WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – December 4, 2024 — The Piedmont Triad Regenerative Medicine Engine (PTRME), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), has announced a groundbreaking investment of $2.5 million in the region’s regenerative medicine industry through its inaugural Ecosystem Building Grant program. This milestone underscores PTRME’s leadership in regenerative medicine and commitment to positioning the Piedmont Triad as a global hub for innovation. Six innovative companies have been awarded grants ...

  Images EAST LANSING, Mich. – As global temperatures rise, it’s imperative that plants can adapt to new and changing conditions.  As global temperatures rise, it’s imperative that plants can adapt to new and changing conditions.  Michigan State University researchers from the Walker lab are looking at ways to give plants an assist. More specifically, their research aims to help plants adapt to changing temperatures by introducing engineered enzymes that will increase plants’ heat tolerance. “I would say that the main goal of our research is to prepare plants for elevated temperatures because, with climate change, ...

The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) — the country’s largest interdisciplinary organization devoted to the field of aging — is proud to acknowledge the work of 34 outstanding individuals through its prestigious awards program. GSA salutes outstanding research, recognizes distinguished leadership in teaching and service, and fosters new ideas through a host of awards. Nominated by their peers, the recipients’ achievements serve as milestones in the history and development of gerontology. The awardees were honored at various ...

1. NIMS has established and begun operating a new testing facility to evaluate the mechanical properties of materials exposed to low-temperature hydrogen environments. This facility can create hydrogen conditions across a broader range of temperatures and pressures than any other facility of its kind in the world. It is designed to assess the properties of materials when in contact with low-temperature gaseous or liquefied hydrogen, with the goal of developing cost-effective materials for hydrogen supply chains. This approach is expected to reduce the cost of producing and operating ...

A team of researchers has beaten its own record for the fastest swimming soft robot, drawing inspiration from manta rays to improve their ability to control the robot’s movement in the water. “Two years ago, we demonstrated an aquatic soft robot that was able to reach average speeds of 3.74 body lengths per second,” says Jie Yin, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “We have improved on that design. Our new soft robot is more energy efficient and reaches a speed of 6.8 body lengths per second. In addition, the previous model could only swim on the surface ...

A new long-term study that has documented the lives of a diverse sample of children over the past three decades shows that the majority of gun carriers began to carry in adulthood, not adolescence. These two groups — which the authors call “adult-onset carriers” if they began carrying after 21 years of age and “adolescent-onset carriers” if their carrying started prior to 21 years of age — have very different patterns in exposure to violence prior to carrying, persistence in carrying, and in actual gun usage. In “Dual Pathways of ...

"Dog is man's best friend" may be an ancient cliché, but when that friendship began is a longstanding question among scientists. A new study led by a University of Arizona researcher is one step closer to an answer on how Indigenous people in the Americas interacted with early dogs and wolves. The study, published today in the journal Science Advances and based on archaeological remains from Alaska, shows that people and the ancestors of today's dogs began forming close relationships as early as 12,000 years ago – ...

Around a third (32%) of people who grew up in Chicago have carried a concealed firearm on the city streets at least once by the time they turn 40 years old, according to a major study of gun usage taking in a quarter of a century of data. Urban sociologists behind the research argue that such carry rates are likely to be similar across many other major US cities.  The research suggests that almost half of men (48%) have carried a concealed gun by the age of 40, compared to just 16% of women.* The study, published in Science Advances, is one of the few to track gun usage in the same US population ...

People who are credulous are less capable of recognizing fake news, and along with mistrustful adults, are more susceptible to conspiracy thinking and vaccine hesitancy, according to a study published December 4, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Michal Tanzer and colleagues from University College London, U.K. Epistemic trust is the readiness to regard knowledge communicated by others as significant, self-relevant, and generalizable to other contexts. Disruption to the capacity for epistemic trust may undermine healthy functioning that requires rapid, efficient checking and updating of social knowledge ...

Misokinesia, intolerance of others' fidgeting and repetitive body movements, can cause people to experience intense reactions, negative emotions and relationship strain, per qualitative study ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313169 Article Title: I struggle with your fidgeting: A qualitative study of the personal and social impacts of misokinesia Author Countries: Canada, U.S. Funding: We received funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for our study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. END ...

Students in biology classes accepted the theory of evolution more often when it was taught with conflict-reducing practices, including an emphasis on religious compatibility and autonomy, according to a study published December 4, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Rahmi Ourota Aini and Elizabeth Barnes from Middle Tennessee State University, U.S., and colleagues. Evolution is of the foundation of biology, but currently half of the United States population rejects the idea of human evolution. One of the most important factors in the acceptance of evolution ...

Higher emotional intelligence is linked to more emoji use with friends, while avoidant attachment is associated with less emoji use with friends and dating or romantic partners, according to a study published December 4, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Dr. Simon Dubé, Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, U.S., and colleagues. This pattern of results varies across genders and relationship types, with women using emojis with friends and family more frequently than men. Emojis are characters depicting emotions, objects, animals, and more. They can be sent ...

Scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence that ancient Americans relied primarily on mammoth and other large animals for food. Their research sheds new light on both the rapid expansion of humans throughout the Americas and the extinction of large ice age mammals. The study, featured on the Dec. 4 cover of the journal Science Advances, used stable isotope analysis to model the diet of the mother of an infant discovered at a 13,000-year-old Clovis burial site in Montana. Before this study, prehistoric diet was inferred by ...

Male African elephants have distinct personality traits, but also adapt their behavior to suit the social context, according to a study publishing December 4, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell at Stanford University and Harvard University Center for the Environment, Jodie L. Berezin of Utopia Scientific, U.S., and colleagues. Many animals show consistent individual differences in behavior, sometimes described as ‘personality’ or ‘temperament’. Elephants are highly intelligent and have rich social lives, and previous research has shown that captive ...

    KEY TAKEAWAYS A team led by researchers at Mass General Brigham built the first immunology-focused biobank with samples from patients who experienced out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Samples from the biobank provided a unique window into the immunological changes that take place after cardiac arrest. Researchers uncovered a population of cells that may provide protection from brain injury following cardiac arrest, leading them to examine a drug that can activate these cells to improve neurological outcomes.       Despite ...

Women who have a high genetic risk of depression are more likely to develop heart disease, University of Queensland researchers have found. During a study that analysed genetic and health data from more than 300,000 people, Dr Sonia Shah and Dr Clara Jiang from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience found women who had a high genetic risk of developing depression also had a high risk of developing heart disease, even in the absence of a depression diagnosis. Dr Shah said these results exposed a difference in the risk for women compared ...

A study from researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of California San Diego has shed light on a previously poorly understood aspect of breast cancer recurrence: how cancer cells survive in bone marrow despite targeted therapies. The paper, “Breast cancers that disseminate to bone marrow acquire aggressive phenotypes through CX43-related tumor-stroma tunnels,” appears in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.  Estrogen receptor positive breast cancer is the most ...

Closing underperforming hospitals could worsen health inequality in rural areas, finds new study Closing underperforming hospitals may do more harm than good, particularly in rural areas -regardless of their performance status, according to new research from the University of Surrey. The study shows that while the promise of improved care quality often justifies hospital closures, they risk exacerbating health inequalities, particularly for patients who already face longer travel distances for treatment.  The study, published in Regional Science and Urban Economics, which focused on elective hip replacement ...

A basic function of cells is that they act in response to their environments. It makes sense, then, that a goal of scientists is to control that process, making cells respond how they want to what they want. One avenue for this ambition is cell receptors, which function like ignition slots on a cell, requiring keys – such as specific hormones, drugs, or antigens – to start up specific cellular activities. There are already synthetic receptors that give us some control over this sequence of events, most famously the chimeric antigen receptors used in CAR-T cell cancer therapy. But existing synthetic receptors are limited in the variety of keys ...

A UCLA study has outlined a new framework that researchers say would improve predictive power of genetics to determine how well a patient would respond to commonly prescribed medications as well as the severity of any side effects.  Published in the journal Cell Genomics, the study found that data from large libraries of sequenced human genomes and other biological data, known as biobanks, can provide new insights into genetic architecture of response to widely prescribed drugs.  Study first author and UCLA Bioinformatics Ph.D. candidate Michal Sadowski said the most ...

Richard G. Baraniuk, the C. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, has been awarded the 2025 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal. This honor recognizes Baraniuk’s exceptional achievements in signal processing, particularly his pioneering work in multiscale and sparse signal processing. Notably, Baraniuk’s professorship is named after his mentor, Charles Sidney Burrus, a former dean of engineering at Rice, who also won the Kilby Medal in 2009. Baraniuk’s innovative contributions have advanced the theoretical and practical frontiers of signal processing and machine learning. His work has focused on low-dimensional models, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Being lonely is a bigger hurdle to a good night’s sleep for college students than too much time at a computer or other electronic screen, a new study by Oregon State University suggests. The research led by scientists in the OSU College of Liberal Arts is important because both insomnia and loneliness are serious public health concerns and are at epidemic levels among young adults in higher education, the researchers note. Jessee Dietch, John Sy and collaborators at Harvard Medical School and Chaminade University ...

A research team at the University of Göttingen, Germany’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) in Rhede, and the Thünen Institute in Braunschweig has investigated the importance of limestone quarries for wild bee conservation. Diverse landscapes with good connectivity between quarries and calcareous grasslands proved to be particularly valuable. Calcareous grasslands – meaning grasslands on chalk or limestone soils – are exceptionally rich in plant and animal species, making them valuable ecosystems. Quarries ...

ROCHESTER, Minn.  — Earlier research showed that primary care clinicians using AI-ECG tools identified more unknown cases of a weak heart pump, also called low ejection fraction, than without AI. New study findings published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Digital Health suggest that this type of screening is also cost-effective in the long term, especially in outpatient settings. Incremental drops in heart function are treatable with medication but can be hard to spot. Patients may or may not have symptoms when their heart is not ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Coconut palms are king throughout the tropics, serving as the foundation for human lives and cultures across the Pacific Ocean for centuries. However, 200 years of planting by colonial interests transformed the palm from the revered “Tree of Life” to a cash crop monoculture grown on Pacific atolls for a singular purpose — production of coconut oil (copra) for export around the world. Despite wide interest in the global footprint of palm crops, the distribution of coconut palms across tropical Pacific atolls has received little attention. Until now. Published in Environmental Research Letters, ...