The implementation of primary health care (PHC) over the last two decades has prevented more than 300,000 child deaths in four Latin American countries, and could prevent more than 140,000 by 2030 in a scenario of economic crisis. This is the main conclusion of a study coordinated by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by “la Caixa” Foundation, published in The Lancet Global Health. The 2018 Astana Declaration highlighted the critical role of PHC in ensuring that everyone enjoys the highest possible standard of health, and in achieving universal health coverage. The Declaration also stressed the ...

WEHI division head and pioneer of ubiquitination Professor David Komander has been elected a Fellow of the esteemed Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy.   Prof Komander was recognised for his significant research contributions towards understanding ubiquitin, the ‘kiss of death’ protein which tells our cells which proteins to break down or recycle – a vital process that helps cells stay healthy and function correctly. Prof Komander’s work has helped unravel the ‘ubiquitin code’ that enables ubiquitin to perform many ...

By Darrin S. Joy A molecular biologist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences may have found a new “rule of biology.” A rule of biology, sometimes called a biological law, describes a recognized pattern or truism among living organisms. Allen’s rule, for example, states that among warm-blooded animals, those found in colder areas have shorter, thicker limbs (to conserve body heat) than those in hotter regions, which need more body surface area to dissipate heat.  Zoologist Joel Allen formulated this idea in 1877, and though he wasn’t the first or the last to present a rule of biology, his ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Scripps Research chemists have accomplished a long elusive feat in synthetic chemistry: the invention of a broadly useful method for constructing “gamma chiral centers” on simple starting compounds called carboxylic acids. The method, published on May 16, 2024 in Science, significantly extends the ability of chemists to build and modify complex pharmaceutical molecules and other valuable chemical products. The term chiral refers to a type of asymmetry that allows some chemical compounds to exist in left-handed and right-handed forms. Often, only one of these forms has the ...

The SIAM Annual Meeting provides a broad view of the state of the art in applied mathematics, computational and data science, and their applications through invited presentations, prize lectures, minitutorials, minisymposia, contributed presentations, and posters. END ...

In the age of generative-AI and large language models (LLMs), massive amounts of inauthentic content can be rapidly broadcasted on social media platforms. As a result, malicious actors are becoming more sophisticated, hijacking hashtags, artificially amplifying misleading content, and mass resharing propaganda.  These actions are often orchestrated by state-sponsored information operations (IOs), which attempt to sway public opinion during major geopolitical events such as the US elections, the Covid-19 pandemic, and more.  Combating ...

The rate of colorectal cancer screenings more than doubled when patients were given a choice between which type of screening they wanted—a take-home kit or colonoscopy—compared to those who were only offered the colonoscopy, according to new research led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Facilitated through a community health center in which about half of patients had Medicaid insurance, the study—published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology—provides insights about how to boost screenings among groups ...

HOUSTON, May 16, 2024 – Thermoelectric materials could play an important role in the clean energy transition, as they can produce electricity from sources of heat that would otherwise go to waste without generating additional greenhouse gases or requiring large up-front investment. But their promise has been slowed by the fact that most current thermoelectric materials don’t efficiently produce enough power to be useful for many practical applications. The search for new, more efficient materials involving complex chemical ...

About The Study: The results of this study suggest that artificial intelligence may be associated with enhanced patient care and oncological decision-making in patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma through detection of localized versus advanced cancer stages. Further model refinement and external validation with electronic health records at different institutions are necessary to improve algorithm accuracy and clinical applicability. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Antoine Eskander, M.D., email antoine.eskander@mail.utoronto.ca. To access the ...

Water shortages are expanding across the Earth. This is particularly acute in desert areas of the Middle East that are subject to both drought and extreme conditions such as flooding. As a result of these uncertainties, there is an increasing reliance on shallow aquifers to mitigate these shortages. However, the characteristics of these aquifers remain poorly understood due to the reliance on sporadic well logs for their management. To address this challenge a team of researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering along with collaborators ...

Women’s health experts from the Raquel and Jaime Gilinski Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai will present new research at the 2024 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting in San Francisco from May 17–19. Please let me know if you would like to coordinate an interview about their forthcoming presentations. Mount Sinai obstetricians and gynecologists are also available to comment on breaking news and other trending topics on prenatal care and women’s ...

In the United States, about 30-40% of donor hearts aren't considered for transplant due to inadequate function in the donor.  This creates a drop in the number of donated hearts that are available to be matched with someone who needs a heart transplant. A team at University of Michigan Health led by Alvaro Rojas-Pena, M.D., a research investigator with the section of transplantation surgery at University of Michigan Health has spent the past eight years looking at better ways to transport organs for donation, specifically hearts, to improve the number of organs ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Large language model-based chatbots have the potential to promote healthy changes in behavior. But researchers from the ACTION Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found that the artificial intelligence tools don’t effectively recognize certain motivational states of users and therefore don’t provide them with appropriate information. Michelle Bak, a doctoral student in information sciences, and information sciences professor Jessie Chin reported their research in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Large language model-based chatbots — also known as generative conversational agents ...

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Securities and Exchange Commission acts as Wall Street’s traffic cop, fining companies for such infractions as securities fraud and insider trading. New research from Texas McCombs finds another parallel between the SEC and traffic enforcement: pressure to meet self-imposed quotas. Assistant accounting professors Matthew Kubic and Sara Toynbee find that the agency files twice as many enforcement cases in September as in other months, a phenomenon they call the September spike. They also link the increase in cases to smaller fines that reduce what the government takes in from violators. The reason for the ...

As researchers search for new insights into Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), there is an ever-greater need for data from clinical trials and research studies. However, many people living with ALS are not certain how to get involved with clinical research, and the demographics of current ALS clinical trial participants are not representative of the full population of people living with the disease worldwide.  To address the critical need for diversity and accessibility in ALS clinical trials and research studies, the Illinois-based Les Turner ALS Foundation has published a new ...

Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago announces the launch of the Journal of Health Advocacy (JHA), the first of its kind peer-reviewed open access journal housed within the organization’s Patrick M. Magoon Institute for Healthy Communities. This new journal bridges the gap between knowledge and action to empower individuals and groups to address real-world challenges to health equity. It opened for submissions May 1, 2024. “Disseminating and recognizing advocacy that is so often successful ...

NEW ORLEANS, La. – Ochsner Health is proud to announce its recognition as one of America’s Best Employers for Diversity for 2024. This honor, awarded by Forbes in collaboration with market research firm Statista, places Ochsner Health among the elite 500 companies leading the way in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the United States. Dedicated to enhancing access and opportunities for all its employees, Ochsner Health is a frontrunner in fostering a professional environment where diversity is celebrated, and every employee is empowered to contribute ...

About The Study: This study found significant sex differences in primary care–based chronic kidney disease management among patients at a care network affiliated with an academic medical center in the U.S., with females overall receiving worse care than males. Though many differences were of small magnitude, the disparity deserves further examination.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Jorge A. Rodriguez, M.D., email jarodriguez1@partners.org. To access the embargoed study: Visit our ...

Being stressed while witnessing injustice may push your brain towards altruism, according to a study published on May 14th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Huagen Wang from Beijing Normal University, China, and colleagues. It takes more cognitive effort to punish others than it does to help them. Studies show that when witnessing an act of injustice while stressed, people tend to behave selflessly, preferring to help the victim than to punish the offender. This aligns with theories proposing that distinct brain networks drive intuitive, fast decisions and deliberate, slow decisions, ...

Organic solid-state lasers (OSLs) hold immense promise for a wide range of applications due to their flexibility, colour tunability, and efficiency. However, they are difficult to make, and with over 150,000 possible experiments required to conduct to find successful new materials, discovering them all would be the work of several lifetimes. In fact, in the previous few decades, only 10-20 new OSL materials have been tested. Researchers with the Acceleration Consortium based at the University of Toronto, took up this challenge and used self-driving lab (SDL) technology that, once set up, enabled them to synthesize and test over 1000 potential OSL materials ...

Sea otters are one of the few animals that use tools to access their food, and a new study has found that individual sea otters that use tools — most of whom are female — are able to eat larger prey and reduce tooth damage when their preferred prey becomes depleted. The study researchers and their enlisted volunteer “otter spotters” followed 196 radio-tagged southern sea otters off the coast of California to better understand how the threatened species uses tools in a rapidly changing environment. The research team from The University ...

Military physicians give patients whose military rank is higher better treatment than those who rank lower, according to a new study involving 1.5 million patient encounters. The findings provide evidence that the powerful enjoy better resources and support in a clinical context, often at the expense of the less powerful. “Our concern does not lie with the doctor-patient power imbalance itself, which is likely necessary for effective physician performance,” write the authors. “Rather, it lies with the inequitable variation in how that power is exercised, with the most vulnerable patients likely bearing the burden of this disparity, as ...

Using tools, like shells and rocks, to open their often thick-shelled mollusk prey increases foraging success in sea otters and protects their teeth from damage by allowing the animals to eat prey that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. The findings suggest that this behavior is a necessity for the survival of some otters in environments where competition is high and preferred prey is in short supply. Sea otters are well-known tool users. Aside from crushing prey with their teeth, sea otters have been observed using rocks, shells, human litter, and even the hulls of boats to bash open hard prey, including ...

Scientists have made several advances in the design of a class of HIV vaccines that could offer broad protection against the virus, according to four new research papers published this week in Science, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Immunology. “The studies […] exemplify progress in the rational design of [germline-targeting] HIV-1 vaccines, and what is being learned will guide [germline-targeting] programs for inducing [broadly neutralizing antibodies] against other human pathogens,” Rogier Sanders and John Moore write in a related ...

The energy invested in animal reproduction is as much as 10 times greater than previously estimated when the metabolic load of bearing and caring for offspring is accounted for, according to a new study. The findings fundamentally challenge longstanding theories and biological models of animal growth and life histories. The act of reproduction is one of the largest energy investments an animal can make. This investment includes direct cost, the energy directly invested in the offspring themselves, and indirect costs, the energy expended to create, carry, and care for offspring before they are born. While the direct costs of reproduction are well understood, the indirect ...