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 ...

After a drought-stricken California lifted a year of mandatory water-use cuts that were effective in 2015 and 2016, urban water use crept back up somewhat, but the overall lasting effect was a more waterwise Golden State, a University of California, Riverside, study has found. Published Tuesday, April 25, in the journal Water Resources Research, the UCR study found that water use by 2019 was still lower than it was in 2013, thanks in large part to water use changes by larger water users.   The water-reduction mandate imposed ...

Using a “spooky” phenomenon of quantum physics, Caltech researchers have discovered a way to double the resolution of light microscopes. In a paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications, a team led by Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, shows the achievement of a leap forward in microscopy through what is known as quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which two particles are linked such that the state of one particle is tied ...

NEW YORK – May 2, 2023 – The program guide for TVT 2023: The Structural Heart Summit is available online. An annual meeting from the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), TVT features cutting-edge research and techniques for structural heart interventions and will take place June 7-10, 2023, at the Phoenix Convention Center – West in Phoenix, Arizona. Transcatheter valve therapy has evolved from a novel treatment for the sickest patients to the standard of care for many with aortic stenosis. The rapid adoption of transcatheter mitral and tricuspid therapies has also changed the treatment landscape, expanding options for patients with structural heart disease. TVT ...

A new WCS-led study that analyzed 17 years of migratory bird-nesting data in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, revealed that nest survival decreased significantly near high-use oil and gas infrastructure and its related noise, dust, traffic, air pollution, and other disturbances. Prudhoe Bay is the site of intensive energy development and is located on the Arctic Coastal Plain, one of the most important avian breeding grounds in the world. Millions of birds nest here, with some then migrating through every state in the nation to wintering grounds in Central and South America, even Africa, with others crossing the Pacific ...

Philadelphia, May 2, 2023 – Vascular diseases, including myocardial infarction, stroke, renal failure, and peripheral vascular disease, continue to account for one third of all mortality in the United States, Europe, and the developing world (World Health Organization, 2021). Vascular smooth muscle cell (VSMC) activation plays a crucial role in the development of multiple vascular diseases. In a novel study in The American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, researchers found that when fragile-X related ...

May 2, 2023 – For young adults with borderline hip dysplasia (BHD), primary arthroscopy provides positive long-term outcomes, improving symptoms and function while avoiding the need for hip replacement surgery in most cases, reports a study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer. Ten-year follow-up data provides new evidence on the benefits of arthroscopy for treatment of BHD, according to the case series by Benjamin G. Domb, MD, of the American Hip Institute, Chicago. New ...

May 2, 2023, Mountain View, CA, Manchester, UK and Mauritius -- What would the Earth look like to an alien civilization located light years away? A team of researchers from Mauritius and Manchester University has used crowd-sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers and predict what an alien civilization might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth. Ramiro Saide, currently an intern at the SETI Institute's Hat Creek Radio Observatory and  M.Phils. student at the University of Mauritius, generated models displaying the radio power that these civilizations would receive as the Earth rotates and the ...

Precision Medicine Milestone Will Result in Smarter Prescribing  Beginning May 9, UC San Francisco will be the first hospital in California, and one of only a few nationwide, to offer pharmacogenetic testing. The test will provide critical clues about a patient’s unique genetic makeup, enabling pharmacists to tailor medications and dosages accordingly.   The service will result in smarter prescribing and improved clinical outcomes, said Bani Tamraz, PharmD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the UCSF School of Pharmacy and lead of the pharmacogenomics program. A patient’s blood will be tested for 15 genes ...