From working with Appalachian communities to examining issues of displacement for refugees, two Virginia Tech faculty have made it their life and scholarly mission to recognize the people that society often overlooks. Now a prestigious national foundation is giving them significant resources to tell the hidden historical stories of communities throughout Southwest Virginia, an opportunity to put their passion into action. Emily Satterwhite and Katrina Powell received a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a three-year project to work with communities across the state’s Appalachia region to commemorate neglected histories. Their project, Monuments ...

Washington, AAAS Annual Meeting. Imagine having a third arm –  a robotic one – to assist you with daily living. Silvestro Micera from EPFL, Switzerland, is engineering the human nervous system to make this a possibility. For decades, professor Silvestro Micera of EPFL has dedicated his research to helping people with sensory and motor deficits to re-gain independence and quality of life by developing wearable and implantable technologies. But this is changing, as he begins to explore what it means to augment the human body. The neuroengineer has thus far avoided the subject of ...

More than 500,000 people in the United States undergo rehabilitation following a stroke or brain injury every year. Movement impairments following a stroke are a major cause of adult disability in the United States, and routine treatments are not currently optimized for individual patient needs. University of Oklahoma biomedical engineer Yuan Yang, Ph.D., has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award, known as a CAREER award, from the National Science Foundation to advance the scientific study of brain functional changes after a stroke and pioneer a tailored rehabilitation strategy that fits individual needs. “The way a stroke victim’s brain adapts to the ...

Helping caregivers take better care of themselves can improve the quality of care they provide to individuals with neurological disabilities, according to experts writing in NeuroRehabilitation Amsterdam, March 3, 2023 – Research on caregiving after neurotrauma and neurological disability extends the focus beyond individuals with neurological conditions to caregivers - family, friends, and significant others who also are also greatly impacted. In this thematic issue published in NeuroRehabilitation, noted experts present the latest research ...

Noel Bairey Merz, MD, professor of cardiology and the director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Smidt Heart Institute, will receive the 2023 Master of the ACC Award from the American College of Cardiology (ACC) in honor of her pioneering contributions to the cardiovascular profession. She will be recognized during the ACC’s Annual Scientific Session on Monday, March 6, in New Orleans. The Master of the ACC Award recognizes and honors ACC Fellows who have served with distinction, consistently contributing to the goals and programs ...

Cedars-Sinai investigators have produced the most extensive analysis to date of changes in the retina—a layer of tissue at the back of the eye where visual information originates—and how those retinal changes correspond to brain and cognitive changes in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Their analysis, published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Neuropathologica, is an important step toward understanding the complex effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the retina, especially at the earliest stages of cognitive impairment. Experts believe this understanding is key for the development of more effective treatments that could prevent ...

A study published in JAMA Network Open has found that in the US between 1999 and 2020, Black infants disproportionately died from necrotizing enterocolitis compared to White infants, despite overall improvements in the rates of death from the disease. Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is one of the most common causes of death in preterm infants. Medically-fragile term infants, such as neonates born with a congenital heart defect, are also at an elevated risk of NEC. Two prior studies reported conflicting trends in NEC rates. One study from 2000-2011 showed increasing rates of death from the condition over time. Another study reported declining rates of NEC from 2006-2017. Researchers ...

Dr. Richard L. Lieber, a senior research career scientist at the Edward Hines, Jr., VA Hospital in Hines, Ill., has received the 2023 Paul B. Magnuson Award for his work to return functional capacity, mobility, and quality of life to Veterans with physical disabilities. The Magnuson Award recognizes outstanding achievement in VA rehabilitation research. Lieber is also a professor in the departments of physiology, biomedical engineering, and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the chief scientific officer and senior vice president at the Shirley Ryan Ability ...

About The Study: This case-control study leveraged a large commercial insurance database and found increased rates of adverse outcomes over a 1-year period for a post–COVID-19 condition (long COVID) cohort surviving the acute phase of illness. The results indicate a need for continued monitoring for at-risk individuals, particularly in the area of cardiovascular and pulmonary management.  Authors: Andrea DeVries, Ph.D., of Elevance Health, Inc., in Indianapolis, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: This study found that the frequency of heating complaints was significantly associated with the frequency of structural fires in New York City. Importantly, this association varied across community districts, with more fires occurring in districts with greater proportions of Black and Latinx residents.  Authors: Clifford C. Sheckter, M.D., of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.1575) Editor’s Note: Please see the ...

Older adults who entered skilled nursing facilities (SNF) for care after hospitalizations after the pandemic received rehabilitation care comparable to the levels of care that were provided pre-pandemic, according to research published in the JAMA Health Forum.   Despite exceptional challenges during the pandemic, SNFs provided post-acute rehabilitation with only a modest decline in intensity, said the researchers. This suggests that SNFs were largely able to adapt and provide post-acute care ...

Recently, a team led by Prof. ZHANG Shiwu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and their collaborators from UK and Australia developed a new electro-mechano responsive elastomer that autonomously adjust stiffness, conductivity and strain sensitivity in response to changes in external mechanical loads and electrical signals. Their research was published in Science Advances. Nowadays, more and more application scenarios like soft robotics and medical surgical equipment call for self-tunable intelligent materials. A widely adopted solution is composite material composed of low melting ...

Greenhouse gases act like a layer of window glass in the atmosphere: They prevent heat from being radiated from the Earth's surface into space. Methane does that 28 times as effectively as carbon dioxide - it is (to stay in the picture) a kind of invisible double glazing. Over the past 200 years, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled. This is mainly due to human meat consumption: For one thing, cows and other ruminants produce methane during digestion. Another important source is the excrement of the animals. "One-third ...

Though wildlife trafficking has been effectively disrupted since the first World Wildlife Day—established 50 years ago today via the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of Wild Fauna and Flora—a newly published case study on one of the world’s rarest tortoise species, the ploughshare tortoise, highlights how much room for improvement still exists. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of the Sciences, University of Maryland Associate Professor Meredith Gore and her coauthors—Babson College’s Emily Griffin, ...

An international team of bee researchers involving Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has integrated a calcium sensor into honey bees to enable the study of neural information processing including response to odours. This also provides insights into how social behaviour is located in the brain, as the researchers now report in the scientific journal PLOS Biology. Insects are important so-called model organisms for research. Despite more than 600 million years of independent evolution, insects share more than 60% of their DNA with humans. For several decades it was mainly the fruit fly ...

Pain afflicts at least 1.5 billion people worldwide, and despite the availability of various painkilling drugs, not all forms of pain are treatable. Moreover, pain medications can have side-effects such as dependence and tolerance, especially in the case of morphine and other opioids.  In search of novel painkillers, researchers at Butantan Institute’s Special Pain and Signaling Laboratory (LEDS) in São Paulo, Brazil, studied TRPV1, a sensory neuron receptor that captures noxious stimuli, including heat and the burning sensation conveyed by chili peppers, and ...

Certain chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer cells protect neighboring cancer cells by sending signals that induce resistance, according to a new study from University of Pittsburgh and UPMC researchers that may help explain why ovarian cancer patients respond poorly to chemotherapy or relapse after treatment. Published in Clinical Cancer Research, the study investigated chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells called quiescent cells. As chemotherapy primarily targets rapidly dividing cells, quiescent cells are resistant because they divide ...

Males of a species evolving traits for sexual conflict can cause problems for females, and, ultimately, the whole population. A new model by Imperial College London and University of Lausanne researchers, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how so-called ‘good genes’ can sometimes cause a population to collapse. Males of any species may compete for females, either by fighting other males for access or impressing females to win their approval. In both cases, ...

A new study led by UC Davis MIND Institute researchers confirms that brain development in people with autism differs from those with typical neurodevelopment. According to the study published in PNAS, these differences are linked to genes involved in inflammation, immunity response and neural transmissions. They begin in childhood and evolve across the lifespan. About one in 44 children in the U.S. has autism. Autistic individuals may behave, communicate and learn in ways that are different from neurotypical people. As they age, they often have challenges with social communication ...

Although electron microscopy can already reveal details as small as one nanometer, ongoing research seeks to break through barriers limiting image quality and reducing the optical dose on the samples. Aberration is a common problem in electron microscopy that can reduce the resolution and quality of the images produced. Additional complex phase and amplitude controls are needed in these microscopes. An international team of researchers led by Akhil Kallepalli (Kallepalli Lab) working within the Optics Group at the University of Glasgow set out to address the problem. Working from an optics perspective, they developed and tested a new ghost ...

Tree-ring analysis – so-called dendrochronological analysis – has been part of archaeology for many years and has made it possible for archaeologists to date old wooden objects with great precision. And in many cases, they have also been able to determine the provenance of the wood. But it has proven difficult for researchers to determine timber’s place of origin when the historic timber was imported into Denmark from further afield to serve as building material. In a new study in the journal PLOS ONE, Associate Professor Aoife Daly and Dr Alicia Van Ham-Meert from the University of Copenhagen show that combining analyses of ...

Depression is a leading cause of disability around the world and contributes greatly to the global burden of disease. Nutrition is essential for the maintenance of normal emotional states. Nutritional therapy is rising up in many disease treatments, but little is known in the depression field. Unbalanced nutrition is implicated in the etiology of depression, potentially hindering treatment. For example, many essential amino acids (EAAs) in serum are changed in patients with depression, such as tryptophan, threonine, leucine, isoleucine, and valine. However, whether EAA contributes to depression ...

Public and private sector health officials and public policymakers should team up immediately with community leaders to more effectively disseminate accurate narratives regarding the life-saving benefits of vaccines to counter widespread, harmful misinformation from anti-vaccine activists. Such is the message of a UC Riverside-led viewpoint piece published Thursday, March 2, in the leading international medical journal, The Lancet. “We need to consistently amplify the best science and find the best ways of communicating so that people are hearing it through multiple channels instead of through one or two sources,” ...

Today, at the prestigious AAAS science conference in Washington DC, Diamond Light Source, the UK’s synchrotron science facility, will unveil plans for its biggest recruitment campaign since its inception 20 years ago. Dozens of new roles will be available in the coming year and some examples of the variety of STEM careers will be showcased and celebrated by an all-women line up from the Diamond team. This recruitment drive aims to ensure the facility has the knowledge and expertise required to help plan and deliver world leading science for the next decade and beyond In the lead up to ...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has allowed scientists at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) to produce an accurate picture of the healthy heart in adolescence. Using this advanced technology, the research team was able to determine reference values for anatomical and functional parameters in the heart during adolescence. This information, pubished in eClinicalMedicine, has direct implications for clinical practice. “Magnetic resonance imaging has become a very important method for studying the heart because it avoids exposing patients to radiation ...