Galaxies are not scattered randomly across the universe. They gather together not only into clusters, but into vast interconnected filamentary structures with gigantic barren voids in between. This “cosmic web” started out tenuous and became more distinct over time as gravity drew matter together.   Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a thread-like arrangement of 10 galaxies that existed just 830 million years after the big bang. The 3 million light-year-long structure is anchored by a luminous quasar – a galaxy with an active, supermassive black hole at ...

DURHAM, N.C. – CRISPR gene editing is a breakthrough that has been used to treat diseases such as sickle cell anemia, leukemia and genetic disorders, but it has challenges that limit its broad utility.   Identifying the root of those issues led a research team at Duke Health to find an improved approach to gene editing that expands its functionality.   In work appearing online June 29 in the journal Cell Chemical Biology, the researchers lay out a new way to identify diverse CRISPR RNA variants that can specifically home in on challenging areas of DNA to target for editing. The new approach opens up more of the genome for editing, ...

Water fasts — where people consume nothing but water for several days — might help you lose weight, but it’s unclear how long you’ll keep it off, according to research from the University of Illinois Chicago. And the other metabolic benefits of water fasts, such as lower blood pressure and improved cholesterol, seem to disappear soon after the fast ends, the researchers found.  However, there do not appear to be any serious adverse effects for those who do a water fast or a similar kind of fast where people consume a very small number of calories a day, said Krista Varady, professor of kinesiology and nutrition, who led the research, ...

In light of climate change and the impending transition to clean energy, many long-standing programs to address energy insecurity need to be refreshed. A new paper published online in the journal Health Affairs provides growing documentation of the connections between energy insecurity and poor health. The paper, by Diana Hernandez, PhD, associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, also offers an overview of current policy initiatives and discusses ways that current policies can be improved upon. The average U.S. household allocates 3.1 percent of its income to energy expenses but for low-income households, ...

Rockville, MD – The latest journal impact factors and rankings reflect the high-quality research that is published each year by the American Society for Nutrition (ASN).  Scopus recently ranked Advances in Nutrition the number one journal in the Nutrition and Dietetics field. The Society’s newest journal, Current Developments in Nutrition, surpassed expectations with an excellent inaugural impact factor of 4.8 confirming its promising future. “I am delighted to receive such a superb first impact factor,” stated Jack Odle, PhD, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University and Editor-in-Chief of Current ...

Glenview, Illinois – The American College of Chest Physicians® (CHEST) recently released a new clinical guideline on antithrombotic therapy in arterial thrombosis andthromboembolism in COVID-19. Published in the journal CHEST®, the guideline contains 11 evidence-based recommendations to improve risk-evaluation and to assist in determining the course of treatment. While there are guidelines for the management of COVID-19-related coagulopathy for venous thromboembolism (VTE), a recent large cohort study showed ...

The College of Pharmacy at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center is now ranked No. 6 in annual research funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to a new listing published by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy of its approximately 140 member institutions. “The ranking of No. 6 in NIH funding for federal fiscal year 2022 is external validation for the UTHSC College of Pharmacy’s standing as one of the leading institutions in research among the 142 U.S. pharmacy schools,” said Bernd Meibohm, ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers report a new single-photon Raman lidar system that operates underwater and can remotely distinguish various substances. They also show that the new system can detect the thickness of the oil underwater up to 12 m away, which could be useful for detecting oil spills. “Differentiating substances in water and detecting their distribution characteristics in the ocean are of great significance for marine monitoring and scientific research,” said research team leader Mingjia Shangguan from Xiamen University in China. “For instance, the remote sensing of underwater oil that we ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed a method to simplify one step of radioisotope production — and it’s faster and safer. ORNL produces several radionuclides from irradiated radium-226 targets, including actinium-227 and thorium-228, both used in cancer treatments. Continuously improving isotopes for human health is one of the lab’s missions. Currently, it takes workers two weeks to prepare radium-226 targets for irradiation in the High Flux Isotope Reactor. The targets are exposed to radiation throughout the process, which involves pressing radium carbonate aluminum composite into 10 pellets — one each day — and sealing ...

About The Study: This systematic review and meta-analysis including 41 studies and 7,800 participants found that psychosocial interventions were associated with decreased health care use in most health services and increased use of outpatient care. The greatest health care decrease was among caregivers and individuals with mental illnesses and in interventions delivered 1-on-1 by health professionals.  Authors: Neta HaGani, M.S.W., of the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia, is the corresponding author.  To ...

New York, NY—June 29, 2023—The data centers and high-performance computers that run artificial intelligence programs, such as large language models, aren’t limited by the sheer computational power of their individual nodes. It’s another problem — the amount of data they can transfer among the nodes — that underlies the “bandwidth bottleneck” that currently limits the performance and scaling of these systems. The nodes in these systems can be separated by more than one kilometer. Since metal wires dissipate electrical signals as heat when transferring data at high speeds, these systems transfer data via fiber-optic ...

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 ...