DENVER — (MAY 5, 2023) For the past two decades, there has been a major resurgence in progressive massive fibrosis (PMF), (also known as black lung) among coal miners, leading researchers from National Jewish Health and across the country to examine what job duties might be putting them at risk. Current federal regulations require routine monitoring of dust levels in specific “high risk” jobs in underground coal mines, mainly jobs near the coal seam where coal is mined from surrounding rock. During the study, crystalline silica, a component of coal mine dust, was found in the lungs of coal miners whose jobs had not been targeted for exposure monitoring based on current ...

Football players who have had repetitive head trauma and concussion are at heightened risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an irreversible condition that leads to dementia. But not every case of cognitive decline means CTE, as illustrated by a new case study published by researchers from Mass General Brigham in Current Sports Medicine Reports. In the publication, Adam Tenforde, MD, a physician in Mass General Brigham’s Sports medicine program and medical director of the Spaulding National Running Center, co-authored a study that described the case ...

By Suhtling Wong | May 1, 2023 11:19 am Bacteria naturally adapt to various environmental stimuli and as they mutate, these changes can make them resistant to drugs that would kill or slow their growth. In a recent article published in PLoS Genetics, UCF College of Medicine microbiologist Dr. Salvador Almagro-Moreno uncovers the evolutionary origins of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in bacteria. His studies on the bacterium that causes ...

Led by Jizhong Zhou, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma, an international research team conducted a long term experiment that found that climate warming reduced the diversity of and significantly altered the community structure of soil archaea. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Climate Change. At the microbiological level, life can be described as belonging to one of three kingdoms – how species are described in relation to one another. Eukarya contains complex organisms like animals and ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 5, 2023) - Despite breastfeeding being recommended for at least two years, only 36 percent of all infants are still breastfed at their first birthday. Black/African American mothers are least likely to initiate breastfeeding with initiation rates of only 74 percent compared to 90 percent of Asian mothers with a national average of 84 percent. Given the disparities in breastfeeding initiation, there are likely to be equivalent disparities in breastfeeding duration. New research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) published in the journal Breastfeeding ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Experts in high-performance computing and data management are gathering in Norfolk next week for the 26th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2023). Held approximately every 18 months, this high-impact conference will be held at the Norfolk Marriott Waterside in Norfolk, Va., May 8-12. CHEP2023 is hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in nearby Newport News, Va. This is the first in-person CHEP conference to be held since 2019. Science is driven by data. As research has progressed, so has the sheer volume of scientific data. The CHEP2023 conference ...

”When pentacene is excited by light, the electrons in the material rapidly react,” explains Prof. Ralph Ernstorfer, a senior author of the study. “It was an open and very disputed question whether a photon excites two electrons directly or initially one electron, which subsequently shares its energy with another electron.” To unravel this mystery the researchers used time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, a cutting-edge technique to observe the dynamics of electrons on the femtosecond time scale, which is a billionth of a ...

New multi-institutional phase 3 clinical trial data published May 2 in Cell Reports Medicine found that a cancer stem cell test can accurately decide more effective treatments and lead to increased survival for patients with glioblastoma, a deadly brain tumor. The University of Cincinnati’s Soma Sengupta, MD, PhD, a co-first author of the research and a University of Cincinnati Cancer Center physician-researcher, said the research focused on patients whose glioblastoma had returned after initial treatment.  The trial tested the effectiveness ...

Toronto - Want to make a positive difference in the wage conditions of developing country factory workers churning out products for multinational firms? Paying them more seems an obvious first step. But research looking at the experience of clothing retailer H&M Group suggests a less direct approach — by intervening at the management practice level — can empower workers and significantly raise wages in sustainable ways, multiplying the impact of the company’s investment many times over. In 2013, following activist pressure for reform, H&M went to its suppliers and asked them to voluntarily implement ...

Anomaly detectors are used to distinguish differences between normal and abnormal data, which are usually implemented by evaluating and ranking the anomaly scores of each instance. A static unsupervised streaming anomaly detector is difficult to dynamically adjust anomaly score calculation. To solve the problem, a research team led by Prof. Zhiwen Yu published their new research on 15 April 2023 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature. The team proposed a human-machine interactive streaming anomaly detection method, named ISPForest, which can ...

Sons of women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are three times more likely to develop obesity, according to a study published in Cell Reports Medicine. According to the researchers from Karolinska Institutet the findings highlight a previously unknown risk of passing PCOS-related health problems across generations through the male side of a family. PCOS is caused by the ovaries producing too much of the sex hormone testosterone. The disease affects around 15 per cent of women of childbearing age worldwide and is a condition that ...

Embargoed for release: Friday, May 5, 2023, 11:00 AM ET Key points: Among those diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer—the most common form of lung cancer—current smokers had 68% higher mortality and former smokers had 26% higher mortality compared to never smokers The longer a patient had gone without smoking pre-diagnosis, the more improved their odds of survival were The study is one of few to examine mortality not just among current and never smokers, but also among former smokers—enabling more robust findings about the impacts ...

About The Study: In this study of patients with non–small cell lung cancer, quitting smoking early was associated with lower mortality following a lung cancer diagnosis, and the association of smoking history with overall survival may have varied depending on clinical stage at diagnosis, potentially owing to the differing treatment regimens and efficacy associated with smoking exposure following diagnosis. Detailed smoking history collection should be incorporated into future epidemiological and clinical studies to improve lung cancer ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 766 patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection suggest that patient-reported perceived cognitive deficits in the first 4 weeks of SARS-CoV-2 infection are associated with post–COVID-19 condition (PCC; colloquially known as long COVID) symptoms and that there may be an affective component to PCC in some patients. The underlying reasons for PCC merit additional exploration.  Authors: Neil Wenger, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of California, Los Angeles, 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.2023.11974) Editor’s ...

Adolescents and young adults with advanced heart disease are at high risk of dying in the hospital, often require invasive treatment and experience significant symptoms that impact their quality of life. And while most of their parents prefer that decision making about their treatment and care options remain between parents and physicians, many young people want to be actively involved in medical decisions affecting them, a new study suggests. “As a pediatric psychologist, I have found that healthcare communication is one of the most critical – yet most underappreciated ...

People who perceived that they had cognitive difficulties such as memory problems during COVID were more likely to have lingering physical manifestations of the disease than people who did not report cognitive issues, new UCLA research suggests. More than one in three people experiencing long COVID symptoms perceived such cognitive deficits, which have been found to be related to anxiety and depression. The findings indicate that psychological issues such as anxiety or depressive disorders may ...

A research team led by Dr. WANG Liang from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that right hippocampal theta power hierarchically encodes the distance between the current position and a goal destination. The study was published online on May 5 in Current Biology. Successful navigation to a goal is crucial for animals in nature as well as for humans in modern life. Computational models show that goal-directed navigation computes the Euclidean distance to the goal. Multi-scale representation of goal distance is extremely efficient and less susceptible to interference from background noise than single-scale coding. ...

The language used to communicate fertility awareness should be more empathetic and target both men and women, finds a new study involving UCL researchers. The review, published in Human Reproduction Open, gives five recommendations on how to promote fertility awareness in a more positive way. While education about fertility is not intrinsically controversial, finding the right language to address the topic can be difficult – with the risk of causing negative effects such as anxiety, culpability, and stigma. After reviewing previous studies and literature on the subject, the team were particularly keen to resolve issues around language that could evoke feelings of personal blame, ...

The implementation of effective policies at local and regional level, and the cooperation of all countries in the Mediterranean Sea basin is urgently needed to successfully reverse the environmental problems in this marine area. This is evidenced by a report carried out by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) presented in the European Parliament by oceanographer Patrizia Ziveri, who stresses the need to urgently fight against the growing pollution caused by marine litter and plastics in the Mediterranean, to improve current legislation and to monitor new pollutants that ...

Two researchers from the University of Bonn have been awarded a Proof of Concept Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) as part of a program designed to help researchers translate their ideas from previous ERC projects into commercial applications. Biologist Prof. Dr. Bernardo S. Franklin from the University Hospital Bonn and physicist Prof. Dr. Simon Stellmer will thus each receive €150,000 over a period of around one year. Prof. Dr. Bernardo S. Franklin from the Institute for Innate Immunity and the ImmunoSensation2 Cluster of Excellence studies hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), which develop into different blood cells through ...

Just a few months ago, Anna Maria Coclite and her team from the Institute of Solid State Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) presented the results of their research as part of Coclite’s ERC Starting Grant project “SmartCore”. They had succeeded in developing the three-in-one “smart skin” hybrid material, which closely resembles human skin by simultaneously sensing pressure, moisture and temperature and converting them into electronic signals. With 2,000 individual ...

Alfalfa (Medicago sativa), commonly called the “King of Grass,” is a legume grown in many parts of the world as a source of animal fodder. It is prized in the forage industry for its high protein content and biomass yield. Recently, alfalfa protein has found applications in aquaculture, pet food industry and human diet. Furthermore, it is seen as an environmentally beneficial crop, with positive impacts on biodiversity and soil nitrogen conservation. Alfalfa produces two seed types—hard and non-hard—with no obvious visible differences. Unfortunately, the hard seeds ...

Lithium-air batteries, also known as lithium-oxygen batteries, are candidates for the next generation of high-energy electricity storage devices. Their theoretical energy storage capacity is ten times that of conventional lithium-ion batteries of the same weight, but they are not yet chemically stable enough to provide a reliable solution. Now a newly launched collaborative research project in which a team from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, led by chemist Professor Dr. Gunther Wittstock is participating is testing ...

Conditions such as coeliac disease and Parkinson’s disease could be detected in principle up to 10 years earlier than they are currently, suggests a new study by UCL researchers. The study, published in the British Journal of General Practice, reviewed existing evidence on how people’s use of healthcare changed in the weeks, months and years ahead of the diagnosis of a range of conditions. This detectable change in healthcare use indicates the condition’s “diagnostic window” – that is, the point at which diagnosis in some patients may theoretically be possible. While ...

Scientists' Hubble Space Telescope observations of the young star, TW Hydrae may signal new planets under construction. In 2017 astronomers reported discovering a shadow sweeping across the face of a vast pancake-shaped gas-and-dust disk surrounding the red dwarf star. The shadow isn't from a planet, but from an inner disk slightly inclined relative to the much larger outer disk – causing it to cast a shadow. One explanation is that an unseen planet's gravity is pulling dust ...