What makes a brilliant scientist? Who are the people behind the greatest discoveries of our time? Connecting art and science, photographer Herlinde Koelbl seeks the answers in this English translation of the German book Fascination of Science, an indelible collection of portraits of and interviews with sixty pioneering scientists of the twenty-first century. Koelbl's approach is intimate and accessible, and her highly personal interviews with her subjects reveal the forces (as well as the personal quirks) that motivate the scientists' work; for example, one wakes up at 3 am because ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Scientists have identified a protein that plays a pivotal role in the action of several emerging cancer therapies. The researchers say the discovery will likely aid efforts to fine-tune the use of immunotherapies against several challenging cancers. They report their findings in the journal Cancer Research.  “Most anticancer drugs cause cancer cells to shrivel up and die in a controlled process known as apoptosis. But apoptosis does not usually strongly activate immune cells,” said David Shapiro, a professor ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE A new review paper co-authored by two Johns Hopkins pain experts suggests that scrambler therapy, a noninvasive pain treatment,  can yield significant relief for approximately 80%–90% of patients with chronic pain, and it may be more effective than another noninvasive therapy: transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). The write-up was published online July 13 in The New England Journal of Medicine. Scrambler therapy, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2009, administers electrical stimulation through the skin via electrodes placed in areas of the body above and below where chronic pain is felt. The goal is to capture the nerve endings ...

New York, NY (July 31, 2023)—Psychosocial stress profoundly affects people’s lives globally, not least because it can be a critical risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Thanks to an $11.5 million award renewal from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, distinguished researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and elsewhere aim to gain a deeper understanding of how stress influences cardiovascular health. “To address residual cardiovascular risk in patients, our research program aims to bolster our mechanistic understanding ...

You know that freeze-ray gun that “Batman” villain Mr. Freeze uses to “ice” his enemies? A University of Virginia professor thinks he may have figured out how to make one in real life. The discovery – which, unexpectedly, relies on heat-generating plasma – is not meant for weaponry, however. Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Patrick Hopkins wants to create on-demand surface cooling for electronics inside spacecraft and high-altitude jets. “That’s the primary problem right now,” Hopkins said. “A lot of electronics on board heat up, but they have no way to cool down.” The U.S. Air Force likes the prospect of a freeze ...

PULLMAN, Wash. –The origin of bees is tens of millions of years older than most previous estimates, a new study shows.  A team led by Washington State University researchers traced the bee genealogy back more than 120 million years to an ancient supercontinent, Gondwana, which included today’s continents of Africa and South America. In a study that proposes a new evolutionary history of bees, the researchers found evidence that bees originated earlier, diversified faster and spread wider than many scientists previously suspected. They published their findings in the journal Current ...

Research Highlights: An analysis of data from seven studies involving more than 19,000 adults in the United States, Korea and Japan found a clear association between increases in systolic (top-number) blood pressure and the number of alcoholic beverages consumed daily. Even people who drank one alcoholic beverage per day showed a link to higher blood pressure when compared to non-drinkers, reinforcing the American Heart Association’s advice to limit alcohol intake and to not start drinking alcohol if you do not already. Embargoed until ...

A new study from Tulane University has identified a new treatment for a chronic immune system disease that can prevent children from eating. Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is triggered by food allergies or airborne allergens which causes a type of white blood cell, eosinophils, to build up in the lining of the esophagus. This causes the esophagus to shorten and the esophageal wall to thicken, making swallowing difficult and causing food to get stuck in the throat. The disease occurs in an estimated 1 in 2,000 adults but more frequently affects children (1 in 1,500) where symptoms can be harder to diagnose and pose greater risks as difficulty feeding can lead to malnutrition, weight loss and ...

Postpartum prescriptions for oxycodone were not associated with increased risk of longer-term opioid use compared to codeine prescriptions, according to new research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.221351. Over the last 10 years, there has been a shift to fewer codeine prescriptions and an increase in prescriptions for stronger opioids, such as hydrocodone, hydromorphone and oxycodone for patients postpartum. “This occurred in part ...

Research Highlights: A novel vaccine that targets a protein involved in Alzheimer’s disease helped eliminate toxic cells in mice with the condition. After vaccination, the mice had fewer amyloid plaques and less inflammation in brain tissue and showed improvement in behavior and awareness. Embargoed until 12 p.m. CT/1 p.m. ET, Sunday, July 30, 2023 BOSTON, July 30, 2023 — A novel vaccine that targets inflamed brain cells associated with Alzheimer’s disease may hold the key to potentially preventing or modifying the course of the disease, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Scientific ...

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have uncovered the physics behind how foams are spread on surfaces. Balls of foam placed on a flat substrate were scraped across with a plate and observed. They identified different patterns which strongly depend on the scraping speed, governed by competing physical phenomena. Their findings apply to all kinds of soft materials that need to be spread evenly on surfaces, from mayonnaise on bread to insulation on walls.   Whether ...

Whether it’s setting up a Bank of England-type body to run it or fining patients for missing appointments, healthcare leaders, policymakers and practitioners past and present have a wealth of ideas about how they would change the NHS for the better. Professor Dinesh Bhugra, a psychiatrist and former president of the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Psychologists, asked 14 peers, physicians and patients’ representatives for their prescription for the NHS. The interviews are reproduced in Professor Bhugra’s new book, Conversations about the NHS.  Thought-provoking and in some cases, controversial, ideas include: Setting ...

As with many toxins, exposure to the toxic metal cadmium during pregnancy can adversely impact fetal development. Now, researchers at the Rutgers School of Public Health think they’re beginning to understand how the metal inflicts its damage: by disrupting placental hormones that regulate pregnancy physiology.   Unlike other toxins, relatively little cadmium crosses the placenta to directly impact the fetus. Instead, the placenta concentrates cadmium in its tissue at rates of up to six times that found in umbilical cord serum.   “We already know a lot about cadmium and its detrimental impacts on fetal health, such ...

A new study by scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University suggests that a micronutrient in human breast milk provides significant benefit to the developing brains of newborns, a finding that further illuminates the link between nutrition and brain health and could help improve infant formulas used in circumstances when breastfeeding isn’t possible. The study, published July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),  also paves the way to study what role this micronutrient might play in the brain as ...

Aurora, Colo. (July 28, 2023) – The Journal of Pediatrics has published a manuscript by Stacey Martiniano, MD, pulmonary specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado. Dr. Martiniano was primary author on the study titled, Late Diagnosis in the Era of Universal Newborn Screening Negatively Effects Short- and Long-Term Growth and Health Outcomes in Infants with Cystic Fibrosis. The manuscript’s senior author was Susanna McColley, MD, professor of pediatrics in pulmonary and sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg ...

The Royal Society of Chemistry has named Yi Hong, a distinguished university professor of bioengineering at The University of Texas at Arlington, as a fellow. Hong said he was honored by the selection. “Chemistry is amazing because it helps to create many new biomedical materials for human health and life saving,” Hong said. “This recognition encourages me not only to invent more creative biomaterials through chemical design for disease treatment, but also to be a role model to our next generation of scientists and engineers ...

More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs) – millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic explosions of electromagnetic radiation – astronomers worldwide have been combing the universe to uncover clues about how and why they form.  Nearly all FRBs identified have originated in deep space outside our Milky Way galaxy. That is until April 2020, when the first Galactic FRB, named FRB 20200428, was detected. This FRB was produced by a magnetar (SGR J1935+2154), a dense, city-sized neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field.  This groundbreaking discovery led some to believe that FRBs identified at cosmological distances outside ...

Myoung-Hwan Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas Tech University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant in the field of materials research (DMR) related to quantum information science (QIS). An emerging field of research, QIS involves studying the transmission of information through quantum mechanics principles. Kim’s research will examine the influence of magnetism and topology on quantum particles delivering information. Kin’s award is one of two Texas Tech recently received from the NSF for QIS research. The other was awarded to Lu Wei, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer ...

Since the insulin pump started widespread use in the early 1980s, it’s become the option of choice for type 1 diabetes patients to manage their glucose levels in a way that doesn’t require testing their blood sugar and injecting insulin multiple times daily. But now, a first-of-its kind study is looking at the issue of patients “running out of real estate” due to pump sites becoming fibrotic, irritated and less effective at delivering insulin. The UW Medicine-led study was published July 14 in the journal Diabetes Care, a publication of the American Diabetes Association. “No ...

Aurora, Colo. (July 28, 2023) – The Journal of Pediatrics has published a manuscript by Stacey Martiniano, MD, pulmonary specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado. Dr. Martiniano was primary author on the study titled, Late Diagnosis in the Era of Universal Newborn Screening Negatively Effects Short- and Long-Term Growth and Health Outcomes in Infants with Cystic Fibrosis. The manuscript’s senior author was Susanna McColley, MD, professor of pediatrics in pulmonary and sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital ...

BOSTON - A new multi-center study led by doctors at Boston Medical Center and Columbia University found that having a genetic variant in the prealbumin gene alone is not sufficient for diagnosis of transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy in older Black patients. Published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, researchers discovered that a blood test that measures the transthyretin or prealbumin protein might also be helpful in diagnosing transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy and could be used to trigger more definitive imaging testing. Transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR‐CM) is an underdiagnosed cause of congestive heart failure among patients 60+ years of age. ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- When breast cancer is diagnosed in the earliest stages, the survival rate is nearly 100 percent. However, for tumors detected in later stages, that rate drops to around 25 percent. In hopes of improving the overall survival rate for breast cancer patients, MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that could allow people to detect tumors when they are still in early stages. In particular, it could be valuable for patients at high risk of developing breast cancer in between ...

(Memphis, Tenn.—July 28, 2023) The influenza (flu) virus is constantly undergoing a process of evolution and adaptation through acquiring new mutations. Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have added a new layer of understanding to explain why and how flu viruses change. The “survival of the accessible” model provides a complementary view to the more widely recognized “survival of the fittest” way of evolving. The work was published today in Science Advances.     Viruses undergo a rapid evolutionary flux due to constant genetic mutations. This rapid flux is why people get a flu shot ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Four decades of conservation spending totaling more than $9 billion in inflation-adjusted tax dollars has failed to improve stocks of wild salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin, according to Oregon State University research. The study led by William Jaeger of the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences is based on an analysis of 50 years of data suggesting that while hatchery-reared salmon numbers have increased, there is no evidence of a net increase in wild, naturally spawning salmon and steelhead.  Findings were published today in PLOS One. Jaeger, a professor of applied economics, notes that ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - When considering ways to sustainably generate environmentally friendly products, bacteria might not immediately spring to mind. However, in recent years scientists have created microbe-semiconductor biohybrids that merge the biosynthetic power of living systems with the ability of semiconductors to harvest light. These microorganisms use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into value-added chemical products, such as bioplastics and biofuels. But how that energy transport occurs in such a tiny, complex ...