In the early 2000s, scientists from the UK made a worrisome discovery that the oceans are teeming with small particles of plastic (less than one millimeter in length) due to the continuous degradation of plastic waste. These microscopic particles of plastic have become a major environmental concern. Scientists classify these small particles as either microplastics or nanoplastics based on their size; the latter term is used exclusively for particles smaller than one micrometer. These particles easily get embedded into the bodies of marine and freshwater animals, ...

Researchers have created a small device that ‘sees’ and creates memories in a similar way to humans, in a promising step towards one day having applications that can make rapid, complex decisions such as in self-driving cars. The neuromorphic invention is a single chip enabled by a sensing element, doped indium oxide, that’s thousands of times thinner than a human hair and requires no external parts to operate. RMIT University engineers in Australia led the work, with contributions from researchers at Deakin University and the University of Melbourne. The team’s research demonstrates a working device that captures, processes and stores visual ...

SDE BOKER, Israel, June 14, 2023 – Photovoltaic technology is indispensable for our ability to mitigate climate change. Nonetheless, more than 70% of the energy made available to us by the sun is wasted in conventional photovoltaic cells. There is little hope for sustainable technological advancement without addressing this issue. The operational temperature is a critical factor in a solar cell's ability to convert sunlight to free energy. Accordingly, much research has been directed toward understanding the temperature effects in the efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells. Surprisingly, ...

Glucose oxidase (GOx)-based biosensors have attracted much attention for their potential in rapid glucose detection and continuous monitoring, which are crucial for disease diagnosis and prevention, as well as for controllable production in sugar-making and fermentation processes. The glucose oxidase/electrocatalysts/electrode (GOx/ECs/electrode) cascade system serves as the core part of most glucose biosensing devices (both invasive and non-invasive). However, patterned assembly of these cascade sensing units remains challenging, thus limiting the ...

Ishikawa, Japan -- Bone-conduction (BC) headphones enhance hearing capability by generating vibrations in bone or skin close to the ear, including the regio temporalis. They simultaneously leave the ear canal open to allow the surrounding air-conducted (AC) sounds for normal hearing. However, word intelligibility – recognition ability – is often poor during bone-conducted speech perceived using BC headphones due to the attenuation of its high-frequency components, especially under noisy conditions. While inserting ear plugs in the ear canal help improve ...

A new study from Australia, New Zealand and Germany published in the New England Journal of Medicine raises important questions about the success or otherwise of emergency medicine.  The study examined the drug tranexamic acid, which is commonly used to limit bleeding during surgery. However, its usefulness in emergency settings as a pre-emptive strike in life-threatening bleeding has been controversial, and recent studies have provided contradictory results about whether or not it saves lives or causes dangerous blood clotting.  The Pre-hospital ...

AMES, IA — Last month, the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General both issued health advisories. Their concerns and recommendations for teens, parents and policymakers addressed a mounting body of research that shows two trends are intertwined. Young people are using social media more, and their mental health is suffering. Researchers at Iowa State University found a simple intervention could help. During a two-week experiment with 230 college students, half were asked to limit their ...

Dr. Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a theoretical astrophysicist at The University of Texas at Dallas, has spent his career seeking answers to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, including why the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating and whether gravity behaves differently beyond our closest cosmic neighbors. To study these and other questions, a large collaboration of scientists, including Ishak-Boushaki and UTD physics doctoral students Cristhian Garcia Quintero, Leonel Medina Varela and Yunan Xie, are using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic ...

Scientists need to get out of the lab and into the rain, say an interdisciplinary group of researchers led by John T. Van Stan of Cleveland State University. Writing in the journal BioScience, the authors make the case that human observation of storm events (be it rain, snow, or occult deposition) is key to understanding wet weather and its myriad effects on the natural world.                 Recently, Van Stan and colleagues noted a trend in the scientific community towards relying on remote ...

A study led by researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research shows for the first time how a gene called RELA, known to regulate inflammation, also plays an essential role in maintaining normal blood-sugar levels. The findings, published in Diabetologia, have implications for the prevention of steroid-induced diabetes, a temporary form of diabetes that affects up to half of hospital patients treated with high-dose steroids. “Our discovery sheds new light on a complex network of factors governing glucose metabolism and how it can go awry in diabetes,” says Professor ...

Wildfire smoke is a threat to air quality, public health, and ecosystems throughout the U.S. Notwithstanding the impact of this year’s Canadian wildfires, the West typically sees much higher exposure to wildfire smoke than other regions of the country. New research from Harvard University, the U.S. Forest Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that controlled burns – particularly in coastal areas of northern California and the Pacific Northwest – could dramatically reduce the overall amount of wildfire smoke exposure in vulnerable rural communities and dense ...

Researchers from McGill University and Ontario Tech University published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines the drivers of specialty drug diffusion. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Scientific Evidence Production and Specialty Drug Diffusion” and is authored by Demetrios Vakratsas and Wei-Lin Wang. A notable trend in the pharmaceutical industry is the development of specialty drugs to treat complex, severe diseases, often with a limited number of patients. Of the 219 new drugs (or new active substances, NASs) that were launched in the U.S. between 2014 and 2018, 136 ...

PLYMOUTH MEETING, PA and LONDON, UK [June 14, 2023] — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) is introducing a new global resource to improve thyroid cancer care in low- and middle-income countries at the upcoming World Congress on Thyroid Cancer, in London. During the event, NCCN Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Wui-Jin Koh, MD, will present on NCCN’s ongoing global work to define and advance high-quality, high-value, patient-centered cancer care. As part of ...

SEATTLE, Wash. – Quitting alcohol or drugs was not a top priority for people experiencing homelessness in a harm reduction treatment study, yet participants still reduced their use of both. A different approach than traditional abstinence-based programs, harm reduction treatment for alcohol use disorder, also called HaRT-A, has patients set their own goals. In a study of 308 people experiencing homelessness, the participants receiving harm reduction treatment set goals of meeting basic needs and improving quality of life well above quitting alcohol and other substances. Yet harm reduction treatment still led to more reduced use compared to a control group who received ...

The Maynooth University Foundation is delighted to announce a significant donation from Intel Ireland to support the creation of a state-of-the-art robotics lab. The lab will provide MU students with invaluable hands-on learning experiences using cutting-edge robotic technologies. The establishment of the robotics lab at a total cost of €150,000 will equip Maynooth University students with access to innovative robotic technologies and equipment used by engineers from Intel and other companies. This hands-on experience will enable them to bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world application, empowering them to develop and refine their skills in robotics. The ...

Beta-2 agonists are bronchodilators commonly used in the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Although beta-2 agonists have been associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in some previous epidemiological studies, this association was not found in a recent register-based study from the University of Eastern Finland. The findings were published in Clinical Epidemiology. Accumulation of the alpha-synuclein protein in the brain plays a central role in Parkinson’s ...

Put yourself in the exoskeleton of a bumblebee for a moment: your world would be a riot of colors and scents, both essential to guide your search for pollen and nectar. Bumblebees have excellent vision: they have a pair of compound eyes that can distinguish UV and most colors except red, plus three additional simple eyes specialized in detecting polarized light. Their sense of smell dwarfs ours: approximately 100 times more sensitive, and capable of sniffing out illegal drugs or explosives at airports, confirming pregnancy in women, or detecting cancers and diabetes in early-stage patients. Now, ...

All living cells contains proteins with different functions, depending on the type of cell. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg have discovered a way to identify proteins even without looking at their structure. Their method is faster, easier and more reliable than previous methods. Currently, the general view is that each protein’s structure is what controls its function in cells. The atomic sequences, meaning how the atoms are arranged in the proteins, create the protein’s structure and shape. But there are many proteins that lack a well-defined structure. Researcher Gergely Katona ...

Summary: The University of Tokyo scientists achieve the delicate task of arranging quantum sensors at a nanoscale, allowing them to detect extremely small variations in magnetic fields. The high-resolution quantum sensors will have potential uses in quantum materials and electronic device research. For example, the sensors can help develop hard disks that use nano-magnetic materials as storage elements. This is the world’s first successful high-resolution magnetic field imaging using a nanoscale arrangement of quantum sensors.   Sensors surround us in our daily life, from garage lights ...

WASHINGTON (June 14, 2023) – More than 500 adolescent mothers, caregivers and community members benefitted from a coordinated “collective impact” model to provide support aimed at addressing the litany of strains faced by teen parents, according to a case study published Wednesday in the journal Pediatrics.    Known as the District of Columbia Network for Parenting and Expectant Teens (DC NEXT), the model used well-tested pillars of community organization to provide services and care that bolstered the well-being of pregnant ...

A University of Waterloo engineer’s MRI invention reveals better than many existing imaging technologies how COVID-19 can change the human brain. The new imaging technique known as correlated diffusion imaging (CDI) was developed by systems design engineering professor Alexander Wong and recently used in a groundbreaking study by scientists at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute and Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. “Some may think COVID-19 affects just the lungs,” Dr. Wong said. “What was found is that this new MRI technique that we created ...

Niigata, Japan – Using machine learning, the Department of Neurology at Niigata University has developed a model to predict the asymptomatic probability at each age from the current age and number of CAG repeats in carriers of spinocerebellar degeneration. Polyglutamine diseases such as DRPLA and SCA3 are caused by an expansion of CAG repeats in the causative gene. In polyglutamine diseases, the number of CAG repeats is known to be inversely related to age of onset. Parametric survival analysis has traditionally been used to predict age of onset, but a more accurate prediction method has been desired. We ...

Niigata, Japan - The phenomenon of improvement of glucose to levels in a normal range and cessation of the need for medication can occur in some patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes who are provided with lifestyle therapy, temporary pharmacotherapy, bariatric surgery, or combinations of these treatments. However, this phenomenon is not yet fully understood in routine care settings, and many factors remain to be clarified. Moreover, since there are differences in insulin secretion and resistance between East Asian and Western populations, the natural history of diabetes seems to differ widely between Western populations and East Asians. Therefore, ...

In science, the explanation with the fewest assumptions is most likely to be true. Called “Occam’s Razor,” this principle has guided theory and experiment for centuries. But how do you compare between abstract concepts? In a new paper, philosophers from UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine discuss how to weigh the complexity of scientific theories by comparing their underlying mathematics. They aim to characterize the amount of structure a theory has using symmetry — or the aspects of an object that remain the same when other changes are made. After much ...

Safety biomarkers aim to provide an additional tool for detecting acute drug-induced pancreatic injury (DIPI) in phase 1 clinical trials TUCSON, Ariz., June 13, 2023 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path) today announced that the Biomarker Qualification Program (BQP) at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a Biomarker Letter of Support (LOS) for four pancreatic injury safety biomarkers identified and evaluated by C-Path’s Predictive Safety Testing Consortium's (PSTC) Pancreatic Injury Working Group (PIWG). This set of biomarkers will help increase the ability ...