New York, NY (July 27, 2023) – Cigarette smokers have higher odds of tobacco dependence than those who vape or use a variety of types of tobacco products, according to a Mount Sinai study published in July in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The findings suggest that tailored tobacco cessation programs are needed for people with different tobacco use habits. The researchers identified three clear types of tobacco users: those who predominantly smoke cigarettes, those who predominantly use smokeless tobacco, and those who predominantly use a combination of cigarettes, e-cigarettes, and cigars. This discovery is important for tailoring tobacco use reduction ...

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is a highly lethal cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 20 percent. Although a precursor lesion to EAC, called Barrett's esophagus (BE), is present in roughly seven percent of middle-aged adults, less than one percent of BE patients will progress to EAC, making it difficult to determine which individuals are at risk of developing this deadly cancer. To better understand why only a small fraction of individuals with BE develop EAC, investigators from the Mass ...

Royal colleges in the UK have received more than £9 million in marketing payments from drug and medical devices companies since 2015, but do not always disclose the payments publicly, finds an investigation published by The BMJ today.  Investigative journalist Hristio Boytchev asked the colleges to disclose all payments from industry, campaign groups or patient associations, including the specific amount received from each donor, but they all refused to do so.  Instead, data was compiled from Disclosure ...

Pupils in state secondary schools in England are much more likely to be excluded if they have a history of receiving social care or special educational needs services, finds a new study by UCL researchers. The research, published in Child Abuse and Neglect, used anonymised data from the Department for Education’s National Population Database, which covered all children starting state secondary school in September 2011 and 2012 across the country – equating to around one million students. The team examined the proportion of pupils who had been excluded – either temporarily suspended or permanently expelled – during their time at secondary ...

In what could lead to a revolutionary advancement in the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy, UC San Diego Health has become one of the first health systems in the country to inject regenerative cells into the brain to treat epileptic seizures.  Part of a national clinical trial, UC San Diego Health’s multidisciplinary team performed the third ever experimental regenerative brain cell therapy procedure earlier this month. UC San Diego Health is the only nationally designated Level 4 Adult Epilepsy Center in the region. During the surgery, Sharona ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 2023 AAN Issues Guidance on New Treatments for Early Alzheimer’s Disease   MINNEAPOLIS – New therapies for early Alzheimer’s disease, monoclonal antibodies that remove amyloid-β plaques in the brain, are bringing hope to people whose lives have been affected by the disease. To help neurologists discuss these therapies with patients and caregivers, the American Academy of Neurology has developed an Emerging Issues in Neurology article, published online on July 26, 2023, in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Emerging Issues in Neurology articles are designed ...

Many families whose transgender children need gender-affirming care will need to drive much further than before because of laws and other actions passed since 2021 in 20 states, a new study shows. The restrictions mean that 25% of Americans age 10 to 17 now live more than a day’s drive away, round trip, from a clinic that could provide medications and hormones to support their gender transition. Before the restrictions, less than 2% lived this far from a clinic that could provide such care. One ...

Researchers from MIT and Stanford University have devised a new machine-learning approach that could be used to control a robot, such as a drone or autonomous vehicle, more effectively and efficiently in dynamic environments where conditions can change rapidly.  This technique could help an autonomous vehicle learn to compensate for slippery road conditions to avoid going into a skid, allow a robotic free-flyer to tow different objects in space, or enable a drone to closely follow a downhill skier despite being buffeted by strong winds. The researchers’ approach incorporates certain structure from control theory into the process for learning a model in such a way that leads ...

LAS VEGAS – July 26, 2023 – Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie.  Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns, for example, reveal their existence by eating materials from their companion stars. And in some instances, supermassive black holes accumulate at the center of some galaxies to form bright compact regions known as quasars with masses equal to millions to billions of our sun. A subset of accreting stellar-mass black holes that can launch jets of highly magnetized plasma are called microquasars.  An international ...

Increased skin cancer screening in individuals with skin of color is not sufficient to address racial disparities in melanoma survival rates, according to a new JAMA Dermatology study by UPMC and University of Pittsburgh researchers. Melanoma causes the most deaths of any skin cancer, but is usually treatable if caught early. Although the disease is most common in white individuals, survival odds are worse in people with darker skin tones. “In this study, we asked whether screening could address this disparity by helping detect melanoma early,” said senior author Laura Ferris, M.D., Ph.D., dermatologist at UPMC and professor of dermatology at the Pitt School of Medicine. ...

American Geophysical Union 25 July 2023 AGU Release No. 23-29 For Immediate Release This press release and accompanying multimedia are available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/petrified-trees-reveal-yellowstone-geysers-ongoing-battle-with-drought/  AGU press contact: Liza Lester, +1 (202) 777-7494, news@agu.org (UTC-4 hours) Contact information for the researchers: Shaul Hurwitz, U.S. Geological Survey, shaulh@usgs.gov (UTC-7 hours)  WASHINGTON — Yellowstone’s Steamboat Geyser has had decades-long dry spells brought on by a history of droughts, a new study finds. With global temperatures on the rise, the American West is projected to become drier. ...

https://www.massgeneral.org/news/research-spotlight/lab-on-chip-technology-red-blood-cellsZiya Isiksacan, PhD, a research fellow in the Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgery (CEMS) is the lead author, and Osman Berk Usta, PhD, an investigator in the CEMS at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, is the senior author of a new study published in PNAS, Assessment of Stored Red Blood Cells Through Lab-on-a-Chip Technologies for Precision Transfusion Medicine. The article is a collaboration between multiple international institutes ...

Scientists have developed a novel method for storing biological materials such as RNA and proteins in a solid-state. The storage in solid-state resembles the form of a pill or a tablet, which dissolves in water for on-demand use.  The innovation provides a new way to overcome current limitations in the storage and handling of products derived from living cells used for a variety of health care and scientific research purposes.  Biological materials that are frequently used in developing new medicines and diagnostic testing tools such as mRNA, enzymes, and antibodies are highly ...

Alessandra Corsi knows that when you shoot for the stars, anything can happen. It’s in that spirit of intellectual curiosity that Corsi, an associate professor in Texas Tech University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, will peer into some of the farthest recesses of space in search of gravitational waves. “We are at a critical moment in this field,” she said. “We had one event in 2017 that was amazing where everyone in multi-messenger astronomy started caring more about gravitational wave data, but now we need more of those type of events so we can study them and understand them better.” Corsi has received a three-year grant from the ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A Penn State-led team of researchers developed a potentially promising approach to make fuel cells more affordable. The new method reduces the amount of platinum-group metal (PGM) loadings by replicating a process used in computer chip manufacturing.   They published their results this week (July 24) in JACS Au, an open-access journal of the American Chemical Society. According to corresponding author Christopher Arges, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and a faculty member in the Institutes ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- A new study from the University of Missouri Sinclair School of Nursing found that barriers, including poverty, low health literacy, cultural beliefs, lack of infrastructure and political issues, all work together to hinder diabetes self-management for Haitian migrants working in sugar cane fields in the Dominican Republic.   Rosalia Molina, a nurse who has taken previous medical missionary trips to the Dominican Republic to help impoverished individuals self-manage their diabetes, led the study as part of her doctoral studies at the MU Sinclair School of Nursing. She interviewed health care workers in the Dominican Republic about their challenges providing ...

Key Takeaways Researchers have discovered that the NLRP11 protein plays critical roles in alerting the body to a bacterial infection and initiating an immune response against it NLRP11 is present in humans and other primates but absent in mice The discovery could enable the development of mouse models that are more similar to humans for bacterial infection experiments BOSTON – A team led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has discovered a protein that plays critical roles in alerting the body to a bacterial ...

MINNEAPOLIS – People who carry the gene variant associated with the strongest risk for Alzheimer’s disease may lose their ability to detect odors earlier than people who do not carry the gene variant, which may be an early sign of future memory and thinking problems, according to a study published in the July 26, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The gene variant associated with this increased risk of Alzheimer’s is called APOE e4. “Testing a person’s ability to detect odors may be a useful way to predict future problems with cognition,” said study ...

Rochester Institute of Technology’s Joel Kastner, a professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and School of Physics and Astronomy, and a team of researchers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have discovered new evidence of how planets as massive as Jupiter can form, using images from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The combination of VLT and ALMA imaging have yielded detections of dusty ...

A new study by Simon Fraser University researchers shows that efforts to reduce methane emissions are needed immediately if we are to meet global climate change goals.  A key element of the 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, is the commitment to limit average global temperatures increases to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This requires reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by or around 2050—and deep reductions in methane and other ...

Lizards may miss out on mating opportunities and pick partners more hastily under warming temperatures ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0285656 Article Title: Behavioural plasticity in activity and sexual interactions in a social lizard at high environmental temperatures Author Countries: Argentina Funding: N.R. - Student Research Grant 2019 - Animal Behavior Society https://www.animalbehaviorsociety.org/web/index.php. M. C. - Consejo Nacional ...

Fungi which normally decay wood can effectively break down low density polyethylene (LDPE) plastic instead - and do so best in the absence of wood ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0288133 Article Title: Wood decay fungi show enhanced biodeterioration of low-density polyethylene in the absence of wood in culture media Author Countries: Sri Lanka Funding: 1. RNA: TWAS research grant 18-020 RG/BIO/AS_I The world academy of science https://twas.org/ 2. RNA, PW, HH: ICGEB research grant CRP/LKA18-03 https://www.icgeb.org/ International Center for genetic engineering and biotechnology 3. RNA, HH: t(NSF/RG/2019/BT/03). http://www.nsf.ac.lk/ ...

What happens inside the carnivorous plant Venus Flytrap when it catches an insect? New technology has led to discoveries about the electrical signalling that causes the trap to snap shut. Bioelectronic technology enables advanced research into how plants react to their surroundings, and to stress. Most people know that the nervous system in humans and other animals sends electric impulses. But do plants also have electrical signals even though they lack a nervous system? Yes, plants have electrical signals that are generated in response to touch and stress factors, such as wounds caused by herbivores and attacks on their roots. As opposed to animals, who can move out of the ...

Many gardeners will tell you that aphids are the bane of their existence. According to a new study from the University of Florida, these tiny pests also pose problems for the iconic monarch butterfly. The study found that when oleander aphids infested tropical milkweed — a nonnative milkweed species commonly used across southern portions of the U.S. stretching from California to Florida — the butterflies laid fewer eggs on the plants, and caterpillars developing on those plants were slower to mature. Monarch butterflies depend on milkweed and its close relatives to complete their life ...

All plants and lichens listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act are sensitive to climate change but there are few plans in place to address this threat directly, according to a new study by Amy Casandra Wrobleski of Pennsylvania State University and colleagues, published July 26, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate. Climate change is expected to have a major impact on species around the world, especially endangered species, which are already rare. A majority of the organisms listed under the Endangered Species Act are ...