Human-made climate change can lead to a destabilisation of large-scale components of the Earth system such as ice sheets or ocean circulation patterns, the so-called tipping elements. While these components will not tip over night, fundamental processes are put into motion unfolding over tens, hundreds or thousands of years. These changes are of such a serious nature that they should be avoided at all costs, the researchers argue. In their new study, they assessed the risks of destabilisation of at least one ...

For some forms of tuberculosis, the chances that an exposed person will get infected depend on whether the individual and the bacteria share a hometown, according to a new study comparing how different strains move through mixed populations in cosmopolitan cities. Results of the research, led by Harvard Medical School scientists and published Aug. 1 in Nature Microbiology, provide the first hard evidence of long-standing observations that have led scientists to suspect that pathogen, place, and human host ...

LA JOLLA, CA—To diagnose heart conditions including heart attacks and heart rhythm disturbances, clinicians typically rely on 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs)—complex arrangements of electrodes and wires placed around the chest and limbs to detect the heart’s electrical activity. But these ECGs require specialized equipment and expertise, and not all clinics have the capability to perform them. Now, a team of scientists and clinicians from Scripps Research has shown that heart conditions can be diagnosed roughly as accurately using just three electrodes and an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. In a ...

Current climate policies imply a high risk for tipping of critical Earth system elements, even if temperatures return to below 1.5°C of global warming after a period of overshoot. A new study indicates that these risks can be minimized if warming is swiftly reversed. Human-made climate change can lead to a destabilization of large-scale components of the Earth system such as ice sheets, ocean circulation patterns, or global biosphere components, the so-called tipping elements. In their new study published in Nature Communications, researchers from IIASA and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) analyzed the risks for four interconnected core climate tipping elements ...

Vaccines are safe and effective, and help reduce death and illness. But global vaccination rates are suboptimal and have trended downward, leaving humanity more vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases such as COVID-19, influenza, measles, polio, and HPV. Identifying interventions that could increase vaccine coverage could help save lives. A new paper from a team led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania offers the first comprehensive meta-analysis examining what types of vaccine intervention strategies have the ...

Osaka, Japan — An aging society has posed a new global problem, the risk of falling. It is estimated that 1 in 3 adults over the age of 65 falls each year and the resulting injuries are becoming more prevalent. To tackle this growing issue, Associate Professor Hiromitsu Toyoda and Specially Appointed Professor Tadashi Okano from Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Medicine, together with Professor Chisato Hayashi from the University of Hyogo, have developed a formula and assessment tool for estimating fall risks that is simple for older adults to use. The tool was developed using data collected from older adults over a ten-year period from April 2010 to December ...

Resistance, or weight training, is widely recommended in sports and rehabilitation as an effective exercise to increase muscular strength and size. This form of exercise involves applying resistance to muscle contraction to build strength. However, some practitioners believe resistance training can increase passive muscle stiffness over time. Passive muscle stiffness is a key indicator of how muscles behave mechanically when they are stretched without active contraction. Specifically, it refers to the amount of force required to change the muscle length by a given amount during passive stretching. Studies ...

Image cropping is an essential task in many contexts, right from social media and e-commerce to advanced computer vision applications. Cropping helps maintain image quality by avoiding unnecessary resizing, which can degrade the image and consume computational resources. It is also useful when an image needs to conform to a predetermined aspect ratio, such as in thumbnails. Over the past decade, engineers around the world have developed various machine learning (ML) models to automatically crop images. These models aim to crop an input image in a way that preserves its most relevant parts. However, ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. (Aug. 1, 2024) – Figuring out how the tissues in our bones, adrenal glands, muscle and fat “talk” to each other could help scientists better understand what happens to our skeletons with age, when our bones tend to lose mass and become weaker, leaving us at risk for falls and fractures. “Tissues don’t function in isolation – everything in the body “talks” to everything else to keep people healthy across the lifespan,” explains Meghan McGee-Lawrence, PhD, bone biologist at the Medical College of Georgia at ...

In an innovative new study of glioblastoma, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to reprogram cancer cells, converting them into dendritic cells (DCs), which can identify cancer cells and direct other immune cells to kill them. Glioblastoma is the most common brain cancer in adults and also the deadliest, with less than 10% of patients surviving five years after their diagnosis. While new approaches such as immunotherapy have revolutionized treatment for other cancers, they have done little for patients with glioblastoma. That is partly because these hard-to-reach brain tumors ...

The likelihood of developing high blood pressure (hypertension) increases with higher levels of tellurium, a contaminant transferred from mining and manufacturing activities to foods. Improved monitoring of tellurium levels in specific foods could help decrease high blood pressure in the general population. The results of a study examining the relationship between tellurium exposure and hypertension were published in the journal Environment International.    The study was led by Nagoya University in Japan. According to Takumi Kagawa, one of the researchers involved in the ...

In electronic technologies, key material properties change in response to stimuli like voltage or current. Scientists aim to understand these changes in terms of the material’s structure at the nanoscale (a few atoms) and microscale (the thickness of a piece of paper). Often neglected is the realm between, the mesoscale — spanning 10 billionths to 1 millionth of a meter. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with Rice University and DOE’s Lawrence ...

LA JOLLA (July 31, 2024)—The Salk Institute was awarded $3.6 million by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), one of the world’s largest institutions dedicated to regenerative medicine. Salk Professor Rusty Gage will lead the new CIRM-funded Shared Resources Laboratory focused on stem cell-based models of aging and neurodegeneration. The award is part of CIRM’s latest round of funding to address challenges in the regenerative medicine field. The state agency dedicated $27 million to help establish six new Shared Resources ...

A new large study led by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS) suggests incidence rates continued to rise in successively younger generations in 17 of the 34 cancer types, including breast, pancreatic, and gastric cancers. Mortality trends also increased in conjunction with the incidence of liver (female only), uterine corpus, gallbladder, testicular, and colorectal cancers. The report will be published today in the journal The Lancet Public Health. “These findings add to growing evidence of increased cancer risk in post-Baby Boomer ...

Nearly nine months of joint replacement surgery has been lost - around 160,000 fewer operations –  since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new study led by the University of Bristol has found.  The research suggests returning to pre-pandemic levels will not tackle the backlog, and even with rapid expansion, it will take many years, if not decades, to fix this joint replacement crisis. The study, published in The Bone & Joint Journal today [1 August], looked in detail at the effect ...

Public health interventions that tackle dementia risk factors could yield as much as £4bn in savings in England by reducing dementia rates and helping people to live longer and healthier, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in The Lancet Healthy Longevity, shows that interventions – such as reformulating food products to reduce sugar and salt intake, introducing low emission zones to improve air quality in cities, and minimum alcohol unit pricing to reduce drinking – could have extensive benefits beyond just the health outcomes they are directly targeting. Lead author Dr Naaheed Mukadam (UCL Psychiatry) ...

Vision loss and high cholesterol add to 12 previously identified modifiable risk factors for dementia, concludes a new report from the 2024 Lancet Commission. The potential to prevent and better manage dementia is high if action to tackle these risk factors begins in childhood and continues throughout life, even in individuals with high genetic risk for dementia. New report outlines 13 recommendations for individuals and governments to help reduce risk, including preventing and treating hearing loss, vision loss, and depression; being cognitively active ...

A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to allow rapid, low-cost detection of clinically actionable genomic alterations directly from tumor biopsy slides has been developed by a team led by engineers and medical researchers at University of California San Diego. A paper describing the new AI protocol for examining routine biopsies, called DeepHRD, was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Senior author Ludmil Alexandrov, Ph.D., professor of bioengineering and professor of cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, says the new method is designed to save weeks and thousands of dollars from clinical oncology treatment workflows ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (July 31, 2024)—Despite the fact that endometrial cancer is the most common cancer of the female reproductive organs, a significant percentage of women do not know that postmenopausal bleeding is a key warning sign of the disease. Worse, even fewer women report having received any type of counseling on the subject from their healthcare professionals. That’s according to a new study published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society. It is estimated that 67,880 new cases of ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (August 1, 2024)—Because of the aging of the ovaries, a woman’s fertility gradually declines, and she eventually enters menopause. The onset of menopause puts women at a significantly higher risk of various diseases such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis. A new study suggests that a shorter reproductive lifespan is linked with a higher risk of multimorbidity. Results of the survey are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The Menopause Society. The effect of reproductive-related factors on women’s health has become a focus of interest and study in recent years. Previous studies have identified the ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – July 31, 2024) Do neurons play a role in brain tumor growth and development? Scientists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine have evidence showing that, for childhood ependymomas, they do. There are no targeted therapies available to treat ependymoma due in large part to a lack of understanding of the tumor microenvironment. By leveraging a recently developed murine model, scientists explored the interaction between ependymoma cells and surrounding neurons. They found that hyperactivation of a specific subset ...

The University of Texas at Austin has embarked on a mission to explore the underwater edges of Greenland’s coastal glaciers to learn more about future sea level rise.  The four-week expedition conducted with international partners will investigate processes that control how these giant glaciers melt and what that means for the future of the Greenland ice sheet, which has about 23 feet (7 meters) of potential sea level rise locked away in its ice.  Joining the researchers is a robotic submersible that will gather measurements of the glaciers’ underwater walls and sediment-laden meltwater, a feat that’s never been ...

Ever wondered if your neighbourhood odour could be impacting your health? University of British Columbia researchers have uncovered surprising insights into the Vancouver region's “smellscape” using data from the Smell Vancouver app. Analyzing 549 reports from one year of app data, they discovered that “rotten” and “chemical” odours dominated, making up about 65 per cent of submissions. These unpleasant smells were linked to self-reported health issues like headaches and anxiety, leading some residents to change their behaviours, like closing windows even in stifling-hot weather. “The ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The University of Alabama at Birmingham startup TIXiMED, Inc., has obtained clearance from the United States Food and Drug Administration to proceed to clinical trials under an Investigational New Drug for TIX100, its novel oral Type 1 diabetes drug. This represents a major milestone in the development of this new approach to T1D treatment and gives TIXiMED the green light to start human studies with TIX100. The development of TIX100 is based on decades of research by Anath Shalev, M.D., the Nancy R. and Eugene C. Gwaltney Family Endowed Chair in Juvenile Diabetes Research in the UAB Division ...

Recently published research shows a medical device may be beneficial for patients who have previously had a stroke and are planning to undergo a transcatheter aortic valve replacement, a type of heart valve operation.  Neel Butala, MD, an assistant professor in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Colorado Department of Medicine, is the first author of the article, which was presented as a late-breaking clinical trial at the New York Valves 2024 conference and simultaneously published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions, an American Heart Association journal.    The ...