There’s an intriguing exoplanet out there – 400 light-years out there – that is so tantalising that astronomers have been studying it since its discovery in 2009. One orbit for WASP-18 b around its star that is slightly larger than our Sun takes just 23 hours. There is nothing like it in our Solar System. A new study led by Université de Montréal Ph.D. student Louis-Philippe Coulombe about this exoplanet, an ultra-hot gas giant 10 times more massive than Jupiter, based on new data from the Canadian NIRISS instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) holds many surprises! Mapping an exoplanet An ...

Philadelphia, May 31, 2023 – About two-thirds of the risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is thought to arise from genetic influences, but about a third could be influenced by environment and lifestyle, opening the door for behavioral interventions that could delay or prevent pathophysiological changes that occur with AD. Now a new study in a mouse model of AD examines the effects of environmental enrichment on AD symptom progression and pathology. The study appears in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier. Gerd ...

East Hanover, NJ. May 31, 2023. A team of rehabilitation researchers discovered that prism adaptation therapy (PAT) was as beneficial for treating right-sided spatial neglect as left-sided spatial neglect in a cohort of individuals with stroke and traumatic and non-traumatic brain injuries. These novel findings and their clinical implications were reported in, “Prism adaptation treatment for right-sided and left-sided spatial neglect: A retrospective case-matched study,” (doi: 10.1016/j.arrct.2023.100263). The article was published open access on March 23, 2023, by the Archives of Rehabilitation Research and Clinical Translation. ...

In general, there is an issue around the quality of information about lupus on the internet. Rumours, unchecked data, and unconfirmed research all contribute to confusion and anxiety, and can lead to people taking the wrong actions for themselves and their disease. There is therefore a need for access to quality information about lupus. Therapeutic patient education (TPE) is a key way to help people self-manage chronic conditions such as lupus. An essential component of TPE is access to valid information ...

Apps have become ubiquitous in many parts of life, including for health. For people with an RMD,  personalized video exercises (PEV) may be useful to support rehabilitation and physical exercise. In an abstract shared at the 2023 EULAR annual congress, Davergne and colleagues explore the effectiveness of PEV provided through Apps in supporting rehabilitation for people with disability. The impact was measured in terms of a range of outcomes, including the effect on functional capacity, confidence in exercise performance, use of care, health-related quality of life, adherence, and adverse events. Data ...

“This evidence suggests that inflammation in PsA is not limited to skin and joints, but also involves the cardiovascular system”, says Nienke Kleinrensink, lead author on the abstract shared in a session on Comorbidities in RMD at the 2023 EULAR congress in Milan, Italy. The new finding is based on work done at UMC Utrecht in the Netherlands. Part of the study was funded by Pfizer and Health Holland. The main objective was to investigate whether vascular inflammation is elevated in PsA patients. The team used positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) in 75 people with PsA with active peripheral arthritis, ...

The increased cardiovascular risks in RA include acute coronary syndromes (ACS). The extent to which DMARD-induced remission could reduce the risk of ACS in RA versus rates in the general population – and whether there are DMARD-specific beneficial effects on ACS risk – remain unknown. In a session titled, From hearts to lungs: comobidities in RA, Delcoigne and colleagues present new data on the risk of ACS in patients with RA who attained remission with methotrexate (MTX) or a tumor necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi). The researchers defined and pooled cohorts of RA patients from registers in Norway and Sweden. This included 14,488 treatment courses ...

There is a large diagnostic delay for people with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA). In 2008, the SPACE cohort started to assess the prevalence of axSpA – and the reliability of an early diagnosis in people with chronic back pain (CBP). Everyone taking part was under the age of 45, and with recent-onset CBP (over 3 months, and up to 2 years) of unknown origin. Now, Marques and colleagues present two abstracts of the 2-year primary outcome of the study at the EULAR congress. The first abstract assesses the 2-year prevalence of an axSpA diagnosis among people with recent onset CBP who had been referred to a rheumatologist and investigates the sustainability of a baseline diagnosis ...

Studies on the long-term consequences of COVID-19 (long-COVID) in patients with inflammatory rheumatic diseases (iRD) are scarce. Where available data do exist, they tend to be heterogeneous and largely inconclusive. In addition, it is not known whether correctly classifying patients with iRD as long-COVID cases is complicated by increased background noise due to the occurrence of persistent symptoms that could be attributed to either long-COVID or iRD. A team in the Netherlands aimed to compare the risk of developing long-COVID after infection with the Omicron ...

EULAR – The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology – held its 2023 annual congress in Milan, Italy. One of the abstracts chosen for presentation in the scientific session on Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) in children and young people, focused on the factors associated with diagnostic delay in FMF, using data from the Juvenile Inflammatory Rheumatism (JIR) cohort. Of 960 FMF patients enrolled, 80% received a diagnosis within 10 years of symptom onset; the remaining 20% had delayed diagnosis, and were significantly older with median age of 46.4 versus ...

EULAR – the European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology – works on a broad spectrum of autoimmune and auto-inflammatory diseases. A rise in the incidence of some of these has been described, raising the possibility that incidence might be impacted by environmental factors. But there is a lack of available data, and commonalities and differences between some individual diseases also remain poorly understood. Conrad and colleagues aimed to clarify the picture by investigating 19 of the most common autoimmune diseases. Their work – shared at the 2023 EULAR congress in Milan, Italy – assesses trends over time, by sex, age, socioeconomic status, season ...

Early inflammatory arthritis is often undifferentiated, but it may develop into established RA or another arthropathy.1 Alternatively, it may resolve spontaneously, or remain undifferentiated for indefinite periods. Erosion is a key prognostic factor which can be detected with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).2 In addition, MRI allows direct visualization and assessment of (teno-) synovitis and bone marrow edema.3 Predicting early RA from MRI images of the hands and feet can help people access timely treatment, which may possibly ...

About The Study: In this study of 4,260 adults with and without psychiatric disorders, smoking cessation, sustained for at least 15 weeks, was associated with improved mental health outcomes in observational analyses, but the instrumental variable analysis provided inconclusive evidence. Findings like these may reassure people who smoke and their clinicians that smoking cessation likely will not worsen and may improve mental health.  Authors: Angela Difeng Wu, M.Sc., of the University of Oxford in Oxford, United Kingdom, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.16111) Editor’s ...

For over a century, researchers have thought that the patterns of brain activity that define our experiences, hopes and dreams are determined by how different brain regions communicate with each other through a complex web of trillions of cellular connections. Now, a study led by from researchers at Monash University's Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health has examined more than 10,000 different maps of human brain activity and found that the overall shape of a person’s brain exerts a far greater influence on how we think, feel and behave than its intricate neuronal connectivity. The study, published ...

A team of researchers has created a new class of titanium alloys that are strong and not brittle under tension, by integrating alloy and 3D-printing process designs. The breakthrough, published in the top journal Nature, could help extend the applications of titanium alloys, improve sustainability and drive innovative alloy design. Their discovery holds promise for a new class of more sustainable high-performance titanium alloys for applications in aerospace, biomedical, chemical engineering, space and energy technologies. RMIT University and the University of Sydney led the innovation, in collaboration with Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the company Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Rare earth elements, like neodymium and dysprosium, are a critical component to almost all modern technologies, from smartphones to hard drives, but they are notoriously hard to separate from the Earth’s crust and from one another. Penn State scientists have discovered a new mechanism by which bacteria can select between different rare earth elements, using the ability of a bacterial protein to bind to another unit of itself, or “dimerize,” when it is bound to certain rare earths, but prefer to remain a single unit, or “monomer,” ...

Philadelphia, May 31, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation Childhood Cancer Data Lab, the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC), and more than 20 additional institutions have partnered to create a first-of-its-kind open-source, reproducible analysis platform for pediatric brain tumors. With the help of thousands of genomically sequenced samples, researchers have used this platform to identify initial findings about genetic variants associated with poorer outcomes that could help guide future diagnostic and therapeutic advances. The ...

A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, led by Ohio University Professor of Physics, and Argonne National Laboratory scientist, Saw Wai Hla, have taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL (or SIGNATURE) of just one atom. This groundbreaking achievement was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences and could revolutionize the way scientists detect the materials. Since its discovery by Roentgen ...

Take a deep breath. Now take nine more. According to new research, the amount of oxygen in one of those 10 breaths was made possible thanks to a newly identified cellular mechanism that promotes photosynthesis in marine phytoplankton. Described as “groundbreaking” by a team of researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this previously unknown process accounts for between 7% to 25% of all the oxygen produced and carbon fixed in the ocean. When also considering photosynthesis occuring on land, researchers estimated that this mechanism could be responsible for generating ...

Electron microscopes give us insight into the tiniest details of materials and can visualize, for example, the structure of solids, molecules or nanoparticles with atomic resolution. However, most materials in nature are not static. They constantly interact, move and reshape between initial and final configurations. One of the most general phenomena is the interaction between light and matter, which is omnipresent in materials such as solar cells, displays or lasers. These interactions are defined by electrons pushed and pulled around by the oscillations of light, and the dynamics are extremely fast: light waves oscillate at attoseconds, the billionth of a billionth ...

Chess grandmasters are often held up as the epitome of thinking far ahead. But can others, with a modest amount of practice, learn to think further ahead?  In addressing this question, a team of cognitive scientists has created a computational model that reveals our ability to plan for future events. The work enhances our understanding of the factors that affect decision-making and shows how we can boost our planning skills through practice. The research, conducted by scientists in New York University’s Center for Neural Science and ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) identify a protein in some people with schizophrenia that causes schizophrenia-like features in mice   Tokyo, Japan – Links have been reported between schizophrenia and proteins produced by the immune system that can act against one’s own body, known as autoantibodies. In a study published last month in Brain Behavior and Immunity, Japanese researchers identified autoantibodies that target a ‘synaptic adhesion protein’, neurexin 1α, in a subset of patients with schizophrenia. When injected into mice, the ...

A research team affiliated with UNIST has made a significant breakthrough in uncovering the potential of ultra-photostable avalanching nanoparticles (ANP). Their study demonstrates that such particles can perform unlimited photoswitching, leading to new advancements in fields like optical probes, 3D optical memory, and super-resolution microscopy. This breakthrough has been achieved through the efforts of Professor Yung Doug Suh and his research team in the Department of Chemistry at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), in collaboration with researchers from Columbia University and ...

New York, NY—May 31, 2023—In 2021, lanthanide-doped nanoparticles made waves—or rather, an avalanche—when Changwan Lee, then a PhD student in Jim Schuck’s lab at Columbia Engineering, set off an extreme light-producing chain reaction from ultrasmall crystals developed at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley Lab. Those same crystals are back again with a blink that can now be deliberately and indefinitely controlled.   “We’ve found the first fully photostable, fully photoswitchable nanoparticle—a holy grail of nanoprobe design,” said Schuck, associate ...

As the proverb “You are what you eat” goes, the type of food we consume influences our health and longevity all through our lives. In fact, there is a direct association between age-related nutritional requirements and metabolic health. Optimal nutrition according to age can help maintain metabolic health, thereby improving the health span (period of life without diseases) and lifespan of an individual. Different nutritional interventions involving varied calorie and protein intake have been known to improve the health and lifespan of rodents and primates. Furthermore, recent studies have also reported the association of dietary macronutrients (proteins, ...