Mass fungus infections that drive populations worldwide to near-collapse don’t just occur in science fiction. Chytridiomycosis, the worst vertebrate disease in recorded history, has already wiped out hundreds of species of amphibians around the world. Due to a large part to this fungal disease, 41% of amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. Only species living in Africa seemed to have been relatively spared from the scourge of chytridiomycosis – at least so far. Now, a study in Frontiers in Conservation Science ...

Oxides of tin (SnxOy) are found in many of modern technologies due to their versatile nature. The multivalent oxidation states of tin—Sn2+ and Sn4+—impart tin oxides with electroconductivity, photocatalysis, and various functional properties. For the photocatalysis application of tin oxides, a narrow bandgap for visible-light absorption is indispensable to utilize a wide range of solar energy. Hence, the discovery of new SnxOy could help improve the efficiency of many environmentally significant photocatalytic reactions like water splitting and CO2 reduction. ...

Glenview, Illinois – The American College of Chest Physicians® (CHEST) recently released a new clinical guideline on respiratory management of patients with neuromuscular weakness. Published in the journal CHEST®, the guideline contains 15 evidence-based recommendations, a good practice statement and an ungraded consensus-based statement. Endorsed by the American Association for Respiratory Care, the American Thoracic Society, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Canadian Thoracic Society, the guideline recommendations include mouthpiece ventilation, transition to home mechanical ventilation, salivary secretion management and airway clearance ...

To understand how driverless vehicles can navigate the complexities of the road, researchers often use game theory — mathematical models representing the way rational agents behave strategically to meet their goals.  Dejan Milutinovic, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz, has long worked with colleagues on the complex subset of game theory called differential games, which have to do with game players in motion. One of these games is called the wall pursuit game, a relatively simple model for a situation in which a faster pursuer ...

Sticking closely to a Mediterranean diet cuts a woman’s risks of cardiovascular disease and death by nearly 25%, finds a pooled data analysis of the available evidence—the first of its kind—published online in the journal Heart. The findings prompt the researchers to call for more sex specific research to guide clinical practice in heart health. Cardiovascular disease accounts for more than a third of all deaths in women around the world. While a healthy diet is a key plank of prevention, most relevant clinical trials have included relatively few women or haven’t reported the results by sex, say the researchers. And current guidelines ...

A high blood caffeine level might curb the amount of body fat a person carries and their risk of type 2 diabetes, suggests research published in the open access journal BMJ Medicine. In light of their findings, the potential role of calorie free caffeinated drinks for lowering the risks of obesity and type 2 diabetes is probably now worth exploring, say the researchers. Previously published research indicates that drinking 3-5 daily cups of coffee, a rich source of caffeine, is associated with a lower risk ...

Health information on M(onkey)pox, posted on the social media platform TikTok, is often inaccurate, incomplete, and of poor quality, finds a recent analysis of relevant videos, published in the open access journal BMJ Global Health. The findings highlight the potential risks of using social media for health information, particularly during public health emergencies, warn the researchers. Mpox, formerly called monkeypox, usually describes fever, swollen lymph glands (lymphadenopathy), and painful skin pustules all over the body ...

New research by the Human Brain Project has found that in the brains of patients with epilepsy, changes in large scale neuronal activations can be detected in the brain’s resting state activity, even when no seizure is ongoing. The non-invasive approach could lead to a new method to aid epilepsy diagnostics. Diagnosing epilepsy can be problematic for patients, who sometimes have to wear helmets and electrodes for prolonged periods of time waiting for an epileptic episode to happen, so that the clinicians can document it with EEG. Alternatively, the seizure is artificially induced, causing discomfort. The new ...

A new study has found evidence of cheesemaking, using milk from multiple animals in Late Neolithic Poland. The research suggests that early farmers reduced the lactose content in milk by making it into cheese or other dairy products like yoghurt, and used dairy products from a number of different animals, such as cows, sheep or goats. Lactose intolerance was a common condition in almost everyone in Europe during the Neolithic and until the Late Bronze Age when the genetic mutation became widespread, enabling adults to produce lactase, the enzyme which breaks down lactose in the body. Researchers looked at the practice of dairy processing ...

Community health workers can make a great difference in increasing the number of pregnant women who receive life-saving preventive antimalarial treatment, according to a study conducted in four sub-Saharan African countries and led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation. The findings, published in The Lancet Global Health, will help to guide malaria control strategies in pregnant women and improve maternal and infant health in malaria-endemic ...

Robots can be useful as mental wellbeing coaches in the workplace – but perception of their effectiveness depends in large part on what the robot looks like. Researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study in a tech consultancy firm using two different robot wellbeing coaches, where 26 employees participated in weekly robot-led wellbeing sessions for four weeks. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions, and scripts for the sessions, the robots’ physical appearance affected how participants interacted with it. Participants who did their wellbeing exercises with a toy-like robot said that they felt more of a connection ...

Wildlife documentaries miss an opportunity to highlight the diversity of nature by focusing too much on mammals and birds, according to a new study. In a new study published in People and Nature, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that while the production of wildlife documentaries has exploded over recent decades, they portray a biased view of the natural world around us. Our natural world is under threat, from habitat and biodiversity loss, to high extinction rates. At the same time, there is a growing disconnect between people and nature, with children’s opportunities to experience the natural world diminishing. Now more ...

Electrification is seen as having an important role to play in the fossil-free aviation of tomorrow. But electric aviation is battling a trade-off dilemma: the more energy-efficient an electric aircraft is, the noisier it gets. Now, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a propeller design optimisation method that paves the way for quiet, efficient electric aviation. In recent years, electrification has been described as having an important role in reducing emissions from future aviation. Due to the challenges posed by longer ranges, interest is chiefly focused on electric propeller planes covering shorter distances. Propellers connected to ...

A new demographic survey of authorship in the American Journal of Archaeology (AJA) reveals that people of color have been largely underrepresented among the scholars published in the journal. The results of the survey, which also found that authors who are the children of people without advanced degrees were also underrepresented in the journal’s pages, are published in the paper “Demographic Dynamics of Publishing in the American Journal of Archaeology.” The study was conducted ...

During the pandemic, medical doctors and researchers noticed that children and adolescents infected with COVID-19 became less ill than adults. A possible explanation for this is that children already had a prior level of immunity to COVID-19 provided by memory T cells generated by common colds. After studying unique blood samples from children taken before the pandemic, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now identified memory T cells that react to cells infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Four coronaviruses cause common colds A possible explanation for this immunity in children is that they already had colds caused by one of the four coronaviruses ...

Houston Methodist scientists reversed infertility in sterile mice by reducing high-circulating cholesterol with a bacterial protein, showing further evidence that links high cholesterol to female infertility. This is a promising development, with one in every five women of childbearing age in the U.S. unable to get pregnant after trying for a year.   “We are working with a protein, called serum opacity factor, with unique characteristics,” said Corina Rosales, Ph.D., assistant research professor of molecular biology in medicine with the Houston Methodist ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 14, 2023) — The lung transplant team at UK HealthCare’s Transplant Center recently celebrated a major milestone, performing the 500th lung transplant since the lung transplant program was founded in 1991. “This is an impressive milestone, and our whole staff — physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, nurse coordinators, pharmacists, nutritionists, social workers, therapists and support staff — should be very proud of their success,” said Sravanthi Nandavaram, M.D., medical director of the Lung Transplant Program. ...

Since the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging in the 1990s, the reliance on neuroimaging has skyrocketed as researchers investigate how fMRI data from the brain at rest, and anatomical brain structure itself, can be used to predict individual traits, such as depression, cognitive decline, and brain disorders. Brain imaging has the potential to reveal the neural underpinnings of many traits, from disorders like depression and chronic widespread pain to why one person has a better memory than another, and why some people’s memories are resilient as they age. But how reliable brain imaging is for detecting traits has been a subject of wide debate. Prior research ...

The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star – among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly detectable stars known – was one of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022. Webb shows the star, WR 124, in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Massive stars race through their lifecycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers. Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, ...

Researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine and colleagues have identified a small molecule that may help treat people with epilepsy whose condition has become resistant to the benzodiazepine drugs usually used in managing seizures. The research, conducted in laboratory cells and rodents, was published online March 7 in Cell Reports Medicine. Uncontrolled epilepsy can lead to frequent and prolonged seizures lasting five minutes or more that can cause brain cell damage and even death. The condition affects an estimated 3.4 million people in the U.S. and millions more worldwide. Epilepsy occurs ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Globally, wildfires are becoming more frequent and destructive, generating a significant amount of smoke that can be transported thousands of miles, driving the need for more accurate air pollution forecasts. A team of Penn State researchers developed a deep learning model that provides improved predictions of air quality in wildfire-prone areas and can differentiate between wildfires and non-wildfires. “As climate change continues to cause ecological changes and challenges, it is likely that wildfire ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In 2002, an area of ice about the size of Rhode Island dramatically broke away from Antarctica as the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed. A new study of the conditions that led to the collapse may reveal warning signs to watch for future Antarctic ice shelf retreat, according to a Penn State-led team of scientists. “The collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is generally thought of as an independent event,” said Shujie Wang, assistant professor of geography at Penn State. “Our ...

“In breast cancer, MTAP downregulation activates ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) which in turn leads to formation of putrescine which promotes tumor migration, invasion and angiogenesis [15].”  BUFFALO, NY- March 14, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 14 on March 11, 2023, entitled, “Genomic landscape of metastatic breast cancer (MBC) patients with methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) loss.” Homozygous deletion of methylthioadenosine phosphorylase (MTAP) upregulates de novo synthesis ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has selected Tim Michalski to lead its Engineering Division as the Engineering Division Manager. In this role, Michalski oversees all aspects of the management and operation of the Engineering Division. The division includes more than 200 staff members and supports the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility and the lab’s growing project portfolio. “I am proud to name Tim as our newest Engineering Division Manager,” said Jefferson Lab Director Stuart Henderson. “Tim has ...

In late 2021, Salvatore Torquato, on sabbatical from Princeton’s Department of Chemistry, reached across the aisle as it were and invited a young astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study to apply the tools of statistical mechanics to his own work on the distribution of galaxies. The astrophysicist, Oliver Philcox, now a postdoc at the Simons Foundation, was intrigued. A year-long collaboration ensued. The questions at the heart of their unusual partnership were straightforward: can the statistical descriptors Torquato has worked with throughout his career find application in unlikely places like cosmology, and can they accurately characterize the complexity in the distribution ...