Cigarette filters are the world’s most common form of litter. Researchers from the University of Gothenburg can now show that the filters leak thousands of toxins and plastic fibres that are toxic to aquatic larvae. The researchers are therefore calling for these filters to be completely banned. On the footpath, at the bus stop, in the park and on the beach. You can hardly avoid seeing cigarette butts in the streetscape. And these butts aren’t just butt-ugly to behold – they’re also really bad for the environment. A research ...

The accepted clinical practice of using beta blockers over the long term to curb the risk of further heart attacks or death doesn’t seem to be warranted in patients who don’t have heart failure, suggests a large study published in the journal Heart. The researchers found no difference in these risks between patients taking beta blockers  more than a year after their heart attack and those who weren’t on these drugs. Beta blockers are a class of drugs that are predominantly used to manage abnormal heart rhythms, ...

Long-term sufferers of chronic back pain experienced dramatic reductions in pain and related disability that remained at their one-year follow-up after taking part in a new treatment tested by Curtin-Macquarie-Monash University research. Published today in the leading medical journal The Lancet, the research found large clinically significant improvements in the intensity of pain and pain-related disability among almost 500 people who had been seeking help for their pain for an average of four years before trialling the new treatment. The treatment, which delivered a healthcare and work productivity saving of more than $5000 per person, took a whole-person approach ...

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE EMBARGOED UNTIL: 01:00 BST / LONDON TIME WEDNESDAY 3 MAY 2023 Paper available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GNT9-oVOFTREzjGTSGMK7nIUvlYR61PE?usp=sharing Dogs may be at risk from high levels of lead from shotgun pellets in raw pheasant dog food, study finds Researchers tested samples of raw pheasant dog food and discovered that the majority contained high levels of lead that could put dogs’ health at risk if they eat it frequently. ...

Some people see moss growing in their gardens as a problem, but what they may not realise is this ancient ancestor of all plants is bringing lots of benefits to our green spaces, such as protecting against erosion. Now a massive global study led by UNSW Sydney has found mosses are not just good for the garden, but are just as vital for the health of the entire planet when they grow on topsoil. Not only do they lay the foundations for plants to flourish in ecosystems around the world, they may play an important role mitigating against climate change by capturing ...

Hongkui Zeng, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, was today elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences for her work to understand the cells and connections in the mammalian brain, and leading the development of tools and openly available data resources that accelerate brain research worldwide. “I am deeply honored to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences, joining more than 3,000 brilliant scientists around the country and the world,” said Zeng. “I feel incredibly fortunate to work at the Allen Institute alongside ...

People diagnosed with dementia are more likely to self-harm within the first six to 12 months after initial diagnosis, highlighting the need for health services to offer more follow-up support in this crucial period. In what is believed to be the largest study of its kind, researchers with expertise in medicine, psychiatry and psychology at UNSW Sydney looked at NSW hospital data captured for more than 180,000 people admitted to hospital between 2001 and 2015. The researchers analysed statistics relating to two cohorts of patients admitted to hospital: 154,811 people recorded as having dementia, and ...

When we think of boxing, it’s understandable many of us wouldn’t associate it with being ‘good’ for our brains.   However, new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research undertaken in partnership with The Perron Institute and boxer Rai Fazio has shown the sport — without an opponent — could be a valuable way for people suffering Parkinson’s Disease (PD) to improve their quality of life.   Also collaborating with Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and the University of Western Australia, ECU researchers had 10 people with early-stage PD perform three one-hour boxing sessions per week, over 15 weeks.   Rather ...

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) triumphed at the 48th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva, winning a total of 19 awards, including two special grand prizes Invention & Innovation CAI Award (China Delegation), and Prize of the Delegation of Malaysia. The results were announced yesterday (April 28). Research teams from Faculty of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Science, LKS Faculty of Medicine, and two HKU Inno Laboratories, established under the Hong Kong Government's InnoHK programme, garnered two special grand prizes, one Gold Medal with the Congratulations of the Jury, six Gold Medals, six Silver Medals ...

Cartilage is a tissue that protects bones by providing shock absorption and facilitates smooth joint movement. Unfortunately, due to its limited intrinsic healing capacity, stem cell transplantation is a promising therapeutic approach to address cartilage inflammation and damage, as well as to promote cartilage regeneration. However, a major limitation of this technique is the rapid disappearance of transplanted stem cells from the smooth cartilage surface and fluidic environment around cartilage, resulting in less effective treatment outcomes. Recently, a  joint team of researchers from POSTECH, Dongguk University Medical Center, and Nature Gluetech in Korea ...

How has online sleuthing successfully replaced wanted posters? Researchers within the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science answered this question by studying the crowdsourced online investigation that followed the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. “These online communities can provide real value, if they’re organized in the right way,” said Kurt Luther,  associate professor of computer science and history. “These aren’t just digital witch hunts now that make false identifications. They can really make solid contributions to ongoing investigations by getting images in front of people, which ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (May 3, 2023) — Concerns continue to grow about the impact social media use has on the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents. According to a new national survey conducted online by The Harris Poll on behalf of The On Our Sleeves Movement For Children’s Mental Health, half (50%) of parents of children younger than 18 feel their child(ren)’s mental health has suffered during the past 12 months because of social media use.  To best understand how social media is impacting their children’s mental health, On Our Sleeves encourages parents and caregivers to sit down and have ...

In a world hungry for clean energy, engineers have created a new material that converts the simple mechanical vibrations all around us into electricity to power sensors in everything from pacemakers to spacecraft.  The first of its kind and the product of a decade of work by researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, the novel generating system is compact, reliable, low-cost and very, very green. “Our breakthrough will have a significant social and economic impact by reducing our reliance on non-renewable power sources,” said Asif Khan, a ...

Dr. Zhijian “Z.J.” Pei and his intercollegiate team recently received the Future Manufacturing Research Grant from the National Science Foundation’s Future Manufacturing program, which funds researchers to develop new manufacturing capability that does not exist today. The focus of this research grant is to substitute products made from petroleum-based plastics or natural wood with biomass. “Our idea is to use living matter, including fungi, algae, bacteria, plus agriculturally derived biomass and use 3D printing to make products,” said Pei, professor in the Wm Michael Barnes ’64 ...

“A biomarker or set of biomarkers to inform on the individual progression risk would be beneficial to the patient and cost-effective for the healthcare system." BUFFALO, NY- May 2, 2023 – A new research perspective was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on April 24, 2023, entitled, “Crossroads: the role of biomarkers in the management of lumps in the breast.” Here, Dr. Georg F. Weber from the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center discusses a long-standing issue in women’s health: ...

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an indispensable tool used by clinicians to diagnose neurological diseases and by researchers to study and discover brain circuit mechanisms that support sensory, mnemonic, and cognitive processing. A new software - Openseize - created by Dr. Matthew Caudill, an investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital and assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine, can now analyze massive amounts of one-dimensional digital ...

WASHINGTON, DC – Jefferson Sciences Associates (JSA) has announced the award of $558,060 through its JSA Initiatives Fund Program. The program supports projects by staff and scientific users at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The FY23 program awards leveraged over $800,000 in matching funds, and taken together, the program and matching awards total over $1.3 million. Project awards include scientific meeting support, education and career development, and outreach activities, ...

Sophisticated systems for the detection of biomarkers — molecules such as DNA or proteins that indicate the presence of a disease — are crucial for real-time diagnostic and disease-monitoring devices. Holger Schmidt, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and his group have long been focused on developing unique, highly sensitive devices called optofluidic chips to detect biomarkers.   Schmidt’s graduate student Vahid Ganjalizadeh led an effort to use machine learning to enhance ...

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is hosting a free webinar, “How the Brain's Dopamine Circuitry Helps Regulate Cognitive Flexibility and Reward-Seeking” on Tuesday, May 9, 2023, at 2:00 pm EST. The presenter will be Nikhil Urs, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Florida and a recipient of a 2018 BBRF Young Investigator Grant. The webinar will be hosted by Jeffrey Borenstein, M.D., President & CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and host of the public television series Healthy Minds. Register today at BBRFoundation.org Dopamine ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the medical field has the possibility to automate diagnoses, decrease physician workload, and even to bring specialized healthcare to people in rural areas or developing countries. However, with possibility comes potential pitfalls. Analyzing crowd-sourced sets of data used to create AI algorithms from medical images, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers found that most did not include patient demographics. In the study published April 3 in Nature Medicine, the researchers also found that the algorithms did not evaluate for inherent biases either. That means they have ...

AMES, IA — Iowa State researchers in psychology and engineering found women experience cybersickness with virtual reality headsets more often than men. Their ongoing work, supported by a new $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, explores why this difference exists and options to help individuals adapt.   Psychology professor Jonathan Kelly studies human computer interaction, spatial cognition and virtual reality. He says gender discrepancies in cybersickness may not seem that important when it’s related to video games and other forms of entertainment. "But it’s still a problem, and when VR gets to the point ...

Using blood samples to study diseases that originate in the brain is a difficulty faced by psychiatric genetics in the search for markers of mental health disorders. Researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil have shown that this hindrance can be surmounted by analyzing microRNAs in extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are produced by most cells in the body, including neurons and other nervous system cells. The study was supported by FAPESP and is reported ...

Three years ago, an international study commissioned by the journal Lancet listed 12 modifiable factors that increased the risk of dementia, including three new ones: excessive alcohol, head injury and air pollution. Writing in the May 2, 2023 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, a team of researchers, led by scientists at University of California San Diego, further elaborate on how exposure to the last of those new factors — ambient air pollution, such as car exhaust and power plant emissions — is associated with a measurably greater risk of developing dementia over time. Senior author William S. Kremen, PhD, professor ...

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (May 2, 2023) — Van Andel Institute scientists have developed a new extraction protocol for RNA-seq and metabolomic analysis, offering a more complete picture of cellular activity than either technique on its own. The protocol employs a streamlined extraction from a single sample, which reduces variation, improves efficiency, preserves data fidelity and maximizes use of precious biospecimens. “Our new technique enables researchers to study metabolic phenotypes in a unique way while getting the most information we can out of single samples,” ...

Scientists at UMass Chan Medical School have developed a technology to deliver gene therapy directly to lung tissue through intranasal administration, a development that could potentially create a new class of treatments for lung disease. Published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study by a multidisciplinary team of RNA biologists, chemical biologists, immunologists and virologists describes the delivery of siRNA molecules locally to lung tissue. It is the first demonstration that multimeric ...