AUGUSTA, Ga. (May 2, 2023) – Inhibiting a tiny RNA whose levels significantly increase with age, along with problems like weaker bones and sagging muscles, may be a way to keep our bodies more youthful and healthy, scientists say.  MicroRNAs help regulate gene expression and consequently the function of our cells, and several, including one called microRNA-141-3p, have been implicated in the ills of aging, like increasing levels of potentially damaging chronic inflammation and that shrinking muscle mass. “When we age in all these complications like chronic inflammation, muscle loss, bone loss, this microRNA is elevated,” says Sadanand ...

HOUSTON – (May 2, 2023) – Feces from fish that are typically thought to promote healthy reefs can damage and, in some cases, kill corals, according to a recent study by Rice University marine biologists. Until recently, fish that consume algae and detritus — grazers — were thought to keep reefs healthy, and fish that eat coral — corallivores — were thought to weaken reef structures. The researchers found high levels of coral pathogens in grazer feces and high levels of beneficial bacteria in corallivore feces, which they say could act like a “coral probiotic.” “Corallivorous ...

New findings in color vision research imply that humans can perceive a greater range of blue tones than monkeys do. “Distinct connections found in the human retina may indicate recent evolutionary adaptations for sending enhanced color vision signals from the eye to the brain,” researchers report April 25 in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Yeon Jin Kim, acting instructor, and Dennis M. Dacey, professor, both in the Department of Biological Structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, led the international, collaborative project. They were joined ...

INFORMS Journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management New Study Key Takeaways: Matching supply and demand of organs can provide broader sharing in a way that results in greater transplant equity. By indiscriminately enlarging the pool of supply locations from where patients can receive offers, they tend to become more selective, resulting in more offer rejections and less efficiency. The model accounts for the variation of “incidence of disease” (i.e., demand) and “availability of deceased-donor organs” ...

TAMPA, Fla. (May 1, 2023) – Subglacial lakes that never see the light of day are among the least accessible frontiers of science, brimming with more tales yet untold than even the planets of our solar system. One thing seems certain: where there is water, there is life -- even if said water is at the bottom of a frigid lake, in pitch darkness, below more than a half mile of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. As reported in AGU Advances, scientists analyzed the chemical fingerprint of the ocean and microbes retrieved from sediments and water at the bottom of a subglacial ...

  Images  //  Video  Couches, tables, sleeves and more can turn into a high-fidelity input device for computers using a new sensing system developed at the University of Michigan.   The system repurposes technology from new bone-conduction microphones, known as Voice Pickup Units (VPUs), which detect only those acoustic waves that travel along the surface of objects. It works in noisy environments, along odd geometries such as toys and arms, and on soft fabrics such as clothing and furniture.    Called SAWSense, for the surface acoustic waves it relies ...

WASHINGTON, DC – The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 87 graduate students representing 33 states for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2022 Solicitation 2 cycle. Through world-class training and access to state-of-the-art facilities and resources at DOE national laboratories, SCGSR prepares graduate students to enter jobs of critical importance to the DOE mission and secures our national position at the forefront of discovery and innovation. “The SCGSR program provides a way for graduate students to enrich their scientific research by engaging with ...

Twenty years after the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed, audiences around the world will now be able to explore the iconic symbol of New Hampshire through an online interactive 3D model created by Matthew Maclay, a graduate student in earth sciences at Dartmouth's Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. The face-shaped granite formation on the northeast side of Cannon Cliff in Franconia Notch State Park fell off the cliff on May 3, 2003, drawing international attention and dismay in New Hampshire itself. "People continue to have a very emotional connection to the Old Man of the Mountain—the state emblem of New Hampshire, so I am really excited that this 3D ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — One person’s trash may well be another’s “come up,” or what the rapper Macklemore calls hidden treasures in the song “Thrift Shop,” but only if secondhand shoppers follow the rapper’s lead and dig through what are sometimes messy bins. New research from Penn State and Texas Christian University shows that shoppers looking to “pop some tags” may be drawn to disordered thrift shop displays because they signal hidden treasure in their inventory. “Secondhand markets are growing in ...

A new study has found that people who were exposed to even moderate levels of aircraft noise were less likely to receive the minimum recommended amount of sleep each night, and this risk increased among people living in the Western U.S., near a major cargo airport, or near a large water body, and among people with no hearing loss. As major airline officials predict another record summer air travel season, a new analysis by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Oregon State University has found that exposure to even moderate levels of airplane noise may disrupt sleep, building upon a growing body of research ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Sodium-ion batteries have been touted as a sustainable alternative to lithium-ion batteries because they are powered by a more abundant natural resource. However, sodium-ion batteries have hit a significant snag: the cathodes degrade quickly with recharging. A Cornell University-led collaboration succeeded in identifying an elusive mechanism that can trigger this degradation – transient crystal defects – by using a unique form of X-ray imaging that enabled the researchers to capture the fleeting defects while the battery was in operation. The group’s ...

New York (May 1, 2023) — Today the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) announced the 16 AGS members who have been awarded AGS Fellowship.  This distinction recognizes AGS members for their deep commitment to the AGS and to advancing high-quality, person-centered care for us all as we age.  The new AGS fellows will be formally recognized at the 2023 AGS Annual Scientific Meeting (#AGS23; May 4-6).  “We are delighted to be recognizing our AGS member colleagues for their ...

In the United States, an average of three people die every day waiting for a liver transplant, which resulted in nearly 1,200 lives lost in 2021. Liver allocation policy has undergone major modifications in the last 10 years. In a new study, researchers examined these policies, finding that despite the changes, geographic inequity persists. The authors recommend a more efficient and equitable way to allocate livers. The study, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Maryland (UMD), is forthcoming in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. “We suggest policymakers move away from the ‘one- size-fits-all’ approach of current ...

Joan Casey lived through frequent wildfire-season power outages when she lived in northern California. While waiting for the power to return, she wondered how the multi-day blackouts affected a community’s health. “For me it was an inconvenience, but for some people it could be life-threatening,” said Casey, now an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. “If you had an uncle that ...

Amid historically high suicide rates and mental health care provider shortages, new research from Incite @ Columbia University suggests that interventions to alleviate mental health care access disparities can prevent unnecessary death and suffering. In an article pending publication in PNAS next week, “Differential Spatial-Social Accessiblity to Mental Health Care and Suicide," Daniel Tadmon and Peter S. Bearman find that in the United States improved access to mental health care is associated with reductions in suicide risk. To enable this research, Tadmon and Bearman developed new methods of measuring access ...

EMBARGO UNTIL: May 1, 2023 at 3 PM ET Gene-editing therapy aimed at two targets – HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, and CCR5, the co-receptor that helps the virus get into cells – can effectively eliminate HIV infection, new research from the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University and the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) shows. The study, published online in the journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to combine a dual gene-editing strategy with antiretroviral ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA — For many decades, neuroscientists believed there was a “critical period” in which the brain could learn to make sense of visual input, and that this window closed around the age of 6 or 7. Recent work from MIT Professor Pawan Sinha has shown that the picture is more nuanced than that. In many studies of children in India who had surgery to remove congenital cataracts beyond the age of 7, he has found that older children can learn visual tasks such as recognizing ...

Fast facts: Congenital cataracts are the leading cause of treatable blindness in children worldwide. In nations where the surgery is widely available, surgery occurs during infancy and there is a good prognosis for the recovery of visual function. It is widely accepted that the window for surgical intervention for congenital cataracts closes by the time a child reaches the ages of six to eight years old, as that is a critical period for visual brain development. Restoration of the visual input later in life is generally ...

[EMBARGOED UNTIL May 1, 2023 at 3:00 PM U.S. Eastern time] Reports of near-death experiences--with tales of white light, visits from departed loved ones, hearing voices, among other attributes—capture our imagination and are deeply engrained in our cultural landscape. The fact that these reports share so many common elements begs the question of whether there is something fundamentally real underpinning them—and that those who have managed to survive death are providing glimpses of a consciousness that does not completely disappear, even after the heart stops ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences assessed changes in the reproductive output of 104 bird species around the world between 1970 and 2019. The study reveals that a warming climate appears to have more worrisome effects on larger birds and migratory birds than on smaller, sedentary species. Study co-author Jeffrey Hoover, an avian ecologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey describes the findings in an interview with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign life sciences editor Diana Yates. Some highlights: Increasing local temperatures during the chick-rearing part of the ...

Coal trains and terminal operations add a significant amount of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution to urban areas, more so than other freight or passenger trains, according to a study conducted in Richmond, California, by the University of California, Davis. The paper, published in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, is the first study of coal train particulate pollution in a U.S. urban area. It’s also the first to use artificial intelligence technologies to verify that the source of air pollution detected comes from coal. It found that passing trains carrying ...

HOUSTON – Several high-performance thermoelectric materials have been discovered over the past two decades, but without efficient devices to convert the energy they produce into emission-free power, their promise has been unfulfilled. Now an international team of scientists led by a University of Houston physicist and several of his former students has reported a new approach to constructing the thermoelectric modules, using silver nanoparticles to connect the modules’ electrode and metallization layers. The ...

For people with cancer, chemotherapy saves lives, but for some patients, the treatment comes with a side effect—heart damage. Screening cancer drugs for cardiotoxicity has been an ongoing challenge as heart cells don’t naturally grow in a dish, requiring researchers to do this critical testing using cardiac tissue from rodent models. A new study from researchers at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and Tufts Medical Center reports that heart tissue obtained through organ donations from dogs dying of other causes are a promising platform for testing cancer drug toxicity, offering scientists a new alternative. The ...

The most common stars in the universe are red dwarf stars, which means that rocky exoplanets are most likely to be found orbiting such a star. Red dwarf stars are cool, so a planet has to hug it in a tight orbit to stay warm enough to potentially host liquid water (meaning it lies in the habitable zone). Such stars are also active, particularly when they are young, releasing ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that could destroy planetary atmospheres. As a result, one important open question in astronomy is whether a rocky planet could maintain, or reestablish, an atmosphere in such a harsh environment.   To help answer that question, astronomers ...

Cancer patients who use cannabis to address their symptoms have less pain and sleep better, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research. But they also experience another, unexpected, benefit: After a few weeks of sustained use, they seem to think more clearly. “When you’re in a lot of pain, it’s hard to think,” said senior author Angela Bryan, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder and a cancer survivor. “We found that when patients’ pain levels came down after using cannabis for a while, their cognition got better.” The small but groundbreaking study, published ...