School attendance figures are dwindling, there are more pupils than ever before needing additional support, and a demanding legion of exams – all of which mean pupils are struggling to learn, an education expert has warned. But, he suggests, with a renewed focus on the techniques of learning, pupils can be guided to success. In a difficult environment for teachers, it is clear they need support. Failure might be inevitable in a classroom, former teacher Alex Quigley argues, but if teachers can understand why learning has failed, they can address ...

Letters written by the famous mountaineer George Mallory have been made available to a global audience for the first time, in the centenary year of his fatal attempt to scale Everest.   An alumnus of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Mallory is known for purportedly replying "because it's there" when asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb Everest. There is still debate about whether he and his climbing partner Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine did in fact make it to the top ...

The Frontiers Planet Prize today (22 April) announced 23 National Champions drawn from science research teams across six continents in the second year of the global competition. The Prize recognizes scientists whose research contributes to accelerating solutions that ensure humanity remains safely within the boundaries of the Earth's ecosystem. The National Champions now move forward to the final round of the competition, where three International Champions will be awarded 1 million CHF each to support their research. ...

**Note: this is an early release from the ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID, Barcelona, Spain, 27-30 April). Please credit the congress if you use this story** New research presented at the ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID) in Barcelona, Spain (27-30 April) shows that in a VACCELERATE Consortium survey study in which infectious diseases experts were asked to rank pathogens in order of their pandemic potential, influenza was considered the pathogen of highest pandemic risk, with 57% ranking influenza as number one, and a further 17% ranking it second (See full table, notes to editors). The study is by Dr Jon Salmanton-García, University ...

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have identified how proteins collect abnormally in neurons, a feature of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. They used fruit flies to show that depletion of mitochondria in axons can directly lead to protein accumulation. At the same time, significantly high amounts of a protein called eIF2β were found. Restoring the levels to normal led to a recovery in protein recycling. Such findings promise new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.   Every cell in our bodies is a busy factory, where proteins ...

Nationwide analysis of a large, geographically diverse cohort of adults in the USA suggests increased risk for hospital-acquired carbapenem-resistant enterobacterales bloodstream infections among racial and ethnic minorities may be due in part to hospitalisations for underlying comorbidities and associated with racial and biological sex inequities **ECCMID has now changed name to ESCMID Global, please credit ESCMID Global Congress (Barcelona, Spain, 27-30 April) in all future stories** New research being presented at this year’s ESCIMD Global Congress (formerly ...

Given the litigation involving products used to feed and support the growth of preterm infants and the direct implication for infants who are at risk of and who have been affected by necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), the NEC Society previously released a statement on the lawsuits. This statement addresses the Watson case. Necrotizing enterocolitis is a devastating intestinal inflammatory disease that can affect premature or otherwise medically fragile infants during their first weeks and months of life. Upon diagnosis, many babies have only hours or days before their intestines become necrotic, progressing to sepsis, multisystem ...

What can be done when one threatened animal kills another? Scientists studying critically endangered lemurs in Madagascar confronted this difficult reality when they witnessed attacks on lemurs by another vulnerable species, a carnivore called a fosa. This dynamic can be particularly complex when the predation occurs in an isolated or poor-quality habitat, according to research from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar. In the new paper published in Ecology and Evolution, researchers describe how they were observing small groups of critically endangered diademed ...

The Atlantic surfclam, an economically valuable species that is the main ingredient in clam chowder and fried clam strips, has returned to Virginia waters in a big way, reversing a die-off that started more than two decades ago. In a comprehensive study of surfclams collected from an area about 45 miles due east from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Rutgers scientists found the population to be thriving and growing. A likely reason could be that environmental conditions improved, and another possibility is that the clams adapted, ...

Harbir Antil (PI), director of the Center for Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (CMAI), professor of Mathematical Sciences, and Rainald Löhner (co-PI), director of Computational Fluid Dynamics Lab, professor of Physics and Astronomy, received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), under the prestigious DURIP program, to establish a neuromorphic imaging and digital twins lab with capabilities to design new optimization algorithms.  This project will set up the Neuromorphic Imaging and Digital Twins Lab—a first of its kind ...

Rishi Pillai and his research team from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will receive a Best Paper award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers International Gas Turbine Institute in June at the Turbo Expo 2024 in London.   The winning paper is “Leveraging Additive Manufacturing to Fabricate High Temperature Alloys with Co-Designed Mechanical Properties and Environmental Resistance,” which Pillai presented in June at the Turbo Expo 2023 in Boston.   The ORNL scientists co-designed a compositionally graded nickel-based alloy for molten halide salts-supercritical carbon dioxide heat exchangers. The objective ...

The Science The Standard Model of Particle Physics is scientists’ best understanding of the forces that describe how subatomic particles interact. The Standard Model encompasses four forces: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. All four forces govern the way our universe works. However, the weak nuclear force is exceptionally difficult to study as it is overshadowed by the much greater effects of the strong nuclear and electromagnetic forces. Scientists have gained new ...

HOUSTON – (April 19, 2024) – While foraging, animals including humans and monkeys are continuously making decisions about where to search for food and when to move among possible sources of sustenance. “Foraging behavior is something we perform daily when we go to the grocery store to pick up food, and we make choices based on the degree of reward each choice provides. It’s a classical problem common to every species on the planet,” said Valentin Dragoi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, professor of neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College and scientific director of the Methodist/Rice Center for Neural Systems Restoration. In ...

Grant of up to $11 million will fund a clinical trial at UCSF that uses a smarter new CAR-T guided by precision technology.   A type of gene therapy called CAR-T that has extended survival for thousands of patients with leukemia and other blood cancers is being adapted at UC San Francisco to treat people with glioblastoma, the most common and deadly adult brain tumor.    This new more powerful version of CAR-T employs a novel technology developed at UCSF called synthetic notch (synNotch) that both protects healthy tissue from damage and enables the treatment to work more effectively.     UCSF ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Inspired by what human liver enzymes can do, Scripps Research chemists have developed a new set of copper-catalyzed organic synthesis reactions for building and modifying pharmaceuticals and other molecules. The new reactions are expected to be widely used in drug discovery and optimization, as well as in other chemistry-based industries. In their study, which initially published in an unedited version on March 28, 2024, in Nature, the chemists showed that their new methods can be used to perform two modifications—called dehydrogenations and lactonizations—on ...

Blessed thistle (Cnicus benedictus) is a plant in the family Asteraceae and also grows in our climate. For centuries, it has been used as a medicinal herb as an extract or tea, e.g. to aid the digestive system. Researchers at the Center for Pharmacology of University Hospital Cologne and at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Cologne have now found a completely novel use for Cnicin under the direction of Dr Philipp Gobrecht and Professor Dr Dietmar Fischer. Animal models as well as human cells have shown that Cnicin significantly accelerates axon (nerve fibres) growth. The study ...

Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security was awarded a $10 million Department of Energy grant in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to create a pilot regional cybersecurity research and operations center to protect the electric power grid against cyberattacks.  The total value of the project is $12.5 million, with the additional $2.5 million coming from Auburn University and other strategic partners. The center, officially named the Southeast Region Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, or SERC3, will bring together experts from the private sector, academia and government to share information and generate innovative ...

People are using “they/them” pronouns more often according to a new study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Led by UNC-Chapel Hill researcher Jennifer E. Arnold, Ph.D., the new research paper published on April 14 in Glossa Psycholinguistics provides the first evidence of how people use “they/them” when talking about a specific person in a spoken storytelling context.  “Within the last decade, people have started to use ‘they’ as a personal pronoun, often because they identify as nonbinary or gender nonconforming,” said Arnold, a professor ...

A new study published today in Nature Medicine unveils a significant breakthrough in the understanding and early detection of multiple sclerosis (MS). Researchers have identified a unique autoantibody signature present in approximately 10% of patients with MS years before the onset of clinical symptoms. Autoantibodies are basically antibodies that are supposed to fight off invaders but end up turning against one’s own body, causing problems like autoimmune diseases. Utilizing the U.S. Department ...

 Annals of Internal Medicine presents breaking scientific news at ACP’s Internal Medicine Meeting 2024   Authors discuss evidence-based research on obesity, antibiotic resistance, and type 2 diabetes   BOSTON April 19, 2024 – Today at ACP’s annual meeting, Internal Medicine Meeting 2024, Annals of Internal Medicine presented three breaking scientific research articles during a live scientific plenary session that featured the authors of those articles. The articles were published in ACP’s flagship journal concurrent with the live meeting presentation. During the session, New in Annals of Internal Medicine: Hear it First from the Authors, the authors ...

Scientists at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and their international collaborators have recently developed a new method for efficiently extracting information from galaxy surveys. Their research results were published online in the latest issue of Communications Physics. Massive galaxy redshift surveys are powerful tools for probing the Universe in this era of precision cosmology. By observing a great number of spectra from distant galaxies, astronomers are able to create density fields of galaxies ...

Researchers have developed a new shoe insole technology that helps reduce the risk of diabetic foot ulcers, a dangerous open sore that can lead to hospitalization and leg, foot or toe amputations. “The goal of this innovative insole technology is to mitigate the risk of diabetic foot ulcers by addressing one of their most significant causes: skin and soft tissue breakdown due to repetitive stress on the foot during walking,” said Muthu B.J. Wijesundara, principal research scientist at The University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI). Affecting about 39 million people in the U.S., diabetes can damage the small blood vessels that supply blood to the nerves, ...

KINGSTON, R.I. – April 17, 2024 – Migration and reproduction are two of the most demanding events in a bird’s annual cycle, so much so that the vast majority of migratory birds separate the two tasks into different times of the year. But a study by University of Rhode Island researchers has found direct evidence of a species – the American woodcock, a migratory shorebird from eastern and central North America – that overlaps periods of migration and reproduction, a rare breeding strategy known as “itinerant breeding.” Their work, backed by collaborators across the East Coast, was published today in the biological sciences journal Proceedings ...

DETROIT — Amiangshu Bosu, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Wayne State University, received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to formulate better practices involving peer code review. Peer code review is a mandatory software verification practice among most open source and commercial software development organizations. In this practice, one or more peers inspect and approve a code change before integrating it into a project's repository. As developers spend significant effort daily ...

Cancer is the monster of our society. Last year alone, more than 600,000 people in the United States died from cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. The relentless pursuit of understanding this complex disease has shaped medical progress on developing treatment procedures that are less invasive while still highly effective.  Immunotherapy is on the rise as a possible solution. Immunotherapy involves harnessing the power of the body’s immune system to fight against cancer cells. Researchers in the College of Engineering ...