other conditions can cause platelet levels to drop throughout the body, termed thrombocytopenia. After a robust clinical and research collaboration, Stephan Moll, MD, and Jacquelyn Baskin-Miller, MD, both in the UNC School of Medicine, have linked adenovirus infection with a rare blood clotting disorder. This is the first time that the common ...

HOUSTON – (Aug. 10, 2023) Rice University chemist Carolyn Nichol has won a competitive Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Institutes of Health to address race-based cancer health disparities by increasing underrepresented minority student populations’ engagement and participation in biosciences education. The 5-year, $1,038,544 award will support Nichol’s Cancer Health Activism Network for Greater Equity (CHANGE) project in bringing together cutting-edge cancer research with insight on race-based healthcare disparities from the social sciences in a series of transformative high school biology lessons aligned with both ...

PULLMAN, Wash. -- Restaurants can persuade patrons to choose healthier foods by adjusting the font size of numbers attached to nutritional information on menus, according to a study headed by a Washington State University researcher. Lead researcher Ruiying Cai, an assistant professor in the WSU School of Hospitality Business Management, said U.S. restaurants with more than 20 locations are already required to show the calorie content of food on their menus. By representing these values incongruously — using physically larger numbers on the page when they’re attached to ...

A team of researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC have published the first detailed description of the interplay between two cell types that allow lizards to regenerate their tails. This research, funded by the National Institutes of Health and published on August 10 in Nature Communications, focused on lizards’ unusual ability to rebuild cartilage, which replaces bone as the main structural tissue in regenerated tails after tail loss.  The discovery could provide insight for researchers studying how to rebuild cartilage damaged by osteoarthritis in humans, a degenerative and debilitating disease that affects about 32.5 million adults ...

After a successful test phase, the Satellite Orbit DecAy (SODA) service, which was jointly developed by TU Graz and the University of Graz, officially became part of the ESA’s Space Safety Programme in mid-July. SODA provides accurate forecasts of the effects of solar storms on low Earth orbiting satellites. This makes TU Graz only the third Austrian institution contributing to this ESA programme. Seibersdorf Laboratories, and the University of Graz, through the Kanzelhöhe Observatory and the Institute of Physics, ...

Each year, more than 200 million people fall sick with malaria and more than half a million of these infections lead to death. The World Health Organization recommends parasite-based diagnosis before starting treatment for the disease caused by Plasmodium parasites. There are various diagnostic methods, including conventional light microscopy, rapid diagnostic tests and PCR. The standard for malaria diagnosis, however, remains manual light microscopy, during which a specialist examines blood films with a microscope to confirm the presence of malaria parasites. ...

A research team led by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed a novel technique to self-assemble a thin layer of amino acids with ordered orientation over a large area that demonstrates high piezoelectric strength, making the manufacturing of biocompatible and biodegradable medical microdevices, such as pacemaker and implantable biosensor, in the near future possible. The generation of bioelectricity from the piezoelectric effect – reversible conversion between mechanical and electrical energies – has physiological significance in living systems. ...

Acquiring real-time spectral information in point-of-care diagnosis, internet-of-thing, and other lab-on-chip applications require spectrometers with hetero-integration capability and miniaturized feature. Compared to conventional semiconductors integrated by heteroepitaxy, solution-processable semiconductors provide a much-flexible integration platform due to their solution-processability, and, therefore, more suitable for the multi-material integrated system. However, solution-processable semiconductors are usually incompatible with the micro-fabrication processes, making them far from practical use in various lab-on-chip applications. In a new paper published ...

Immunothrombosis, or the formation of microscopic blood clots during inflammation, is a major cause of morbidity among patients with sepsis or severe COVID-19. A key enzyme in this process is thrombin. To date, no method exists for early detection of immunothrombosis in a living organism.  A team of investigators led by Ali Hafezi-Moghadam, MD, PhD, director of the Molecular Biomarkers Nano-Imaging Laboratory (MBNI) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, developed a novel technology to diagnose immunothrombosis by measuring ...

TUCSON, Ariz., August 9, 2023 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path) announced today that Sanofi, a global leader in immunology and diabetes care, has joined its Type 1 Diabetes Consortium (T1DC). Sanofi joins T1DC as part of its commitment to push the boundaries of innovation to improve the lives of those with diabetes. T1DC was established in 2017 with the goal to significantly advance the drug development landscape for T1D prevention and treatment. The consortium achieves this by fostering ...