A pair of internationally renowned stem cell cloning experts at the University of Houston is reporting their findings of variant cells in the lungs of patients with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) which likely represent key targets in any future therapy for the condition.    IPF is a progressive, irreversible and fatal lung disease in which the lungs become scarred and breathing becomes difficult. The rapid development and fatal progression of the disease occur by uncertain mechanisms, but the most pervasive school of thought is that IPF arises from recurrent, subclinical lung ...

For more than a century, biologists have wondered what the earliest animals were like when they first arose in the ancient oceans over half a billion years ago. Searching among today's most primitive-looking animals for the earliest branch of the animal tree of life, scientists gradually narrowed the possibilities down to two groups: sponges, which spend their entire adult lives in one spot, filtering food from seawater; and comb jellies, voracious predators that oar their way through the world's oceans in search of food. In a new study published this week in the journal Nature, researchers use a novel approach based on chromosome structure to come up with ...

A team at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has discovered a group of brain cells that boosts appetite when there is a prolonged surplus of energy in the body, such as excess fat accumulation in obesity. The researchers discovered that these cells not only produced the appetite-stimulating molecule NPY, but they in fact made the brain more sensitive to the molecule, boosting appetite even more. “These cells kickstart changes in the brain that make it more sensitive to even low levels of NPY when there is a surplus of energy in the body in the form of excess fat – driving appetite during obesity,” explains Professor Herbert Herzog, senior ...

About The Study: This study of 18.1 million beneficiaries of fee-for service Medicare found that, in contrast to in-person health services, receipt of medications for chronic conditions was relatively stable in the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic overall, across racial and ethnic groups, and for community-dwelling patients with dementia. This finding of stability may hold lessons for other outpatient services during the next pandemic.  Authors: Nancy E. Morden, M.D., M.P.H., of the Geisel ...

About The Study: This genetic association study including 39,000 participants with clinically diagnosed Alzheimer disease (AD) and 401,000 control participants without AD found novel genetic associations between high high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol concentrations and high systolic blood pressure with higher risk of AD. These findings may inspire new drug targeting and improved prevention implementation.  Authors: Ruth Frikke-Schmidt, M.D., D.M.Sc., Ph.D., of Copenhagen University Hospital–Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, 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.2023.13734) Editor’s ...

In the latest issue of the journal Nature, astronomers from Stockholm University reveal the origin of a thermonuclear supernova explosion. Strong emission lines of helium and the first detection of such a supernova in radio waves show that the exploding white dwarf star had a helium-rich companion. Supernovae of Type Ia are important for astronomers since they are used to measure the expansion of the Universe. However, the origin of these explosions has remained an open question. While it is established that the explosion is that of a compact ...

Imagine an Earth-sized planet that’s not at all Earth-like. Half this world is locked in permanent daytime, the other half in permanent night, and it’s carpeted with active volcanoes. Astronomers have discovered that planet. The planet, named LP 791-18d, orbits a small red dwarf star about 90 light years away. Volcanic activity makes the discovery particularly notable for astronomers because volcanism facilitates interaction between a world’s interior and its exterior. “Why is volcanism important? It is the major source contributing to a planetary atmosphere, and with an atmosphere you could have surface liquid water — a requirement for sustaining ...

Pain is good. It’s the body’s way to keep an animal from harming itself or repeating a dangerous mistake. But sometimes the debilitating sensation can get in the way. So evolution has devised ways to tamp that response down under certain circumstances. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara identified the pathway in fruit flies that reduces the sensation of pain from heat. Remarkably, just a single neuron on each side of the animal’s brain controls the response. What’s more, the molecule responsible for suppressing ...

A study published by MBARI researchers and their collaborators today in Nature provides new insights about one of the earliest points in animal evolution that happened more than 700 million years ago. For more than a century, scientists have been working to understand the pivotal moment when an ancient organism gave rise to the diverse array of animals in the world today. As technology and science have advanced, scientists have investigated two alternative hypotheses for which animals—sponges or comb jellies, also known as ctenophores—were most distantly related to all other animals. Identifying this outlier—known as the sibling ...

What was the question you set out to answer with this study? ChatGPT, a new language processing tool driven by artificial intelligence (AI), provides conversational text responses to questions and can generate valuable information for enquiring individuals, but the quality of ChatGPT-generated answers to medical questions is currently unclear. What Methods or Approach Did You Use? We retrieved eight common questions and answers about colonoscopy from the publicly available webpages of three randomly-selected hospitals from the top-20 list of the US News & World Report Best Hospitals for Gastroenterology and Gastrointestinal Surgery. We ...

In what may turn out to be a long-missing piece in the puzzle of breast cancer, Harvard Medical School researchers have identified the molecular sparkplug that ignites cases of the disease currently unexplained by the classical model of breast-cancer development.  A report on the team’s work is published May 17 in Nature.  “We have identified what we believe is the original molecular trigger that initiates a cascade culminating in breast tumor development in a subset of breast cancers that are driven by estrogen,” said study senior investigator Peter Park, professor of ...

Cambridge, Mass. – Astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet, a world beyond the solar system, that may be carpeted with volcanoes and could potentially support life. Called LP 791-18 d, the planet could undergo volcanic outbursts as often as Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The planet was first reported in Nature and the discovery was made possible in part due to ground-based observations made by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. LP 791-18 d orbits a small red dwarf star about 90 light-years away in a southern constellation called Crater. The ...

Vigorous exercise does not appear to increase the risk of death or life-threatening arrhythmia for people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), according to a study supported by the National Institutes of Health. HCM is a rare, inherited disorder that causes the heart muscle to become thick and enlarged and affects 1 in 500 people worldwide. It has been associated with sudden cardiac death in young athletes and other young people. However, the study, published in JAMA Cardiology, found that people with the disease who exercise vigorously are no more likely to die or experience severe cardiac events than those who exercised moderately ...

Human-caused climate change made April’s record-breaking humid heatwave in Bangladesh, India, Laos and Thailand at least 30 times more likely, according to rapid attribution analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists as part of the World Weather Attribution group. The study also concludes that the high vulnerability in the region, which is one of the world’s heatwave hotpots, amplified the impacts. In April, parts of south and southeast Asia experienced an intense heatwave, with record-breaking temperatures that passed 42ºC in Laos and 45°C in Thailand. The heat ...

A strong link between the extent of deprivation of local authorities in England and their numbers of children going into the care system through the family courts has been uncovered by researchers at Lancaster University. The study, available online and due to be published in July 2023 in the journal Children & Society, found that for every one unit increase in the standardized Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) English index of multiple area deprivation, the number of children in care proceedings in English family courts increased by around 70%. The research team analysed data from the English Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service ...

JMIR Dermatology—the official journal of the International Society of Teledermatology (ISTD)—and the journal’s guest editors welcome submissions to a special theme issue to coincide with the 10th ISTD World Congress held at the 23rd World Congress of Dermatology on July 4 to 7, 2023, in Singapore. This theme issue will allow attendees of the ISTD World Congress to share their work with a wider audience by disseminating their work in a well-respected, peer-reviewed, open-access journal.  Teledermatology has been increasingly gaining recognition as a means of delivering dermatological ...

A machine learning-based model that enables medical institutions to predict the mortality risk for individual cardiac surgery patients has been developed by a Mount Sinai research team, providing a significant performance advantage over current population-derived models. The new data-driven algorithm, built on troves of electronic health records (EHR), is the first institution-specific model for assessing a cardiac patient’s risk prior to surgery, thus allowing health care providers to pursue the best course of action for that individual. The team’s work was described in a study published in The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery ...

Tokyo, Japan – Organic chemistry, the study of carbon-based molecules, underlies not only the science of living organisms, but is critical for many current and future technologies, such as organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays. Understanding the electronic structure of a material’s molecules is key to predicting the material’s chemical properties. In a study recently published by researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, a machine-learning algorithm was developed to predict the density ...

A marine research team led by Professor YAN Qingyun has proposed a method to assess the net carbon sink of marine macroalgae (Gracilaria) cultivation. Then, they calculated the net carbon sink of Gracilaria cultivation in China based on the yield of annual cultivated Gracilaria in the last ten years. Also, the net carbon sink trend of Gracilaria cultivation in the next ten years was predicted by the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA). Finally, they explored the potential carbon sink increase and methane reduction related to Gracilaria cultivation in China through a scenario analysis. Their results suggested that the net carbon sink ...

Prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe sourced a great deal of natural gas from Russia. But as a result of EU sanctions on Russia, this supply is no longer there. European countries have scrambled to find and secure new suppliers. But if both the war and these sanctions last into next winter, gas will remain in short supply – especially if next winter is a cold one and people need a lot of gas for heating. There is a distinct possibility that a shortage of gas will mean homes go unheated and will force industry to halt production. As a result, some countries might ...

Korean researchers and an SME have successfully commercialized a light source1) capable of transmitting 25 billion bits per second over long distances for the first time in Korea. 1) Light source: An element that converts electrical signals into optical signals and is manufactured by a compound semiconductor process Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute(ETRI) announced that it has succeeded in commercializing an electro-absorption modulator-integrated laser(EML)2) capable of transmitting data over 30 km at a speed of 25 Gbps with ELDIS Co., Ltd., a III-V semiconductor laser ...

Paris, France, 17 May 2023.  The field of coronary drug-coated balloon (DCB) angioplasty looks set to assume growing importance in the years to come and the potential for increased use of these devices in clinical practice is considerable. DCB catheters became available for coronary use in Europe more than 14 years ago and have become widely used in clinical practice around the world since then. In recent years there has been renewed interest in this therapy linked to the development of novel devices coated with drugs from the limus family and a wider experience in the treatment of de novo lesions. As of today, for coronary use, there are no less ...

New study analysed data on near-surface air temperatures recorded for North-West Europe over the past 60 years. The findings show that the maximum temperature of the hottest days is increasing at twice the rate of the maximum temperature of average summer days. The results highlight the need for urgent action by policy makers to adapt essential infrastructure to the impacts of climate change. New research led by the University of Oxford has found that climate change is causing the hottest days in North-West Europe to warm at double the rate of average ...

First-generation bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS) may be just as effective as drug-eluting metallic stents, which are currently the standard treatment for heart disease patients undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).   These are significant findings from a global clinical trial led by a researcher from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The work could lead to advancements and improvements in new BVS technology and future clinical use among interventional cardiologists across the ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Decision-making capabilities of college students – including some graduating this spring – were likely negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, new research suggests. Students in the small study conducted by researchers at The Ohio State University were less consistent in their decision making during the 2020 fall semester compared to students who had participated in similar research over several previous years. The researchers compared responses to a hypothetical situation made by students during the pandemic to responses made by students in earlier studies. They found evidence that students in 2020 ...