Have you ever felt the strong sensation that someone is behind you, so intense that you turn around, only to see that no-one is there? This is a 'presence hallucination’. Presence hallucinations are particularly frequent but underreported in patients with Parkinson’s disease and may appear early on in the course of the disease. They are sometimes ignored by the patient, by clinicians, or brushed off as a simple side-effect of medication.   Now, EPFL scientists have found that patients recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and who have early hallucinations are ...

Tubulin is a protein that plays a crucial role in the structure and function of cells. It is the main component of microtubules, which are long, hollow fibers that provide structural support, help the cell divide, give it its shape, and act as tracks for moving molecular cargo around inside the cell. There are two types of tubulin: alpha-tubulin and beta-tubulin. Together, they form dimeric (two-part) building blocks, spontaneously assembling into microtubules that undergo further continuous cycles of assembly and disassembly. The tubulin code To fine-tune microtubules, the dimers undergo various post-translational modifications (PTMs), which are chemical modifications that occur ...

Skokie, IL – The ISSCR is pleased to announce Amander T. Clark, PhD, Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA, as its President. Dr. Clark’s one-year term of office leading the global society begins 1 July 2023. “I will work to ensure that the society continues to defend stem cell science and the researchers working to transform lives,” Dr. Clark said at the ISSCR 2023 Annual Meeting in Boston this month. “We will expand our engagement with the public ...

A new machine learning model uses electrocardiogram (ECG) readings to diagnose and classify heart attacks faster and more accurately than current approaches, according to a study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers that published today in Nature Medicine.  “When a patient comes into the hospital with chest pain, the first question we ask is whether the patient is having a heart attack or not. It seems like that should be straightforward, but when it’s not clear from the ECG, it can take ...

RICHLAND, Wash.—Scientists have taken an important step forward in predicting who will develop Type 1 diabetes months before symptoms appear.   In a paper published online on June 29 in Cell Reports Medicine, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and their colleagues identify a set of altered proteins that predict a condition known as islet autoimmunity, a precursor for everyone who will ultimately develop Type 1 diabetes.   The scientists caution that the work marks a beginning, not the end, of a search for a way to predict who will develop the disease. More work needs to be done ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Humans contain multitudes. Each person on the planet contains enough DNA to stretch to Pluto – several times.  Studying how all this genetic material works, and especially how genes influence human behavior, is an enormously complicated undertaking – one that’s being made easier by the emergence of massive banks of genetic data and complex data science analysis techniques to parse that data. Robbee Wedow, an assistant professor of sociology and data science in Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, an adjunct assistant professor of ...

LOS ANGELES — City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States and a leading research center for diabetes and other life-threatening illnesses, today announced that effective June 30, David W. Craig, Ph.D., will be professor and founding chair of its newly created Department of Integrative Translational Sciences within Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope. Craig also will serve as deputy director of translational sciences at Beckman Research Institute and associate ...

UNIVERSITY PARK — Around the globe, forests are facing unprecedented challenges. They're grappling with wildfires, diseases, droughts and deforestation. The survival of these great forests hinges on their ability to regrow — and for many trees, a process called "masting" is key to this regeneration. Masting — the unpredictable boom-and-bust cycle of seed production — can have profound consequences for plant populations and the food webs that are built on their seeds. But the complex relationship between seed-production cycles and seed consumers ...

Overheating of wearable skin-like electronic devices increases the risk of skin burning and results in performance degradation. A research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) invented a photonic material-based “soft, ultrathin, radiative-cooling interface” that greatly enhances heat dissipation in devices, with temperature drops more than 56°C, offering an alternative for effective thermal management in advanced wearable electronics. “Skin-like electronics are an emerging development in wearable devices,” said Dr Yu Xinge, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at CityU, who co-led the research. “Effective thermal ...

When real-world disasters occur, logistics play a crucial role in emergency disaster management. Emergency material scheduling is a vital piece of the emergency logistics plan. Having a reasonable and efficient emergency material scheduling plan is essential in order to save lives and reduce property losses. A research team has applied a variable reduction strategy to an emergency material scheduling problem. This accelerated the optimization process of the algorithms that were already being used and obtained better solutions by simplifying the corresponding emergency material schedule problem.   Their research is published in the journal ...

The Asian–Pacific Oscillation (APO) is a recently identified atmospheric teleconnection pattern in the Asia–Pacific sector characterized by a seesaw vibration of upper-tropospheric temperatures between Asia and the North Pacific. Teleconnections are links between weather phenomena at widely separated locations. The APO has substantial impacts on atmospheric circulation, monsoon rainfall, and cyclone activity, amongst other phenomena. Therefore, the link between the APO and climate change has become a hot topic within the climate change community. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) ...

Oak Brook, IL – The June 2023 issue of SLAS Discovery contains one review article, five full-length articles and two technical briefs covering spheroid models, 3D cell high-throughput screening (HTS) applications for treating Alzheimer’s and other drug discovery research. In drug discovery, 3D cell models have emerged as more physiologically relevant than traditional 2D cell cultures in ex vivo models. As the complexity of patient-derived primary 3D cell cultures increases, so does the need for a supportive matrix for facilitating their formation. Featured in this month’s issue is the article “Comparison of two supporting matrices for patient-derived cancer ...

Oak Brook, IL – Ideas that were once inconceivable, such as generating human tissue for organ transplants, are quickly becoming a reality as bioprinting technology is rapidly advancing. The June special issue of SLAS Technology showcases the latest developments in the field of biotechnology with its collection of seven research articles. “With the continuous development of novel materials, fabrication techniques and bio-ink compositions, bioprinting is poised to revolutionize many aspects of medicine, from drug development to organ transplantation,” says SLAS Technology Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D. (National University ...

INDIANAPOLIS – Mild cognitive impairment, which occurs in about one in six individuals in the U.S., age 65 and older, remains substantially underdiagnosed, especially in disadvantaged populations. Convened by the non-profit UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, The Brief Cognitive Assessment Work Group, is composed of 15 clinicians, researchers and health systems administrators from across the U.S. The group advocates for early detection of cognitive impairment to benefit both patients and caregivers by providing time to plan for future care, allowing preventive steps to potentially delay some symptoms as well as recognizing cognitive impairment due to a currently treatable condition. The ...

A review paper by researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology summarized recent advancements and challenges in the use of cross-frequency coupling (CFC) for neuroscience and cyborg and bionic systems (CBS). The new review paper, published on May 31 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, provided an overview of the latest developments in CFC research, with emphasis on methodologies, neural mechanisms, and applications in CBS, especially clinical interventions. “CFC has gained great interest as an ...

Sports are a way in for people who want to build contacts with other people. Sports give you an opportunity to integrate and interact with people on an equal footing. For immigrants, sports can be the key that allows them to fit into a society. But how easy is it for people with strange names to join in the fun? That depends on how foreign sounding a person’s name is, and perhaps where the person lives. Because the results from the experiment were not the same throughout Scandinavia. Some are more similar than others. The rigged football experiment actually shows encouraging ...

The Vidalia onion is a trademarked variety of sweet onion that can only be grown in several counties in Georgia by law. These prized vegetables are currently threatened by the bacterial pathogen Pantoea ananatis, which severely damages the plant by rotting the onion bulbs and leaves. This results in substantial losses for onion growers in Georgia, as there are no disease resistant cultivars available. The plant toxin pantaphos, produced by the P. ananatis pathogen, causes the rotting symptoms in onion. More specifically, the eleven genes responsible ...

Nearly 4 million infants are born in the United States each year. Despite improvements in obstetric and perinatal care, infant mortality in the U.S. is of ongoing concern. The nation ranks No. 23 in the world for infant mortality rates with 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, with worse outcomes observed in Black infants compared to white infants. Now, new original research from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators indicates that infant mortality alone may be insufficient as a health indicator. For the study, researchers explored time trends and racial inequities ...

(Toronto, June 28, 2023) With the release of the 2023 Journal Citation Reports™ (JCR) today, we first want to thank everyone who has contributed to our continued mission toward a more open world. Of our 34 open access journals, 14 now have a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)—that’s a 133% increase since last year, and we still have more journals launched in the last 2 years that won’t yet be relevant for metrics such as the JIF and CiteScore.   Eight of our journals now have a JIF: Interactive Journal of Medical Research - 2 JMIR ...

The UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) is actively contributing to the shipping industry being far off course from ever reaching its climate goals. In large part, this is because the organization lacks funding and expertise. Without strengthening the IMO, any transition of the enormous industry is hazily imaginable. This, according to the Copenhagen and Lund university researchers behind a new study of the organization. Three percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to the shipping industry. And things remain headed in the wrong direction – with CO2 emissions from ships continuing to rise year after year. This has increased ...

Ikoma, Japan – The gastric corpus, which is a major component of the glandular stomach, is composed of parietal, chief, pit, and neck cells. Each of these specialized epithelial cells play an important role in digestion, and they are continuously replenished by new ones which are formed via the differentiation of stem cells. Defects in this process lead to gastric diseases such as intestinal metaplasia and gastric cancer. However, the underlying mechanisms responsible for the renewal and differentiation of stem cells, and ...

TORONTO, ON – American adults 65 years old and older living in warmer regions are more likely to have serious vision impairment than their peers living in cooler regions, according to a recent study published in the journal Ophthalmic Epidemiology.   Compared to those who lived in counties with average temperature of less than 50°F (< 10 °C), the odds of severe vision impairment were 14% higher for those who lived in counties with average temperature between 50-54.99°F, 24% higher for those between ...

Pregnant women may be better supported by trained dietitians to control weight gain during pregnancy, a new analysis of almost 100 studies shows.   The meta-analysis of almost 35,000 participants across 99 studies published in JAMA Network Open found that interventions from allied health professionals such as dietitians were the most beneficial for controlling gestational weight gain (GWG).   Spanning 30 years of international evidence, the research team including maternal health expert Professor Shakila Thangaratinam from the University of Birmingham identified that between 6 and 20 sessions on a one-to-one ...

A new meta-analysis (an analysis of past research) published by the scientific journal Addiction presents important findings that shed light on the effectiveness of psychological treatments for gambling problems. The analysis provides both positive and negative insights, including uncovering potential overstatements of the benefits associated with using cognitive-behavioural techniques (CBTs). Significantly more funds are essential to increase the rigor of studies and to improve understanding of treatment impact among individuals experiencing gambling problems. The analysis pooled the results of 29 randomised controlled trials of CBTs on reducing ...

In Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories, released today, Marcel Danesi Ph.D., a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, analyzes the speeches of dictators including Mussolini, Stalin, Putin and Hitler, as well as prominent hate groups. His research finds there is one thing they all have in common: they all use dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others. “The intent of such speech is to attack those who do not belong to the mainstream, such as racial minorities, or people of different sexual orientations,” says Danesi. Powerful language For example words like ‘pests’, ...