SRI today announced that researchers are developing a new treatment that aims to provide a better option to fight malaria, particularly for people in low-income and rural regions. Researchers in SRI’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Lab are working on an affordable, shelf-stable anti-malarial drug formulation that could provide months of protection against the mosquito-borne disease with just a single injection, which means that individuals would no longer have to worry about missing a dose. Additionally, it has a low propensity for resistance and can be ...

In a recent study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggest the cell’s messenger RNA (mRNA) — the major translator and regulator of genetic material — along with a critical protein called ZAK, spur the cell’s initial response to UV radiation damage and play a critical role in whether the cell lives or dies. While UV radiation has long been known to damage DNA, it also damages mRNA, and the latest findings, published June 5 in Cell, indicate that mRNAs act as first responders in telling the cells how to manage the stress. “RNA is a canary in the coal mine. It’s telling the cell, ‘We’ve got major damage here and ...

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new two-photon polymerization technique that uses two lasers to 3D print complex high-resolution structures. The advance could make this 3D printing process less expensive, helping it find wider use in a variety of applications. Two-photon polymerization is an advanced additive manufacturing technique that traditionally uses femtosecond lasers to polymerize materials in a precise, 3D manner. Although this process works well for making high-resolution microstructures, it isn’t widely used in manufacturing ...

The American Geriatrics Society extends its warmest congratulations to ADGAP President George Kuchel, MD, CM, FRCP on his appointment as a member expert of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). ACIP develops recommendations on the safe use of vaccines in the United States. Dr. Kuchel, who became President of the Association of Directors of Geriatrics Academic Programs in spring 2024, is Director of both the UConn Center on Aging and the Claude D Pepper Older Americans Independence Center at the University of Connecticut. He has significant expertise and knowledge in vaccines and immunology, particularly in older adults, including performing ...

Mohammad Moshahid Khan, PhD, principal investigator and associate professor in the Department of Neurology in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, was recently awarded a $308,000 grant from the Department of Defense for a study that will investigate the role of the gut microbiome in dystonia, a movement disorder of abnormal postures and involuntary twisting or repetitive movements, to improve neurobehavioral outcomes. Jianfeng Xiao, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Neurology, is the co-investigator of the study. Although ...

LA JOLLA, CA and NEW YORK, NY—A major challenge in developing a vaccine for HIV is that the virus mutates fast—very fast. Although a person initially becomes infected with one or a few HIV strains, the virus replicates and mutates quickly, resulting in a “swarm” of viral strains existing in a single body. But scientists at Scripps Research; IAVI; the Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard; La Jolla Institute for Immunology; and additional institutions have conducted a series of preclinical ...

A Global Heat Early Warning system is now essential, and requires planning in four key areas to overcome barriers and enable successful implementation, per new review. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000437 Article Title: Preventing heat-related deaths: The urgent need for a global early warning system for heat Author Countries: Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, US Funding: CB,IMO, CG and JT are funded by Horizon Europe through the HIGH horizon project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme (grant number 101057843). IMO and CG are also ...

Electrons have an intrinsic angular momentum, the so-called spin, which means that they can align themselves along a magnetic field, much like a compass needle. In addition to the electric charge of electrons, which determines their behaviour in electronic circuits, their spin is increasingly used for storing and processing data. Already now, one can buy MRAM memory elements (magnetic random access memories), in which information is stored in very small but still classical magnets – that is, ...

Already at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of Brazilian researchers pioneered in showing why SARS-CoV-2 infection tends to be more severe in diabetic patients. Now, the same team based at the Institute of Biology of the State University of Campinas (IB-UNICAMP) has discovered one of the reasons why obese people who do not have diabetes or even insulin resistance also have an increased risk of developing the severe form of the disease.  “New experiments show that the molecular mechanisms are quite different in the two cases,” Pedro Moraes-Vieira, a professor at IB-UNICAMP, who is coordinating ...

Getting individuals to act in the best interest of society can be a tricky balancing act, one that often walks a fine line between trying to convince people to act of their own volition, versus passing laws and regulations that make these actions compulsory.  In a new paper, published in the journal PNAS Nexus, SFI External Professor Stefani Crabtree (Utah State University) and Science Board Fellow Simon Levin (Princeton University), together with Colin Wren (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs) and Avinash ...

“If there was any doubt, this discovery demonstrates that genomics, extensively deployed over the past two decades, still has much to reveal to us.” BUFFALO, NY- July 2, 2024 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on June 20, 2024, entitled, “Genomics has more to reveal.” In this new editorial, researchers Laurène Fenwarth and Nicolas Duployez from the University of Lille and CHU Lille discuss molecular and cytogenetic analyses that are now used to identify mutations and structural variants defining distinct subtypes of acute myeloid leukemias (AML) ...

The incidence of low birth weight rose sharply in India amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame. Globally, 1 in 4 newborns has a low birth weight (less than 5.5 pounds), and the problem disproportionately affects low- and middle-income countries — particularly in South Asia, home to approximately one-fourth of the world’s population. Santosh Kumar, associate professor of development and global health economics at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, co-authored the study published in Communications Medicine, a Nature series journal. “This research shows that low birth weight became more common in India ...

With a $300,000 grant, the Welch Foundation is supporting University of Texas at Arlington research into creating new materials to safely and effectively deliver medications to treat diseases such as cancer. Since its founding in 1954, the Houston-based Welch Foundation has contributed over $1.1 billion to the advancement of chemistry through research grants, departmental programs, endowed chairs and other special projects in Texas. “As one of the nation’s largest private funding sources for chemical research, we are committed to supporting the field in a way that advances science while ...

A common infection-causing bacteria was much less likely to evolve antibiotic resistance when treated with a mixture of antimicrobial peptides rather than a single peptide, making these mixtures a viable strategy for developing new antibiotic treatments. Jens Rolff of the Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany, and colleagues report these findings in a new study publishing July 2nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have become a major threat to public health. The World Health Organization estimates ...

The Mediterranean Diet is a powerful ally for health even after a cancer diagnosis. This is the key result of an Italian study carried out as part of the UMBERTO Project, conducted by the Joint Research Platform Umberto Veronesi Foundation - Department of Epidemiology and Prevention of the I.R.C.C.S. Neuromed of Pozzilli, in collaboration with the LUM "Giuseppe Degennaro" University of Casamassima (BA). According to this research, people diagnosed with any type of tumor, who had a high adherence to the Mediterranean Diet in the year preceding their enrollment into the study, live longer and have a reduced risk of cardiovascular mortality, ...

The International Biogeography Society (TIBS) has relaunched its flagship open-access scientific journal, Frontiers of Biogeography (FoB), on the ARPHA platform, where it will be co-published with Pensoft Publishers. This collaboration underscores the society’s commitment to maintaining high-quality, high-visibility and low-cost open-access publishing for the biogeographical community. "This switch of our journal to a cutting-edge platform, and its committed team of editors, should continue to raise the journal's ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- National Science Foundation (NSF) officials joined Binghamton University, State University of New York to officially launch the Upstate New York Energy Storage Engine. After winning the designation earlier this year, Binghamton University and its New Energy New York and Engine coalition partners gathered to celebrate what this all means to the region. At a press conference on Thursday, Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger welcomed NSF Assistant Director of the Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate Erwin Gianchandani to Binghamton to help launch the Engine program. Erwin ...

In 2023, the American Library Association documented hundreds of attempts to remove more than 4,000 books from schools and libraries across nearly all states in the U.S.  In one of the first comprehensive analyses of book bans in the U.S., a University of Colorado Boulder researcher and her collaborators revealed that these bans disproportionally target women authors of color, and a large portion of the banned books feature characters of color.  The findings appeared June 11 in the journal ...

The American Society for Nutrition (ASN) has announced that next year’s meeting is scheduled to be held May 31 – June 3, 2025, in Orlando, Florida. NUTRITION is the premier meeting for the nutrition community, exploring developments in clinical and translational nutrition, food science and systems, diet and disease, basic science, global health and more. In its seventh year, the event has continued to evolve and grow with innovative scientific sessions and networking opportunities for scientists, clinicians and healthcare professionals interested in ...

MADISON — A promising therapy that treats blood cancers by harnessing the power of the immune system to target and destroy cancer cells could now treat solid tumors more efficiently. Thanks to a recent study published in Molecular Therapy – Methods & Clinical Development from Dan Cappabianca and Krishanu Saha at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy can be improved by altering the conditions the T cells are grown in. And it was all discovered by chance.                   ...

OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA. – A study published today by a University of Oklahoma researcher shows that financial incentives can make a big difference in helping smokers quit. The study found that when people with low socioeconomic staus are offered small financial incentives to stop smoking (in addition to receiving counseling and pharmacotherapy, primarily nicotine replacement therapy), they achieve higher quit rates, with some measures doubling the quit rates, when compared to study participants who received the same treatments without incentives. This finding is particularly important because adults with socioeconomic challanges ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – July 2, 2024) Biomolecular condensates are membraneless hubs of condensed proteins and nucleic acids within cells, which researchers are realizing are tied to an increasing number of cellular processes and diseases. Studies of biomolecular condensate formation have uncovered layers of complexity, including their ability to behave like a viscoelastic material. However, the molecular basis for this putty-like property was unknown. Through a multi-institution collaboration, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists examined the interaction networks within condensates ...

MSU has a satellite uplink/LTN TV studio and Comrex line for radio interviews upon request. EAST LANSING, Mich. – Randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, are believed to be the best way to study the safety and efficacy of new treatments in clinical research. However, a recent study from Michigan State University found that people of color and white women are significantly underrepresented in RCTs due to systematic biases.  The study, published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse, reviewed 18 RCTs conducted over the last 15 years that tested treatments for post-traumatic stress and alcohol use disorder. The researchers ...

Key takeaways Raising the energy state of an atom’s nucleus using a laser, or exciting it, would enable development of the most accurate atomic clocks ever to exist. This has been hard to do because electrons, which surround the nucleus, react easily with light, increasing the amount of light needed to reach the nucleus. By causing the electrons to bond with fluorine in a transparent crystal, UCLA physicists have finally succeeded in exciting the neutrons in a thorium atom’s nucleus using a moderate amount of laser light. This accomplishment means that measurements of time, gravity and other fields that are currently performed ...

EDMONTON — A new groundbreaking study sheds light on a medical question scientists have long wondered: why do 40 per cent of children with the rare neurodevelopmental disorder KBG syndrome have heart defects? The research now points to a critical link between the heart and the brain. KBG syndrome can cause unusual facial development, skeletal abnormalities, intellectual underdevelopment and heart defects. The syndrome is caused by mutations in the ANKRD11 gene, which plays a crucial role in brain development, but it wasn’t until now ...