A randomised clinical trial is looking at whether faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) from healthy donors into adults with early-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS – one of the most common forms of motor neurone disease) can modulate the immune reaction during inflammation responses that characterise disease progression, and aims to investigate the relationship between specific gut bacteria and their action on immune system cells. The preliminary findings by Dr Alessandra Guarnaccia from Columbus-Gemelli University Hospital IRCCS, Rome, Italy and ...

The steps taken by a London hospital to prevent an outbreak of measles will be detailed at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark (15-18 April). Measles, which is highly contagious, can cause serious and potentially life-threating illness and complications including blindness, encephalitis (swelling of the brain) and pneumonia.  Pregnant women, infants and severely immunocompromised individuals are at highest risk. Contracted when pregnant, it can cause low birth weight babies, premature birth, miscarriage or stillbirth. It usually starts with cold-like symptoms, followed by a rash a few days later.  ...

AI software can accurately detect TB from chest X-rays, a study being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark, (15-18 April), shows. Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of death and disease worldwide. It causes 1.6 million deaths a year, making it is the 13th leading cause of death globally and the second biggest infectious killer, after COVID-19. In low-resource settings, chest X-rays play an important role in the diagnosis of patients ...

New research presented at this week’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (Copenhagen, 15-18 April) shows how interventions focused on so called ‘supercontactors’ in hospitals and other long term care facilities (LTCF) can optimise infection control and reduce the spread of infectious diseases. The study is by Dr Quentin Leclerc and colleagues at Institut Pasteur and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Paris, France). Hospitals and ...

Researchers at the University of California, Davis College of Engineering are using machine learning to identify new materials for high-efficiency solar cells. Using high-throughput experiments and machine learning-based algorithms, they have found it is possible to forecast the materials’ dynamic behavior with very high accuracy, without the need to perform as many experiments.  The work is featured on the cover of the April issue of ACS Energy Letters.  Hybrid perovskites are organic-inorganic molecules that have received a lot of attention ...

Salmonella infections cause about a million deaths a year worldwide, and there is an urgent need for better vaccines for both typhoid fever and non-typhoidal Salmonella disease. New work from researchers at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine shows how memory T cells, crucial for a vaccine that induces a powerful immune response, can be recruited into the liver in a mouse model of Salmonella.  The work was published April 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “Understanding the immunology is key to developing a better vaccine,” said Professor Stephen McSorley, ...

This planet of 8 billion people is bumping up against its ecological limits, and researchers are trying to quantify the effect of human activity on these finite resources. Some keep tallies of how much carbon they contribute to the atmosphere, others measure direct and indirect water consumption or keep tabs on the amount of land that our food habits demand. Each of these “footprints” offers an estimate of the impacts individuals and institutions have on the wider world, and are useful — but are flawed, according to geographer Chris ...

Berkeley — Rates of school discipline fluctuate widely and predictably throughout a school year and increase significantly faster for Black students than for their white counterparts, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have found.   A new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents for the first time the “dynamic” nature of student discipline during an academic year. Daily rates of punishment across all schools in the study ratchet up in the weeks before Thanksgiving break, decline immediately ...

Chronic wounds are a major health problem for diabetic patients and the elderly – in extreme cases they can even lead to amputation. Using electric stimulation, researchers in a project at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Freiburg, Germany, have developed a method that speeds up the healing process, making wounds heal three times faster. There is an old Swedish saying that one should never neglect a small wound or a friend in need. For most people, a small wound does not lead to any serious complications, but many common diagnoses ...

Spiders that don’t weave good silk don’t get to eat. The silk spiders produce which creates their webs is key to their survival – but spiders live in many different places which require webs fine-tuned for local success. Scientists studied the glue that makes orb weaver spiders’ webs sticky to understand how its material properties vary in different conditions. “Discovering the sticky protein components of biological glues opens the doors to determining how material properties evolve,” said Dr Nadia Ayoub of Washington and Lee University, co-corresponding author of the study ...

As regulators and providers grapple with the dual challenges of protecting younger social media users from harassment and bullying, while also taking steps to safeguard their privacy, a team of researchers from four leading universities has proposed a way to use machine learning technology to flag risky conversations on Instagram without having to eavesdrop on them. The discovery could open opportunities for platforms and parents to protect vulnerable, younger users, while preserving their privacy. The team, led by researchers from Drexel University, Boston University, Georgia Institute of Technology ...

Charlottesville, VA – The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines Advisory Board welcomes its new chair, Sean Grant, and board members to support its mission to promote transparency across the research lifecycle.  Grant is a Research Associate Professor at the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice at the University of Oregon with extensive experience researching TOP as Co-Principal Investigator for Transparency of Research Underpinning Social Intervention ...

Irvine, Calif., April 17, 2023 — The nano-scale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. But University of California, Irvine physicists have reported the discovery of nano-scale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states. It’s a finding that could fundamentally change the nature of electronic devices, as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials. The study is published ...

Marm Dixit, a Weinberg Distinguished Staff Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was nominated for his work on imaging techniques for solid-state batteries. Marm Dixit, a Weinberg Distinguished Staff Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was named the 2023 recipient of the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. Since 2004, this biannual award has been given by the Advanced Photon Source (APS) user organization. It recognizes important scientific or technical accomplishments at (or beneficial to) the APS by a young investigator, typically a senior graduate student or early career researcher. The APS is a DOE Office ...

After three popular primetime medical dramas included storylines about health harms from using e-cigarettes, hundreds of people took to Twitter to comment – including some who said they planned to quit vaping because of what they saw on the shows. A new analysis led by University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health scientists and published in the Journal of Health Communication examines the tweets for insights into the use of television shows to share public health messaging. Following the January 2020 episodes of New Amsterdam, Chicago Med and Grey’s Anatomy that each included plots involving adolescents with vaping-associated lung-injury, ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, April 17, 2023 – The green Mediterranean – high polyphenols diet substantially regresses proximal aortic stiffness (PAS), a marker of vascular aging and increased cardiovascular risk. The green Mediterranean diet was pitted against the healthy Mediterranean diet and a healthy guideline-recommended control diet in the DIRECT PLUS, a large-scale clinical intervention trial. Researchers found that the green Mediterranean diet regressed proximal aortic stiffness by 15%, the Mediterranean diet by 7.3%, and ...

LA JOLLA, CA—A new therapeutic designed by Scripps Research chemists can alter the molecular structure of the potent opioid carfentanil, inactivating the opioid and reversing a carfentanil overdose. The compound, which is described in an ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science paper published on April 17, 2023, and hasn’t yet been studied in humans, works in a fundamentally different way than existing treatments for opioid overdose. Carfentanil is up to 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times stronger than fentanyl, making it one of the deadliest opioids. It is typically only used as a tranquilizer ...

Putting on your workout clothes and getting to the gym can feel like a slog at first. Eventually, you might get in the habit of going to the gym and readily pop over to your Zumba class or for a run on the treadmill. A new study from social scientists at Caltech now shows how long it takes to form the gym habit: an average of about six months.    The same study also looked at how long it takes health care workers to get in the habit of washing their hands: an average of a few weeks.    “There is no magic number for habit formation,” says Anastasia Buyalskaya (PhD ’21), now an assistant professor of marketing at HEC Paris. Other authors ...

Cai from Argonne’s X-ray Science division recognized for his commitment and advances in beamline science, most notably X-ray diffraction. Physicist Zhonghou Cai is the 2023 recipient of the Gopal K. Shenoy Excellence in Beamline Science Award. He is a beamline scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. The annual award recognizes active beamline scientists at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility, for significant contributions to research or instrumentation and support of the beamline user community. The APS Users Office, which grants the award, renamed it ...

ABSTRACT: 3431  ORLANDO, Fla. ― A new study led by researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center discovered that co-occurring mutations in three tumor suppressor genes – KEAP1, SMARCA4 and CDKN2A – are linked with poor clinical outcomes in patients with KRAS G12C-mutant non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with the KRAS G12C inhibitors adagrasib or sotorasib.   The findings were presented today at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2023 and published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the AACR. This study, which encompasses the largest cohort to date of patients with KRAS G12C-mutant NSCLC treated with ...

New York, NY (April 17, 2023) — Tisch Cancer Center scientists have developed unique models of the deadliest blood cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), creating a transformative resource to study this cancer and eventually its drug response and drug resistance. The models were described in a late-breaking abstract at the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research and simultaneously published in Blood Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. These are the first powerful models that are ...

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a study at UTHealth Houston. The study, led by Oscar Woolnough, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and Nitin Tandon, MD, professor and chair ad interim of the department in the medical school, was published ...

AMHERST, Mass. – A team of scientists led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently made a surprising discovery, with the help of a wind tunnel and a flock of birds. Songbirds, many of which make twice-yearly, non-stop flights of more than 1,000 miles to get from breeding range to wintering range, fuel themselves by burning lots of fat and a surprising amount of the protein making up lean body mass, including muscle, early in the flight. This flips the conventional wisdom ...

New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit, according to an article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America today*.  The main amber fragments studied, from the Spanish locality of San Just (Teruel), contain larval moults of small beetle larvae tightly surrounded by portions of downy feathers. The feathers belonged to an unknown theropod dinosaur, either avian (a term referring ...

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor – rising sea level – likely played a major role.   “There are many theories as to what exactly happened” to drive the Vikings from their settlements in Greenland, said Marisa J. Borreggine, lead author of the “Sea-Level ...