Graphics  //  Photos The earliest humans to settle the Great Lakes region likely returned to a campsite in southwest Michigan for several years in a row, according to a University of Michigan study.   Until recently, there was no evidence that people from the Clovis period had settled the Great Lakes region. Clovis people appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, during the geologic epoch called the Pleistocene. During the Pleistocene, sheets of glaciers covered much of the world, including Michigan, making the land inhospitable for human settlers. But a 2021 U-M study confirmed that Clovis people built ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2024 MINNEAPOLIS – People who have had a stroke may be more likely to sleep too much or too little compared to those without prior stroke, according to a study published in the September 11, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that stroke causes abnormal sleep; it only shows an association. “Sleeping the right amount is considered essential for ideal brain and heart health,” said study author Sara Hassani, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have created microscale robots less than 1 millimeter in size that are printed as a 2D hexagonal “metasheet” but, with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl. The robot’s versatility is due to a novel design based on kirigami, a cousin of origami, in which slices in the material enable it to fold, expand and locomote. The team’s paper, “Electronically Configurable Microscopic Metasheet Robots,” published Sept. 11 in Nature Materials. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral ...

September 11, 2024 — A noninvasive ultrasound technology called Break Wave™ lithotripsy (BWL) offers a safe and effective new option for treatment of urinary stones, reports a clinical trial in the October issue of The Journal of Urology®, an Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  "In this initial experience, BWL provided a high treatment success rate, using a portable technology that can be used in a range of settings, without the need for anesthesia" comments lead ...

A new study led by Cesar de la Fuente, PhD, Presidential Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Microbiology, Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, has uncovered sequences for infection-fighting molecules in the genomic data of extinct species. This most recent study in the emerging field of “molecular de-extinction”, pioneered by Prof. de la Fuente, offers the potential to develop new antimicrobial treatments in the fight against rising antibiotic resistance. The study, published in Cell Reports Physical Science, analyzed genomic data from the extinct moa, a flightless bird from New Zealand, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Mold can survive the harshest of environments, so to stop harmful spores from growing on future space stations, a new study suggests a novel way to prevent its spread.    Researchers created a predictive approach for modeling unintended microbial growth in critical spaces and applied it to life on the International Space Station.   An analysis of dust samples obtained from the space station found that repeated elevated humidity exposures for even a short time can lead to rapid microbial growth and composition changes in dust that make it easier for microbes, ...

Pisa, 11 september. It is the first magnetically controlled prosthetic hand, that allows amputees to reproduce all movements simply by thinking and to control the force applied when grasping fragile objects. No wires, no electrical connection, only magnets and muscles to control the movements of the fingers and enable everyday activities such as opening a jar, using a screwdriver, picking up a coin. A research team from the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, coordinated by Prof. Christian Cipriani, has ...

Four plants consumed by wild gorillas in Gabon and used by local communities in traditional medicine show antibacterial and antioxidant properties, find Leresche Even Doneilly Oyaba Yinda from the Interdisciplinary Medical Research Center of Franceville in Gabon and colleagues in a new study publishing September 11 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Wild great apes often consume medicinal plants that can treat their ailments. The same plants are often used by local people in traditional medicine. To investigate, researchers observed the behavior of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla ...

Survey data collected from Chicago, Illinois at the time of the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in nearby Wisconsin shows that trust in police plummeted among Black residents after the shooting. Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa of Columbia University in New York, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 11, 2024. For young minority men in the U.S., police violence has become a leading cause of death. Prior research has explored how police violence and misconduct might reduce trust in police, but most studies have been limited in ...

Quitting cigarettes can significantly lower a person’s risk of atrial fibrillation (AFib) compared to those who continue to smoke, according to a study published today in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology. The findings show that the benefits of quitting start right away, suggesting that it is possible to reverse the risk of negative health outcomes. “The findings provide a compelling new reason to show current smokers that it’s not too late to quit and that having smoked in the past doesn’t ...

Atrial fibrillation, a rapid, irregular heart beat that can lead to stroke or sudden death, is three times more common than previously thought, affecting nearly 5% of the population, or 10.5 million U.S. adults, according to new estimates from UC San Francisco. A-Fib, as the condition is commonly known, has been on the rise for at least the past decade, driven by the aging of the population, along with increasing rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Earlier projections had estimated that 3.3 million U.S. adults ...

Summary: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing its first detailed maps of the Sun’s coronal magnetic fields. This milestone, led by NSO Associate Astronomer Dr. Tom Schad, was recently published in Science Advances, and promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun's atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth's technology-dependent society. The corona, or the Sun’s ...

  In a landmark study published today in Science Advances, Dr. Shai Bel and his research team at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University have uncovered crucial insights into how antibiotic use increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study demonstrates that antibiotics interfere with the protective mucus layer in the intestine, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of antibiotic effects and IBD development. IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects approximately 1% of the global population. This debilitating condition is ...

In a landmark advancement, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published today in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a huge step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states.  Such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to ...

Regions of the genome associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in African populations will be presented at the Future of Dementia in Africa conference on September 11-12, 2024. The studies highlight discrepancies compared to Caucasian populations and underscore that a lack of diversity in genomic studies potentially limits the effectiveness of targeted therapies across diverse populations.  The Future of Dementia in Africa conference will take place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a Nature Conference, ...

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun.  Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024. Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to ...

If you were to collect all the organisms from the ocean surface down to 200 meters, you’d find that SAR11 bacteria, though invisible to the naked eye, would make up a fifth of the total biomass. These bacteria, also known as Pelagibacterales, have evolved to thrive in nutrient-poor marine environments and play a significant role in global nutrient cycles. Despite their importance, the mechanisms behind their impact on the planetary ecosystem have remained unclear.  But now, a recent Nature paper by researchers from the Okinawa ...

Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have created the first two-dimensional version of the Bose glass, a novel phase of matter that challenges statistical mechanics. The details of the study have been published in Nature. As the name suggests, the Bose glass has some glassy properties and within it all particles are localised. This means that each particle in the system sticks to itself, not mixing with its neighbours. If coffee was localised, then when stirring milk into the coffee, the intricate pattern of black and white stripes would remain forever, instead of washing out to an average. To create this new phase of matter, the group overlapped several laser ...

New research has found four genes with some of the largest known effects on the timing of menopause discovered to date, providing new insight into links between menopause timing and cancer risk.   Genes come in pairs, and when women only have one working copy of the four new genes identified (ETAA1, ZNF518A, PNPLA8, PALB2), they have menopause between two and five-and-a-half years earlier than average.   Published in Nature, the large-scale analysis was funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome. The team first looked at variation in data from genetic sequencing of 106,973  post-menopausal ...

Rapa Nui or Te Pito o Te Henua (the navel of the world), also known as Easter Island, is one of the most isolated inhabited places in the world. Located in the Pacific, it lies over 1,900 km east of the closest inhabited Polynesian island and 3,700 km west of South America. Although the island, its inhabitants and their rich culture have been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists, two key elements of Rapanui history remain very controversial to this day. One of these is the theory of population collapse through "ecocide" or "ecological ...

With maps of the connections between neurons and artificial intelligence methods, researchers can now do what they never thought possible: predict the activity of individual neurons without making a single measurement in a living brain. For decades, neuroscientists have spent countless hours in the lab painstakingly measuring the activity of neurons in living animals to tease out how the brain enables behavior. These experiments have yielded groundbreaking insights into how the brain works, but they have only scratched the surface, leaving much of the brain unexplored. Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence and the connectome – a ...

BOSTON – Many clinical trials of new cancer drugs may be inappropriately excluding some people with "Duffy-null phenotype," a trait found predominantly in people of African or Middle Eastern descent, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Queen Mary University of London report in a new study. The Duffy-null phenotype results in relatively lower levels of white blood cells called neutrophils when measured in the blood. This is not because they have less neutrophils overall, but because they are more frequently located in other body tissues. Tests that restrict clinical trial eligibility to patients with certain blood levels of neutrophils may therefore ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, more than 50% of adults with uncontrolled hypertension in the U.S. were unaware of their hypertension and were untreated, and 70.8% of those who were treated had hypertension that remained uncontrolled. These findings have serious implications for the nation’s overall health given the association of hypertension with increased risk for cardiovascular disease.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, LaTonia C. Richardson, PhD, email lcrichardson@cdc.gov. To access the embargoed study: ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study of neighborhood opportunity and preterm birth, elevated risk associated with exposure to a very low opportunity neighborhood, coupled with the disproportionate exposure by race and ethnicity, points to a modifiable factor that may contribute to racial and ethnic inequities in preterm birth. Future research should investigate interventions that seek to address neighborhood opportunity.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Candice Belanoff, ScD, MPH, email cbelanof@bu.edu. To ...

Researchers have for the first time identified degeneration-associated “molecular markers” – observable changes in cells and their gene-regulating networks – that are shared by several forms of dementia that affect different regions of the brain. Critically, the UCLA-led research, published in the journal Cell, also identified markers specific to different forms of dementia, and the combined findings represent a potential paradigm shift in the search for causes, treatments and cures. “This ...