Most people — up to 94% of U.S. adults — experience at least some dulling of their senses with age, finding themselves squinting at screens, craving stronger flavors, and missing snatches of conversations more and more frequently. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine are looking into how these changes can go beyond mere inconvenience and actually worsen overall mental health in older adults. “When your senses decline, you can't experience the world as well,” said Jayant Pinto, MD, a physician ...

Scientists and engineers are ready to fly an infrared mission called EXCITE (EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope) to the edge of space.  EXCITE is designed to study atmospheres around exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system, during circumpolar long-duration scientific balloon flights. But first, it must complete a test flight during NASA’s fall 2024 scientific ballooning campaign from Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  “EXCITE can give us a three-dimensional picture of a planet’s atmosphere and temperature by collecting data the whole time the world orbits its star,” said Peter Nagler, the mission’s principal ...

As climate change creates hotter, drier conditions, we are seeing longer fire seasons with larger, more frequent wildfires. In recent years, catastrophic wildfires have destroyed homes and infrastructure, caused devastating losses in lives and livelihoods of people living in affected areas, and damaged wildland resources and the economy. We need new solutions to fight wildfires and protect areas from damage. Researchers at Stanford have developed a water-enhancing gel that could be sprayed on homes and critical infrastructure to help keep them from burning during wildfires. The research, published Aug. ...

Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Nina Fefferman became a mathematician because she loves puzzles. She’s just been awarded $18 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation to solve one puzzle that has the potential to change the world: how, when and why an infection in a population will spread, or cause an epidemic or pandemic, rather than dying out. Fefferman, director of the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems and associate director of the UT One Health Initiative at the University ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — While a mosquito bite is often no more than a temporary bother, in many parts of the world it can be scary. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, spreads the viruses that cause over 100,000,000 cases of dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year. Another, Anopheles gambiae, spreads the parasite that causes malaria. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone causes more than 400,000 deaths every year. Indeed, their capacity to transmit disease has earned mosquitoes the title of deadliest ...

Faculty members in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have been awarded $5 million by the U.S. Department of Defense to work with partners in Ukraine on clinical and logistical challenges associated with modern large-scale combat operations and prolonged casualty care. The overarching program — Research and Scalable Infrastructure to Improve Outcomes on the Front Lines of Ukraine by Advancing Treatment and Evaluation (RESOLUTE) — is focusing on collecting data related to antibiotic-resistant wound infections, which have substantially increased amid the military conflict. The initial project — ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) with an advanced 3D body-volume scanner – originally developed for the clothing industry – to help doctors predict metabolic syndrome risk and severity. The combination of tools offers doctors a more precise alternative to other measures of disease risk like body mass index (BMI) and waist-to-hip ratio, according to findings published in the European Heart Journal - Digital Health. Metabolic syndrome can lead to heart attack, stroke and other serious health issues and affects over a third of the U.S. population and a quarter of people globally. ...

Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 don’t respect boundaries, moving between species and continents and leaving destruction as they go. Beating the next pathogen with pandemic potential means getting good at crossing borders ourselves — between fields of study, between research universities, and between scientists and the wider community. An $18 million grant announced by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) will put that goal within reach. The award brings together five universities and more than 20 researchers, academics, and public health experts to establish the Virginia Tech-led Center ...

Formerly known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH) is an inflammatory disease characterized by liver scarring or fibrosis that progressively impairs liver function. It is a major risk factor for cirrhosis and liver cancer. And because treatment options are limited,  MASH is the second leading cause for liver transplants in the United States after cirrhosis caused by chronic hepatitis C infection. A better understanding of the pathological processes that drive MASH is critical to creating effective treatments. In a new paper published ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ensuring that scientific funding goes to states and territories that have typically received smaller fractions of federal research dollars in the past, the Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $36 million in funding for 39 research projects in 19 states via the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The grants connect innovative ideas from scientists at eligible institutions with leading-edge capabilities at the DOE national laboratories. Supporting scientists while building the expertise and capabilities critical for performing leading research ...

A new machine learning analysis has revealed the most effective climate policies out of 1,500 implemented worldwide over the last two decades. Some of the success stories – numbered at about 63 – involve rarely studied policies and unappreciated policy combinations. “Our results provide a clear yet sobering perspective on the policy effort necessary for closing the remaining emissions gap of 23 billion tons carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2023,” write the authors. To achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate targets, it is essential to know which ...

Researchers have presented a new family of polymer adhesives that offer a sustainable and recyclable alternative to conventional polymer adhesives and can be used across a wide range of applications, from industrial adhesives to surgical superglues. The new chemical approach to aLA polymerization addresses the performance and environmental challenges of traditional polymers, providing environmentally friendly adhesive solutions. Polymer adhesives are ubiquitous in modern life and are widely used in many medical, consumer, and industrial products. Given this diversity, each adhesive material is often tailored ...

Concerns over the biosecurity risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) models in biology continue to grow. Amid this concern, Doni Bloomfield and colleagues argue, in a Policy Forum, for improved governance and pre-release safety evaluations of new models in order to mitigate potential threats. “We propose that national governments, including the United States, pass legislation and set mandatory rules that will prevent advanced biological models from substantially contributing to large-scale dangers, such as the creation of novel or enhanced pathogens ...

Somatic nuclear mitochondrial DNA (Numt) insertions are mito-nuclear gene transfer events that can arise in the germline and in cancer. This study shows that Numt insertions arise spontaneously and accumulate in brain tissues during development or over the human lifespan. ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002723 Article Title: Somatic nuclear mitochondrial DNA insertions are prevalent in the human brain and accumulate over time in fibroblasts Author Countries: United States Funding: see manuscript END ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A type of drug developed for treating cancer holds promise as a new treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, according to a recent study by researchers at Penn State, Stanford University and an international team of collaborators. The researchers discovered that by blocking a specific enzyme called indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase 1, or IDO1 for short, they could rescue memory and brain function in models that mimic Alzheimer’s disease. The findings, published today (Aug. 22) in the journal Science, suggest that IDO1 inhibitors currently ...

Among the many ways neuroscientists think Alzheimer’s disease may strip away brain function is by disrupting the glucose metabolism needed to fuel the healthy brain. In essence, declining metabolism robs the brain of energy, impairing thinking and memory. Against that backdrop, a team of neuroscientists at the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute have zeroed in on a critical regulator of brain metabolism known as the kynurenine pathway. They hypothesize that that the kynurenine pathway is overactivated as a result of ...

A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has revealed what animals do after they have feigned death in order to avoid being killed by a predator and what the context of this behaviour is. Many animals, as a last-ditch defence, become motionless after being contacted by a predator. This behaviour is so common that it's recognised in such phrases as “playing possum”. It is even said to occur in humans in extreme circumstances.  In previous studies, carried out by the same team using antlion larvae, scientists noticed that they become motionless after being individually handled. At one point ...

Many fish stocks around the world are either threatened by overfishing or have already collapsed. One of the main reasons for this devastating trend is that policymakers have often ignored the catch limits calculated by scientists, which were intended to be strict thresholds to protect stocks. But it has now become clear that even these scientific recommendations were often too high. In the European Union (EU), for example, fisheries are primarily managed through allowable catch limits, known as quotas, which are set by the European ...

New research using neural networks, a form of brain-inspired AI, proposes a solution to the tough challenge of modelling the states of molecules. The research shows how the technique can help solve fundamental equations in complex molecular systems. This could lead to practical uses in the future, helping researchers to prototype new materials and chemical syntheses using computer simulation before trying to make them in the lab. Led by Imperial College London and Google DeepMind scientists, the study is published today in Science. Excited molecules The team investigated the problem of understanding ...

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 22, 2024)--As direct descendants of ancient bacteria, mitochondria have always been a little alien. Now a study shows that mitochondria are possibly even stranger than we thought.  Mitochondria in our brain cells frequently fling their DNA into the nucleus, the study found, where the DNA becomes integrated into the cells’ chromosomes. And these insertions may be causing harm: Among the study’s nearly 1,200 participants, those with more mitochondrial DNA insertions in their brain cells ...

“DNA, RNA and proteins are the key players to regulate all processes in the cells of our body,” Leiden Professor John van Noort explains. “To understand the (mis-)functioning of these molecules, it is essential to uncover how their 3D structure depends on their sequence and for this it is necessary to measure them one molecule at a time. However, single-molecule measurements are laborious and slow, and the number of possible sequence variations is massive.” From decades to days Now the team of scientists developed an innovative tool, called SPARXS (Single-molecule Parallel Analysis for Rapid eXploration ...

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 22, 2024)--Columbia University announced today a new $400 million gift from Roy and Diana Vagelos, which will secure Columbia’s leadership in biomedical science research and education and produce a vast array of compelling opportunities for improving society’s health and wellbeing. The gift is the single largest ever made to Columbia’s medical school and, taken together with their previous giving, establishes Roy and Diana as the most generous donors in the history of Columbia University.  A ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Air pollution is bad for mental health. That much is clear. Now, new research shows the impact may be even worse in neighborhoods that were historically redlined.  University at Buffalo researchers looked at 17 cities across New York State where longstanding federal housing policies once denied neighborhoods with people of color from receiving mortgages. Although this practice was outlawed in 1968, the researchers found that elevated levels of air pollutants in these neighborhoods of the state ...

An international team of 45 researchers studying meteor showers has found that not all comets crumble the same way when they approach the Sun. In a paper published in the journal Icarus this week, they ascribe the differences to the conditions in the protoplanetary disk where comets formed 4.5 billion years ago. “The meteoroids we see as meteors in the night sky are the size of small pebbles,” said lead author and SETI Institute and NASA Ames meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens. “They are, in fact, the same size as the pebbles that collapsed into comets during the formation of ...

August 22, 2024 — The groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot shows potential as a time-saving tool for responding to patient questions sent to the urologist's office, suggests a study in the September issue of Urology Practice®, an Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  The artificial intelligence (AI) tool generated "acceptable" responses to nearly one-half of a sample of real-life patient questions, according to the new research ...