Nanophotonics and topology have gained significant interest due to the unique properties they offer. One area of focus is the investigation of topological edge states (TESs). These states have captured widespread attention because they are very resistant to errors and imperfections. Arising from topologically nontrivial phases, TESs provide a powerful toolkit for the architectural design of photonic integrated circuits. TES transport has led to the discovery of various intriguing optical effects and applications, including directional couplers, one-way waveguides, mode-locked waveguides, ...

Researchers led by Cathleen Lutz, Ph.D., are using an exciting new method, preclinical genomic editing, to develop safe, effective therapies for rare diseases and bring them to the clinic. Unfortunately, the translation of the accumulated knowledge to safe and effective therapies has lagged. There are many reasons to predict that the situation is changing for the better, however, as powerful new gene-based therapies succeed in clinical trials and receive FDA approval. Therapeutic strategies such as gene replacement and gene modulation (e.g., blocking protein production with anti-sense oligonucleotides) are at the forefront of the recent progress. ...

Sage and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University are pleased to announce Elizabeth Anderson and Alondra Nelson as winners of the 2023 Sage-CASBS Award. Established in 2013, the Sage-CASBS Award recognizes outstanding achievement in the behavioral and social sciences that advances our understanding of pressing social issues. It underscores the role of the social and behavioral sciences in enriching and enhancing public discourse and good governance. Past winners of the award include Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate in economic sciences; Pedro ...

Children and teenagers who volunteer tend to flourish mentally and physically, according to a new study from UTHealth Houston. The study, led by Kevin Lanza, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology, human genetics, and environmental sciences at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health, was published recently in JAMA Network Open. Overall, the research team found that youths who had volunteered in the past year were in better physical health, had a more positive outlook on life, and were less likely to have anxiety, depression, or behavioral problems compared to their peers who did not volunteer. “These study results bring optimism that youth volunteering could be ...

DALLAS, June 6, 2023 — According to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, lesbian and bisexual women in France had poorer heart health than heterosexual women, a finding that could be attributed to discrimination and other stressors faced by the LGBTQ+ community. In support of Pride Month, the American Heart Association, a global force for longer, healthier lives for all, is promoting awareness and health education for all people across the spectrum of diversity, including those who identify as LGBTQ+. For more than 50 years, the LGBTQ+ community has spent the month of June ...

HOUSTON – (June 6, 2023) – Climate scientists at Rice University have discovered an “internally generated periodicity” — a natural cycle that repeats every 150 days — in the north-south oscillation of atmospheric pressure patterns that drive the movement of the Southern Hemisphere’s prevailing westerly winds and the Antarctic jet stream. “This is something that arises from the internal dynamics of the atmosphere,” said Pedram Hassanzadeh, co-author of a study about the discovery in the open-access journal AGU Advances. “We were playing with some new equations that we had derived ...

ACS Measurement Science Au is a member of the ACS Au family of journals. These publications are open access, and each one focuses on a specific field relevant to chemistry. Here, we take a look at a few recent papers from ACS Measurement Science Au, which publishes experimental, computational or theoretical research in all areas of chemical measurement science. The journal welcomes papers on any phase of analytical operations, such as sampling, measurement and data analysis. “Colorimetric Signal Readout for the Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds Using a Printable Glass-Based ...

Researchers led by Dr. Nima Mesgarani at Columbia University, US, report that the brain treats speech in a crowded room differently depending on how easy it is to hear, and whether we are focusing on it. Publishing June 6th in the open access journal PLOS Biology, the study uses a combination of neural recordings and computer modeling to show that when we follow speech that is being drowned out by louder voices, phonetic information is encoded differently than in the opposite situation. The findings could help improve hearing aids that work by isolating attended speech. Focusing on speech in a crowded room can be difficult, especially ...

Treatment efficacy for a broad range of chronic diseases does not differ depending on patients’ comorbidities, according to a new study publishing June 6th in the open access journal PLOS Medicine by David McAllister of the University of Glasgow, UK, and colleagues. There is often uncertainty about how treatments for single conditions should be applied to people who have multiple chronic conditions (multimorbidity). This confusion stems, in part, from the fact that people with multimorbidity are under-represented in randomized controlled trials, and trials rarely report whether the efficacy of treatment ...

Researchers have long thought that once a cell starts down its path of differentiation, growing into a skin cell or a liver cell or a neuron, that path could not be changed.   But over the past two decades, scientists have realized this pathway is more complex. Now, using zebrafish as a model, a University of Michigan research team has discovered that a loop in the body's mitochondria—organelles within cells that produce energy for the body—may allow cells to retreat up the path of differentiation. Their results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   "Cell fate and differentiation ...

LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- South America’s Andes Mountains, the world’s longest mountain range and home to some of the planet’s highest peaks, feature thousands of hot springs. Driven by plate tectonics and fueled by hot rock and fluids, these thermal discharges vary widely in geochemistry and microbial diversity. Utah State University geoscientists, along with colleagues from Montana State University, examined 14 hot springs within the southern Andes in Peru and discovered microbial community composition is distinctly different in two tectonic settings. Dennis Newell, associate professor in USU’s Department of Geosciences, and recent USU graduate Heather Upin, ...

A new paper in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health makes the case that pandemic prevention requires a global taboo whereby humanity agrees to leave bats alone—to let them have the habitats they need, undisturbed.   Like the SARS coronavirus outbreak of 2003, the COVID-19 pandemic can be traced back to a bat virus. Whether someone handled or ate an infected bat or was exposed to a bat’s bodily fluids in a cave or some other way, or was exposed to another animal that had been infected by a bat, we will quite likely never know. Even a virus released via a lab accident would still have originally come from ...

The Laurie and Todd Platt BrainHealth Project MRI Scanner will help researchers identify neural markers of improved brain health Center for BrainHealth® celebrates major contributions reaching more than $1 million to support discoveries of brain improvement biomarkers. This investment in advancing the science of brain health is made possible by Sarah and Ross Perot, Jr., Laurie and Todd Platt and many of their friends. The Sammons BrainHealth Imaging Center is dedicated to discovering a scalable panel of brain measurements correlating physical changes in the brain with changes in a holistic composite metric of brain ...

A successful long-term experiment with live hogs indicates Nebraska scientists may be another step closer to achieving a safe, long-lasting and potentially universal vaccine against swine flu. The results are not only important to the pork industry, they hold significant implications for human health. That’s because pigs act as “mixing vessels,” where various swine and bird influenza strains can reconfigure and become transmissible to humans. In fact, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, involving ...

LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- The 1,200-mile-long Denali Fault stretches in an upward arc from southwestern Alaska and the Bering Sea eastward to western Canada’s Yukon Territory and British Columbia. The long-lived and active strike-slip fault system, which slices through Denali National Park and Preserve, is responsible for the formation of the Alaska Range. “It’s a big, sweeping fault and the source of a magnitude 7.9 earthquake in 2002, that ruptured more than 200 miles of the Denali Fault, along with the Totschunda Fault to the east, causing significant damage to remote villages and central Alaska’s infrastructure,” says Utah State University ...

Many neurological conditions that involve involuntary muscle contractions have long been considered as diseases of the brain. However, both the brain and the spinal cord contain many nerve cells associated with movement. The research, published in Science Translational Medicine, used state-of-the-art mouse genetics to distinguish whether the brain or spinal cord was responsible for the disorganisation of movement experienced by dystonia patients. Focusing on the most common inherited form of dystonia called DYT1, UCL scientists confined a genetic mutation to the spinal cord of the ...

Flat-faced dogs, such as French and English Bulldogs, are extremely popular despite suffering from severe innate diseases. Hungarian researchers have attempted to uncover the explanation for this paradox. In the end, they concluded that although enthusiasts of flat-faced dogs are aware of the health issues and strive to provide the best for their dogs, they are likely to normalize health problems. The French and English Bulldogs are among the most popular breeds in both the United States and Europe, but Pugs ...

Irvine, Calif., June 6, 2023 — The quality of care for nursing home residents with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is best when they are in the majority, but most facilities also accommodate a heterogeneous population, where specialized staff training is limited, according to a study led by the University of California, Irvine. “Recognizing and managing the complex medical conditions and behavioral symptoms of residents with ADRD require enhanced knowledge among staff. These findings raise significant concerns regarding the level of care and quality of life for the majority of these people, highlighting ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – An important certificate now hangs on the wall of the Superconducting Radiofrequency Operations group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. SRF Operations builds cryomodules and other particle accelerator parts for the lab’s very own Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. The group also supports user facilities at other DOE labs, including SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This piece of paper represents the department’s dedication to supplying ...

Philadelphia, June 6, 2023 – Early studies of COVID-19 focused on the acute phase of the disease. However, attention has now turned to the long-term consequences of the disease, which are also significant causes of morbidity and mortality. Two studies reported in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, seek to understand the drivers of the chronic and sometimes progressive phase of the disease and identify possible pathways for drug treatment. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted ...

Each person's gut microbiome contains a specific community of microorganisms that normally remains stable for years. However, it can be thrown off balance by factors such as dietary changes, infections or medications. Antibiotics in particular have a strong influence on the microbiome. In response, microorganisms employ various resistance mechanisms, with individual bacterial populations evolving through selection of antibiotic-resistant variants. Yet, the extent and mechanisms of these processes and their impact on the ecology of the microbial community are ...

(Atlanta – June 6, 2023) – A new study led by Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University researcher Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, has found that women, racial and ethnic minorities and individuals identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer are disproportionately affected by workplace mistreatment in academic medicine, and this mistreatment negatively impacts their mental health. The study, which was published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked specifically at three aspects of workplace mistreatment in academic medicine – sexual harassment, cyber incivility and negative workplace climate – and whether they differ by ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine, UNC McAllister Heart Institute, and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center characterized the expression of thousands of cardiac proteins during eight critical stages of embryonic heart development. This research, published in Development Cell, will provide scientists with much-needed information to identify biological causes for congenital heart disease, or CHD. “We now have a foundational data set that shows how protein dynamics change in normal heart development,” said first ...

LAWRENCE — Over the past few decades, herbaria and museums worldwide have created digital data records documenting millions of specimens in their holdings. The benefits of digitizing the contents of natural history museums and research institutions flow to the public and researchers worldwide. Now, through a group of related grants from the National Science Foundation, researchers are systemically digitizing more than a million specimens of plants from across tropical Africa held at 20 institutions throughout the United States. The tropical African plant specimens — documenting some of ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists found that a small tweak created big performance improvements in a type of solid-state battery, a technology considered vital to broader electric vehicle adoption. These batteries use a solid electrolyte instead of a potentially flammable liquid. When the battery charges or operates, ions move between electrodes through the electrolyte between them. A new method for pressing the solid electrolyte practically eliminates tiny air pockets that block ion flow, so the battery charges twice as fast. ORNL lead researcher Marm Dixit said the approach involved heating the press after spreading ...