MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (06/09/2023) — In a new study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, University of Minnesota researchers found that metformin, a drug commonly used to treat diabetes, prevents the development of long COVID.  The study, called COVID-OUT, investigated if early outpatient COVID-19 treatment with metformin, ivermectin or fluvoxamine could prevent long COVID. Long COVID is a chronic illness that can affect up to 10% of people who have had COVID-19.  “The results of this study are important because long COVID can have ...

One of the most high-profile mysteries in physics today is what scientists refer to as the “Strong CP Problem.” Stemming from the puzzling phenomenon that neutrons do not interact with electric fields despite being made up of quarks—smaller, fundamental particles that carry electric charges—the Strong CP Problem puts into question the Standard Model of physics, or the set of theories scientists have been using to explain the laws of nature for years. A team led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities theoretical physicists has discovered a new way to search for axions, hypothetical particles that could help solve this mystery. Working ...

Cleveland: Researchers presenting preliminary data from a clinical trial aimed at discovering a cure for sickle cell disease reveal positive results among its first patients. Sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder, is a painful and debilitating condition for which there are few approved therapies. Researchers involved in the multicenter Ruby Trial presented an update on the safety and effectiveness of a single dose of EDIT-301, an experimental one-time gene editing cell therapy that modifies a patient’s own blood-forming stem cells to correct the mutation responsible for sickle ...

  The Campi Flegrei volcano in southern Italy has become weaker and more prone to rupturing, making an eruption more likely, according to a new study by researchers at UCL (University College London) and Italy’s National Research Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV). The volcano, which last erupted in 1538, has been restless for more than 70 years, with two-year spikes of unrest in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, and a slower phase of unrest over the last decade. Tens of thousands of small earthquakes have occurred during these periods ...

Although the prehistoric site of Eynan-Mallaha in northern Israel has been thoroughly examined since 1955, it still holds some surprises for scientists. Seven prehistoric wind instruments known as flutes, recently identified by a Franco-Israeli team1, are the subject of an article published on 9 June in Nature Scientific Reports. The discovery of these 12,000 -year-old aerophones is extremely rare – in fact, they are the first to be discovered in the Near East. The “flutes”, made from the bones of a small waterfowl, produce a sound similar to certain birds of prey (Eurasian sparrowhawk and common kestrel) when air is blown ...

New research has revealed there is a gap between how people imagine they’d act if sexually harassed and how those who experience it respond. The study by the University of Exeter, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, discovered that seeking justice by coming forward is just one of the needs people who experience sexual harassment consider after the event, with other needs, including those for safety, instead rated as more important. The research may explain why people who ...

Millions of people in the US are concussed every year playing sports. Players of games like American football are at particularly high risk for injuries that can have devastating long-term consequences. Stanford University scientists working with the company Savior Brain have now designed one potential way of protecting players: a helmet containing liquid shock absorbers that could reduce the impact of blows to the head by a third. “Most of the members of our team have a personal connection to traumatic brain injury and we care deeply about ensuring long-term ...

Candidate genes that could help fish to tolerate warmer and saltier water have been identified in new research from the Earlham Institute, potentially providing a vital resource to guide breeding programmes in freshwater aquaculture. As water quality and availability is reduced by higher global temperatures, these insights can be used to breed more resilient fish and safeguard a key source of food for millions of people. The Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus, is widely farmed in freshwater aquaculture, providing essential nutrients and protein. Their use in aquaculture has risen dramatically, largely due to their adaptability to different water conditions and ...

Tokyo, Japan – 3D integrated circuits are a key part of improving the efficiency of electronics to meet the considerable demands of consumers. They are constantly being developed, but translating theoretical findings into actual devices is not easy. Now, a new design by a research team from Japan can turn these theories into reality. In a study recently published for the VLSI Symposium 2023, researchers from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo have reported a deposition process for nanosheet oxide semiconductor. The oxide semiconductor resulting from this process has high carrier mobility and reliability in transistors. 3D ...

New transceiver design capable of both transmission and reception at frequencies over 100 GHz and at 112 Gb/s data rate could pave the way to 6G technologies, as reported by scientists at Tokyo Tech. By effectively suppressing the self-interference caused by the transmission signal leaking into the receiver, the proposed architecture reaches unprecedented data rates while maintaining a surprisingly compact size. Scientists and engineers in the field of telecommunications are already working on the technologies that will be used for sixth generation (6G) networks. Ideally, 6G should deliver data rates of ...

EL PASO, Texas (June 8, 2023) – Researchers from The University of Texas at El Paso’s School of Pharmacy will explore the viability of a new treatment for vascular dementia, thanks to a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The grant builds on work that’s previously been done by the team and their collaborators.   Vascular dementia — the second most common type of dementia worldwide — ...

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 ...