Neuroscientists have revealed that recency bias in working memory naturally leads to central tendency bias, the phenomenon where people’s (and animals’) judgements are biased towards the average of previous observations. Their findings may hint at why the phenomenon is so ubiquitous. Researchers in the Akrami Lab at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and the Clopath Lab at Imperial College London developed a network model with a working memory module and another accounting for sensory histories. The study, published in eLife, describes how the model shows neural circuits ...

April 24, 2024, NEW YORK – A Ludwig Cancer Research study has discovered how a lipid molecule found at high levels within tumors undermines the anti-cancer immune response and compromises a recently approved immunotherapy known as adoptive cell therapy (ACT) using tumor infiltrating lymphocytes, or TIL-ACT. In this individualized cell therapy, TILs—CD8+ T cells that kill cancer cells—are expanded in culture from a patient’s tumor samples and reinfused into the patient as a treatment. Researchers led by Ludwig Lausanne’s Matteo ...

In 2022, an estimated 249 million malaria cases killed 608,000 people  in 85 countries worldwide including the United States, according to the World Health Organization. Malaria continues to pose a considerable public health risk in tropical and subtropical areas, where it impacts human health and economic progress. Despite concerns about the potential impact of climate change on increasing malaria risk, there is still limited understanding of how temperature affects malaria transmission – until now. Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite that spreads from bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes. If left untreated in humans, malaria can cause severe symptoms, ...

The secondary salinization of saline-alkali land is increasing globally. It is of strategic significance to explore the salt-tolerant molecular mechanism of halophytes and cultivate saline-alkali resistant crops for the improvement of saline-alkali land. The recretohalophyte Limonium bicolor has a unique salt-secreting structure, salt gland, which can directly excrete Na+ out of the body to effectively avoid salt stress. Exploring the development mechanism of salt gland structure in recretohalophyte is of great significance for analyzing the development of plant epidermis structure and improving the salt-resistant mechanism of plants. Recently, Wang ...

SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human has been named as a 16th Annual Shorty Awards finalist in the Science and Technology Podcast Category.  The Shorty Awards honor the best work in digital and social media by the most creative and influential brands, agencies, organizations, and individuals whose work has excelled in creativity, strategy, and effectiveness. SAPIENS’s work has demonstrated outstanding performance across the judging criteria, which makes it a top contender for a Shorty Award in a most competitive year. The work is also eligible for ...

Commercial bankers provide capital to fund the operations and growth of businesses. However, as these lenders evaluate entrepreneurs who apply for loans, gender bias leads to women being denied more often than their male counterparts. Estimates show a $1.7 trillion financing gap worldwide for small- and medium-sized enterprises owned by women. Studies show that when women do secure business loans, the amounts tend to be smaller, have higher interest rates and require more collateral, which restricts the economic potential of women-led ventures. However, findings ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Adverse life events are a known and predominant risk factor for postpartum depression in women after delivery of their baby. Furthermore, the postpartum depression in women who have experienced adverse life events tends to be refractory to treatment. In a study using a mouse model and human subjects, researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Johns Hopkins Medicine show that stress from adolescent social isolation in mice elicits a prolonged elevation of corticosterone levels and glucocorticoid signaling, which in turn results ...

One day you hear that red wine is good for your heart. The next day, it’s not. The same goes for chocolate. And coffee. The see-saw of contradicting information isn’t anything new, but what happens when clinicians hear conflicting studies about a medication they use for their patients? Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are hoping to use, among other methods, a variety of artificial intelligence to help sort that out.  Ellen Caniglia, ScD, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and Enrique Schisterman, PhD, a professor and the chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics (DBEI), ...

New research has discovered that neotame, one of the new generation of artificial sweeteners, is capable of damaging the human intestine and causing illness. The study is the first to show that neotame can cause previously healthy gut bacteria to become diseased and invade the gut wall – potentially leading to health issues including irritable bowel syndrome and sepsis – and also cause a breakdown of the epithelial barrier, which forms part of the gut wall. The research, which is published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition and was carried out at Anglia Ruskin ...

In a proof-of-concept study, researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of a potential new therapy for Timothy syndrome, an often life-threatening and rare genetic disorder that affects a wide range of bodily systems, leading to severe cardiac, neurological, and psychiatric symptoms as well as physical differences such as webbed fingers and toes. The treatment restored typical cellular function in 3D structures created from cells of people with Timothy syndrome, known as organoids, which can mimic the function of cells ...

HOUSTON ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights showcases the latest breakthroughs in cancer care, research and prevention. These advances are made possible through seamless collaboration between MD Anderson’s world-leading clinicians and scientists, bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic and back. Recent developments at MD Anderson offer insights into a novel targeted therapy for rare cancers, the role of enhancer RNAs in cell differentiation, novel biomarkers for the prognosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer, imaging signatures to stratify ...

Crossing a busy street safely typically is a result of a social exchange. Pedestrians look for cues—a wave, a head nod, a winking flash of the headlights, and, of course, a full vehicle stop—to know it’s safe to cross. But those clues could be absent or different with self-driving vehicles. How will children and adults know when it’s safe to cross the road? In a new study, University of Iowa researchers investigated how pre-teenage children determined when it was safe to cross a residential street with oncoming self-driving cars. The researchers found children made the ...

Mount Sinai researchers have published the first study to use single-cell analysis in identifying several pathophysiological mechanisms of abnormal passageways in the digestive system known as perianal fistulae, a common complication of Crohn’s disease. These findings were published in the journal Med on April 24. Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory bowel disease that causes chronic inflammation at any part of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and impacts more than half a million people in the United States. Perianal fistulae, abnormal connections between the anal canal and perianal skin, are a common complication of Crohn’s disease that often result in ...

HOUSTON – (April 24, 2024) – People say “When pigs fly” to describe the impossible. But even if most mammals are landlubbers, the ability to glide or fly has evolved again and again during mammalian evolution, in species ranging from bats to flying squirrels. How did that come about? In a study published in the journal Nature this week, a team of researchers led by Princeton University and Baylor College of Medicine explains the genomic and developmental basis of the patagium, the thin skin membrane that allows some mammalian species to soar through the air. “We don't quite understand how novel traits and adaptations originate from a molecular ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of pediatric enrollees across three commercial health insurance databases, statistical signals detected for myocarditis or pericarditis after BNT162b2 (ages 12-17 years) were consistent with previous reports, and seizures after BNT162b2 (ages 2-4 years) and mRNA-1273 vaccinations (ages 2-5 years) should be further investigated in a robust epidemiologic study with confounding adjustment. The Food and Drug Administration concludes that the known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks of COVID-19 infection.  Authors: Patricia C. Lloyd, Ph.D., Sc.M., of the Food and Drug Administration in Silver ...

About The Study: This analysis shows that declines in heart failure-related mortality from 1999 to 2012 have been entirely undone by reversals from 2012 to 2021, meaning that contemporary heart failure mortality rates are higher than in 1999. The origins of these reversals preceded the COVID-19 pandemic, although the larger increases in 2020 to 2021 indicate that the pandemic may have accelerated them due to limitations to health care access and possible cardiac involvement.  Authors: Marat Fudim, M.D., M.H.S., of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, is the ...

About The Study: In this repeated cross-sectional study, there was no evidence that recreational marijuana laws were associated with encouraging youth marijuana use, based on both the logistic regression and interaction-weighted models.  Authors: D. Mark Anderson, Ph.D., of Montana State University in Bozeman, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.0698) Editor’s Note: Please see ...

In a significant development in the field of superconductivity, researchers at The University of Manchester have successfully achieved robust superconductivity in high magnetic fields using a newly created one-dimensional (1D) system. This breakthrough offers a promising pathway to achieving superconductivity in the quantum Hall regime, a longstanding challenge in condensed matter physics. Superconductivity, the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with zero resistance, holds profound potential for advancements of quantum technologies. However, achieving superconductivity in the quantum Hall regime, characterised by quantised electrical conductance, has proven to be a mighty ...

Tumors actively prevent the formation of immune responses by so-called cytotoxic T cells, which are essential in combating cancer. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) Hospital have now uncovered for the first time how this exactly happens. The study in the journal Nature provides rationales for new cancer immunotherapies and could make existing treatments more effective. A second paper in Nature confirms the findings. In cancer, tumors often impair the body's immune response. For example, they can prevent immune cells from perceiving cancer cells as a threat or render them inactive. Immunotherapies aim ...

  ·  73% of children with skin disease experience stigma and poor quality of life ·  ‘Chronic skin conditions can be tremendously life-altering’ ·  Shame during childhood can affect them throughout their lives, dermatologist says CHICAGO --- The majority of children and teens with chronic skin diseases such as acne, eczema, psoriasis, alopecia areata (hair loss) and vitiligo (pigment loss) feel stigmatized by peers for their condition and are sometimes bullied, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. As a result, these children have a ...

Electrons inside solid materials can only take certain values of energy. The allowed energy ranges are called “bands” and the space between them, the forbidden energies, are known as “band-gaps”. Both of them together constitute the “band structure” of the material, which is a unique characteristic of each specific material. When physicists plot the band structure, they usually see that the resulting curves resemble mountains and valleys. In fact, the technical term for a local energy maximum or minimum in the bands is called a “valley”, and the field which studies and exploits how electrons in the material ...

Images The most up-to-date understanding of the flowering plant tree of life is presented in a new study published today in the journal Nature by an international team of 279 scientists, including three University of Michigan biologists.   Using 1.8 billion letters of genetic code from more than 9,500 species covering almost 8,000 known flowering plant genera (ca. 60%), this achievement sheds new light on the evolutionary history of flowering plants and their rise to ecological dominance on Earth.   Led by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the research team believes ...

As our battle against cancer rages on, the quest for more sophisticated and realistic models to study tumor development has never been more critical. Until now, research has relied on animal models and simplified cell culture methods, which are valuable but cannot fully capture the complex interplay of factors involved in tumor development. Even newer, more advanced models for studying cancer, such as organoids – tiny, lab-grown versions of organs – do not faithfully replicate the cell behaviors and tissue architectures seen in actual tumors. This gap has significantly hindered our understanding ...

Much like how electric circuits use components to control electronic signals, quantum networks rely on special components and nodes to transfer quantum information between different points, forming the foundation for building quantum systems. In the case of quantum networks, color centers in diamond, which are defects intentionally added to a diamond crystal, are crucial for generating and maintaining stable quantum states over long distances. When stimulated by external light, these color centers in diamond emit photons carrying information about their internal electronic states, especially the spin states. The interaction between the emitted photons and the ...

JMIR Publications invites submissions to a new theme issue titled “Incorporating Participatory Methods in Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating Rehab Interventions and Assistive Technologies” in its premier, open access journal JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies (JRAT).    JRAT is a peer-reviewed journal indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central, SCOPUS, DOAJ, Web of Science, Sherpa Romeo, and EBSCO and EBSCO Essentials. This theme issue aims to showcase research that actively engages patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders (knowledge users) ...