In some African countries that have traditionally faced issues such as undernourishment and hunger, being overweight is perceived as a good sign of health and prosperity. However, in most of these countries, a malnutrition paradox is evident. Obesity, a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide, is increasing at an alarming rate in countries like Zimbabwe, where the consumption of processed, energy-dense foods associated with western lifestyles, has been adopted. An insightful study led by graduate student Ashleigh Pencil, from the Graduate School of Human Life ...

A team of computer scientists and designers based out of the University of Waterloo have developed a tool to help people use colour better in graphic design.  The tool, De-Stijl, uses powerful machine learning technology to suggest intuitive colour palettes for novice designers and inexperienced users. The software combines and improves on the functionalities of existing tools like Figma, Pixlr, and Coolor, allowing users to select important theme colors and quickly visualize how they’ll impact a design. “You put your graphical ...

It’s been 22 years since UC Davis MIND Institute Medical Director Randi Hagerman and her husband, researcher Paul Hagerman, discovered the neurodegenerative condition called FXTAS (fragile X-associated tremor ataxia syndrome). Hagerman, a pediatrician known for her enthusiasm for her work and patients, has been studying FXTAS ever since, seeking to develop treatments for it. She was recently awarded her 24th consecutive year of funding from the National Institutes of Health for her fragile X-related work, a ...

Scientists are urging caution before artificial intelligence (AI) models such as ChatGPT are used in healthcare for ethnic minority populations. Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, epidemiologists at the University of Leicester and University of Cambridge say that existing inequalities for ethnic minorities may become more entrenched due to systemic biases in the data used by healthcare AI tools. AI models need to be ‘trained’ using data scraped from different sources such as healthcare websites and scientific research. However, evidence shows ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Scripps Research scientists have shown that analyzing a certain type of immune cell in the blood can help identify people at risk of developing type 1 diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune disease. The new approach, if validated in further studies, could be used to select suitable patients for treatment that stops the autoimmune process—making type 1 diabetes a preventable condition. In the study, which appeared in Science Translational Medicine on July 5, 2023, the researchers ...

Humanity has a long track record of making big changes with little forethought. From fossil fuels to AI, plastics to pesticides, we love innovating away our problems, only to find we’ve created different ones. So it can be refreshing to hear about cases where we’ve taken a step back to deliberate before committing to a drastic new idea, like carbon dioxide removal. With carbon emissions continuing to climb, many scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers have advocated taking action to directly ...

Private equity ownership of healthcare services such as nursing homes and hospitals is associated with harmful impacts on costs and quality of care, suggests a review of the latest evidence published by The BMJ today. No consistently beneficial impacts of private equity ownership were identified, and the researchers say these results confirm the need for more research on private equity ownership in healthcare and possibly increased regulation. Private equity firms use capital from wealthy individuals and large institutional investors to buy companies, and, after a relatively brief period of ownership, ...

People who experienced disrupted access to healthcare (including appointments and procedures) during the covid-19 pandemic were more likely to have potentially preventable hospital admissions, finds a study published by The BMJ today. This is the first study to examine the impact of disruption on health outcomes using individual level longitudinal data, and the researchers say reducing the backlog from covid-19 disruption is vital to tackle the short and long term implications of the pandemic. The ...

PITTSBURGH, July 19, 2023 — Most mothers who took prescription antiseizure medications during pregnancy can breathe a sigh of relief: A new study published today in Lancet Neurology found that young children who were exposed to commonly-prescribed medications in utero do not have worse neurodevelopmental outcomes than children of healthy women.   Commonly used antiseizure medications such as lamotrigine and levetiracetam are generally considered effective and safe, especially compared to many first-generation epilepsy treatments that carried profound risks to the unborn child. ...

Leesburg, VA, July 19, 2023—According to an accepted manuscript published in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), lacking Medicare coverage could contribute to greater income-based differences in use of screening CT colonography (CTC) than of other recommended screening strategies or of diagnostic CTC. Noting that Medicare’s non-coverage for screening CTC may account for lower adherence with screening guidelines among lower-income beneficiaries, “Medicare coverage of CTC could reduce income-based disparities for individuals avoiding optical colonoscopy due to invasiveness, need for anesthesia, or complication ...

A new study identifies how certain proteins in the immune system interact leading to organ rejection. The study, which involved experiments on mice and human patients, uncovered an important communication pathway between two molecules called CEACAM1 (CC1) and TIM-3, finding that the pathway plays a crucial role in controlling the body's immune response during liver transplantation. When an organ is transplanted from a donor to a recipient, the recipient's immune system recognizes the transplanted tissue as foreign, activating an immune response that can lead to rejection. T cells play a significant role ...

Alzheimer’s is considered a disease of old age, with most people being diagnosed after 65. But the condition actually begins developing out of sight many years before any symptoms emerge. Tiny proteins, known as amyloid-beta peptides, clump together in the brain to form plaques. These plaques lead to inflammation and eventually cause neuronal cell death. Interplay of proteins in the brain reveals disease mechanism Exactly what triggers these pathological changes is still unclear. “We’re lacking good diagnostic markers that would allow us to reliably detect the disease at an early stage or make predictions about its course,” says Professor ...

UPTON, NY—Putting a suite of new materials synthesis and characterization methods to the test, a team of scientists from the University of Iowa and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has developed 14 organic-inorganic hybrid materials, seven of which are entirely new. These uranium-based materials, as well as the detailed report of their bonding mechanisms, will help advance clean energy solutions, including safe nuclear energy. The work, currently published online, was recognized as both a Very Important Paper and a Hot Topic: Crystal Engineering in ...

Research is shedding light on kidneys, their critical functions, and predictors of disease. The research co-led by Matthias Kretzler, M.D. describes the creation of a cellular atlas of the kidney describing nearly 100 cell types and states. It represents the most comprehensive study of cellular states, neighborhoods, and outcome-associated signatures in the kidney. Researchers from more than twenty institutions collaborated on this project. Kidneys monitor and maintain the internal balance in the body, filter out ...

Research conducted at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil shows that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can infect liver cells (hepatocytes), stimulating glucose production and leading to a condition similar to diabetes (hyperglycemia) in hospitalized patients, even if their blood sugar level was normal before they were admitted to hospital. An article on the study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings describe part of the mechanism used by the virus to infect liver cells and impair glucose metabolism, and point ...

Carbon-based materials have several qualities that make them attractive as catalysts for speeding up chemical reactions. They are low-cost, lightweight and their high surface area provides a good scaffold on which to anchor catalysts, keeping them stable and dispersed far apart, while providing molecules a lot of surface area to work. This makes carbons useful for energy storage and sensors. Over the last 10 years, carbons have been used in electrochemistry to catalyze reactions to make chemicals and fuel cells. However, ...

In a world increasingly concerned about the environmental and geopolitical implications of fossil fuel usage, nuclear energy has resurfaced as a subject of great interest. Its ability to generate electricity at scale without greenhouse gas emissions holds promise as a sustainable clean energy source that could bridge society’s transition away from fossil fuels to a net-zero future. However, nuclear power generation does produce radioactive waste. The safe management of nuclear waste remains a crucial challenge that must be addressed to gain public confidence in this transformative power solution. Now, a team of University of Houston researchers has come up with an innovative ...

  A widely-used tool that finds the exact references needed to pinpoint differences in our DNA just got a refresh. On 17 July, the Standards Steering Committee of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) voted to release refget v2.0. With better compatibility for a range of reference genome names, formats, and systems, the new version of refget makes it easier than ever to retrieve verified genomic reference sequences.   A vital infrastructure You may not even realise that you’re using refget already. “Almost ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – Higher levels of vitamin B-related amino acids may be linked to the risk of dementia associated with a certain type of air pollutants called particulate matter, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that pollution or amino acids cause dementia, but it suggests a possible link among them. Researchers ...

Philadelphia, July 19, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that cancer patients who continued to smoke after their diagnosis were significantly more likely to receive treatment for tobacco use when “nudges” to provide tobacco treatment were directed at clinicians through the electronic health record. The findings strengthen the case for using behavioral economics, or targeting predictable patterns in human decision-making to overcome ...

New Haven, Conn. — Decades after Purdue Pharma began to push physicians to prescribe addictive pain pills, the opioid crisis has been a slow-motion disaster, with overdoses destroying lives and families across the country. Now, it appears the consequences of those early marketing efforts are even more devastating. In a new study, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health show that infectious disease rates in the United States also climbed as a direct long-term result of the marketing of OxyContin. By ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 2023 MINNEAPOLIS – People who start taking medication soon after the first signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) may have a lower risk of disability later, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. MS is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. Symptoms of MS may include fatigue, numbness, ...

You’re a poker wizard. A friend knows all about French cuisine. Another friend is a Mozart expert. The three of you get together and share knowledge about your respective expertise. Each of you leaves learning something from the other two. People learn a lot by sharing and exchanging information. Can computers do the same with other computers—can robots, in effect, teach other robots how to learn by sharing knowledge? A team of researchers led by computer science Professor Laurent Itti and one of his Ph.D. students, Yunhao Ge, address this question in ...

As molecular biologists at Boston University and as husband and wife, Ruslan Afasizhev and Inna Afasizheva, have worked together for decades. Together, they have published dozens of papers on the mechanics of mitochondrial DNA and RNA in a single-celled, disease-causing parasite called Trypanosoma brucei. Now, years of breakthroughs have led to their latest paper published in Science, which provides a detailed look at a mystifying process called RNA editing and could potentially help treat a deadly disease. In ...

Researchers led by a team at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created the first tool to map and visualize the areas where human settlements and nature meet on a global scale. The tool, which was part of a study recently published in Nature, could improve responses to environmental conflicts like wildfires, the spread of zoonotic diseases and loss of ecosystem biodiversity. These areas where people and wildlands meet are called the wildland-urban interface, or WUI for short. More technically, a WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”) describes anywhere that has at least one house per 40 acres and is also 50% covered by wildland ...