A multi-institutional study led by University of Illinois and Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) scientists concluded that, although soil moisture varies significantly both within a single field and from field to field due to varying soil properties and different management practices, soil moisture distribution relative to the field average remains consistent across time within each field.  Over three years, the team used sensor measurements and a high-density campaign to reveal that the drier areas remain the drier areas and the wetter areas remain the wetter areas. The study also deduced this finding, reliable estimations of ...

The severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms in the planetary science community is greater than in the general U.S. population, according to a study led by a University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa scientist and published this week in Nature Astronomy.  “After reading about so much anxiety and depression in academia, and as someone who loves both planetary science and psychology, I felt like I needed to do something because there are so many people suffering,” said David Trang, an assistant researcher in the Hawai‘i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the ...

As space travel becomes more common, it is important to consider the impacts of space flight and altered gravity on the human body. Led by Dr. Ana Diaz Artiles, researchers at Texas A&M University are studying some of those impacts, specifically effects on the eye. Gravitational changes experienced by astronauts during space travel can cause fluids within the body to shift. This can cause changes to the cardiovascular system, including vessels in and around the eyes.  As the commercialization of space flight becomes more common and individual space travel increases, astronauts will not be the ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Haewon Jeong, an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, experienced a pivotal moment in her academic career when she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. She was investigating how machine learning (ML) models can discriminate against students in education-related applications. Discrimination, or bias, occurs when a model used to train algorithms makes incorrect predictions that systematically disadvantage a group of people. Bias in ML models can lead to inaccurate or unfair predictions, which can have serious consequences in fields such as healthcare, finance and criminal justice. ...

University of Toronto engineering researchers have designed a new way to recycle steel that has the potential to decarbonize a range of manufacturing industries and usher in a circular steel economy.  The method is outlined in a new paper published in Resources, Conservation & Recycling and co-authored by Jaesuk (Jay) Paeng, William Judge and Professor Gisele Azimi.   It introduces an innovative oxysulfide electrolyte for electrorefining, ...

      MEDIA INQUIRES   WRITTEN BY Laura Muntean   Paul Schattenberg laura.muntean@ag.tamu.edu   paschattenberg@ag.tamu.edu 601-248-1891   210-859-5752 FOR ...

June 18, 2024   Non-native Plants and Animals Expanding Ranges 100 Times Faster than Native Species, Finds New Research Led by UMass Amherst Native species cannot move fast enough on their own to avoid climate-driven chaos   AMHERST, Mass. – An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed ...

BOSTON (MA), June 18, 2024 – Jim Free, associate administrator for NASA, will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday, July 31, at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference (ISSRDC) in Boston. Free, the senior advisor to Administrator Bill Nelson and Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, is NASA’s third highest-ranking executive and its highest-ranking civil servant. In addition to leading the agency’s 10 center directors and the mission directorate associate administrators at NASA Headquarters ...

When people get a prescription for the opioid addiction medication called buprenorphine, they almost always fill it — even if they have to pay more out of their own pocket, a new study shows. Whether it’s their first prescription for the medication, or they’ve been taking it for months, nearly all patients pick up the order from the pharmacy, according to the new findings from a University of Michigan team. Even among those just starting on buprenorphine, higher costs aren’t a deterrent. The researchers say this suggests that removing barriers ...

SEATTLE — June 18, 2024 — Fred Hutch Cancer Center announced the recipients of the 2024 Dr. Eddie Méndez Scholar Award, which recognizes outstanding early-career scientists from underrepresented backgrounds who are studying cancer, infectious diseases and basic sciences.   The eight postdoctoral awardees come from research institutions across the U.S. and are experts in a range of subjects including cancer immunology, fungal model systems and craniofacial development. “We enthusiastically congratulate this year’s recipients who were chosen from a very competitive pool of candidates,” said Christina Termini, PhD, MM, co-director ...

NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected Lockheed Martin Corp. of Littleton, Colorado, to build the spacecraft for NOAA’s Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) satellite program. This cost-plus-award-fee contract is valued at approximately $2.27 billion. It includes the development of three spacecraft as well as four options for additional spacecraft. The anticipated period of performance for this contract includes support for 10 years of on-orbit operations and five years of on-orbit storage, for a total of 15 years for each spacecraft. ...

TUCSON, Ariz., June 18, 2024 — Critical Path Institute (C-Path), a leader in accelerating drug development for rare diseases, today announced the targeted integration of additional Friedreich’s ataxia (FA) datasets into C-Path’s Rare Disease Cures Accelerator-Data and Analytics Platform (RDCA-DAP®) as part of a partnership with Friedreich’s Ataxia Research Alliance (FARA).   This update includes data from two natural history studies; the FA-CHILD study, which focuses on pediatric ...

In low- and middle-income countries, anemia reduction efforts are often touted as a way to improve educational outcomes and reduce poverty. A new study, co-authored by a global health economics expert from the University of Notre Dame, evaluates the relationship between anemia and school attendance in India, debunking earlier research that could have misguided policy interventions. Santosh Kumar, associate professor of development and global health economics at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, is co-author of the study, published in Communications ...

A class of drugs already on the market to lower blood pressure appears to reduce adults’ risk of developing epilepsy, Stanford Medicine researchers and their colleagues have discovered. The finding comes out of an analysis of the medical records of more than 2 million Americans taking blood pressure medications. The study, published June 17 in JAMA Neurology, suggests that the drugs, called angiotensin receptor blockers, could prevent epilepsy in people at highest risk of the disease, ...

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced the recipients of four prestigious technical awards. These four awards in diverse categories celebrate the hard work and creativity which underpin many of today’s most important technologies.   Prateek Mittal, Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2023 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for foundational contributions to safeguarding Internet privacy and security using a cross-layer approach.  The unifying theme in Mittal’s ...

Viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, can get passed from person to person via contaminated surfaces. But can some surfaces reduce the risk of this type of transmission without the help of household disinfectants? As reported in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, wood has natural antiviral properties that can reduce the time viruses persist on its surface — and some species of wood are more effective than others at reducing infectivity. Enveloped viruses, like the coronavirus, can live up to five days on surfaces; nonenveloped viruses, including enteroviruses linked to the common cold, can live for weeks, in some cases even if the ...

When trees and livestock compete for land, the trees usually lose. It doesn’t have to be this way. But centrally designed plans to implement tree-livestock coexistence in deforested areas don’t always work on faraway farmland. The ineffectiveness can be due to trying to accomplish too much too quickly. Transforming hundreds of thousands of hectares of treeless or degraded pastures into sustainable landscapes for livestock, nature and people should be a gradual, low-disruption process. And it should start ...

AERA President Janelle T. Scott and Executive Director Felice J. Levine issued the following joint letter on June 18, 2024. Dear AERA Members, Colleagues in the Field, and Leaders in Research and Education: We are writing this joint letter to announce that Felice has decided to step down as Executive Director (ED) effective June 15, 2025. As she entered her fifth consecutive term, she signaled that she wished to move to an Emerita status next June and would not seek a further term of office. We both want to communicate this news now to provide sufficient lead time to conduct a search and ensure a smooth transition. As ...

Autoimmune diseases cannot currently be cured, only treated, and this is also true for neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, which affects the central nervous system. A Kobe University study of how the treatment acts on the immune system shows that it shifts the balance of types of immune cells. This finding may represent a step toward the development of personalized medicine for autoimmune diseases. An autoimmune disease is the body’s immune system turning against parts of the body itself. Neuromyelitis optica disorder spectrum, or NMOSD, is one of them and it causes inflammation of the central nervous system, leading to vision and sensory loss, weakness ...

Boston – An analysis of data from a randomized clinical trial for patients with stage 3 colon cancer found that those with PIK3CA mutations who took celecoxib, an anti-inflammatory drug, after surgery lived significantly longer and had longer disease-free survival compared to those without the mutation. The study, highlighting a potential breakthrough in personalized cancer treatment, was led by clinical investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. These findings are ...

When it comes to health, inequalities can be seen at every level for women with breast cancer: prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and survival. But what about their quality of life? A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Inserm, and Gustave Roussy has tracked nearly 6,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer over a 2-year period, showing that socioeconomic status has a major and lasting impact on their quality of life, despite identical medical treatment. These results from the UNICANCER-sponsored CANTO study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, call ...

“[...] immunotherapy is more likely to be effective at eliminating metastatic disease if the tumor burden is low, making it more logical to treat patients with high-risk melanomas at the earliest possible time [...]” BUFFALO, NY- June 18, 2024 – A new research perspective was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on June 13, 2024, entitled, “When does a melanoma metastasize? Implications for management.” In this new perspective, researchers John F. Thompson and Gabrielle J. Williams from The University of Sydney, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and the University ...

Allison Lopatkin ’13, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester, is one of 22 scientists selected to join the Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences this year. The program provides early-career scientists four years of funding to explore some of the most pressing questions in human health and medicine. The funding will help Lopatkin’s lab explore how changes in bacterial metabolism contribute to the development of antibiotic resistance. She says that decades of antibiotic overuse—in both clinical and agricultural ...

American Geophysical Union  Press release 24-26  18 June 2024  For Immediate Release  This press release is available online at: https://news.agu.org/press-release/millions-households-exceed-soil-lead-epa/   At least one in four US residential yards exceed new EPA lead soil level guideline  Nearly 40% of households will exceed safety recommendations where multiple lead sources may exist. Remediation with standard techniques at this scale could cost more than $1 trillion nationally  AGU press contact:  Rebecca Dzombak, news@agu.org (UTC-4 hours)  Contact information ...

Studies have shown how inward foreign direct investment (FDI) increases the productivity or innovation of local firms in emerging markets, but little research has explored how local firms have to strategically cope with this competition. Upon exploring these connections, a new article in the Global Strategy Journal recommends that local firms adopt a balanced approach to contend with these competition challenges: Companies should adopt both market and nonmarket strategies to maximize benefits, as relying solely on political connections may not be the most effective option. FDI refers to when a company purchases a business or sets up new operations in a country different from the one of ...