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 ...

Results from the S1609 DART clinical trial, which tested an immunotherapy combination of ipilimumab plus nivolumab in 53 cohorts of patients with rare cancers, are being reported for five cohorts of patients who had rare gynecologic cancers.  In three of those five cohorts – the cohorts for clear cell ovarian cancer; small cell ovarian carcinoma, hypercalcemic type; and non-epithelial ovarian cancer – some patients have shown durable responses to the immunotherapy, including several patients whose complete remissions have now lasted more than three years. The findings will be presented in three abstracts at the 2023 ...

Blind or colorblind people can describe colors and use expressions like “green with envy” or “feeling blue.” A hearing-impaired person can also say those same vibrant hues are “loud.” But many linguists and cognitive neuroscientists have assumed that somatosensation—touch, pain, pressure, temperature, and proprioception, or the sense of where your body is oriented in space—is fundamental for understanding metaphors that have to do with tactile sensations. Understanding expressions like “she is having a tough time” or “that class was hard,” it was believed, requires previous experience with those sensations to extend ...

“Our results implicate p21 as a critical regulator of chronic bronchitis and a driver of chronic airway inflammation and lung destruction.” BUFFALO, NY- April 17, 2023 – A new research paper was published on the cover of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 7, entitled, “p21 facilitates chronic lung inflammation via epithelial and endothelial cells.” Cellular senescence is a stable state of cell cycle arrest that regulates tissue ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Gynecologic surgeons with The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) are leading an international clinical trial to determine whether minimally invasive surgery robotic surgery is better or worse than open surgery when performing a radical hysterectomy to treat cervical cancer. Although minimally invasive and robotic-assisted surgery techniques have become the standard approach for many surgeries, in gynecologic cancer open surgery – which involves one ...

LA JOLLA, CA—La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Instructor Estefania Quesada Masachs, M.D., Ph.D., has won the 2023 Young Investigator of the Year Award from the Network for Pancreatic Organ donors with Diabetes (nPOD). This prestigious award recognizes Quesada Masachs' groundbreaking research in type 1 diabetes. Quesada Masachs says she was "happily surprised" to receive the award from nPOD at their 2023 conference. The organization provides pancreatic tissue samples to researchers, opening the door for in-depth research into type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease where the body's own immune ...

“[...] long-term treatment with rapamycin slows down aging, a major risk factor for cancer [...]” BUFFALO, NY- April 17, 2023 – A new research perspective was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on April 14, 2023, entitled, “Cancer prevention with rapamycin.” The mTOR (Target of Rapamycin) pathway is involved in both cancer and aging. Furthermore, common cancers are age-related diseases, and their incidence increases exponentially with age. In his new research perspective, Mikhail V. Blagosklonny, M.D., Ph.D., from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center discusses rapamycin and other rapalogs and their ...

It epitomizes the Great Plains in spirit and in form: a 2,000-pound tank on hooves, cloaked in shaggy winter-tested coat, capped by horns acting as warning and weapon. Even its scientific name, Bison bison bison, seems to conjure an echo worthy of its majesty. Still, the implacable profile of the Plains bison — the national mammal of the United States and largest on the continent — belies the vulnerability in its history, which saw its legions decimated from tens of millions to just a few hundred in the span of a few colonial centuries. Conservation efforts have pushed its number back to roughly 20,000, and its status from endangered ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Oregon State University researchers have discovered a new class of compounds that contributes to the ashy or smokey flavors in wine made with grapes exposed to wildfire smoke. This development is significant for winemakers who have struggled to combat the impact of smoke on grapes at a time when climate change is leading to an increase in the number and severity of wildfires, the researchers said. “These findings provide new avenues for research to understand and prevent smoke taint in grapes,” said Elizabeth Tomasino, an associate professor of enology ...

The high seas have been colonized by a surprising number of coastal marine invertebrate species, which can now survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to the floating community composition. This finding was published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution by a team of researchers led by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) and the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa.  The researchers found coastal species, representing diverse taxonomic groups and life history traits, in the eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre on over 70 percent of the plastic debris ...