As discussed in the paper, the fear of public speaking is widely cited as being the most common fear. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that the prevalence of social anxiety and a fear of public speaking are both on the rise. This is concerning when one considers the range of known subsequent negative impacts on mental health, physical health, academic attainment, and career progression. To address this, Dr Chris Macdonald created an online platform where users transform into skilled and confident public speakers. On the platform, tailored course ...

Bethesda, MD (March 12, 2025) — The 13th Gut Microbiota for Health World Summit, taking place March 15-16 in Washington, D.C., will reveal how cutting-edge research on gut microbiome science is being applied to clinical practice. The event – organized by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) and the European Society of Neurogastroenterology and Motility (ESNM) – will bring together clinicians, researchers, nutritionists, and dietitians from around the world.  For media access to meeting abstracts ...

A global survey of more than 30,000 people in 30 countries has revealed how people around the world feel about climate change, and how those emotions relate to perceptions of and support for climate interventions that could address the crisis. The new study is published in the journal Risk Analysis. To investigate the intensity of “climate emotions” on a global scale and their intersection with perceptions of climate interventions, a team of researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria conducted an online survey in 19 different ...

Today is World Speech Day, a day where we are called upon to embrace public speaking opportunities. Unfortunately, this call to action is unlikely to be widely embraced given that the majority of people are affected by speech anxiety and the fear of public speaking. Fortunately, however, there is now a free and highly effective solution. At Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, researchers are using emerging digital technology to enrich and accelerate learning. Their Immersive Technology Lab received a national innovation award for a project that uses VR to better translate ...

Artificial intelligence can transform medicine in a myriad of ways, including its promise to act as a trusted diagnostic aide to busy clinicians. Over the past two years, proprietary AI models, also known as closed-source models, have excelled at solving hard-to-crack medical cases that require complex clinical reasoning. Notably, these closed-source AI models have outperformed open-source ones, so-called because their source code is publicly available and can be tweaked and modified by anyone. Has open-source AI caught up? The answer appears to be yes, at least when it comes to one such open-source AI model, according to the findings ...

A predator’s gotta eat, but sometimes what they eat harms people sharing the landscape, and that often leads to the carnivore’s death.   Fortified corrals are one strategy used in Tanzania to protect both livestock and vulnerable carnivore species. But then where do lions, leopards and hyenas go for dinner? Do they feed on the next herd over?   A new study led by Colorado State University has found that good fences truly do make good neighbors because fortified enclosures also benefit livestock keepers who live nearby. Instead of dining on easier meals next-door and negatively impacting neighbors who don’t ...

Results from the NRG Oncology GOG-0263 phase III clinical trial testing the addition of cisplatin-based chemotherapy to adjuvant radiotherapy following radical hysterectomy and lymphadenectomy for patients with early-stage, intermediate-risk cervical carcinoma indicated that the addition of chemotherapy did not improve outcomes for patients and led to increased toxicity for patients. The outcomes of this trial support the use of the current standard of care using adjuvant radiotherapy alone following surgery. These results were ...

We’re thrilled to announce the 16 distinguished early-career gastroenterologists and hepatologists selected for our 2025-2026 class of AGA Future Leaders. This AGA program cultivates effective leadership skills for professional advancement in AGA and within the field of digestive diseases.  Meet the AGA Future Leaders Class of 2025-2026 Lubin Arevalo, MD Veroushka Ballester, MD, MS Victor Chedid, MD, MS Ryan Fawley, MD Melissa Hershman, MD Pichamol Jirapinyo, MD, MPH Babu Pappu Mohan, MD Carolyn Newberry, MD Long ...

Despite the fear they may inspire in humans, sharks have far more reason to fear us. Nearly one-third of sharks are threatened with extinction globally, mostly as a result of fishing. A team led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara discovered that mandates to release captured sharks won’t be enough to prevent the continued decline of these important ocean predators. These findings, published in Fish & Fisheries, highlight the importance of monitoring shark populations and combining different strategies for managing their numbers. Some ...

Three esteemed engineers with ties to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Class of 2025. NAE members are among the world’s most accomplished engineers from business, academia and government. “On behalf of the Office of Naval Research, I’m proud to extend my sincerest congratulations to these new members of the National Academy of Engineering,” said Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Kurt Rothenhaus. “Not only have these accomplished engineering professionals supported and conducted valuable naval-relevant research, they’re also enhancing the strength and prosperity of our nation by serving ...

Bioengineering professor and The Grainger College of Engineering’s Dean, Rashid Bashir, led a team of researchers in a project that’s resulted in new technology that offers rapid, highly sensitive detection of multi-drug-resistant bacteria and other pathogens at low concentrations. This research was featured in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Researchers designed a CRISPR-based test that rapidly detects low levels of pathogen genetic material in blood. This is done without the need for nucleic acid amplification. In ...

PHILADELPHIA – Adding immunotherapy to a new type of inhibitor that targets multiple forms of the cancer-causing gene mutation KRAS kept pancreatic cancer at bay in preclinical models for significantly longer than the same targeted therapy by itself, according to researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center. The results, published in Cancer Discovery, prime the combination strategy for future clinical trials. Combatting the “undruggable” ...

Agrivoltaic systems, which combine solar power generation with agricultural practices, offer a promising solution to the growing demand for both renewable energy and food production. By integrating solar panels with crops, these systems not only address the land use conflict between agriculture and energy production, but they also provide important benefits such as reducing crop water stress and offering protection against extreme weather events. In addition, agrivoltaics can contribute to biodiversity by providing pollinator habitats and forage production. ...

Alternative RNA splicing is like a movie editor cutting and rearranging scenes from the same footage to create different versions of a film. By selecting which scenes to keep and which to leave out, the editor can produce a drama, a comedy, or even a thriller—all from the same raw material. Similarly, cells splice RNA in different ways to produce a variety of proteins from a single gene, fine-tuning their function based on need. However, when cancer rewrites the script, this process goes awry, fueling tumor growth and survival. In a recent study reported in the Feb. 15 issue of Nature ...

New INFORMS Marketing Science Study Key Takeaways: YouTube influencers increase player engagement and playtime but often reduce game purchases, especially for story-driven games. A unique event in YouTube’s history, the “Adpocalypse,” allowed researchers to measure the causal impact of influencer content, revealing its complex effects on game sales and usage. Game developers must align their business models with influencer marketing, because games with in-game purchases benefit from exposure, while ...

A team of researchers from the University of Ottawa has made significant strides in understanding the ionization of atoms and molecules, a fundamental process in physics that has implications for various fields including x-ray generation and plasma physics. Think about atoms - the building blocks of everything around us. Sometimes, they lose their electrons and become charged particles (that's ionization). It happens in lightning, in plasma TVs, and even in the northern lights. Until now, scientists thought they could only control this process in limited ways. Led by Ravi Bhardwaj, Full Professor at uOttawa’s Department of Physics, and PhD student Jean-Luc Begin, in collaboration ...

We’ve mapped nearly all of Mars’ surface from orbit, yet we know less about Earth’s ocean floor — almost 75% remains unmapped in high resolution. This terrestrial blind spot is driving NJIT Mathematics Professor Eliza Michalopoulou’s latest research, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The project aims to improve how scientists explore the vast, uncharted ocean floor through sound. “Mapping the seabed is a challenging endeavor due to the extreme conditions,” said Michalopoulou, ...

Following the 3,000th orbit of NASA’s AWE (Atmospheric Waves Experiment) aboard the International Space Station, researchers publicly released the mission’s first trove of scientific data, crucial to investigate how and why subtle changes in Earth’s atmosphere cause disturbances, as well as how these atmospheric disturbances impact technological systems on the ground and in space. “We’ve released the first 3,000 orbits of data collected by the AWE instrument in space and transmitted back to Earth,” said Ludger Scherliess, principal investigator for the mission and physics professor at Utah State University. “This is a view of atmospheric ...

Life may not have begun with a dramatic lightning strike into the ocean but from many smaller “microlightning” exchanges among water droplets from crashing waterfalls or breaking waves. New research from Stanford University shows that water sprayed into a mixture of gases thought to be present in Earth’s early atmosphere can lead to the formation of organic molecules with carbon-nitrogen bonds, including uracil, one of the components of DNA and RNA. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, adds evidence – and a new angle – to the much-disputed Miller-Urey ...

EMBARGOED until Friday, March 14 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time (12 noon MT) Contacts:  David Hosansky, NSF NCAR and UCAR Manager of Media Relations hosansky@ucar.edu 303-497-8611 Audrey Merket, NSF NCAR and UCAR Science Writer and Public Information Officer amerket@ucar.edu 303-497-8293 The smoke from fires that blaze through the wildland-urban interface (WUI) has far greater health impacts than smoke from wildfires in remote areas, new research finds. The study, published this week in Science Advances, estimates that emissions from WUI fires are proportionately about three times more likely to lead ...

Osaka-Japan - We all know someone who seems to defy aging—people who look younger than their peers despite being the same age. What’s their secret? Scientists at Osaka University (Japan) may have found a way to quantify this difference. By incorporating hormone (steroid) metabolism pathways into an AI-driven model, they have developed a new system to estimate a person’s biological age a measure of how well their body has aged, rather than just counting the years since birth. Using just five drops of ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Proteins are long molecules that must fold into complex three-dimensional structures to perform their cellular functions. This folding process occasionally goes awry, resulting in misfolded proteins that, if not corrected, can potentially lead to disease. Now, a new study has described a potential mechanism that could help explain why some proteins refold in a different pattern than expected. The researchers, led by chemists at Penn State, found that a type of misfolding, in which the ...

PHILADELPHIA – Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) located H5N1 bird flu virus in samples of raw, or unpasteurized, milk in tests in four states in April 2024, and bird flu has been detected in commercially sold raw milk, many Americans do not know that consuming raw milk and its products poses greater health risks than consuming pasteurized milk and its products, especially for children. Consuming raw milk can expose one to Salmonella, E. coli, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Listeria, and Brucella – and, potentially, H5N1 bird flu. A majority of U.S. adults (56%) knows that drinking raw milk from cows, sheep, or goats is less safe than drinking pasteurized milk. ...

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (03/14/2025) — A University of Minnesota research team was recently awarded a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to develop a new cell therapy to combat Alzheimer’s disease. More than 55 million people worldwide live with dementia, which includes Alzheimer's disease and other related conditions. The project aims to adapt advanced techniques developed for cancer treatment to create specialized macrophages — immune cells that can surround and remove proteins from their environment — to seek out and clear harmful proteins in the brain.  "Engineered ...

In Nature Neuroscience, UConn School of Medicine researchers have revealed a new scientific clue that could unlock the key cellular pathway leading to devastating neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, and the progressive damage to the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes in frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) and the associated disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The study, “Endothelial TDP-43 Depletion Disrupts Core Blood-Brain Barrier Pathways in Neurodegeneration,” was published on March 14, 2025. The lead author, Omar Moustafa Fathy, an MD/Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Vascular Biology at UConn School of ...