A team of researchers, led by the University of Houston, has discovered two new ways of preventing and treating respiratory viruses. In back-to-back papers in Nature Communications, the team - from the lab of Navin Varadarajan, M.D. Anderson Professor of William A. Brookshire Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering - reports the development and validation of NanoSTING, a nasal spray, as a broad-spectrum immune activator for controlling infection against multiple respiratory viruses; and the development of NanoSTING-SN, a pan-coronavirus nasal vaccine, that can protect against infection and disease by all members of the coronavirus family.  NanoSTING ...

A new UBC study has revealed regular seasonal shifts in people’s moral values. The finding has potential implications for politics, law and health—including the timing of elections and court cases, as well as public response to a health crisis. The research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) analyzed survey responses from more than 230,000 people in the U.S. over 10 years and revealed that people’s embrace of certain moral ...

The chemical and energy industries depend upon catalysts to drive the reactions used to create their products. Many important reactions use heterogeneous catalysts — meaning that the catalysts are in a different phase of matter than the substances they are reacting with, such as solid platinum reacting with gases in an automobile’s catalytic converter. Scientists have investigated the surface of well-defined single crystals, illuminating the mechanisms underlying many chemical reactions. However, there is much more to be learned. For heterogeneous catalysts, their 3D atomic structure, their chemical composition and the nature of ...

When we’re sick, the first step on the road to recovery is a visit to the doctor’s office.  It turns out the same may also be true for breathing life into America’s democracy. A Rutgers University–New Brunswick study published in the journal JAMA Health Forum finds that physicians can play a crucial role in strengthening political inclusion of marginalized groups by aiding patients in voter registration. “Hospitals aren’t the first place we think of when it comes to voter registration,” said Katherine McCabe, an associate professor of American politics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and lead ...

Electronic waste, or e-waste, is a rapidly growing global problem, and it’s expected to worsen with the production of new kinds of flexible electronics for robotics, wearable devices, health monitors, and other new applications, including single-use devices. A new kind of flexible substrate material developed at MIT, the University of Utah, and Meta has the potential to enable not only the recycling of materials and components at the end of a device’s useful life, but also the scalable manufacture of more ...

Working with human stem cells that form a kind of “mini intestine-in-a-dish,” Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists say they have found several molecular mechanisms for COVID-19-related diarrhea, suggesting potential ways to control it. Details of the experiments in a model of human intestinal tissue, called enteroids, are described on July 30 in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Along with the unpleasant aches, fever, sore throat, cough, respiratory distress and other symptoms that may accompany COVID-19 infection, up to half of people who get the virus will experience diarrhea. Some 30% of them will go on to develop ...

Leuven, 6 August 2024 - A team of researchers from the lab of Prof. Stein Aerts (VIB-KU Leuven) presents Nova-ST, a new spatial transcriptomics technique that promises to transform gene expression profiling in tissue samples. Nova-ST will make large-scale, high-resolution spatial tissue analysis more accessible and affordable, offering significant benefits for researchers. The research was published in Cell Reports Methods. Transcriptomics is the study of gene expression in a cell or a population of cells, but it usually does not include spatial information about where those genes were active. This hurdle limited our understanding of complex ...

BUFFALO, NY- August 6, 2024 – On July 28, 2024, Mikhail V. Blagosklonny M.D., Ph.D., from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center published a new editorial in Volume 16, Issue 14 of Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science), entitled, “Targeted cancer therapy: the initial high concentration may slow down the selection for resistance.” “Unfortunately, any targeted therapy is, always, started with low levels of the drug in the organism, selecting for drug resistance. One should propose that initial drug levels must be maximized, ...

Mayonnaise continues to help researchers better understand the physics behind nuclear fusion. “We’re still working on the same problem, which is the structural integrity of fusion capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, and Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise is still helping us in the search for solutions,” says Arindam Banerjee, the Paul B. Reinhold Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Lehigh University and Chair of the MEM department in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.  In simple terms, fusion reactions are what power the sun. If the process could ...

Minxiang “Glenn” Zeng, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University, has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Launching Early-Career Academic Pathways in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences (LEAPS-MPS) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to further his research about printable semiconductors and electronics under extreme environments.   The grant supports Zeng’s work in understanding and controlling the thermal degradation pathways of printed metal chalcogenides, which are semiconductor materials including selenides, tellurides and sulfides. His goal is to develop strategies to enhance the thermal stability ...

The 8th Annual Meeting of the Digital Olfaction Society (DOS) will take place on December 5-6, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan, and Online. The DOS meeting is uniquely aimed at digitizing scents, transferring them, and re-creating them in different parts of the world. The two-day event includes one day dedicated to talks and another day for demonstrations. Under the slogan "Olfaction to Digital Olfaction", the congress will explore the latest advances in olfaction science and digital olfaction technologies, highlighting their transformative impact across multiple fields. The first day of the congress will focus on olfaction science, scent-based diagnosis and treatment ...

In 2023, roughly 60,000 firework shells exploded above Manhattan’s East River as part of Macy’s Fourth of July show. The resulting air pollutant levels were many times higher in the hours after the display than those seen when smoke from a Canadian wildfire had blanketed the area a month before. This is according to the results of a new study, led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, which measured air quality just before and after the Independence Day event, one of the largest in the United States. Tiny particles of hazardous metals and organic compounds peaked at 3,000 micrograms per cubic meter at an air sampling site ...

A paper out today in Nature Communications reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone.   Dated to about 700,000 years old, the new findings shed light on the evolution of Homo floresiensis, the so-called ‘Hobbits’ of Flores whose remains were uncovered in 2003 at Liang Bua cave in the island’s west by a team co-led by Australian-New Zealand archaeologist Professor Mike Morwood (1950–2013).   Archaeological evidence suggests these diminutive, small-brained humans inhabited Liang Bua ...

About The Study: The results from this study suggest that the higher fracture risk among older women with type 2 diabetes may be due to impaired physical function and not skeletal characteristics.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Mattias Lorentzon, MD, PhD, email mattias.lorentzon@medic.gu.se. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.25106) Editor’s Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study, the artificial intelligence (AI) model demonstrated strong performance in accurately identifying myopia, strabismus, and ptosis using only smartphone images. These results suggest that such a model could facilitate the early detection of pediatric eye diseases in a convenient manner at home. Corresponding Authors: To contact the corresponding authors, email Lin Li, MD, PhD (jannetlee130@gmail.com), and Jie Xu, DHM (xujie@pjlab.org.cn). To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: This study identifies demographic biases in artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images of physicians with disproportionate representation of white and male physicians and concerning underrepresentation of other races and ethnicities (Asian and Latino) and female physicians in some platforms. This bias has the potential to reinforce stereotypes and undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within health care.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Sang Won Lee, MSc, email sangwon_lee@hms.harvard.edu. To access the embargoed ...

Leuven, 7 August 2024—The mechanisms underlying intellectual disabilities or autism remain largely unknown. Researchers in the labs of Prof. Pierre Vanderhaeghen and Prof. Vincent Bonin at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and NERF have discovered that mutations in a gene called SYNGAP1 disrupt the prolonged development of human neurons, which is thought to be essential for normal cognitive function. Their work has interesting implications for our understanding and treatment ...

**EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL AUG. 6 AT 11 A.M. ET** A protein called Meteorin-like (METRNL) in the tumor microenvironment saps energy from T cells, thereby severely limiting their ability to fight cancer, according to new research directed by investigators at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Finding ways to block the effects of METRNL signaling on tumor-infiltrating T cells may allow these immune cells to regain the energy necessary to eliminate tumors.     A report about the work was published Aug. 6 in the journal Immunity.  METRNL ...

Everyone wants to live to a ripe old age, but no one wants to be decrepit. Now, University of Connecticut researchers have demonstrated a treatment that could lengthen life—and vigor—up to the very end. Even as human lifespans have lengthened over the past century, most people in old age suffer a serious health decline in the last decade of life. Chronic illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease may begin, followed by frailty. Many interventions can prolong life, but not necessarily good health. And nobody wants to spend the last ...

In materials science, substances are often classified based on defining factors such as their elemental composition or crystalline structure. This classification is crucial for advances in materials discovery, as it allows researchers to identify promising classes of materials and explore new ones with similar functions and properties. A recent Advanced Intelligent Systems study led by Researcher Nobuya Sato and Assistant Professor Akira Takahashi from Tokyo Institute of Technology developed a new machine learning-powered clustering technique. This technique groups similar materials by taking into account both their ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – Analysis of CT scans in people who undergo imaging for health screening can identify individuals at risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a study published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Researchers said the findings underscore CT’s value in opportunistic imaging—the use of information from routine imaging examinations to learn more about a patient’s overall health. For the new study, researchers evaluated the ability of automated CT-derived markers ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. – A deep learning model performs at the level of an abdominal radiologist in the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer on MRI, according to a study published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The researchers hope the model can be used as an adjunct to radiologists to improve prostate cancer detection. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men worldwide. Radiologists typically use a technique that combines different MRI sequences (called multiparametric MRI) to diagnose clinically significant prostate cancer. ...

CHICAGO – Nearly 100 wildfires are currently raging throughout the country, burning more than 2 million acres. The rising frequency of these fires poses a special concern for anesthesiologists – the potential for increased rates of adverse outcomes from anesthesia and surgery among patients exposed to wildfire smoke, according to a special article in the Online First edition of Anesthesiology, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA). "Wildfire smoke causes inflammation and is known to worsen heart and lung disease and pregnancy outcomes," said senior author Vijay Krishnamoorthy, M.D., M.P.H., Ph. D., chief of the Critical Care ...

A new study by an international team of collaborators led by researchers at the University of Vienna, and in collaboration with the Dom Museum Wien, aimed to address the questions of whether art exhibitions can make us more empathic or even change our attitudes and behaviors? The researchers were able to show that, indeed, looking through the exhibition reduced xenophobia and increased acceptance of immigration. Even more, by employing a new cellphone-based experience sampling method, they could track how long ...

Some believe the future of fusion in the U.S. lies in compact, spherical fusion vessels. A smaller tokamak, it is thought, could offer a more economical fusion option. The trick is squeezing everything into a small space. New research suggests eliminating one major component used to heat the plasma, freeing up much-needed space. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), the private company Tokamak Energy and Kyushu University in Japan have proposed a design for a compact, spherical fusion pilot plant ...