Researchers have developed an innovative method for assessing spinal muscle strength, utilizing isokinetic testing combined with advanced spine musculoskeletal modeling. This cutting-edge approach, detailed in a study published by the Cyborg and Bionic Systems journal, marks a significant advancement in personalized health and athletic training. Understanding individual muscle strength is crucial for optimizing physical therapy and enhancing athletic performance. Traditional methods, however, often fall short in precision. The newly introduced technique by Zuming Xiao and colleagues from the Beijing Institute of Technology and Shenyang ...

We are pleased to share that many MIT Press journals were ranked highly in their fields in 2023, earning exceptional impact factors—which measure recent citation activity for scholarship—and placing in the top quartile of all journals for their areas of study.  Several MIT Press journals in linguistics landed in the top of the field—including Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics at #6 out of all 297 linguistics journals in publication; Computational Linguistics at #10; Neurobiology of Language at #14; and Linguistic Inquiry at #77.  We ...

OAKLAND, Calif., June 27, 2024 – Power outages are on the rise nationwide as climate change brings more frequent wildfires, heat waves, and severe weather events. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the state of California have both recently established funding to help communities create “resilience hubs” that rely on solar+battery systems to provide emergency power for residents. A new study in the journal Risk Analysis finds that strategically placing resilience hubs throughout California could generate up to 8 GW of solar energy and lower the state’s carbon emissions by 5 million tons ...

A new study has illuminated the connection between inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and lipid profile.  IBD is a chronic condition that causes inflammation in the intestines. Abnormal lipid factor levels such as cholesterol in IBD patients have been observed in previous studies, but whether this association is causal remained unclear. This study employed Mendelian randomization (MR) to investigate the potential causal link between lipid profile and IBD. The results revealed no significant ...

In recent years, rehabilitation robots have become increasingly popular in the field of healthcare, able to mimic the movements of a therapist and enhance patients' mobility through carefully designed control methods. A team from the Automation College of Beijing Institute of Technology, led by Kexin Hu, Zhongjing Ma, Suli Zou, Jian Li, and Haoran Ding, in collaboration with collaborators from the University College London, has recently proposed a novel impedance sliding mode control method that combines stiffness scheduling technology, which has brought significant advancements to rehabilitation robot systems. This research has broken through the ...

Around the time of the untimely death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man in police custody, researchers from Johns Hopkins University were collecting data for Communities CARING, a study that examined the relationship of health behaviors among public housing residents in East and West Baltimore communities in Maryland. Led by Kristal Lyn Brown, PhD, an assistant professor in Drexel University’s College of Nursing and Health Professions, a secondary analysis of the data collected for Communities CARING examined the relationship between a high-profile event (Gray’s death) and disordered eating ...

Korean researchers are strengthening South Korea’s leadership in the global market through the development of 6G, the next-generation mobile communication technology. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that they showcased their latest research results at the “6G Symposium Spring 2024” held in Oulu, Finland, from April 9 to 11, drawing the attention of attendees. At this symposium, ETRI particularly showcased its “service mesh” technology. This technology is a key 6G technology that addresses complex communication issues among numerous cloud-nativemobile network functions that ...

Researchers have identified a protein called PFDN6 that may play a role in the development and spread of colorectal cancer (CRC). The study, published in [journal name], found that PFDN6 levels are increased in CRC patients and contribute to tumor growth. By reducing PFDN6 in lab studies, scientists were able to slow cancer cell spread and increase cell death. These findings suggest that PFDN6 could be a target for future CRC treatments. CRC is the third most common cancer worldwide and has a poor prognosis, especially ...

When operating on the heart, surgeons may find another issue in the patient. Depending on what they see, the surgical team may address on the secondary condition during the same operation.  These are sometimes called concomitant procedures.  However, two studies led by Michigan Medicine find that female patients who undergo heart surgery are less likely to have secondary ailments corrected during a procedure — despite guidelines that indicate they should.  “Across the spectrum of cardiovascular care, from medical management to transcatheter and surgical procedures, there is growing evidence that women ...

LONDON, ON – A team at Lawson Health Research Institute is the first in Canada to perform a transplant using a technique called abdominal normothermic regional perfusion (A-NRP), which could lead to more organs being available for transplant. The technique was used to optimize organs from two donors in April 2024 at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC), resulting in the successful transplantation of two kidneys and two livers to four patients.  “Organ donation after circulatory death (when the heart stops beating) has historically been less reliable than organ donation after brain death,” explained Dr. Anton Skaro, Associate Scientist ...

Researchers have discovered that zinc plays a crucial role in the nitrogen fixation process of legumes. This finding, along with the transcriptional regulator Fixation Under Nitrate (FUN), could revolutionize legume-based agriculture by optimizing crop efficiency and reducing reliance on synthetic fertilizers. By understanding how zinc and FUN regulate nitrogen fixation, researchers might be able to enhance nitrogen delivery, improve crop yields, and promote more sustainable agricultural practices. The new knowledge about zinc can change the way we cultivate crops, as plants can ...

Just four per cent of talented teen academy prospects make it to the top tier of professional football, a new study has shown. A sample of nearly 200 players, aged between 13-18, also revealed only six per cent of the budding ballers even go on to play in lower leagues. The University of Essex researchers discovered the players who succeeded excelled in self-confidence, ball reception skills, dribbling and coaches’ subjective technical assessments. The study – published in the International Journal ...

Experts have identified 240 Chinese cities whose emission reduction are mainly benefiting from the carbon mitigation actions of other cities, whilst putting in less effort themselves.  Researchers studied the phenomenon across 309 Chinese cities using data from 2012 to 2017 – a period when China underwent economic reform and industrial transformation.  Constructing a city-level input-output model to assess carbon footprints, the researchers identified 78% of the cities as ‘outsourced beneficiaries’, ...

It is widely accepted that biological interactions are stronger or more important in generating and maintaining biodiversity in the tropics than in temperate regions. However, this hypothesis has not been fully tested in ecology and evolutionary biology. In a study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have provided strong support for this central prediction by examining phytochemical diversity and herbivory in 60 tree communities ...

Slush – water-soaked snow – makes up more than half of all meltwater on the Antarctic ice shelves during the height of summer, yet is poorly accounted for in regional climate models. Researchers led by the University of Cambridge used artificial intelligence techniques to map slush on Antarctic ice shelves, and found that 57% of all meltwater is held in the form of slush, with the remaining amount in surface ponds and lakes. As the climate warms, more meltwater is formed on the surface of ice shelves, the floating ice surrounding Antarctica which acts as ...

A more accurate way to scan for tuberculosis (TB) has been developed by UK and US researchers, using positron emission tomography (PET). The team, from the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the Universities of Oxford and Pittsburgh and the National Institutes of Health in the USA, have developed a new radiotracer, which is taken up by live TB bacteria in the body. Radiotracers are radioactive compounds which give off radiation that can be detected by scanners and turned into a 3D image. The new radiotracer, called FDT, enables PET scans to be used for the first time ...

Ammonites were not in decline before their extinction, scientists have found. The marine molluscs with coiled shells and one of palaeontology’s great icons flourished in Earth’s oceans for more than 350 million years until they died out during the same chance event that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Some palaeontologists have argued that their demise was inevitable and that ammonite diversity was decreasing long before they went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous. However new research, published today in Nature Communications and led by palaeontologists at the ...

Being nursed by a single parent could be an evolutionary strategy to curb the spread of harmful microbes in mammals, according to a novel theory developed by mathematicians. The rainforests of Malaysia are home to the only known case of a wild male mammal that produces milk. The Dayak fruit bat is a vanishingly rare case of male milk production, despite the fact that the potential for breastfeeding remains in place in most male mammals.  In the 1970s, evolutionary theorists posited that the near absence of ...

Los Angeles, CA (June 27, 2024) —A new study published in the journal Nature Communications led by paleontologists at the University of Bristol along with a team of international researchers, including Dr. Austin Hendy, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, finds that instead of fizzling out ahead of their extinction, ammonoids were still going strong across the globe in the Late Cretaceous. Made possible by museum collections, the new study compared their diversity across the globe just prior to extinction, unearthing the complex evolutionary history ...

Embargoed until 4am EDT Cleveland, OH (Thursday, June 27, 2024) – Cleveland Clinic and app developer FitNow, Inc.  have launched the Cleveland Clinic Diet app, which offers health and diet advice built upon evidence-based nutrition science and clinical success, paired with a comprehensive food and fitness tracker.     The app provides individualized guided support with the input of Cleveland Clinic health experts to help users make sustainable changes to their lifestyle and dietary habits for better health and well-being.     “We know that health is about far more than just weight. ...

Researchers from Tampere University, Finland, and the University of Pittsburgh, USA, have developed a tiny robot replicating the aerial dance of falling maple seeds. In the future, this robot could be used for real-time environmental monitoring or delivery of small samples even in inaccessible terrain such as deserts, mountains or cliffs, or the open sea. This technology could be a game changer for fields such as search-and-rescue, endangered species studies, or infrastructure monitoring. At Tampere University, Professor Hao Zeng and Doctoral Researcher Jianfeng Yang ...

Bottom Line: Patients with treatment-refractory cancers who received eligibility and testing waivers to participate in a large basket/umbrella oncology trial had similar rates of clinical benefit and adverse events as patients who participated in the trial without waivers. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Author: Hans Gelderblom, MD, senior author of the study and chair of the Department of Medical Oncology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands Background: Eligibility requirements ...

Psilocybin mushrooms are the psychedelic substance most often used in the U.S., with its popularity outpacing other psychedelic drugs such as MDMA (known as ecstasy), according to a new RAND report.   Based on a new national survey, researchers found that about 12% of respondents reported using psilocybin at some point over their lives and 3.1% reported using the substance over the past year. An estimated 8 million American adults used psilocybin in 2023.   Psychedelic substances such as psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA long have been touted as holding promise for treating various mental ...

Arlington, Va. — June 27, 2024 — A new study published today in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) describes the outcome of a new approach to testing for Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) guided by the principles of diagnostic stewardship. At Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Fla., revised rules for when C. diff tests could be ordered helped to reduce inappropriate testing by 20%, which in turn can help rein in the overtreatment of patients. C. diff is a common and potentially dangerous gastrointestinal pathogen, often linked to healthcare-associated infections ...

Like the flutter of a butterfly's wings, sometimes small and minute changes can lead to big and unexpected results and changes in our lives. Recently, a team of researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) made a very small change to develop a material called “spin-orbit torque (SOT),” which is a hot topic in next-generation DRAM memory.   This research team, led by Professor Daesu Lee and Yongjoo Jo, a PhD candidate, from the Department of Physics and Professor Si-Young ...