Washington, D.C. – Bacteria found in 74 kitchens spread among 5 European countries were mostly harmless according to new research published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.  “We have previously found considerable variations in kitchen standards, food preparation practices, and cleaning regimes between France, Norway, Portugal, Romania, and Hungary,” said Birgitte Moen, Ph.D., Scientist—Department of Food Safety and Quality, Nofima—Norwegian Institute of Food, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Research, Ås, Norway. In ...

The aim is to maximize impact by turning to the combined talent and insight of the broader international neuroscience community. SEATTLE — July 11, 2023 — Today, scientists from the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, a division of the Allen Institute, launched the world’s first completely open- and crowd-sourced neuroscience experiment—inviting researchers from around the world to publicly design a shared experiment that will run on the Allen Brain Observatory, as part of the Institute’s OpenScope program. Experiments will probe ...

Biologists attempting to conserve and restore denuded environments are limited by their scant knowledge of what those environments looked like before the arrival of humans. This is especially true of coastal ecosystems, many of which had already been drastically altered by pollution and overharvesting hundreds of years before scientists began monitoring them. According to a new study published in the journal PeerJ, a faithful analogue of modern marine ecosystems lies just beneath the surface. Building on more than 20 years of conservation paleobiology, the results suggest that fossils of various marine groups — including worms, mollusks, crabs and sea urchins — are ...

Click here to watch a video on the new Cath Lab Mount Sinai Queens today announced the opening of a new cardiac catheterization lab that will provide rapid and comprehensive care to hundreds of heart patients every year for life-threatening emergencies and scheduled cardiac procedures. The first cardiac catheterization lab in Astoria, it will transform treatment for patients in the growing communities of western Queens by vastly improving access to cardiac care in the borough and beyond. Atul Kukar, DO, has been named the Director of the Mount Sinai Queens Catheterization Lab and leads a team of 14 specialists including interventional cardiologists, nurses, and technicians. “Our ...

There is a “silent hazard” lurking underneath our major global cities, and our buildings were not designed to handle it. A new Northwestern University study has, for the first time, linked underground climate change to the shifting ground beneath urban areas. As the ground heats up, it also deforms. This phenomenon causes building foundations and the surrounding ground to move excessively (due to expansions and contractions) and even crack, which ultimately affects structures’ long-term operational performance and durability. Researchers also report that past building damage ...

A team led by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has developed a technique to study how different fish species interact with each other in a coastal region, a breakthrough that helps explain the complex relationships among marine species and how global warming impacts fish populations. By analyzing minute traces of fish DNA from samples of seawater, the team combined the use of environmental DNA – known as eDNA – and advanced statistical analysis to not only detect ...

Motor learning skills let us move through the world: we use them to teach ourselves how to walk, how to pick up a drink, how to run. But age or sickness can weaken our ability to learn motor tasks. Scientists studying the impact of oxygen supplementation on motor learning have found a promising treatment that could help patients who have experienced neurological trauma recover old skills. “A simple and easy to administer treatment with 100% oxygen can drastically improve human motor learning processes,” said Dr Marc Dalecki, now at the German University of Health and Sports in Berlin, senior author of the study in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Repurposing ...

A three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting technology capable of eliminating cancer cells using the function of immune cells has been developed for the first time in the world. Through joint research with the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (President Sang Jin Park, hereinafter referred to as KIMM), the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (President Jang Seong Kim, hereinafter referred to as KRIBB), institute under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science and ICT, developed a 3D bioprinting technology using natural killer cells (NK cells)* as a new method of immunotherapy for treating cancer, and ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to two psychologists who study memory and perception, fraudsters tend to exploit the common habits of thought and decision-making that make us susceptible – and often oblivious – to their fabrications. Their book, “Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It,” gives readers an overview of dozens of types of scams, hoaxes and strategies used by cheaters to deceive, and explains how to evaluate their ploys and avoid becoming a victim. The authors, Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University ...

ARLINGTON, Va. (July 11, 2023) — Five medical societies have published a set of recommendations for operationalizing strategies for infection prevention in acute care settings that account for conditions within the facility, including the culture and communications style of teams, hospital policies, resources available, leadership support and staff buy-in. “There is no best way to implement a practice, but implementation need not be overly complex,” said Joshua Schaffzin, MD, a pediatric infectious disease physician and a senior author of Implementing Strategies to Prevent ...

A new analysis shows that there are probably many more Earth-like exoplanets with liquid water than had been thought, significantly increasing the chance of finding life. The work finds that even where the conditions are not ideal for liquid water to exist at the surface of a planet, many stars will harbour geological conditions suitable for liquid water under the planet’s surface. Presenting the work at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Lyon, lead researcher Dr Lujendra Ojha (Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA) said “We know that the presence of liquid water is essential for life. Our work shows that this water can be found in places ...

Hairdressers, beauticians, and accountants are among certain job roles that may be associated with a heightened risk of ovarian cancer, finds a case-control study published online in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine. Those working in sales, retail, clothing and construction industries may also be vulnerable, while high cumulative exposure to particular agents, including talcum powder, ammonia, propellant gases, petrol and bleaches may have an important role, the findings suggest. Few modifiable risk factors for ovarian cancer have been identified. Environmental factors, ...

Fibromyalgia, a condition that causes persistent widespread pain and fatigue, may be linked to a heightened risk of death as a result of vulnerability to accidents, infections, and especially suicide, suggests a pooled data analysis of the available evidence, published in the open access journal RMD Open. The findings prompt the researchers to call for regular monitoring of patients’ physical and mental health to minimise these risks. It’s not clear what causes fibromyalgia, but its prevalence is increasing, say the researchers. And there’s growing recognition that the condition often coexists with other health problems, ...

There are significant variations in healthcare spending and care delivery across NHS hospitals in England and Wales following hip fracture, a new study aimed at understanding how hospital care impacts patients’ outcomes and costs has revealed. The study, led by the University of Bristol and funded by Versus Arthritis, highlights the urgent need for evidence-based quality improvement strategies to reduce healthcare spending and improve patient outcomes in the year following a hip fracture.  The research is published online in The Lancet Healthy Longevity today ...

The quantum nature of interactions between elementary particles allows drawing non-trivial conclusions even from processes as simple as elastic scattering. The ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator reports the measurement of fundamental properties of strong interactions between protons at ultra-high energies.   The physics of billiard ball collisions is taught from early school years. In a good approximation, these collisions are elastic, where both momentum and energy are conserved. The scattering angle depends on how central the collision was (this is often quantified by the impact parameter value – the distance between the centres of ...

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Unused solar, wind, and hydroelectric power in the U.S. could support the exponential growth of transactions involving non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Cornell Engineering researchers have found. Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering in Cornell Engineering, is corresponding author of “Climate Concerns and the Future of Non-Fungible Tokens: Leveraging Environmental Benefits of the Ethereum Merge,” which published July 10 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You’s co-author is Apoorv Lal, ...

With support from Amplicore, a University of Cincinnati spinoff biopharmaceutical company, researchers at UC have begun a Department of Defense-funded clinical trial that seeks a regenerative pharmaceutical solution for meniscal tears. Each year more than 500,000 people in the United States sustain acute tears in their meniscus, a piece of cartilage in the knee that cushions and stabilizes the joint. This rate is even higher in the military population, where such injuries can greatly impact the ability of servicemen and women to perform their duties.   The Phase 1/2 clinical trial enrolled its first patients in Cincinnati with Brian Grawe, ...

Imagine a wearable patch that tracks your vital signs through changes in the colour display, or shipping labels that light up to indicate changes in temperature or sterility of food items. These are among the potential uses for a new flexible display created by UBC researchers and announced recently in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. “This device is capable of fast, realtime and reversible colour change,” says researcher Claire Preston, who developed the device as part of her master’s in ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—A common food and medicine additive has shown it can boost the capacity and longevity of a next-generation flow battery design in a record-setting experiment. A research team from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory reports that the flow battery, a design optimized for electrical grid energy storage, maintained its capacity to store and release energy for more than a year of continuous charge and discharge. The study, just published in the journal Joule, details the first use of a dissolved simple sugar called β-cyclodextrin, a derivative of ...

New York, NY—July 10, 2023—As researchers make major advances in medical care, they are also discovering that the efficacy of these treatments can be enhanced by individualized approaches. Therefore, clinicians increasingly need methods that can both continuously monitor physiological signals and then personalize responsive delivery of therapeutics. Need for safe, flexible bioelectronic devices Implanted bioelectronic devices are playing a critical role in these treatments, but there are a number of challenges that have stalled their widespread adoption. These devices require specialized components for signal acquisition, processing, data transmission, and powering. ...

The August 2023 issue of the American Journal of Health Economics will feature a cluster of articles that examine the opioid crisis. These articles consider such topics as access to treatment for opioid use, the impact of the Affordable Care Act on opioid-related emergency department visits, and the effectiveness of prescription drug monitoring programs. In “Do Policies to Increase Access to Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder Work?” authors Leemore S. Dafny, Eric Barrette, and Karen Shen use longitudinal patient-level claims data to examine the impact of demand and supply-side policies on treatment rates among patients diagnosed with opioid ...

New Jersey Institute of Technology has been awarded $10 million by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as part of a $315 million initiative from President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda to expedite the assessment and cleanup of brownfield sites across the country. The funding comes entirely from the historic $1.5 billion investment from Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.  Brownfields are abandoned or underutilized properties that may have hazardous substances, pollutants, or contaminants present, making their redevelopment complex. Under the EPA’s Technical Assistance to ...

Researchers have finally settled a decades-long dispute about the evolutionary origins of the pygmy right whale.   The smallest of the living baleen whales, it’s tank-like skeleton is unique, and its ecology and behaviour remain virtually unknown.   Because it is so unusual, the evolutionary relationships of the pygmy right whale (Caperea marginata) have long been a bone of contention.   In a study that solves the debate, just published in Marine Mammal Science, an international group of researchers sequenced the complete genome of Caperea, combining ...

1. Acute kidney injury not associated with worsening kidney function in persons with CKD Findings suggest kidney disease observed after AKI often present before injury Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M22-3617 URL goes live when the embargo lifts A study of hospitalized persons with chronic kidney disease (CKD) fournd that acute kidney injury (AKI) did not predict worsening of kidney function trajectory once difference in pre-hospitalization characteristically were fully accounted for. Instead, the authors suggest that much of determinants of faster ...

With just a few clicks of a mouse, you can purchase your very own redtail garra, a type of fish that feeds on algae. Information about the fish’s biology, however, is much less easily obtained. That’s because redtail garra, although popular in the aquarium trade since the early 2000s, has until now been unknown to science. Researchers were peripherally aware of the fish’s existence, but “discovering” a new species requires scientific description based on specimens collected in their natural ...