The Texas Heart Institute and The University of Texas at Austin received a four-year, $2.37 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to develop a novel method of managing ventricular arrhythmias, which cause sudden cardiac death. The research initiative is the brainchild of Dr. Elizabeth Cosgriff-Hernandez, Professor of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, an expert in biomaterial scaffold engineering for tissue repair and regeneration and electrophysiology medical device pioneer and clinician ...

Failure to implement active bystander training could thwart NHS attempts to tackle sexual harassment, say researchers at the University of Cambridge. An analysis of data from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests found that fewer than one in five NHS Trusts in England provided active bystander training to address workplace harassment, sexual harassment and other forms of unacceptable behaviour like bullying and racism. It found of those that did – the majority of which were in London – most did not deliver content specific to sexual misconduct and ...

Only one NHS Trust offers its staff training focused on how to intervene when they witness sexual harassment at work, according to new research published in JRSM Open. Dr Sarah Steele of the University of Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and Dr Ava Robertson, received responses from 199 NHS Trusts to their Freedom of Information request. Of those, 35 Trusts offer their staff Active Bystander Training (ABT) but only one of these has a specific module on sexual harassment. While welcomed by the researchers, they note that even that one module is optional for staff and outsourced to a private provider. No staff have yet completed the module. Of the 163 Trusts ...

Sophia Antipolis, 5 May 2023:  Talking on a mobile for 30 minutes or more per week is linked with a 12% increased risk of high blood pressure compared with less than 30 minutes, according to research published today in European Heart Journal – Digital Health, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1 “It’s the number of minutes people spend talking on a mobile that matter for heart health, with more minutes meaning greater risk,” said study author Professor Xianhui Qin of Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China. “Years of use or employing a hands-free set-up had ...

Genes make up only a small fraction of the human genome. Between them are wide sequences of DNA that direct cells when, where, and how much each gene should be used. These biological instruction manuals are known as regulatory motifs. If that sounds complex, well, it is. The instructions for gene regulation are written in a complicated code, and scientists have turned to artificial intelligence to crack it. To learn the rules of DNA regulation, they’re using deep neural networks (DNNs), which excel at finding patterns in large datasets. DNNs are at the core of popular ...

Scientists at Flinders University have used sub-surface imaging and aerial surveys to see through floodplains in the Red Lily Lagoon area of West Arnhem Land in Northern Australia. These ground-breaking methods showed how this important landscape in the Northern Territory was altered as sea levels rose about 8,000 years ago. Their discovery shows that the ocean had reached this, now inland region, which has important implications for understanding the archaeological record of Madjedbebe—the oldest archaeological site in Australia. The findings also provide a new way to understand ...

SINGAPORE, 5 May 2023 – Scientists from Singapore have demonstrated the critical role played by a special transporter protein in regulating the brain cells that ensure nerves are protected by coverings called myelin sheaths. The findings, reported by researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School and the National University of Singapore in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, could help to reduce the damaging impacts of ageing on the brain. An insulating membrane encasing nerves, myelin sheaths facilitate the quick and effective conduction of electrical signals throughout the body’s nervous system. When the myelin sheath gets damaged, nerves may lose their ability ...

Results were published on March 29 in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research. Researchers used data from previous publications aiming to answer the question of why the Arctic sea ice is responding much more quickly and obviously than the Antarctic sea ice, which has stayed relatively stable according to the long-term studies monitoring the Antarctic region’s sea ice patterns.   “The differences in responses are explained in terms of geographic, climatic and meteorological differences between the two regions. Arctic sea ice is located in the polar area and encircled by land, while sea ice in the Antarctic ...

A study from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago found that parents with children who were not yet vaccinated against COVID-19 were most likely to vaccinate their child after reading the following hypothetical scenario: You hear from other parents you trust that they have vaccinated their children against COVID-19. Some of them say that they weren’t sure at first about whether the vaccine is safe for kids. But they ended up deciding that it was the best way to fight COVID-19, and the vaccination went fine. ...

Developmental biologists have learned a great deal about how the human digestive tract functions through many years of studies involving fish, frogs, and rodents along with detailed explorations of individual human cells. But nothing quite matches the learning that could be achieved from studying actual human organ systems as they form. Yet for obvious reasons, running experiments on growing human fetuses is both unethical and illegal. Now a study led by researchers at Cincinnati Children’s, published online April 18, 2023, in the journal Development, reports that lab-grown tissues called organoids accurately mimic key development stages of the human intestine. “Achieving ...

Sage has launched a free-to-read collection of research and other resources that explore the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region. Categories in the collection include: gender role and oppression governments, laws, and policies information and media mental health, healthcare, and medicine protests, conflicts, and war refugees, displaced, and stateless people Readers can access the Southwest Asia and North Africa microsite free for a limited time. END ...

May 4, 2023, Cleveland: Cleveland Clinic has been designated a Rare Disease Center of Excellence by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). The new Cleveland Clinic Center for Rare Diseases is one of 40 U.S. academic medical centers selected to join the first-of-it-kind national network dedicated to diagnosing, treating and researching all rare diseases. The NORD Rare Disease Centers of Excellence program provides a much-needed national infrastructure to help accelerate advancements for rare diseases. The network of medical institutions, led by NORD, is designed to improve rare disease patient care by connecting patients to appropriate specialists regardless of disease ...

Nearly 90 percent of patients with an aggressive subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma had their cancer go into remission in a small phase 2 clinical trial testing a treatment aimed at making chemotherapy more effective, according to Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators. The clinical trial, whose results were published May 4 in Blood, included 17 patients with a type of blood cancer called peripheral T-cell lymphoma with T-follicular helper phenotype (PTCL-TFH), also known as angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma. Fifteen of them (88.2 percent) had complete ...

· No evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19  · Nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary bacterial pneumonia · Crucial to find and aggressively treat secondary bacterial pneumonia in ICU patients CHICAGO --- Secondary bacterial infection of the lung (pneumonia) was extremely common in patients with COVID-19, affecting almost half the patients who required support from mechanical ventilation. By applying machine learning to medical record data, scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine found that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key ...

New York (May 4, 2023) — Today, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) released the 2023 update to the AGS Beers Criteria® for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults (DOI: 10.1111/jgs.18372). The AGS Beers Criteria® serves as a comprehensive list of medications that older people should potentially avoid or consider using with caution because they often present unnecessary risks for this population. Given that, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, United States (NCHSUS), more than 88% of older people use at least one prescription and more than 66% use ...

Continents are part of what makes Earth uniquely habitable for life among the planets of the solar system, yet surprisingly little is understood about what gave rise to these huge pieces of the planet’s crust and their special properties. New research from Elizabeth Cottrell, research geologist and curator of rocks at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and lead study author Megan Holycross, formerly a Peter Buck Fellow and National Science Foundation Fellow at the museum and now an assistant professor at Cornell University, deepens the understanding of Earth’s crust by testing ...

The North Pacific “Garbage Patch” is home to an abundance of floating sea creatures, as well as the plastic waste it has become famous for, according to a study by Rebecca Helm from Georgetown University, US, and colleagues, publishing April 27th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. There are five main oceanic gyres — vortexes of water where multiple ocean currents meet — of which the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) is the largest. It is also known as the North Pacific “Garbage Patch”, because converging ocean currents have concentrated large amounts ...

Cholesterol and phytosterol are sterols, fatty compounds essential for many biological processes such as the functioning of cell membranes. Up to now, it has been assumed that phytosterols are characteristic for plants, and cholesterol for animals, and that only plants can make phytosterols, while animals typically make cholesterol. Dolma Michellod, Nicole Dubilier and Manuel Liebeke from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, were therefore surprised when they discovered that a small marine worm called Olavius ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – New research led by an Oregon State University scientist begins to unravel the role dust plays in nourishing global ocean ecosystems while helping regulate atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Researchers have long known that phytoplankton – plantlike organisms that live in the upper part of the ocean and are the foundation of the marine food web – rely on dust from land-based sources for key nutrients. But the extent and magnitude of the impact of the dust – ...

Huge swarms of migratory locusts take on the proportions of natural disasters and threaten the food supply of millions of people, especially in Africa and Asia.  As the eighth of the ten biblical plagues, the Book of Moses in the Old Testament already describes how swarms of locusts darkened the sky and ate up everything that grew in the fields and on the trees.  Scientists suspect that cannibalism among locusts contributes to their swarming behavior, and swarms therefore constantly move ...

Swarming migratory locusts – which threaten food security across the globe – avoid being eaten by other locusts by producing a smelly pheromone called phenylacetonitrile (PAN), according to a new study. The discovery of an anticannibalistic signaling pathway in locusts could provide a target for locust management strategies since cannibalistic interactions among locusts have been implicated in creation of swarms, which are highly destructive. A wide range of species practice cannibalism, mostly to supplement nutrition. This has led to the evolution of ...

A randomized controlled experiment featuring more than 26,000 students across 22 4-year U.S. universities shows that the effects of a low-cost, brief online intervention focused on social belonging can promote success and equity for college students. This finding was particularly apparent among those from groups that have historically achieved at lower rates. The likelihood of earning a university degree in the U.S. is highly unequal across racial-ethnic and socioeconomic groups. In most cases, programs designed to help, by promoting college persistence, work differently for different people. Understanding these heterogenous effects ...

Streams of intergalactic gas, enriched with elements heavier than helium, encircle and spiral into a massive galaxy observed at redshift 2.3, researchers report. The findings provide evidence of enriched gas recycling during galaxy formation in the early Universe. Galaxies form through the accretion of gas from the circumgalactic medium (CGM) and intergalactic medium (IGM), which subsequently condenses into stars. Simulations and observations have shown that cold stream accretion – the accumulation of pristine intergalactic gas that contains almost no elements heavier ...

Reconstructing the bacterial genomes recovered from the calcified plaque of human and Neanderthal remains has offered new insights into previously undescribed Pleistocene bacterial metabolites, researchers report. The approach expands researchers ability to study microbial natural products, which has otherwise been mostly limited to studying living bacteria. Bioactive small molecules produced by microbes, often called natural products, have been an important source of diverse functional compounds for industry and medicine, including many antimicrobials. Characterizing the natural products encoded in biosynthetic gene clusters ...

A major challenge in human genetics is understanding which parts of the genome drive specific traits or contribute to disease risk. This challenge is even greater for genetic variants found in the 98% of the genome that does not encode proteins.   A new approach developed by researchers at New York University and the New York Genome Center combines genetic association studies, gene editing, and single-cell sequencing to address these challenges and discover causal variants and genetic mechanisms for ...