HOUSTON – (April 10, 2023) – Improving lighting in the operating room could cut the duration of some surgeries by as much as 25%, according to Dr. Munish Gupta, an orthopedic spine surgeon at Washington University in St. Louis. With that in mind, he tasked Rice University engineering students on the OR Lights team — Ellice Gao, Bryn Gerwin, Justin Guilak, Rosemary Lach, Renly Liu and Hemish Thakkar — with building a tunable lighting system that allows surgeons to better illuminate their working ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – An ideal nanovesicle to fight cancer would have three functionalities: 1) a precision-targeting molecule to preferentially bind it to surface markers on cancer cells, 2) a strongly bound radionuclide signal that would allow a PET scan to locate the vesicles in the body, and 3) the ability to carry and release a drug treatment, such as a chemotherapy, at the cancer tumor. It would also meet two other requirements — having a simple and facile method of manufacture, and being biocompatible and biodegradable in the body. A University of Alabama at Birmingham team has now described a tiny polymersome that — in initial preclinical ...

DALLAS, April 10, 2023 — The American Heart Association sends fans of the two-time Emmy Award winning best drama series “Succession” our heartfelt condolences following the sudden cardiac death that killed off main character, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox. (SPOILER ALERT) Those who watched last night’s episode on HBO in stunned silence, saw patriarch businessman Logan suffer a cardiac arrest while on a plane as his eldest son, Connor, celebrated his wedding. Logan’s other three children ...

Purdue receives $1 million USDA grants for sustainable agriculture projects WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University has received two grants of $1 million each from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture for five-year projects to enhance sustainable agricultural systems. One grant is part of a $10 million project led by Michigan State University’s Brent Ross to develop more resilient food systems for coping with multiple ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study’s finding that urban light pollution may disrupt the winter dormancy period for mosquitoes that transmit West Nile virus could be considered both good news and bad news. The good news is that the disease-carrying pests may not survive the winter if their plans to fatten up are foiled. The bad news is their dormancy period, known as diapause, may simply be delayed – meaning they’re biting humans and animals longer into the fall. “We see the highest levels ...

Xingpeng Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering, has been named an Emerging Leader by the 2023 Offshore Technology Conference. Of the nine honorees, Li is the only one from an institution of higher education. The program selects young professionals with fewer than 10 years of experience in the offshore energy sector who demonstrate exceptional talents, commitment and promise as future leaders, according ...

The relationship between alcohol use and burn injuries is a negative one in multiple ways. Not only are about 50% of adults who sustain burn injuries intoxicated at the time of injury, suggesting that alcohol use may have contributed to the incident, but alcohol use among burn-injured patients is associated with more severe complications, delayed recovery, and increased morbidity and mortality.  “Return to work or normal life can be impaired or delayed for burn-injured patients who use alcohol,” says Elizabeth Kovacs, PhD, vice chair of research and professor of GI, trauma, and endocrine surgery ...

People who avoid COVID-19 precautions to prevent illness are more likely to purchase firearms – a pattern of behavior most common among moderate and conservative individuals, according to a Rutgers study. The researchers surveyed a sample of 6,404 adults from three states: Minnesota, Mississippi and New Jersey. The survey was conducted in early 2021, before COVID-19 vaccines were widespread, and participants were asked about their intent to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, how often they wear masks in public, ...

For the last six years, Indiana University researchers and collaborators from around the world have sought to answer important questions about the most basic laws of physics that govern our universe. Their experiment, the Majorana Demonstrator, has helped to push the horizons on research concerning one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe: neutrinos. The experiment’s final report was published in Physical Review Letters in February. Neutrinos – subatomic particles similar to an electron but that have no electric ...

Researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil are using artificial intelligence (AI) and Twitter, one of the world’s largest social media platforms, to try to create anxiety and depression prediction models that could in future provide signs of these disorders before clinical diagnosis. The study is reported in an article published in the journal Language Resources and Evaluation.  Construction of a database, called SetembroBR, was the first step in the study. The name is a reference to Yellow September, an annual suicide awareness and prevention campaign, and also to the fact that ...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Oklahoma has published a perspective article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences advocating for convergent research that integrates the fields of biogeography and behavioral ecology to more rapidly respond to challenges associated with climate change and biodiversity loss. While news about climate change fills headlines, the crisis of biodiversity loss has gotten less attention. In their article, the authors contend that “identifying solutions that prevent large-scale extinction requires addressing critical questions about biodiversity dynamics that – ...

The American College of Cardiology will host the annual Advancing the Cardiovascular Care of the Oncology Patient course on April 14-16, 2023, in Washington, DC. The course is intended for all members of the interprofessional care team—including cardiologists, oncologists, pharmacists and nurses—and aims to equip the global cardio-oncology community with the tools they need to improve patient care. Ana Barac, MD, PhD, FACC, and Bonnie Ky, MD, MSCE, FACC, will serve as co-directors for the course, which ...

PHILADELPHIA—Brain development does not occur uniformly across the brain, but follows a newly identified developmental sequence, according to a new Penn Medicine study. Brain regions that support cognitive, social, and emotional functions appear to remain malleable—or capable of changing, adapting, and remodeling—longer than other brain regions, rendering youth sensitive to socioeconomic environments through adolescence. The findings were published recently in Nature Neuroscience. Researchers charted how developmental processes unfold across the human brain from the ages of 8 to 23 years old ...

The story of how ancient wolves came to claim a place near the campfire as humanity’s best friend is a familiar tale (even if scientists are still working out some of the specifics). In order to be domesticated, a wild animal must be tamable — capable of living in close proximity to people without exhibiting dangerous aggression or debilitating fear. Taming was the necessary first step in animal domestication, and it is widely known that some animals are easier to tame than others. But did humans also favor certain wild plants for domestication because they were more easily “tamed”? Research from Washington University in St. ...

Captain of her high school tennis team and a four-year veteran of varsity tennis in college, Amanda Studnicki had been training for this moment for years. All she had to do now was think small. Like ping pong small. For weeks, Studnicki, a graduate student at the University of Florida, served and rallied against dozens of players on a table tennis court. Her opponents sported a science-fiction visage, a cap of electrodes streaming off their heads into a backpack as they played against either Studnicki or a ball-serving machine. That cyborg look was vital ...

You’d be hard pressed to find an industry today that doesn’t use data in some capacity. Whether it's health care workers using data to report the rate of flu infections in a certain state, manufacturers using data to better understand average production times, or even a small coffee shop owner flipping through sales data to learn about the previous month’s bestselling latte, data can reveal patterns and offer insights into our everyday behavior. All of this data plays a critical role in artificial intelligence ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 10, 2023)--Columbia researchers have found that babies born to moms who had mild or asymptomatic COVID during pregnancy are normal, based on results from a comprehensive assessment of brain development. The findings expand on a smaller study that used maternal reports to assess the development of babies born in New York City during the first wave of the pandemic. That study found no differences in brain development between babies who were exposed to COVID in utero and those who were not exposed. For the new study, the researchers developed a method of observing infants remotely, ...

DURHAM, N.C. –- Most kids know it’s wrong to yell or hit someone, even if they don’t always keep their hands to themselves. But what about if that someone’s name is Alexa? A new study from Duke developmental psychologists asked kids just that, as well as how smart and sensitive they thought the smart speaker Alexa was compared to its floor-dwelling cousin Roomba, an autonomous vacuum. Four- to eleven-year-olds judged Alexa to have more human-like thoughts and emotions than Roomba. But despite the perceived difference in intelligence, kids felt neither the Roomba nor the Alexa deserve to be yelled at or harmed. That feeling dwindled as kids advanced ...

Jane Hooper, Associate Professor, History, received funding for the project: "Global Passages: Creating a Public Database of Slaving Voyages across the Indian Ocean and Asia." Hooper, along with three other scholars, has received a three-year digital production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a major expansion of the open access SlaveVoyages website, available online at https://www.slavevoyages.org. The primary investigators will create an Indian Ocean and Asia (IOA) database of voyages that ...

CRISPR-Cas9 is widely used to edit the genome by studying genes of interest and modifying disease-associated genes. However, this process is associated with side effects including unwanted mutations and toxicity. Therefore, a new technology that reduces these side effects is needed to improve its usefulness in industry and medicine. Now, researchers at Kyushu University in southern Japan and Nagoya University School of Medicine in central Japan have developed an optimized genome-editing method that vastly reduces mutations, opening the door to more effective treatment of genetic diseases with fewer unwanted mutations. Their findings were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.  Genome-editing ...

PITTSBURGH, April 10, 2023 – Black and Hispanic older adults whose annual income is slightly above the federal poverty level are more likely than their white peers to face cost-related barriers to accessing health care and filling medications for chronic conditions, according to new research led by a University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health scientist.  Published today in JAMA Internal Medicine, the analysis links these disparities to a Medicaid “cliff” – an abrupt end ...

A recently developed amino acid compound successfully treats nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in non-human primates — bringing scientists one step closer to the first human treatment for the condition that is rapidly increasing around the world, a study suggests. Researchers at Michigan Medicine developed DT-109, a glycine-based tripeptide, to treat the severe form of fatty liver disease called nonalcoholic steatohepatitis. More commonly known as NASH, the disease causes scarring and inflammation in the liver and is estimated to affect up to 6.5% of the global population. Results ...

Most conservation efforts are reactive. Typically, a species must reach threatened status before action is taken to prevent extinction, such as establishing protected areas. A new study published in the journal Current Biology on April 10 shows that we can use existing conservation data to predict which currently unthreatened species could become threatened and take proactive action to prevent their decline before it is too late. “Conservation funding is really limited,” says lead author Marcel Cardillo (@MarcelCardillo) of Australian National University. “Ideally, what we need is some way of anticipating species that may not be threatened ...

Elephants like to eat bananas, but they don’t usually peel them first in the way humans do. A new report in the journal Current Biology on April 10, however, shows that one very special Asian elephant named Pang Pha picked up banana peeling all on her own while living at the Berlin Zoo. She reserves it for yellow-brown bananas, first breaking the banana before shaking out and collecting the pulp, leaving the thick peel behind. The female elephant most likely learned the unusual peeling behavior ...

About The Study: In this survey study of 9,400 adults ages 18 to 64, a higher rate of respondents with self-reported post–COVID-19 condition (PCC; also known as long COVID) did not obtain needed health care in the past year because of cost compared with adults without PCC. Adults with PCC were also more likely to have unmet needs because of difficulties getting timely appointments or health plan authorization, among other challenges with health care institutions or health insurance. These findings suggest that improved health care access for adults with PCC may require developing clinical protocols and addressing insurance-related barriers.  Authors: Michael ...