The study, published in the journal Addiction and funded by Cancer Research UK, looked at survey data on vaping habits in England, Wales and Scotland before and after the UK Government announced plans to restrict vaping, including by banning disposable vapes, in January 2024. The team found that the proportion of people vaping increased by nearly a quarter each year from January 2022 to January 2024, but stayed constant between January 2024 and January this year, including for young people. After January 2024, they also found a substantial decline in the proportion of vapers mainly using disposable e-cigarettes. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the proportion ...

TAMPA, Fla. (April 15, 2025) – The University of South Florida recently hosted the inaugural Invention Convention Florida at the University of South Florida, an event noted for showcasing the creativity and problem-solving of the next generation of changemakers. Moere than 150 K–12 student inventors from across the state visited USF’s Tampa campus on April 12 to present original solutions to real-world challenges ranging environmental issues to everyday inconveniences. Invention Convention Florida, ...

Prescribed burns literally fight fire with more fire. Often referred to as a “beneficial fire,” they target areas at risk for wildfires and burn away material that could otherwise fuel a future blaze. However, all fires, whether accidental or planned, produce smoke that can cause health and respiratory issues, especially in nearby communities. Burning fires release harmful chemicals, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), that are carcinogenic – PAHs can cause cancer, lung damage, and lead to weakened immunity in those who inhale smoke.  Recently, in a study published in Atmospheric ...

Inactive ingredients in agricultural, pharmaceutical and other common products have typically been excluded from consideration as potential contaminants in drinking water. However, while these chemicals are inert in certain products, they still can pose hazards when combined with other materials during the drinking water treatment process. A new study from researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis reveals how large this impact might be. Jean Brownell, a graduate student working with Kimberly Parker, associate professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering, ...

UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Scott Winton has been wading through thick, smelly muck in the tropics for almost a decade. He wouldn’t have it any other way. As a wetland ecologist and biogeochemist, he’s been hard at work investigating an important and mysterious topic: peatlands.   Peatlands are a special type of wetland with enormous potential to either help or hurt global efforts to address climate change. If we want peatlands on our side, we’ll have to protect them. But that’s difficult to do, since we still don’t ...

CLEVELAND – A new study from University Hospitals Connor Whole Health found that it was feasible to conduct a hybrid music therapy intervention for patients with heart failure and patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Participants reported positive effects on their mental health, and the pilot uncovered solutions to improve future research with this population. The findings from this study were recently published in BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies. Patients with chronic illnesses such as heart failure and COPD face significant challenges due ...

Heitor Medeiros, MD, and A. Sassan Sabouri, MD, of the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, are the lead and corresponding authors, respectively, of a paper published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia (BJA).  How would you summarize your study?  Spinal anesthesia is widely used to numb patients during surgery, but its effects sometimes wear off too soon. Many anesthetists have experimented with adding extra drugs to extend pain relief. Dexmedetomidine demonstrated results in multiple randomized clinical trials suggesting it could prolong numbness ...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  April 15, 2025   BATON ROUGE – The 2025 Bray Obesity Symposium welcomes all health physicians and researchers interested in the latest in metabolic health to register for the on-demand online offerings. The online-only content is available to access upon registration, and the symposium has been designated by the American Board of Obesity Medicine, or ABOM, as a Group One Primary Medicine Continuing Medical Education partner. The symposium is an intensive Board Review Course in preparation for the ABOM’s certification exam, including materials ...

Orthodontic treatments often take years, but a breakthrough discovery could drastically shorten this period. Researchers have uncovered that ATF6, a protein activated in macrophages during corticotomy, accelerates tooth movement by promoting inflammation and boosting the production of TNFα, a key factor in bone remodeling. This finding paves the way for faster, more efficient orthodontic procedures, minimizing both treatment time and patient discomfort. The study highlights the potential for non-invasive therapies that could reshape the future of orthodontic care. Corticotomy, a surgical procedure aimed at accelerating tooth movement, ...

SAN ANTONIO — April 15, 2025 —The Southwest Research Institute-led Lucy mission is preparing to survey the next target in its epic 4-billion-mile, 12-year, 11-asteroid tour. On April 20, 2025, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will fly past the three-mile-wide main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson as a test run to the main event: visiting the never-before-explored Trojan asteroids in the Jupiter system. For billions of years, these mysterious space rocks have been gravitationally trapped in two swarms leading and trailing Jupiter in orbit around the Sun, holding clues to the formation of our solar system. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will be the ...

New bat cell lines and reagents help to study bat antiviral immune responses against hantaviruses and coronaviruses   In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/3E5BYAJ Article title: Expanding the bat toolbox: Carollia perspicillata bat cell lines and reagents enable the characterization of viral susceptibility and innate immune responses Author countries: Canada, United States Funding: see manuscript END ...

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: https://plos.io/3RuCJ9v Article title: Genome-wide nucleosome footprints of plasma cfDNA predict preterm birth: A case-control study Author countries: China, United Kingdom Funding: This work was supported by project grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [81600404 to JT, 82270600 to JT, 81871177 to FY, 82271711 to XY, 82173001 to ZG]; Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation [2022A1515220204 to JT; 2024A1515012792 to ZG]; Guangzhou Key Laboratory ...

DALLAS, April 15, 2025 — Ferhaan Ahmad, M.D., Ph.D., FAHA, is the new editor-in-chief of Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Heart Association, effective with the journal’s April issue, published today. Ahmad is the founding director of the Cardiovascular Genomics Program and associate professor of internal medicine-cardiovascular medicine at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in Iowa City, Iowa. He takes the helm leading Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine from Kiran Musunuru, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H, FAHA, who served as interim editor-in-chief ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – A "remarkable" transformation is underway in American religious life, new Cornell-led research finds: Large numbers are leaving organized religion – not in favor of secular rationality, but to pursue spirituality in ways that better align with their individual values. This reimagining of religion outside traditional institutions fits within broader social changes that have prioritized individual fulfilment and “finding” oneself, including shifting views about gender and sexuality and the rise of the internet. Spanning political views, it also reflects a revolt against ...

A Johns Hopkins Medicine-led analysis of medical information gathered on a diverse group of almost 250,000 people over four years has significantly clarified the link between the “exclusive” use of e-cigarettes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as high blood pressure in a sub-group of adults 30 to 70 years of age.     The findings, supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and published in the March. 15 edition of Nicotine & Tobacco Research, underscore the potential risks of e-cigarette ...

On January 17, 2025, Professor ZHANG Zhen’s team at the Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), reported a solid-state proton gating membrane with an ultrahigh gating ratio of 5,740, surpassing existing technologies. The study was published in Nature Communications. Biological ion channels exhibit strong gating effects due to their zero-current closed state. However, artificial nanochannels often demonstrate weaker gating capabilities because larger nanopores cannot fully block ion transport when in a closed ...

Liver cancer can arise spontaneously from healthy liver tissue. Recently, however, researchers have discovered an increasing correlation between some liver cancers and non-viral chronic liver disease (CLD). One liver cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), is associated with CLD in about 15–25% of cases. While increasing awareness and screening of cancers has improved the ability to detect liver cancer at earlier stages when it is more effectively treated, cancer prevention is always a primary goal of both healthcare providers and biomedical researchers. The increasing prevalence of ...

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2025 – With millions of dollars at stake across tournaments and more than 45 million regular annual participants, bowling continues to reign as a top sport in the U.S. A unified model that predicts how a bowling ball behaves down the lane, however, remains elusive. In AIP Advances, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Princeton, MIT, the University of New Mexico, Loughborough University, and Swarthmore College share a model that identifies the optimal location for bowling ball placement. Employing a system of ...

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2025 – Surround-sound speakers can immerse you in a multimedia experience, but what if there was a speaker that could completely re-create a three-dimensional soundscape? The AudioDome is more than just a loudspeaker arrangement — it’s a dome of speakers that can create an immersive sound experience that reproduces sound sources at any location when the listener is placed in the middle. In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of older women with screen-detected estrogen receptor–positive or human epidermal growth factor receptor 2–negative breast cancer, prior screening mammography was associated with earlier stage at breast cancer diagnosis and lower breast cancer mortality. These findings support the potential for routine screening to improve breast cancer outcomes. As with all observational studies, this study is limited by the potential effects of other differences between the screening and nonscreening groups. Corresponding Author: To contact the ...

Researchers at Pitt have produced the most detailed image to date of a bacteriophage–phage for short–that has allowed them to see for the first time the structural makeup of the part of the phage that directly attaches to its target Mycobacterium cell. “Now you've got like a spec sheet for going in and designing phages so that they’ll bind to different kinds of cells,” said Graham Hatfull, the Eberly Family Professor of Biotechnology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. That’s important because of what a phage, which is a kind of virus, does after it binds to a bacterial cell: it pierces a hole in the cell membrane and injects ...

University of Virginia researcher Natasha D. Sheybani, PhD, has received $5.5 million from the federal Department of Defense to support her cutting-edge efforts to use focused sound waves to improve our immune system’s ability to battle breast cancer. Sheybani, the research director of UVA’s Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center, was the only scientist in the nation selected to receive a Breast Cancer Research Program Era of Hope Scholar Award in the latest funding round; she is UVA’s first recipient of the award. She will use the grant to advance her research into the potential of focused ultrasound to improve the safety, ...

“Our results indicate a strong association between certain genotypes of the SNP -765 G>C of the PTGS2 gene and BPH.” BUFFALO, NY – April 15, 2025 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget, Volume 16, on April 4, 2025, titled “Association between two single nucleotide polymorphisms of the Prostaglandin-Endoperoxide Synthase 1 and 2 genes and cell proliferative prostatic diseases in Lebanon.” The team of researchers led by first author Brock J. Sheehan and corresponding author Ruhul H. Kuddus, from Utah Valley University, discovered that a specific genetic variation ...

Teoxane reinforces its commitment to scientific innovation with the publication of a new study in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open, providing robust preclinical and clinical evidence on the safety, biocompatibility, and performance of RHA®4* in midface augmentation. The study confirms that RHA®4[1], a resilient hyaluronic acid filler designed for dynamic facial areas[2],[3], integrates harmoniously within subcutaneous adipose tissue, preserving its natural biomechanics while delivering effective volume restoration. ...

Herndon, VA, March 25, 2025 -- About two million people in the United States lack access to running water or indoor plumbing in their homes. Another 30 million people live where drinking water systems violate safety rules. Water privatization -- the transfer of public water systems ownership and/or management to private companies -- has been proposed as a potential solution to provide more Americans with safe, clean drinking water. But opponents argue that private companies may prioritize profits over public needs. To investigate how ...