Gene expression of a tropical starfish fluctuates between the seasons   ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002620 Article Title: Seasonal tissue-specific gene expression in wild crown-of-thorns starfish reveals reproductive and stress-related transcriptional systems Author Countries: Australia Funding: This research was supported by a Linkage Project grant (LP170101049) from the Australian Research Council to BMD, ...

A Monash-led study - the first to globally map heatwave-related mortality over a three-decade period from 1990 to 2019 – has found that an additional 153,000+ deaths per warm season were associated with heatwaves, with nearly half of those deaths in Asia. In comparison to 1850–1990, the global surface temperature has increased by 1.14℃ in 2013–2022 and is expected to increase by another 0.41-3.41℃ by 2081–2100. With the increasing impacts of climate change, heatwaves are increasing not only in frequency but also in severity and magnitude. The study, published today in PLOS Medicine and led by Monash University’s Professor Yuming Guo, ...

Between 1990 and 2019, more than 150,000 deaths around the globe were associated with heatwaves each year, according to a new study published May 14th in PLOS Medicine by Yuming Guo of Monash University, Australia, and colleagues. Heatwaves, periods of extremely high ambient temperature that last for a few days, can impose overwhelming thermal stress on the human body. Studies have previously quantified the effect of individual heatwaves on excess deaths in local areas, but have not compared these statistics around the globe over such ...

Guideline Highlights: The new joint guideline from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology provides recommendations to guide clinicians in the treatment of patients with lower extremity peripheral artery disease (PAD) and supports broad implementation of the PAD National Action Plan – an outline of six strategic goals to improve awareness, detection and treatment of PAD nationwide. The guideline urges clinicians to be aware of the signs and symptoms of PAD in its four clinical presentations (asymptomatic, chronic symptomatic PAD, chronic limb-threatening ...

SASKATOON--Using an innovative new method, a University of Saskatchewan (USask) researcher is building tiny pseudo-organs from stem cells to help diagnose and treat Alzheimer’s. When Dr. Tyler Wenzel (PhD) first came up with the idea of building a miniature brain from stem cells, he never could have predicted how well his creations would work. Now, Wenzel’s “mini-brain” could revolutionize the way Alzheimer’s and other brain-related diseases are diagnosed and treated. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think that our crazy idea would work,” ...

      MEDIA INQUIRES     Laura Muntean     laura.muntean@ag.tamu.edu     601-248-1891     FOR ...

MIT researchers, including several undergraduate students, have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe, and they happen to live in our own galactic neighborhood. The team spotted the stars in the Milky Way’s “halo” — the cloud of stars that envelopes the entire main galactic disk. Based on the team’s analysis, the three stars formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, the time when the very first galaxies were taking shape. The researchers have coined the stars ...

Within the Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project, 14 European institutions from ten countries, spent the last three years elaborating on services and high-tech digital tools, in order to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR-ness) of various types of data about the world’s biodiversity. These types of data include peer-reviewed scientific literature, occurrence records, natural history collections, DNA data and more. By ensuring all those data are readily available and efficiently interlinked to each other, the project consortium’s intention is to provide better tools to the scientific community, ...

Metal halide perovskites have emerged in recent years as a low-cost, highly efficient semiconducting material for solar energy, solid-state lighting and more. Despite their growing use, a fundamental understanding of the origins of their outstanding properties is still lacking. A Husker scientist is aiming to find answers that could lead to the development of new materials and new applications. Yinsheng Guo, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, also wants to transform how physical chemistry is taught to undergraduate and graduate students, who often struggle to understand and apply what ...

Reston, VA—The protein galectin-1 (Gal-1) has been identified as a new PET imaging biomarker for immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) therapy, allowing physicians to predict the tumor responses before beginning treatment. Information garnered from Gal-1 PET imaging could also be used to facilitate patient stratification and optimize immunotherapy, enabling targeted interventions and improving patient outcomes. This research was published in the May issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Immunotherapies, such as ICB, have produced promising clinical ...

“In this study, we first obtained evidence that, in mouse, aging primarily reduced the number of active sweat glands.” BUFFALO, NY- May 14, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 16, Issue 8, entitled, “Characterization of age-associated gene expression changes in mouse sweat glands.” Evaporation of sweat on the skin surface is the major mechanism for dissipating heat in humans. The secretory capacity of sweat glands (SWGs) ...

DALLAS, May 13, 2024 — Fewer than half of all women are aware that heart disease is their leading cause of death. That is why the American Heart Association, celebrating one hundred years of lifesaving service, created its community-based Woman of Impact™ initiative as an outgrowth of its year-round Go Red for Women® activist movement. The movement spotlights the lack of awareness and the clinical care gaps in women’s heart health. This year’s National Winner of the Go Red for Women 2024 Woman of Impart initiative is a 26-year-old heart transplant recipient, stroke survivor and American Heart Association local volunteer, Hana Hooper from Puget ...

The blood-retinal barrier is designed to protect our vision from infections by preventing microbial pathogens from reaching the retina where they could trigger an inflammatory response with potential vision loss. But researchers at the University of Missouri School of Medicine have discovered the virus that causes COVID-19 can breach this protective retinal barrier with potential long-term consequences in the eye.  Pawan Kumar Singh, PhD, an assistant professor of ophthalmology, leads a team researching new ways to prevent and treat ocular infectious diseases. Using a humanized ...

Scientists have discovered a new insight into the genetic pathway of childhood cancer, offering new hope for tailored treatments. Researchers from the University of Sheffield have created a stem cell model designed to investigate the origins of neuroblastoma, a cancer primarily affecting babies and young children.  Neuroblastoma is the most common childhood tumour occurring outside the brain, affecting the lives of approximately 600 children in the European Union and the United Kingdom each year.  Until now, studying genetic changes and their role in neuroblastoma initiation has been challenging due to the lack of suitable laboratory ...

As people age, they become more prone to blood clotting diseases, when blood cells called platelets clump together when they don’t need to and can cause major issues such as strokes and cardiovascular disease. For decades, scientists have studied why older people’s blood cells behave in this way, using their insights to develop the myriad of blood-thinning drugs now on the market for treating the leading cause of death in the United States. Now, UC Santa Cruz Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Camilla Forsberg and her research group have ...

Researchers have found that 2023 was the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in the past two thousand years, almost four degrees warmer than the coldest summer during the same period. Although 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record, the instrumental evidence only reaches back as far as 1850 at best, and most records are limited to certain regions. Now, by using past climate information from annually resolved tree rings over two millennia, scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have shown how exceptional the summer of 2023 was. Even allowing for natural climate variations over hundreds of years, 2023 was still ...

UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 4PM GMT  (11AM ET) on 14 May 2024.   Peer reviewed | Observational | People  Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) is present in hundreds of copies in the genome, but has not previously been part of genetic analyses. A new study of 500,000 individuals indicates that people who have more copies of rDNA are more likely to develop inflammation and diseases during their lifetimes.  Standard genetic analysis techniques have not studied areas of the human genome that are repetitive, such as ribosomal ...

Three out of four U.S. adults support the use of emerging technologies that estimate a future child’s likelihood of developing health conditions influenced by multiple genes — such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression — before an embryo is implanted during in vitro fertilization (IVF), according to a new public opinion survey led by researchers at Harvard Medical School. Results of the survey, to be published May 14 in JAMA Network Open, underscore the need for public education and conversation about the positive ...

Children with neurodevelopmental disorders report congenital abnormalities, such as defects of the heart and/or urinary tract, at least ten times more frequent compared to other children. This is one of the findings from an analysis from Radboud university medical center of data from over 50,000 children. Thanks to this new database, it's now much clearer which health problems are associated with a particular neurodevelopmental disorder and which are not. The study has been published in Nature Medicine. Two to three percent of the population have a neurodevelopmental disorder, such as autism or intellectual ...

May 14  2024 – A study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP), published by Elsevier, found that pharmacological treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reduced violence- and public-order related crimes. However, it did not reduce  other types of crimes, among patients with ADHD in early to late adolescence considered to be in the grey zone (or on the margin) for such treatment. This study uses variation in healthcare providers treatment preference as the basis for a quasi-experimental design that examines the effect of pharmacological ...

A team led by Dr. Eddie Imada, assistant professor of research in pathology and laboratory medicine, has been awarded a three-year, $1.5 million United States Department of Defense grant for research on a cellular process called alternative polyadenylation and its role in prostate cancer. The grant was awarded under DoD’s long-running Prostate Cancer Research Program, a Congressionally-directed medical research funding project aimed at improving prostate cancer prevention, detection and patient care. Thousands of current and former servicemen ...

UVA Health researchers have developed a powerful new risk assessment tool for predicting outcomes in heart failure patients. The researchers have made the tool publicly available for free to clinicians. The new tool improves on existing risk assessment tools for heart failure by harnessing the power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to determine patient-specific risks of developing unfavorable outcomes with heart failure.  “Heart failure is a progressive condition that affects not only quality of life but quantity as well. All heart failure patients are not the same. Each patient ...

Previously, it was commonly assumed that having an inner voice had to be a human universal. But in recent years, researchers have become aware that not all people share this experience.  According to postdoc and linguist Johanne Nedergård from the University of Copenhagen, people describe the condition of living without an inner voice as time-consuming and difficult because they must spend time and effort translating their thoughts into words: “Some say that they think in pictures and then translate the pictures into words when they need to say ...

OTTAWA, Ontario, May 14, 2024 – Every love story is unique, and in traditional Indigenous Southern Plains culture, it begins with an original ballad performed on the flute. In order to win a lover’s affection, and respect among the tribe, each pursuer must compose one good flute serenade. Paula Conlon, a former music professor at the University of Oklahoma, has researched the history and cultural significance of the Indigenous flute since the 1980s. Conlon will present her work Tuesday, May 14, at 9:45 a.m. EDT as part of a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical ...

SAN ANTONIO — May 14, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute is investigating an unusual event in the Earth’s magnetotail, the elongated portion of the planet’s magnetosphere trailing away from the Sun. Using data from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, SwRI scientists are examining the nature of substorms, fleeting disturbances in the magnetotail that release energy and often cause aurorae. Since their launch in 2015, the MMS spacecraft have been surveying the magnetopause, the boundary between the magnetosphere ...