As we age, our cognitive and motor functions deteriorate, which in turn affects our independence and overall quality of life. Research efforts to ameliorate or even completely abolish this have given rise to technologies that show a lot of promise. Among these is non-invasive brain stimulation: a term encompassing a set of techniques that can affect brain functions externally and noninvasively, without the need for surgery or implants. One such promising technique, in particular, is anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (atDCS), which uses ...

Harvesting water from the air and decreasing humidity are crucial to realizing a more comfortable life for humanity. Water-adsorption polymers have been playing a key part in atmospheric water harvesting and desiccant air conditioning, but desorption so that the polymers can be efficiently reused has been an issue. Now, Osaka Metropolitan University researchers have found a way to make desorption of these polymers more efficient. Usually, heat of around 100°C is required to desorb these polymers, but Graduate School of Engineering student Daisuke Ikegawa, Assistant Professor Arisa Fukatsu, ...

A large new population study of men over 45 indicates insulin resistance may be an important risk factor for the development of the world’s most common heart valve disease – aortic stenosis (AS).    Published today in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Medicine, the findings are believed to be the first to highlight this previously unrecognised risk factor for the disease.    It is hoped that by demonstrating this link between AS and insulin resistance – when cells fail to respond effectively to insulin and the body makes more than necessary to maintain normal glucose ...

Effective immunity hinges on the ability to sense infection and cellular transformation. In humans, there is a specialised molecule on the surface of cells termed MR1. MR1 allows sensing of certain small molecule metabolites derived from cellular and microbial sources; however, the breadth of metabolite sensing is unclear. Published in PNAS, researchers at the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute have identified a form of Vitamin B6 bound to MR1 as a means of engaging tumour-reactive immune cells. The work involved an international collaborative team co-led by researchers from the University of Melbourne. According ...

    A collaborative effort by the research groups of Professor Haruhiko Fuwa from Chuo University and Professor Masashi Tsuda from Kochi University has culminated in the structure elucidation and total synthesis of anticancer marine natural products, iriomoteolide-1a and -1b. These natural products were originally isolated from the marine dinoflagellate collected off the Iriomote Island, Okinawa, Japan.   Because of its potent anticancer activity, iriomoteolide-1a is an intriguing natural product that attract immense attention from the chemical community around the globe. ...

A storeroom specimen that changed the origins of modern lizards by millions of years has had its identity confirmed. The tiny skeleton, unearthed from Triassic-aged rocks in a quarry near Bristol, is at least 205 million years old and the oldest modern-type lizard on record. Recently, the University of Bristol team’s findings came under question, but fresh analysis, published today in Royal Society Open Science, proves that the fossil is related to modern anguimorphs such as anguids and monitors. The discovery ...

If everyone in the United States population was as active as the top 25 per cent, individuals over the age of 40 could add five years to their life, according to a new study led by Griffith University researchers.   Physical activity has long been known to be good for health, however estimates have varied regarding how much benefit could be gained from a defined amount of activity, both for individuals and for populations.  This latest study used accelerometry to gain an accurate view of the population’s physical activity levels instead of relying on survey responses as per other studies, and found the benefits were around twice as strong ...

Plants need light to grow, but too much light can induce damage to the photosynthetic complex known as photosystem II. It is known that plants adapted to growing under full sun repair this light-induced damage more. But this repair activity slows down in colder temperatures. An Osaka Metropolitan University-led international research team has now found some clues to how plants survive in colder regions. Graduate School of Science Associate Professor Riichi Oguchi and colleagues from Australia, Austria, and Japan grew Arabidopsis thaliana (commonly ...

Public health recommendations generally suggest drinking eight cups of water a day. And many people just assume it’s healthy to drink plenty of water.   Now researchers at UC San Francisco have taken a systematic look at the available evidence. They concluded that drinking enough water can help with weight loss and prevent kidney stones, as well as migraines, urinary tract infections and low blood pressure.   “For such a ubiquitous and simple intervention, the evidence hasn’t been clear and the benefits were not well-established, so we wanted to take a closer look,” said senior and corresponding author Benjamin Breyer, MD, MAS, the Taube ...

Men with cardiovascular disease risk factors, including obesity, face brain health decline a decade earlier—from their mid 50s to mid 70s—than similarly affected women who are most susceptible from their mid 60s to mid 70s, suggest the findings of a long term study, published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.   The most vulnerable regions of the brain are those involved in processing auditory information, aspects of visual perception, emotional processing and memory, with ...

An irregular sleep-wake cycle is associated with a heightened risk of major cardiovascular events, such as heart attack and stroke, even for those who clock up the recommended nightly hours of shut-eye, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Most studies looking at the impact of sleep on health have focused on sleep length and less is known about the impact of sleep patterns, in particular the impact of irregular sleep—defined as variations in the time a person goes to sleep and wakes up.  To explore this further, the researchers drew on 72,269 people aged 40 to 79, taking part in the UK ...

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression and often experience more severe physical symptoms. This gender difference is particularly evident during reproductive years and dramatically impacts the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. However, although links between mental health and reproductive health have been found, the associations have remained underexplored. In a new study published in Briefings in Bioinformatics, researchers from China and the UK have found that depression can increase the chances of a person experiencing menstrual pain (dysmenorrhea). Shuhe Liu, lead author of the study and a  PhD ...

PHILADELPHIA — (Nov. 26, 2024) — The Wistar Institute’s Alessandro Gardini, Ph.D., and lab have shed new light on how certain biological processes determine the development of neural cells. Their findings on a molecular “bridge” complex demonstrate a new level of detail in the understanding of early neural development — which is fundamental for the further understanding of neurodevelopmental syndromes. The new paper, “The enhancer module of integrator controls cell identity and early neural fate commitment” was published in the journal, Nature Cell Biology. “By achieving a better understanding of how the nervous system develops ...

A team of researchers led by Anna-Karin Gustavsson at Rice University has developed an innovative imaging platform that promises to improve our understanding of cellular structures at the nanoscale. This platform, called soTILT3D for single-objective tilted light sheet with 3D point spread functions (PSFs), offers significant advancements in super-resolution microscopy, enabling fast and precise 3D imaging of multiple cellular structures while the extracellular environment can be controlled and flexibly adjusted. The research was recently published in Nature Communications. Studying ...

Enron. Lehman Brothers. More recently, General Electric and Supermicro. During the past quarter century, a variety of high-profile companies have been caught cooking their books. But they’re often not caught before they’ve cost investors billions of dollars. That’s why analysts have long tried to sniff out businesses that may be using questionable or flat-out illegal accounting tricks to hide poor performance. New research from Urooj Khan, accounting professor and the Deloitte & Touche Centennial Faculty Fellow at Texas McCombs, proposes a new and more effective way to gauge companies’ “earnings quality.” In analyses of corporate ...

With 2024 on track to be declared the hottest on record, scientists from IIASA and Columbia University have noticed that specific regions are consistently more affected by extreme temperatures. A new study provides the first worldwide map of these regional climate danger zones. Amid the continued upward march in average temperatures over the past decades, a recent surge of record shattering extreme heat waves raise questions about the degree to which climate models can provide adequate estimates of relations between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks. The study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides the ...

On Nov. 18, the heart failure and transplantation team at Emory University Hospital (EUH) made history, performing the first-ever surgical implantation in the United States of a brand-new type of ventricular assist device (VAD), which provides crucial care to patients with failing hearts. An expert team led by veteran cardiothoracic surgeon Mani Daneshmand, MD, successfully implanted a novel magnetically levitated pump, a VAD that has been specifically designed for patient ease and long-term health. The BrioVAD System, made by BrioHealth Solutions Inc., was authorized by the FDA to begin clinical trials ...

Congenital heart defects are the most common form of human birth defect, but we still don’t fully understand what causes them. Previous research had suggested that some heart defects could be triggered by problems with the placenta, the organ that provides oxygen and nutrients to the developing embryo. Now, researchers at Nanjing University, China have confirmed this link by focusing on a protein whose levels are reduced in many patients with congenital heart defects, called SLC25A1. SLC25A1 plays a key role in transporting ...

Chelsey Schlechter, MPH, PhD, Huntsman Cancer Institute investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah (the U), has been selected as a Cancer Moonshot Scholar. Schlechter is one of only eleven researchers in the U.S. chosen for the prestigious program this year, which aims to both advance impactful cancer research and broaden the research workforce. For the project, Schlechter and her team partnered with the Association for Utah Community Health and Utah Community Health Centers—organizations which ...

A new study led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers a solution to water scarcity during droughts amid the tug of economic development, population growth and climate uncertainty for water users in Western U.S. states. The proposed two-way leasing contracts would coordinate agricultural-to-urban leasing during periods of drought and urban-to-agricultural leasing during wet periods, benefiting both urban and agricultural water users. “Water markets are an important tool for allocating water in the Western U.S., and other water-scarce regions around the world, but they are often slow to respond to drought, ...

Alexandria, VA, USA - The Journal of Dental Research (JDR) has announced the publication of a new issue of Advances in Dental Research, a supplement to the Journal of Dental Research (JDR), entitled, "Women in Dental, Clinical, and Translational Research.” The 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR) and the Canadian Association for Dental Research featured a two-day “Meeting Within a Meeting” on the topic of “Women in Dental, Clinical, and Translational Research” organized by AADOCR Then- President Alexandre Vieira. During these sessions, speakers were challenged to reflect on ...

Team Unlocks New Insights on Pulsar Signals November 26, 2024, Mountain View, CA – Dr. Sofia Sheikh from the SETI Institute led a study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals—the spinning remnants of massive stars—distort as they travel through space. This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, was performed by a multi-year cohort of undergraduate researchers in the Penn State branch of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory student club. Maura McLaughlin, Chair, Eberly Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, created the Pulsar Search Collaboratory to engage ...

Great apes track events with their eyes in the same way that humans do, according to a study published November 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Vanessa Wilson from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and colleagues. When watching a cat chase a mouse, humans will alternate looking at cat and mouse, using the information to connect the two into what’s called an agent-patient relationship—with the cat as the agent and the mouse as the patient. This cognitive mechanism is thought to be ...

Routine screening to detect risk factors for heart disease dropped sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic in England, and some key measurements, such as blood pressure readings, may still lag behind pre-pandemic levels. These findings are reported in a new study by Frederick Ho and Naveed Sattar of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, and colleagues published November 26th in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine. During the COVID-19 pandemic, patients went without routine face-to-face health checks, which are important for detecting common cardiometabolic ...

While NASA’s NEOWISE telescope ended its journey through space on Nov. 1, 2024, the team at IPAC, a science center at Caltech, was working on one further gift from the prolific mission.  The final data release from NEOWISE was released to the astronomy community just two weeks later, on Nov. 14, encompassing over 26 million images and nearly 200 billion sources detected by the telescope. And today, IPAC is releasing six new images from the mission’s archival data as a tribute to this landmark project, available here: https://www.astropix.org/link/3b2x  NEOWISE ...