A team of researchers from the University of Bristol have shed light on the life of the ancient reptile Rhynchosaur, which walked the earth between 250-225 million years ago, before being replaced by the dinosaurs. Rhynchosaurs are a little-understood group of roughly sheep-sized ancient reptiles that thrived during the Triassic Period, a time of generally warm climates and tough vegetation.   In the new study, the researchers studied specimens found in Devon and used CT scanning to see how the teeth wore down ...

Researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) are leading ground-breaking global trials which could save lives by changing how we treat cancer in the near future.   ECU Centre for Precision Health Clinical Professor Adnan Khattak presented the trial’s latest results at the 2023 American Society of Oncology (ASCO) congress in Chicago this week, the biggest cancer treatment conference in the world with more than 45,000 attendees.   Professor Khattak outlined how survival and disease recurrence rates among people who’d had high-risk skin cancers (melanomas) removed improved significantly when an mRNA vaccine ...

Peer-reviewed / Randomised Controlled Trial / People Peer-reviewed / Randomised Controlled Trial / People The Lancet Infectious Diseases: Taking a common diabetes medication after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 reduces risk of developing long COVID by 40%, study finds US study of 1,126 overweight and obese people finds 6.3% of participants who took metformin, a medication commonly used to control blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes, within three days of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 reported a long COVID diagnosis within 10 months, compared to 10.4% of those who received a placebo. This is the first published randomised ...

Public confidence in vaccines has plunged across sub-Saharan Africa since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study of 17,000 people, across eight countries, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics.   The findings come as the World Health Organization and UNICEF have reported the largest sustained fall in uptake of routine childhood immunizations in three decades.   Six million fewer children in Africa received routine shots for diseases including tetanus, polio, diphtheria and measles over the past ...

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people are more than twice as likely than their straight peers to experience suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviours, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, is the first ever to analyse nationally representative data on sexual orientation and suicidality in England whilst being able to compare individual sexual minority groups. The researchers analysed data combined from two household surveys of 10,443 English adults (aged 16 and over), representative of the population, sampled in 2007 and 2014. As ...

Right now, United States employers are unable to fill around 1 million computer science-related jobs because of a lack of qualified candidates, as estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the demand isn’t going away – the bureau projects employment in the field to grow much faster than average through 2031, while the number of graduates will continue to lag behind job openings. This workforce need is the primary reason the College of Engineering will soon offer a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering, said Michael Wu, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which houses the ...

Chilean policies aimed at reining in unhealthy food marketing are succeeding in protecting children from the onslaught of television advertisements (TV ads) for these products, according to new research. The country’s multi-phased regulations, which began in 2016, have led to a 73% drop in children’s exposure to TV ads for regulated foods and drinks (those that exceed legal thresholds for calories, sugar, salt or saturated fat) by 2019. During this time, the number of ads for unhealthy foods dropped 64% on all TV programs ...

Leesburg, VA, June 8, 2023—According to an accepted manuscript published in ARRS’ own American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), transient ischemic attack (TIA) emergency department (ED) encounters with incomplete neurovascular imaging were associated with higher odds of subsequent stroke within 90 days. “Increased access to urgent neurovascular imaging in patients with TIA may represent a target that could facilitate detection and treatment of modifiable stroke risk factors,” wrote first author Vincent M. Timpone, MD, from the department of radiology at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora. Timpone et al. ...

Researchers Create Engineered Human Tissue to Study Mosquito Bites, Disease Scientists hope to use this new platform to study how pathogens that mosquitoes carry impact and infect human cells and tissues. By Eric Eraso | June 8, 2023 A UCF research team has engineered tissue with human cells that mosquitoes love to bite and feed upon — with the goal of helping fight deadly diseases transmitted by the biting insects. A multidisciplinary team led by College of Medicine biomedical researcher Bradley Jay Willenberg with Mollie Jewett (UCF Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences) and Andrew Dickerson (University of Tennessee) ...

As one of the first hospitals in the world to establish a proton radiotherapy program to treat cancer, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Mass General Cancer Center have been pioneers in using and improving proton therapy for treating both benign and malignant tumors effectively while delivering a lower dose of radiation to tissue surrounding the target site. Researchers at MGH have led and continue to lead studies that are defining the best use of proton therapy, which is now being offered at 106 centers worldwide. In a Review article published in The ...

INFORMS Journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management New Study Key Takeaways: Researchers develop a method to more accurately predict and showcase hospital wait times to patients and emergency personnel by using new information that is learned in the intake process. This method provides more up-to-date wait times allowing patients and paramedics to make choices about which emergency department to go to. This process streamlines patient flow, creates more uniform spread of patients and lowers congestion across emergency departments, and could improve patient outcomes ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a study published in the journal Ecology Letters reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes.  “There’s a fair amount of biodiversity research on fire and plants,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with UC Cooperative Extension who is based at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and is the study’s lead author. Research has shown that in ecosystems where fire is a natural and regular occurrence, there ...

What exactly makes for a fit Fido? And how does a dog’s environment factor into their dog years?   “People love their dogs,” said ASU School of Life Sciences assistant professor Noah Snyder-Mackler.  “But what people may not know, is that this love and care, combined with their relatively shorter lifespans, make our companion dogs a great model for studying how and when aspects of the social and physical environment may alter aging, health and survival.”   Now, the largest survey and data compilation of its kind--- from more than 21,000 dog owners--- has revealed the social determinants that may be ...

Examining the Ethics and Impacts of Laws Restricting Transgender Youth‐Athlete Participation Valerie Moyer, Amanda Zink, Brendan Parent As of this writing, 21 states have passed laws barring transgender youth-athletes from competing on public school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a “level playing field” for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions. Gathering more robust ...

Geisel Study Offers New Insights into How Medicare Fraud Has Spread Across U.S. Regions in Recent Years   Findings from an innovative study conducted by a team of researchers at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, are providing new insights into how the rapid spread (or diffusion) of fraudulent Medicare home healthcare billing has occurred across the U.S. in recent years.   To understand the significant growth of Medicare fraud during the 2000s in just a few regions of the country, the research team examined the network structure of home health agencies (HHAs) and identified a set ...

The U.S. government could save taxpayers between $228 million-$2.15 billion a year if insurers who operate its Medicare Part D plans purchased seven generic oncology drugs at the same prices obtained by the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company (MCCPDC), according to a study published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,   The Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) study, led by Ruchika Talwar, MD, a urologic oncology fellow, estimated potential savings by switching to MCCPDC prices with the implication ...

ANN ARBOR—Young adults ages 19 to 30 nearly doubled their past 12-month use of non-LSD hallucinogens in the United States from 2018 to 2021, according to a study by the University of Michigan and Columbia University. In 2018, the prevalence of young adults' past-year use of non-LSD hallucinogens was 3.4%. In 2021, that use increased to 6.6%. "While non-LSD hallucinogen use remains substantially less prevalent than use of substances such as alcohol and cannabis, a doubling of prevalence in just three years is a ...

To help solve hunger and malnutrition while also slowing climate change, some farmers could shift from land to sea, suggests a recent study from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. The study was published in Global Food Security. Producing and selling seaweed could boost incomes for farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in coastal regions of Africa and Southeast Asia, said Patrick Webb, the Alexander McFarlane Professor of Nutrition at the Friedman School and senior author of the study. The other ...

When we listen to our favorite song, what sounds like a continuous wave of music is actually transmitted as tiny packets of quantum particles called phonons. The laws of quantum mechanics hold that quantum particles are fundamentally indivisible and therefore cannot be split, but researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago are exploring what happens when you try to split a phonon. In two experiments – the first of their kinds – a team led by Prof. Andrew Cleland used a device called an acoustic beamsplitter ...

Unmanned ground vehicles can be used to identify and eliminate the breeding sources of mosquitos that carry dengue fever in urban areas, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases by Wei-Liang Liu of the Taiwan National Mosquito-Borne Diseases Control Research Center, and colleagues. Dengue fever is an infectious disease caused by the dengue virus and spread by several mosquito species in the genus Aedes, which also spread chikungunya, yellow fever and zika. Through the process of urbanization, ...

Taurine deficiency may be a driver for aging, according to a new study, which evaluated the amino acid’s effect on health and longevity across several animal models. According to the authors, reversing age-associated taurine loss via supplementation improved the healthy lifespan in worms, rodents, and non-human primates – findings that warrant further human trials to examine taurine’s effect on healthy lifespan in humans and the potential risks involved. Taurine – a semi-essential micronutrient – is one of the most abundant amino acids in animals. Previous studies in several species have shown that taurine deficiency during early life causes functional ...

Reduced traffic and human mobility during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown restrictions rapidly altered some mammals’ movement behaviors, according to a new study. The findings illustrate how human activities constrain animal movement and how they react when those activities cease, which provides valuable insight into future conservation strategies designed to improve human-wildlife coexistence. During the initial global outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, governments worldwide introduced lockdown measures to curb the spread of the virus, resulting in a drastic reduction in human mobility and vehicular traffic. This “anthropause,” as it’s come to be known, ...

Two new studies in Science and Science Immunology spotlight a group of intestinal T cells with α4β7 integrin receptors that could be targeted to prevent resistance to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) cancer immunotherapy. Both studies were conducted in mice and corroborated in samples from patients. In the Science study, Marine Fidelle and colleagues evaluated how interactions between antibiotics, the gut microbiome, and α4β7+ CD4+ T cells promote ...

Coupled field observations and phytoclimatic modeling show that the distribution of African forest and savanna ecosystems are highly predictable by climate, researchers report in a new study. The findings suggest that the effects of climate change on the distribution of African forests and savanna may be more easily forecasted than previously recognized. An important yet challenging goal for ecological science is predicting how global vegetation patterns will be altered by ongoing climate change. Generally, the distribution of Earth’s vegetation biomes is determined by climate. However, at local or regional ...

Tucker and 174 colleagues, including members of the COVID-19 Bio-Logging Initiative, analysed global data from land mammals tracked by GPS devices. Tucker: “There were many media reports that nature was recovering during those first lockdowns. For example, cougars were roaming the streets of Santiago, Chile, but we wanted to know: is there any evidence of this? Or were people simply paying more attention to everything while being at home?”  Movements of mammals Tucker and colleagues collated ...