A new study led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers a solution to water scarcity during droughts amid the tug of economic development, population growth and climate uncertainty for water users in Western U.S. states. The proposed two-way leasing contracts would coordinate agricultural-to-urban leasing during periods of drought and urban-to-agricultural leasing during wet periods, benefiting both urban and agricultural water users. “Water markets are an important tool for allocating water in the Western U.S., and other water-scarce regions around the world, but they are often slow to respond to drought, ...

Alexandria, VA, USA - The Journal of Dental Research (JDR) has announced the publication of a new issue of Advances in Dental Research, a supplement to the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), entitled, "Women in Dental, Clinical, and Translational Research.” The 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR) and the Canadian Association for Dental Research featured a two-day “Meeting Within a Meeting” on the topic of “Women in Dental, Clinical, and Translational Research” organized by AADOCR Then- President Alexandre Vieira. During these sessions, speakers were challenged to reflect on ...

Team Unlocks New Insights on Pulsar Signals November 26, 2024, Mountain View, CA – Dr. Sofia Sheikh from the SETI Institute led a study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals—the spinning remnants of massive stars—distort as they travel through space. This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, was performed by a multi-year cohort of undergraduate researchers in the Penn State branch of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory student club. Maura McLaughlin, Chair, Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, created the Pulsar Search Collaboratory to engage ...

Great apes track events with their eyes in the same way that humans do, according to a study published November 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Vanessa Wilson from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and colleagues. When watching a cat chase a mouse, humans will alternate looking at cat and mouse, using the information to connect the two into what’s called an agent-patient relationship—with the cat as the agent and the mouse as the patient. This cognitive mechanism is thought to be ...

Routine screening to detect risk factors for heart disease dropped sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and some key measurements, such as blood pressure readings, may still lag behind pre-pandemic levels. These findings are reported in a new study by Frederick Ho and Naveed Sattar of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, and colleagues published November 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, patients went without routine face-to-face health checks, which are important for detecting common cardiometabolic ...

While NASA’s NEOWISE telescope ended its journey through space on Nov. 1, 2024, the team at IPAC, a science center at Caltech, was working on one further gift from the prolific mission.  The final data release from NEOWISE was released to the astronomy community just two weeks later, on Nov. 14, encompassing over 26 million images and nearly 200 billion sources detected by the telescope. And today, IPAC is releasing six new images from the mission’s archival data as a tribute to this landmark project, available here: https://www.astropix.org/link/3b2x  NEOWISE ...

"Research in the last several decades has established endothelial cells (ECs) as a dynamic interface critical for vascular protection.” BUFFALO, NY- November 26, 2024 – This editorial was published by Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) in Volume 16, Issue 17, titled, “The silent protector: Nucleoporin93’s role in vascular health.” Written by Julia Michalkiewicz, Tung D. Nguyen, and Monica Y. Lee from The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26, 2024 – Human activities are causing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to rise, which increases the global average surface temperature—and poses a threat to crop growth. Escalating concerns about climate change’s impact on global food security inspired researchers from Banaras Hindu University in India to create a way to explore how these factors influence crop yields. In Chaos, from AIP Publishing, the researchers share a mathematical model created to capture the nonlinear relationships between CO2, temperature, human population, ...

About The Study: This cohort study among individuals participating in a weight loss program found that nearly half of those consuming alcohol at baseline decreased their alcohol use after anti-obesity medication initiation. There may be properties of anti-obesity medications that lead to reduced use. For example, naltrexone decreases cravings for alcohol and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) may attenuate the rewarding effects of alcohol, similar to food.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Lisa R. Miller-Matero, PhD, email lmatero1@hfhs.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at ...

A multinational collaboration co-led by the Garvan Institute of Medical Research has uncovered a potential explanation for why some cancer patients receiving a type of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors experience increased susceptibility to common infections. The findings, published in the journal Immunity, provide new insights into immune responses and reveal a potential approach to preventing the common cancer therapy side effect. “Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies have revolutionised cancer treatment ...

Amphibians hold a significant place in evolution, representing the transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles. They are crucial for understanding the brain and spinal cord of tetrapods—animals with four limbs, including humans. A group of scientists led by a team at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) now shows how harmless viruses can be used to illuminate the development of the frog nervous system. The results have now been published in Developmental Cell. Virus. When you hear the word, you probably shudder. But not all viruses are bad or cause disease. Some are even used for therapeutic ...

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications and VAST Data are giving supercomputing system Delta and the newly launched DeltaAI a boost in their storage and application performance. NCSA launched Harbor, a service that provides very fast storage for global home and software directories across all NCSA open-science resources. Its deployment has led to a 400% increase in application launch performance for the Delta system, among many other gains. Over the last two years, we’ve seen a significant increase in ...

Researchers have unveiled a groundbreaking advancement in liver failure care: the CATCH-LIFE-MELD score (Chinese Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure Consortium (CATCH-LIFE)-MELD score). This innovative tool, developed by an international team led by Xia Yu and colleagues, enhances the accuracy of predicting short-term survival outcomes for patients suffering from acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF). The study, published in eGastroenterology, promises to revolutionize patient management and treatment planning for this life-threatening condition. “ACLF presents unique challenges due to its rapid progression and high mortality rates,” said Dr. Yu Shi, senior researcher at Zhejiang University ...

A recent special issue of the journal Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters has brought together some of China's top scientists to provide a picture of the latest progress in understanding and controlling air pollution. Fine particulate matter, referred to as PM2.5, and ground-level ozone (O3) are the main pollutants degrading the air quality of China’s cities and wider urban regions. Both have serious human health effects, such as heart disease, asthma, and lung damage. The World Health Organization (WHO) provides clear guidelines regarding acceptable concentrations ...

SAN FRANCISCO—November 26, 2024—Subtle signs of Alzheimer’s disease can emerge decades before a diagnosis—often in the form of irregular behaviors that reflect very early stages of brain dysfunction. But until now, identifying and measuring these slight behavioral changes in a scientific way hasn’t been feasible, not even when studying Alzheimer’s in mice.   In a study published in Cell Reports, a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes used a new video-based machine learning tool to pinpoint ...

UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland is enrolling patients in an innovative clinical trial that seeks to cure sickle cell disease. The trial is the first in the U.S. to apply non-viral CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology in humans to directly correct the genetic mutation that causes the disease. The research involves taking the patient’s blood stem cells to correct the mutation and returning those edited cells to the patient through a bone marrow transplant. It’s hoped the corrected blood stem cells will then multiply and create a new blood system, one free of sickle cell.   “This ...

Gene editing could create hypoallergenic cats, according to a sequence analysis of the protein that triggers allergies to cats. Some 15% of people are allergic to cats, and symptoms can be severe. Martin D. Chapman and colleagues investigated CH1 and CH2, genes that code for the allergen, Fel d 1. Cats produce Fel d 1 in their sebaceous, salivary, perianal, and lachrymal glands. The function of Fel d 1 is unknown but comparisons of Fel d 1 sequences and homologs from 276 domestic or exotic cats—including cougars, cheetahs, lions, tigers, and jaguars, among others—suggests that CH1 and CH2 have been under active selection, and ...

The demand for electronics has led to a significant increase in e-waste. In 2022, approximately 62 million tons of e-waste were generated, marking an 82% increase from 2010. Projections indicate that this figure could rise to 82 million tons by 2030. E-waste contains valuable materials such as metals, semiconductors, and rare elements that can be reused. However, in 2022, only 22.3% of e-waste was properly collected and recycled, while the remaining materials, estimated to be worth almost $62 billion, were discarded in landfills. Although efforts to improve e-waste recycling continue, the process remains labor-intensive, and a significant portion of e-waste ...

Cooling systems are an integral part of many modern technologies, as heat tends to wear down materials and decrease performance in several ways. In many cases, however, cooling can be an inconvenient and energy-intensive process. Accordingly, scientists have been seeking innovative and efficient methods to cool substances down.   Solid-state optical cooling is a prominent example that leverages a very unique phenomenon called anti-Stokes (AS) emission. Usually, when materials absorb photons from incoming light, their electrons transition into an “excited” state. Under ideal conditions, as electrons return to their original ...

Thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity, are valuable tools for capturing waste heat and turning it into usable electricity. These materials are especially useful in industries and vehicles where engines produce a lot of waste heat, improving energy efficiency by converting it into additional power. They also exhibit potential for portable power generation, in remote sensors and satellites where traditional power sources may be impractical. Traditional thermoelectric devices, known as parallel thermoelectric devices, generate a voltage in the same direction as the heat ...

Recent research led by Kerstin Ozkan and published in PeerJ Life and Environment has uncovered the complex and contrasting effects of human-generated noise on Western Bluebird (Sialia mexicana) parental behavior, raising critical questions about how anthropogenic noise affects wildlife in both urban and non-urban settings. The study, titled “Divergent effects of short-term and continuous anthropogenic noise exposure on Western Bluebird parental care behavior,” explores how different types of noise exposure alter the bird's ...

Imagine gradually losing the ability to express yourself — not because you've forgotten the words, but because they simply won't come out. This is the reality for individuals living with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a rare form of dementia that usually begins in middle age and increasingly impairs language abilities over time. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine are working to illuminate the struggles of those living with this condition and pioneer accessible treatment models. They recently published new studies that measure PPA’s significant impact ...

Let’s say it’s a home game for the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry shows he’s still got it, sinking back-to-back three-pointers minutes into the first quarter. The fans at Chase Center take notice, and so do the betting markets, where the odds move in the Warriors’ favor. Yet it’s a long game. The away team comes back, and with just 10 seconds to go, the Warriors are down by two and have just missed a shot. A victory is unlikely, and the betting odds should have shifted to reflect that near-certainty. ...

CHICAGO – In patients with long COVID, lower pulmonary gas exchange may be associated with impaired cognitive function, according to a study being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). According to the National Center for Health Statistics, approximately 17.6% of adults in the U.S. have experienced a post-COVID condition commonly referred to as long COVID. People with long COVID may exhibit a wide variety of symptoms, including difficulty concentrating (“brain fog”), change in sense of smell or taste, fatigue, joint or muscle pain, dyspnea (shortness of breath), digestive ...

CHICAGO – A new study of high school football players found that concussions affect an often-overlooked but important brain signal. The findings are being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Reports have emerged in recent years warning about the potential harms of youth contact sports on developing brains. Contact sports, including high school football, carry a risk of concussion. Symptoms of concussion commonly include cognitive disturbances, such as difficulty with balancing, ...