As the world’s population ages, intervertebral disc degeneration (IDD) has become a major medical issue, causing chronic lower back pain and mobility issues that diminish the quality of life for millions. The study from the University of Macau offers new hope with a novel “sugar glue” designed to repair damaged spinal discs. Led by Professor Chunming Wang, in collaboration with Professor Dong Lei of Nanjing University and supported by Professor Geng Dechun’s team at the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University. The research introduces a glucomannan-based solution that restores disc health by targeting a key protein, published in Nature Communications, ...

Imagine a world where deepfakes have become so good that no detection mechanism can unmask them as imposters. This would be a bonanza for criminals and malignant state actors: for example, these might use deepfakes to slander rival political candidates or frame inconvenient defenders of human rights. This nightmare scenario isn’t real yet, but for years, methods for creating deepfakes have been locked in a ‘technological arms race’ against detection algorithms. And now, scientists ...

Policymakers often overlook the challenges faced by shrinking small and medium-sized cities. Yet, keeping these cities sustainable is crucial for many urban stakeholders. Unfortunately, the methods that have succeeded in large cities cannot be unilaterally applied to combat this issue. This suggests that a research gap on effective urban management in small and medium-sized cities exists. Dr. Haruka Kato, a junior associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University, examined the types of municipal expenditures ...

A new systematic review has found that parents and other child caregivers who have alcohol-related diagnoses are twice as likely to maltreat children in their care than parents and caregivers with no alcohol-related diagnoses.  ‘Alcohol-related diagnoses’ included alcohol-related hospitalisation, alcohol-related service use, or a history of clinically determined alcohol dependence. ‘Child maltreatment’ included physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse; neglect; and other types of maltreatment such as harsh parenting. The study pooled the results from twelve studies of child maltreatment.  All were cohort studies in high-income countries: three in ...

Imagine a crocodile built like a greyhound — that’s a sebecid. Standing tall, with some species reaching 20 feet in length, they dominated South American landscapes after the extinction of dinosaurs until about 11 million years ago. Or at least, that’s what paleontologists thought, until they began finding strange, fossilized teeth in the Caribbean. “The first question that we had when these teeth were found in the Dominican Republic and on other islands in the Caribbean was: What are ...

Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) found that the fringe-lipped bat, known to eavesdrop on frog and toad mating calls to find its prey, learns to distinguish between palatable and unpalatable frogs and toads through experience. The findings, published April 29 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, provide the first evidence that eavesdropping predators fine-tune their hunting cues over the course of their development.  To source their food, some predators eavesdrop on calls emitted by prey. Fringe-lipped bats, which range from Panama to Brazil, are some of the most skilled eavesdroppers in the world: They are attuned to the sexual advertisement ...

The likelihood of a pedestrian or cyclist being fatally injured is 44% higher if they are hit by a sports utility vehicle (SUV) or light truck vehicle (LTV) compared with smaller passenger cars, new research shows. For children there is an even larger effect, with a child hit by a SUV or LTV being 82% more likely to be killed than a child hit by a passenger car. As part of a new analysis of existing studies, researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Imperial College London gathered real-world collision data from over 680,000 collisions from the last 35 years. They compared the severity of injuries suffered by pedestrians ...

Researchers at Amsterdam UMC have developed a new diagnostic test that can quickly and accurately diagnose bacterial meningitis. The test measures the CRP protein in cerebrospinal fluid, a protein that is already often tested in blood to detect bacterial infections. Research shows that elevated CRP in cerebrospinal fluid is a very reliable indicator of bacterial meningitis. Currently it often takes a long time before meningitis is diagnosed, which delays the start of adequate treatment. The study is published today in The Lancet Regional Health Europe.  Bacterial ...

Nearly two-thirds of adults in the U.S. have experienced some form of in-person exposure to gun violence, according to a national study by Rutgers researchers tracking racial disparities in direct and media-based experiences. This study, published in the Lancet Regional Health – Americas, examines how frequently U.S. adults are exposed to gun violence, both in person and through media, based on data from a nationally representative sample. It looks at who is most affected based on their race, income, and the neighborhoods they live in. Researchers surveyed 8,009 adults throughout the U.S. to find out how often people experience gun violence, whether directly (such ...

Cholera kills thousands of people and infects hundreds of thousands every year—and cases have spiked in recent years, leaving governments with an urgent need to find the best ways to control outbreaks. Current public health guidelines discourage treating cholera with antibiotics in all but the most severe cases, to reduce the risk that the disease will evolve resistance to the best treatments we have. But recent disease modeling research from University of Utah Health challenges that paradigm, suggesting that for some cholera outbreaks, prescribing antibiotics ...

A higher tax on cigarettes in low and middle-income countries can help to reduce child mortality, especially amongst the poorest children, a new study led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and published in The Lancet Public Health suggests. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends a tax of at least 75 percent on the retail price of cigarettes, but most countries impose a much lower tax than that. “If all 94 countries included in the study had raised their cigarette tax to the level recommended by the WHO, the lives of over 280,000 children could potentially have been saved in a single year,” says Márta Radó, principal investigator at ...

Exercise can counter the detrimental effects of cancer treatment, such as heart and nerve damage and brain fog, suggests an overarching review of the existing pooled data analyses of the most recent research, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Exercise also seems to boost psychological wellbeing and overall quality of life, lending weight to its routine inclusion in treatment protocols for the disease, say the researchers. Several pooled data analyses of the available research have evaluated the impact of exercise on health outcomes in people with cancer, but significant gaps remain in our understanding, ...

Employing too few permanent nurses on hospital wards is linked to longer inpatient stays, readmissions, patient deaths, and ultimately costs more in lives and money, finds a long term study published online in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Redressing the balance is cost-effective, saving an estimated £4728 for each year of healthy life gained per patient, but not if  temporary agency staff are used to plug the gaps, the findings indicate.  Inadvertent understaffing–through unfilled vacancies–or deliberate–through cost cutting ...

A new technology in the form of a bracelet that helps children better understand how others play and interact has been developed by University of Bristol researchers. The bracelet, which includes coloured buttons to activate a light colour signifying the play mode or activity of the children, is selected by the wearer. Children who participated in the research were able to use the bracelet to display to others whether they were playing together (green), playing alone (blue) or wanted to play with others (yellow). The study, presented today at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, highlights the importance of children being able to display and ...

A ground breaking international study has revealed spruce trees not only respond to a solar eclipse but actively anticipate it by synchronising their bioelectrical signals hours in advance into a cohesive, forest-wide phenomenon. The discovery, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, shows older trees exhibit a more pronounced early response, suggesting these ancient sentinels retain decades of environmental memory and may use it to inform younger trees of impending events. This study adds to the emerging evidence that plants ...

A team of psychologists led by the University of Cambridge have found that it takes parents about a year, on average, to attune to their child’s attitudes towards school once they start education. In fact, by Year 1, parental perceptions of how a child feels about school most closely match responses given by the child when they were in Reception class a year earlier. Scientists say that parents can get a “misleading picture” of a child’s introduction to education, especially if children only talk about school when they have a bad day.  Now, researchers have teamed up with writer Anita Lehmann and artist ...

DALLAS, April 29, 2025 — The American Heart Association, committed to changing the future of health for everyone, everywhere, is standing with Arkansas health officials in their efforts to reduce sugary drink consumption in the face of fierce opposition by the soda industry. The Association submitted written comments today in support of the state’s application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for approval to prohibit sugary beverage purchases within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Every year, some mothers die after giving birth due to heart problems, and many of these deaths could be prevented. The ability to screen for heart weakness before pregnancy could play a crucial role in identifying women who may need additional care to improve pregnancy outcomes. Mayo Clinic researchers, led by Anja Kinaszczuk, D.O., and Demilade Adedinsewo, M.D., tested artificial intelligence (AI) tools, using recordings from an electrocardiogram (ECG) and a digital stethoscope, to find unknown heart problems in women of childbearing age seen in primary care.    Study ...

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes the use of human-based research to improve health and replace animal use, enthusiastically supports the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s landmark commitment to prioritize innovative, human-based methods, like organoids, tissue chips, computational models, and real-world data analyses, while reducing animal use.  “NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya’s historic announcement that the NIH will prioritize human-based science is ...

FINDINGS Analyzing data from the 2016-2021 National Inpatient Sample, UCLA researchers found that 25% of 7350 patients hospitalized for scooter-related injuries were using substances such as alcohol, opioids, marijuana and cocaine when injured. Published in The American Surgeon, the study also notes that overall scooter-related hospitalizations during the 5-year period jumped more than eight-fold, from 330 to 2705. In addition, the risk of traumatic brain injuries among the substance use group was almost double that of the non-impaired patients. ...

April 29, 2024, TORONTO – A new study from York University’s Faculty of Health may offer reassuring news for parents whose children have a history of concussion, but want to get back to playing sports. Researchers from York University’s Faculty of Health spent more than a decade scouting fields, rinks and courts across the Greater Toronto Area for participants with a history of concussion and tested their performance on complex eye-hand coordination tasks, finding that age and previous sports experience were larger factors in cognitive-motor integration than a history of multiple concussions.  “In previous work, we've already shown that kids ...

Researchers at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) have discovered that dogs with meningiomas — the most common type of brain tumor in dogs — live longer if they receive radiation therapy rather than surgery. With collaborators at clinics in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan, the researchers compared the treatment records of 285 pet dogs with meningiomas and found that the average post-treatment survival rate for radiation therapy ...

Lung cancer can co-opt genes that normally help a fetus develop and evade the mother’s immune system. And while these pregnancy-specific glycoproteins (PSGs) can get activated in the cancers of both men and women, female patients had poorer outcomes, a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) research team has found. The analysis suggests targeting these genes might improve survival in female patients with lung cancer, according to findings presented at this year’s American Associate for Cancer Research Annual Meeting. Genes That Protect Fetuses… and Cancer? During pregnancy, the placenta ...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – April 29, 2025 – Financial toxicity, the financial distress linked to cancer treatment, significantly impacts patient outcomes. To combat this, the Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute established a Financial Toxicity Tumor Board in 2019.  The board is the first known institutional-level intervention of its kind, functioning like a traditional disease-focused multidisciplinary tumor board, but with a singular focus on financial distress. It includes participants from all areas of the cancer center ...

April 29, 2025 — For patients undergoing jaw reconstruction after surgery for head and neck cancer, computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) techniques can improve some key clinical outcomes, reports a study in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. "Our experience suggests that CAD/CAM techniques offer several benefits in patients undergoing free fibula ...