(CHAPEL HILL, N.C., April 13, 2023) New research led by the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health shows that bivalent COVID-19 boosters are still providing effective protection from hospitalization and death, even against the most recent omicron subvariants. Published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers found that the bivalent boosters were 67% effective in preventing hospitalization and death in those who had been previously vaccinated or boosted. Effectiveness waned to 48% after four weeks, 44% after 10 weeks and 38% after 20 weeks. Though ...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) or heart diseases are still the leading cause of death globally. Fortunately, doctors are now equipped with more advanced and sophisticated tools that help them diagnose CVDs. A prominent example is intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), which enables cardiologists to obtain images of the inside of blood vessels using a thin ultrasound probe. These images can then be used to assess problems such as the thickening of arteries caused by fat or plaque buildup. While IVUS is undoubtedly a powerful ...

Hepatitis C and hepatitis B viruses both attack the liver, eventually causing deadly cirrhosis or cancer. But while antivirals can cure 95 percent of HCV infections, its cousin HBV has long eluded effective therapeutics. As a result, nearly 1 million people die from HBV every year. Now researchers from the lab of Rockefeller’s Charles M. Rice—who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for pioneering novel methods to grow and study HCV—have developed an approach for studying HBV in the lab that ...

Most cells evolve slowly, accumulating incremental changes that better suit their environments. Immune cells, because they must adapt rapidly to counter new threats, evolve much more quickly. Part of that, UCLA physicists now report, rests on their ability to forcibly pull antigens off other cells’ surfaces and “study” them. By using this type of mechanical force, the immune system’s B cells, which create antibodies that fight off harmful pathogens like viruses, bacteria and parasites by targeting their ...

Researchers have created the largest atlas of post-zygotic genome mutations in healthy human tissue ever assembled — a scientific advancement that could unlock new avenues for diagnosing and treating genetic disease. It is the largest ever in terms of the combined number of tissues and number of donors sampled. The study, led by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University, published today in the journal Science. The development points the way toward understanding the genetic underpinnings of disease associated with cancer as well as innumerable conditions caused by cellular malfunction, including ...

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this “brain-to-brain synchrony,” shows a new study by a team of psychology and education researchers. The findings, which appear in the journal Psychological Science, offer new insights into the learning process.  “This is the first study to show that the extent to which students’ and teachers’ brainwaves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information from class,” says lead author Ido Davidesco, an assistant professor at the ...

Using first-of-their-kind observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team looked more than 13 billion years into the past to discover a unique, minuscule galaxy that generated new stars at an extremely high rate for its size. The galaxy is one of the smallest ever discovered at this distance—around 500 million years after the Big Bang—and could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the Universe came into existence. The paper is published in Science, one of the world's top peer-reviewed academic journals. The University of Minnesota researchers were one of the first teams to study ...

“Don’t poke the bear”, they said. But that’s exactly what a team of scientists have been doing, to discover the secrets of blood clotting. Hibernating bears, paralysed humans, and pigs kept in small enclosures all avoid dangerous blood clots, despite being immobile for extremely long periods. Research from the University of Reading, with partners in Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden, shows that reduction of a key protein prevents the formation of blood clots in all three mammal species when they ...

(SAN ANTONIO) April 13, 2023 -  An international research team led by UTSA Associate Professor of Astrophysics Thayne Currie has made a breakthrough in accelerating the search for new planets.  In a paper slated for publication April 14 in Science, Currie reports the first exoplanet jointly discovered through direct imaging and precision astrometry, a new indirect method that identifies a planet by measuring the position of the star it orbits. Data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawai`i and space telescopes from the European Space Agency (ESA) were integral to the team’s discovery. An ...

Embargoed: Not for Release Until 19:00 (7.00 pm) British Summer Time, Thursday, 13 April 2023 Shift to ‘flash droughts’ as climate warms ‘Flash droughts’ have become more frequent due to human-caused climate change and this trend is predicted to accelerate in a warmer future, according to research published today [13 April 2023] involving the University of Southampton. The research published in Science shows that flash droughts, which start and develop rapidly, are becoming ‘the new normal’ for droughts, making forecasting and preparing for their impact more difficult. Flash ...

First Nations populations at greater risk of severe flu, research finds Responsible for over 5 million infections and 100,000 deaths every year, influenza remains one of the most challenging public health issues for populations globally, particularly First Nations communities.  New research from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) has found that First Nations populations around the world are significantly more likely to be hospitalised and die from influenza compared to non-Indigenous populations.  Researchers from the Doherty ...

A research group led by scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have developed a unique material, based on nanofillers embedded in a hydrogel, that can channel mechanical energy in one direction but not the other, acting in a “nonreciprocal” way. With this composite material--which can be constructed at various sizes--the team was able to use vibrational up-and-down movements to make liquid droplets rise within a material against gravity. Using this material could thus make it possible to make use of random vibrations and move matter in a preferred direction. Channeling energy in a preferred direction is an ...

They’ve been called “dream” plastics: polyhydroxyalkanoates, or PHAs. Already the basis of a fledgling industry, they’re a class of polymers naturally created by living microorganisms, or synthetically produced from biorenewable feedstocks. They’re biodegradable in the ambient environment, including oceans and soil. But there’s a reason PHAs haven’t taken off as a sustainable, environmentally benign alternative to traditional plastics. Crystalline PHAs are brittle, so not as durable and convenient as conventional plastics. They cannot easily be melt-processed and recycled, making them expensive to produce. Colorado State ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Native bees in the Oregon Coast Range are diverse and abundant in clearcut areas within a few years of timber harvest but their numbers drop sharply as planted trees grow and the forest canopy closes, research by Oregon State University shows. The findings are important for understanding the roles forest management might play in the conservation of a crucial pollinator group, the researchers said. The study, led by graduate student Rachel Zitomer and Jim Rivers, an animal ecologist in the OSU College of Forestry, was published in Ecological Applications. “The research demonstrates ...

A new international study finds that women vaccinated for COVID-19 have a slightly higher risk for a heavier period after vaccination. The study, led by Oregon Health & Science University reproductive health services researcher Blair Darney, Ph.D., M.P.H., and physician-scientist Alison Edelman, M.D., M.P.H., published today in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. These findings build on prior work from the same research team that first identified an association between COVID-19 vaccines ...

AMES, IA – Driven by online shopping, a growing number of retailers have launched virtual fitting rooms in recent years. That includes Amazon, the top apparel seller in the U.S., along with Nike, Macy’s and Walmart. The virtual rooms allow shoppers to ‘try on’ clothes through interactive simulation technology and texture-mapped product images. It can cut down on returns and nudge hesitant shoppers to click the checkout button. But findings from a recently published study indicate virtual fitting rooms could backfire on retailers if they assume ...

The first study to examine evaluation scores for professionalism and interpersonal communication skills among physicians-in-training and what happens afterward as these doctors begin their practice is reported in JAMA Network Open. The study tracked 9,340 early-career physicians from across the country.    The study finds a strong association between lower ratings for these competencies among residents in their last year of training and greater likelihood of unsolicited patient complaints among doctors during their first year of employment ...

Amsterdam, April 13, 2023 – The Journal of Neuromuscular Diseases (JND), published by IOS Press, is pleased to announce that from July 1, 2023 (Volume 10, Issue 4), the journal will transition to a Gold Open Access publication. This means that all articles published after that date will be immediately and permanently freely available online for readers to view, download, share, and reuse, and will enable authors to more easily comply with funder and institutional mandates. “When JND launched almost 10 years ago, among our primary goals was and continues to ...

During August 2019, more than 40,000 tourists visited Hawaii’s Molokini island to snorkel or dive. In March 2020 the worldwide COVID lockdown dropped that number to zero. The sudden and prolonged drop in visitors to one of the world’s most popular snorkeling spots provided scientists with a novel opportunity to study how underwater tourism impacts marine fishes. The results of their study, published in the most recent issue of PLOS One, will help resource managers better care for Molokini and other threatened marine habitats. The study’s lead author, Dr. Kevin Weng of William & Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, ...

Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), Florida State University (FSU), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have demonstrated that starting intervention coaching parents of autistic toddlers as early as 18 months leads to better gains in language, social communication, and daily living skills. Their findings were recently published in the journal Autism. While prior studies provided strong evidence for the benefits of early intervention in autism, many are correlation studies rather than randomized controlled studies that ...

As Brazil seeks ways to protect its crucial Amazon Forest, a new study shows that excusing private landowners from conserving their precious land has come at a steep cost to global sustainability. In this week’s Nature Communications Earth & Environment, scientists at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (MSU-CSIS) as well as Brazil and the UK found that since 2012 more than half of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has taken place on designated private conservation areas within rural private properties. However, ...

CLEVELAND–By discovering how zebrafish use their hair cells to detect distant movement, a team of Case Western Reserve scientists may have found a path to help explain human hearing loss.   Even though the tiny water creatures and humans would appear to have nothing in common, the structure and function of the hair cells on zebrafish skin are nearly identical to cochlear hair cells found in the human inner ear.   In addition, both the fish and human cell receptors have a type of protein known as an “ion channel,” which converts the waves that the cells detect into electrical impulses that carry useful information.   However, in humans, ...

Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a study published in the journal Ecology Letters reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes. “There’s a fair amount of biodiversity research on fire and plants,” said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with UC CooperativeExtension who is based at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and is the study’s lead author. Research has shown that in ecosystems where fire is a natural and regular occurrence, there ...

A key source of information underpinning the upcoming National Climate Assessment suggests that heavy precipitation days historically experienced once in a century by Americans could in the future be experienced on several occasions in a lifetime.  Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) report that extremely intense days of rain or snow will be more frequent by the end of this century than previously thought ...

A spin-out company from the graphene innovation ecosystem at The University of Manchester has formed an international partnership that will spearhead an unprecedented scale-up of graphene-based technologies intended “to make a substantial impact on global CO2 emissions”.            UK-based Graphene Innovations Manchester Ltd (GIM), founded by University of Mancheser graduate Dr Vivek Koncherry, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Quazar Investment Company to create a new company in the UAE. Graphene innovation has " This agreement - ...