Orono, Maine -- The origins of ice age climate changes may lie in the Southern Hemisphere, where interactions among the westerly wind system, the Southern Ocean and the tropical Pacific can trigger rapid, global changes in atmospheric temperature, according to an international research team led by the University of Maine. The mechanism, dubbed the Zealandia Switch, relates to the general position of the Southern Hemisphere westerly wind belt -- the strongest wind system on Earth -- and the continental platforms of the southwest Pacific Ocean, and their control on ocean currents. Shifts in the latitude of the westerly winds affects the strength ...

March 12, 2021 - Financial strains like debt or unemployment are significant risk factors for becoming homeless, and even help to explain increased risk of homelessness associated with severe mental illness, reports a study in a supplement to the April issue of Medical Care. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. The findings "suggest that adding financial well-being as a focus of homelessness prevention efforts seems promising, both at the individual and community level," according to the new research, led by Eric Elbogen, PhD, of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center on Homelessness and Duke University School of Medicine. The study appears as part of a special issue on ...

Mantle cell lymphoma is a malignant disease in which intensive treatment can prolong life. In a new study, scientists from Uppsala University and other Swedish universities show that people with mantle cell lymphoma who were unmarried, and those who had low educational attainment, were less often treated with a stem-cell transplantation, which may result in poorer survival. The findings have been published in the scientific journal Blood Advances. Patients diagnosed with a mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) where the disease has spread receive intensive treatment with cytotoxic drugs and stem-cell transplantation. In a new study, researchers looked at which people are more likely to be offered transplants, and compared survival between those ...

WINSTON-SALEM, NC - March 12, 2021 - The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is investigating how cats with chronic kidney disease could someday help inform treatment for humans. In humans, treatment for chronic kidney disease -- a condition in which the kidneys are damaged and cannot filter blood as well as they should -- focuses on slowing the progression of the organ damage. The condition can progress to end-stage kidney failure, which is fatal without dialysis or a kidney transplant. An estimated 37 million people in the US suffer from chronic kidney disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there are about 58 million ...

If you were given "ultrasound" in a word association game, "sound wave" might easily come to mind. But in recent years, a new term has surfaced: bubbles. Those ephemeral, globular shapes are proving useful in improving medical imaging, disease detection and targeted drug delivery. There's just one glitch: bubbles fizzle out soon after injection into the bloodstream. Now, after 10 years' work, a multidisciplinary research team has built a better bubble. Their new formulations have resulted in nanoscale bubbles with customizable outer shells -- so small and durable that they can travel to and penetrate some of the ...

(BOSTON) -- There is a great need to generate various types of cells for use in new therapies to replace tissues that are lost due to disease or injuries, or for studies outside the human body to improve our understanding of how organs and tissues function in health and disease. Many of these efforts start with human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that, in theory, have the capacity to differentiate into virtually any cell type in the right culture conditions. The 2012 Nobel Prize awarded to Shinya Yamanaka recognized his discovery of a strategy that can reprogram adult cells to become iPSCs ...

Arlington, Va. (March 12, 2021)--A new supplement offering guidance on severe COVID-19 management in resource-limited settings is now available on the American Journal of Tropical Medicine (AJTMH) website. Pragmatic Recommendations for the Management of Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients in Low- and Middle-Income Countries was coordinated by a COVID-LMIC Task Force headed by Alfred Papali, MD, of Atrium Health, Charlotte, NC, and Marcus Schultz, MD, PhD, of Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; University of Oxford, United Kingdom; and Amsterdam University Medical Centers, The Netherlands. ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. - University at Buffalo computer scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes. The tool proved 94% effective in experiments described in a paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing to be held in June in Toronto, Canada. "The cornea is almost like a perfect semisphere and is very reflective," says the paper's lead author, Siwei Lyu, PhD, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "So, anything that is coming to the eye with a light emitting from those sources will have an image on ...

Reston, VA--Immuno-positron emission tomography (PET) imaging can provide early insight into a tumor's response to targeted therapy, allowing physicians to select the most effective treatment for patients who have cancer. The new research was published in the March issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The research showed that immuno-PET successfully visualizes changes in different cancer receptors (receptor tyrosine kinases, or RTKs) within tumors during targeted therapies. This gives physicians a tool that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment soon after its administration. "When healthy cells turn into cancer cells, there is a disruption in the RTK signaling. This makes RTKs a valuable therapeutic and ...

Leesburg, VA, March 12, 2021--According to an open-access article in ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), compared with multi-target stool-DNA (mt-sDNA) and fecal immunochemical test (FIT), CT colonography (CTC) with 10 mm threshold most effectively targets advanced neoplasia (AN)--preserving detection while decreasing unnecessary colonoscopies. "CTC performed with a polyp size threshold for colonoscopy referral set at 10 mm represents the most effective and efficient non-invasive screening test for colorectal cancer (CRC) prevention and detection," clarified first author Perry J. Pickhardt from the department of radiology ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Did you ever wonder how social networking applications like Facebook and LinkedIn make recommendations on the people you should friend or pages you should follow? Behind the scenes are machine learning models that classify nodes based on the data they contain about users -- for example, their level of education, location or political affiliation. The models then use these classifications to recommend people and pages to each user. But there is significant bias in the recommendations made by these models -- known as graph neural networks (GNNs) ...

A new study by UC Davis MIND Institute researchers suggests that executive control differences in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be the result of a unique approach, rather than an impairment. Executive control difficulties are common in individuals with autism and are associated with challenges completing tasks and managing time. The study, published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, sought to tease out whether these difficulties represent a disruption in proactive executive control (engaged and maintained before a ...

Quantum dots are manmade nanoparticles of semiconducting material comprising only a few thousand atoms. Because of the small number of atoms, a quantum dot's properties lie between those of single atoms or molecules and bulk material with a huge number of atoms. By changing the nanoparticles' size and shape, it is possible to fine-tune their electronic and optical properties - how electrons bond and move through the material, and how light is absorbed and emitted by it. Thanks to increasingly refined control of the nanoparticles' size and shape, the number ...

A machine learning algorithm that predicts suicide attempt recently underwent a prospective trial at the institution where it was developed, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Over the 11 consecutive months concluding in April 2020, predictions ran silently in the background as adult patients were seen at VUMC. The algorithm, dubbed the Vanderbilt Suicide Attempt and Ideation Likelihood (VSAIL) model, uses routine information from electronic health records (EHRs) to calculate 30-day risk of return visits for suicide attempt, and, by extension, suicidal ideation. Suicide has been on the rise in the U.S. for a generation ...

What The Study Did: Researchers investigated whether acute COVID-19 symptoms are associated with the probability of subsequent depressive symptoms. Authors: Roy H. Perlis, M.D., M.Sc., of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, 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.2021.3223) Editor's Note: Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, ...

What The Study Did: National claims data were used to look at changes in well-child care visits with out-of-pocket costs before and after passage of the Affordable Care Act. Authors: Paul R. Shafer, Ph.D., of Boston University, 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.2021.1248) Editor's Note: Editor's Note: The article includes conflicts of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding ...

What The Study Did: Researchers compared rates of psychotropic drug prescriptions during adolescence and young adulthood between individuals born preterm and at term. Authors: Christine S. Bachmann, M.D., of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, 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.2021.1420) Editor's Note: Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, ...

(Philadelphia, PA) - About 6.2 million Americans suffer from heart failure, an incurable disease with a staggering mortality rate - some 40 percent of patients die within five years of diagnosis. Heart failure is one form of heart disease, for which new therapies are desperately needed. Now, in new work, scientists at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine (LKSOM) at Temple University identify a path to a promising novel therapeutic strategy, taking aim at a molecule in the heart known as G protein-coupled receptor kinase 5 (GRK5). In a study published online in the journal Cardiovascular Research, the scientists show in mice that reducing GRK5 levels can significantly improve survival ...

Scientists have long theorized that supermassive black holes can wander through space--but catching them in the act has proven difficult. Now, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have identified the clearest case to date of a supermassive black hole in motion. Their results are published today in the Astrophysical Journal. "We don't expect the majority of supermassive black holes to be moving; they're usually content to just sit around," says Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who led the study. "They're just so heavy that it's tough to get them going. Consider how much more ...

Since the pandemic hit, researchers have been uncovering ways COVID-19 impacts other parts of the body, besides the lungs. Now, for the first time, a visual correlation has been found between the severity of the disease in the lungs using CT scans and the severity of effects on patient's brains, using MRI scans. This research is published in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. It will be presented at the 59th annual meeting of the American Society of Neuroradiology (ASNR) and has also been selected as a semifinalist for that organization's Cornelius Dyke Award. The results show that by looking at lung CT scans of patients diagnosed with COVID-19, physicians may be able to predict just how badly they'll experience other ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - A new Penn State and Cornell study describes an effort to produce the most comprehensive and high-resolution map yet of chromosome architecture and gene regulation in yeast, a major step toward improving understanding of development, evolution and environmental responses in higher organisms. Specifically, the study mapped precise binding sites of more than 400 different chromosomal proteins in the yeast genome, most of which regulate the expression of genes. Yeast cells provide a simple model system with 6,000 genes, most of which are found in other organisms, including humans, making them excellent candidates for studying fundamental genetics and complex biological pathways. The paper, "A High-Resolution Protein Architecture of the Budding Yeast ...

Around three times as many males are diagnosed with autism than females. This suggests that biological sex factors may play a role in the development and presentation of autism. Studies on the neurobiology (brain biology) of males and females with autism have begun to examine brain networks but results have been mixed. This is largely due to the limited availability of data from autistic females. In response, researchers from END ...

Humans rely on nature extensively for everything from food production to coastal protection, but those contributions might be more threatened than previously thought, according to new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder. This research, out today in Nature Communications, looked at three different coastal food webs that include those services provided to humans, or ecosystem services, and found that even if the services themselves aren't directly threatened, they can become threatened when other species around them go extinct--often called secondary ...

More than one million operations are performed in Switzerland every year. A surgeon's skill has a direct impact on the outcome of the operation. Training and experience, as well as momentary fatigue and other influencing factors all play a role. At present, skill is tested by experts, either directly during an operation or by evaluating video footage. This approach is very costly and only a limited number of experts are available. Moreover, the assessment may vary and is not always fully reproducible. For some time, attempts have been made to automate and objectify the assessment of surgeons' skills. Proof of feasibility The key result of the study is the proof of the fundamental feasibility of an ...

Colloidal suspensions of microscopic particles show complex and interesting collective behaviors. In particular, the collective dynamics of colloids is fundamental and ubiquitous for materials assembly, robotic motion, microfluidic control, and in several biological scenarios. The collective dynamics of confined colloids can be completely different from that of free colloids: for instance, confined colloids can self-organize into vortex structures, coherent motion, or different phase behaviors. On one hand, due to the complexity of colloidal suspensions, how to finely tune the ...