An England-wide study of over 58 million people has identified eight rare diseases that carry significantly increased risks for COVID-19-related mortality in fully vaccinated individuals. This important research calls for better inclusion of rare diseases in public health strategies, including future pandemic planning, vaccination policies, and NHS service provision.  Historically rare diseases have been difficult to study and neglected in research, in part due to a lack of large-scale data. This means that people living with rare conditions often struggle to get the treatment and support they need. Additionally, rare disease patients were overlooked in public health ...

Fresh embryo transfer may be a better option than use of frozen embryos for women with a low chance of having a healthy baby by vitro fertilisation (IVF), suggests a trial from China published by The BMJ today. The researchers say their findings do not support the routine use of the freeze-all strategy in women with low prognosis of IVF treatment success, which can be due to older age, low quantity or quality of eggs, or certain underlying conditions. IVF has revolutionised infertility treatment and a strategy of freezing all suitable embryos before transfer (freeze-all strategy) is now a routine part of the treatment to help prevent ...

Dongqing Wang, an assistant professor of Global and Community Health at George Mason’s College of Public Health, is pioneering research in prenatal nutritional interventions. His latest report identifies prenatal supplements that reduce health risks to small and vulnerable babies. This research was published in the prestigious The Lancet Global Health journal and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Wang found that compared to folic acid and iron alone, a multiple micronutrient supplement ...

-With images-   Researchers at Durham University have achieved a major advancement in understanding how proteins bind metals inside cells, a process crucial to life.   The study, published in Nature Communications, introduces a pioneering approach that allows scientists to accurately predict and engineer the metalation of proteins, a discovery with far-reaching implications for biotechnology and sustainable biomanufacturing.   The research builds upon years of work by the research team, dating back to key discoveries published in 2008.   In ...

Encouraging bilingualism at home can have many cognitive benefits, which may be particularly helpful to kids with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), new research from the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences indicates. A team of researchers led by Celia Romero, a graduate student in clinical psychology, along with associate professor Lynn Perry, professor Michael Alessandri, and former University professor Lucina Uddin, explored the role of bilingualism in 112 children, including typically developing children and children with autism, between the ages of 7 to 12 years old. Overall, they found that children who spoke two or more languages often had stronger executive ...

Systemic lupus erythematosus, more commonly known as lupus, has a variety of symptoms and room for improvement when it comes to treatment. Cutaneous lupus erythematosus is a common manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus. The condition is characterized by rashes on various parts of the body including the face and scalp, hair loss and scarring of the skin. The rashes are caused by inflammation from the immune system fighting the body. The standard treatment for cutaneous lupus erythematosus is using immunosuppressants and biologic drugs to reduce inflammation. While ...

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new thermometer using atoms boosted to such high energy levels that they are a thousand times larger than normal. By monitoring how these giant “Rydberg” atoms interact with heat in their environment, researchers can measure temperature with remarkable accuracy. The thermometer’s sensitivity could improve temperature measurements in fields ranging from quantum research to industrial manufacturing.  Unlike traditional thermometers, a Rydberg thermometer doesn’t need to be first adjusted or calibrated at the ...

Lockdowns. Social distancing. Shuttered schools and businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic and its sweeping disruptions set off a stampede of “what it’s doing to us” research, focused largely on schoolchildren. How were students’ academics affected? Their mental health? Their social development? Left unexamined was whether the pandemic impacted the social cognition of preschool children — kids younger than 6 — whose social norms were upended by day care closures and families sheltered at home. That changed when a UC Merced ...

University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka scientists have successfully analysed more than 30 years of vital data on the thickness of landfast sea ice in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound, which will prove useful to measure future impacts of climate change.   The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, set out to discover what key influences determine the thickness of landfast sea-ice, known as fast ice, using data from 1986 to 2022.   Fast ice is frozen ocean water that is attached to shorelines and persists for at least 15 days. It provides vital habitats for penguins and seals, as well as fish, krill and algae underneath the ice.   Scientists ...

  Tuberculosis remains one of the top infectious disease killers worldwide, a challenge amplified by drug-resistant forms of the disease. Now, in a major step forward, an international clinical trial has found three new safe and effective drug regimens for tuberculosis that is resistant to rifampin, the most effective of the first-line antibiotics used to treat TB. The research, published Jan. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine, was led by researchers at Harvard Medical School and other members of the endTB project, ...

Rutgers Health researchers have found that a weekly injection of diabetes medication could replace painful daily hormone shots for people with a rare genetic form of lipodystrophy that leaves patients with almost zero fat tissue, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine. Congenital generalized lipodystrophy (CGL), which affects only a few thousand people worldwide, results in severe metabolic disease, diabetes, insulin resistance and reduced life expectancy. With no fat tissue for proper storage, fat accumulates in organs ...

DALLAS, January 29, 2025 — When someone’s heart stops pumping, early CPR can save their life.[1] New survey research from the American Heart Association reveals more Americans are prepared to provide that lifesaving rhythm for their friends, family and community. The newly released data, conducted by Decision Analyst on behalf of the American Heart Association, indicates more U.S. adults now say they feel ready to handle and respond to a cardiac arrest[2]. When Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field during Monday Night Football in January ...

Research led by the University of Michigan arrived at a surprisingly unsurprising result while assessing the sustainability gap between public transit and services like Uber and Lyft, formally known as transport network companies or TNCs. With data collected by the city of Chicago, the researchers studied people's use of TNCs over transit, allowing the team to put a value on the time riders saved with their choices. The median value of that number, about $34 per hour, was virtually identical to the Chicago region’s median hourly wage. "I was a bit surprised that our median ...

Neurons may get all the glory, but they would be nothing without glial cells. While brain cells do the heavy lifting in the nervous system, it’s the glia that provide nutrients, clean up waste, and protect neurons from harm. Now, scientists have discovered a new mechanism by which these crucial supporting players detect and respond to neuron damage. Published in Nature Communications, the study describes how two key proteins allow glial cells to actively monitor the hair-like cilia that extend out of nematode dendrites, so that the glial cells can respond ...

Abdominal pain is among the most common reasons children are taken to the emergency department. A small proportion of them usually have appendicitis, and timely detection is essential. To do so, clinicians often rely on imaging, such as ultrasound or CT scans. Although delayed diagnosis of appendicitis in children can be life threatening, overtesting is wasteful and can even cause harm. Now in a study, published in Academic Emergency Medicine, University of Michigan researchers found that emergency departments vary widely in how they balance the ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new optical sensor that provides a simple way to achieve real-time detection of extremely low levels of arsenic in water. The technology could enable household testing for arsenic, empowering individuals to monitor their own water quality. Arsenic contamination is a serious environmental and public health challenge affecting millions of people around the world. This contamination occurs when natural geological processes release arsenic from rocks and soil into groundwater ...

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has investigated the influence of the forces exerted by the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdistan region of Iraq on how much the surface of the Earth has bent over the last 20 million years. Their research revealed that in the present day, deep below the Earth’s surface, the Neotethys oceanic plate – the ocean floor that used to be between the Arabian and Eurasian continents – is breaking off horizontally, with a tear progressively ...

Hebrew SeniorLife and Healthworks Community Fitness have partnered to offer on-site fitness programs at senior living communities across the Boston metro area. Hebrew SeniorLife, the largest nonprofit provider of senior services in New England, will offer the services through its Right Care, Right Place, Right Time Initiative (R3), which embeds wellness teams into affordable senior housing communities. Recently, Healthworks Community Fitness launched a new program called Get Movin’, an 8 – 12 week fitness program delivered on-site to senior living communities ...

Across cosmic history, powerful forces have acted on matter, reshaping the universe into an increasingly complex web of structures. Now, new research led by Joshua Kim and Mathew Madhavacheril at the University of Pennsylvania and their collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests our universe has become “messier and more complicated” over the roughly 13.8 billion years it’s been around, or rather, the distribution of matter over the years is less “clumpy” ...

Imagine being at a big marquee event at an arena, like the Super Bowl, with the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, and a sea of jerseys all merging into one chaotic blur. While the frenzied, exciting environment certainly enhances your viewing experience, it can also make it difficult to find the people you came with if you get separated. If you’re communicating by phone or waving from the stands, it can be an exhausting game of hide-and-seek amid the noise and commotion. Now imagine if you had ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2025 MINNEAPOLIS — Older adults whose cholesterol changes over time may be more likely to develop dementia than people whose cholesterol is stable, regardless of the actual cholesterol level, according to a study published in the January 29, 2025, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that changing cholesterol causes dementia; it only shows an association. “These results suggest that fluctuating cholesterol, measured annually, may be a new biomarker for identifying ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA – A home robot trained to perform household tasks in a factory may fail to effectively scrub the sink or take out the trash when deployed in a user’s kitchen, since this new environment differs from its training space. To avoid this, engineers often try to match the simulated training environment as closely as possible with the real world where the agent will be deployed. However, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have now found that, despite this conventional wisdom, sometimes training in a completely different environment yields a better-performing artificial intelligence agent. Their results indicate that, in some situations, training a simulated ...

It’s a place where few living things can survive in the water. Deep in the world’s largest rainforest, there is a boiling river. Found in eastern central Peru, it is a small tributary that eventually leads to the Amazon River. Heated by cracks in the Earth’s crust, at its warmest spots, the water can reach 200 degrees Fahrenheit, an inhospitable environment with air temperatures hotter than anywhere else in the Amazon. But the steamy river, known locally as “Shanay-Timpishka,” which translates as “boiled with the heat of the ...

ROCHESTER, Minnesota — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed organoid models to study uveal melanoma, one of the most common types of eye cancer in adults. Their goal is to use these models to better understand how this disease works and develop treatments for unmet patient needs.  Organoids are 3D models grown from patient tissue that accurately reflect a patient's unique genetic and biological characteristics, also known as "avatars." When derived from a patient's cancer tumor, an organoid will behave and respond to treatments outside the body in a lab (in vitro) just like the original tumor would inside the body (in vivo).  In 50% of patients, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Turning environmental waste into useful chemical resources could solve many of the inevitable challenges of our growing amounts of discarded plastics, paper and food waste, according to new research.  In a significant breakthrough, researchers from The Ohio State University have developed a technology to transform materials like plastics and agricultural waste into syngas, a substance most often used to create chemicals and fuels like formaldehyde and methanol.  Using simulations to test how well the system could break down waste, scientists found that their approach, called ...