Tobacco-funded research is still appearing in highly-cited medical journals - despite attempts by some to cut ties altogether, finds an investigation by The Investigative Desk and The BMJ today. Although the tobacco industry has a long history of subverting science, most leading medical journals don’t have policies which ban research wholly or partly funded by the industry.  And even when publishers, authors and universities are willing to restrict tobacco industry ties, they struggle ...

Trout living in rivers polluted by metal from old mines across the British Isles are genetically “isolated” from other trout, new research shows. Researchers analysed brown trout at 71 sites in Britain and Ireland, where many rivers contain metal washed out from disused mines. While trout in metal-polluted rivers appear healthy, they are genetically distinct – and a lack of diversity in these populations makes them vulnerable to future threats. By comparing the DNA of trout in rivers with and without metal pollution, the researchers found that metal-tolerant trout ...

Trust is vital to the widespread acceptance of AI across industries, especially when safety is a concern. For example, people may be hesitant to ride in a self-driving car knowing that the AI running it can be hacked. One barrier to increasing trust is that the algorithms powering AI are vulnerable to such attacks.  Dr. Samson Zhou, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, and Dr. David P. Woodruff, professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, hope to strengthen algorithms used by big data AI models against attacks. Big data AI models are ...

Researchers of CIDIS at ESPOL Polytechnic University have developed a new method to enhance thermal image super-resolution by employing synthetic imagery. This novel approach utilizes high-resolution images  from the visible spectrum to guide the super-resolution of low-resolution thermal images, significantly  improving the detail and utility of thermal imaging across various applications. When visualizing thermal images, one typically imagines the blurry, less-detailed outputs common with  standard thermal ...

Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC scientists studying ultra-processed foods have created a new tool for assessing the rewarding and reinforcing properties of foods that make up 58 percent of calories consumed in the United States. The foods have been linked to a wide range of negative health outcomes. The research, which was published in April in the journal Appetite, provides a collection of carefully curated images of minimally processed and ultra-processed foods matched on 26 characteristics, including macronutrients, sodium, dietary fiber, calories, price, and visual characteristics such as a color and portion size. The work was based on the NOVA classification system ...

New images of Jupiter's volcano-studded moon Io, taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, offer the highest resolution of Io ever achieved with an Earth-based instrument. The observations were made possible by a new high-contrast optical imaging instrument, dubbed SHARK-VIS, and the telescope's adaptive optics system, which compensates for the blurring induced by atmospheric turbulence.  The images, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveal surface features as small as 50 miles across, ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – May 30, 2024 – Researchers at Wake Forest University of School of Medicine have received a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to study bone microarchitecture in patients following bariatric surgery. With the funding support, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine will partner with Virginia Tech to add a virtual biopsy that uses an innovative technique called high-resolution peripheral quantitative ...

Urinary catheters are required for nearly every surgical procedure. However, a major challenge for the health care industry is predicting who may develop catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) and when these infections may lead to death. Now, a study from the University of Notre Dame has identified a population that is more susceptible to developing a CAUTI. Researchers showed that models with fibrinolytic deficiencies, or conditions that cause overactivation of the protein fibrin, had increased risk for developing severe and persistent CAUTIs. ...

URBANA, Illinois – Residential segregation is an example of the long history of structural racism in the United States. Black Americans are more likely to live in low-quality neighborhoods, which contributes to disparities in health outcomes. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at how community stress affects the mental and emotional health of Black men and women in the U.S. “Community stress refers to the effects of living in disadvantaged areas. This includes objective aspects, such as buildings ...

Summer can be an extra challenging time for Texas’ 189 major water supply reservoirs. With temperatures consistently reaching 100 degrees or higher, reservoir evaporation rates see high increases. Accurate evaporation rate estimates are crucial for water resource managers, as reservoirs play an essential role in our social and economic systems by supplying water for agricultural, municipal, and industrial consumption. Reservoirs are also critical for mitigating impacts from droughts and floods. A recent study published ...

MIAMI, FLORIDA (May 30, 2024) – Many countries with national healthcare systems or payers such as insurance companies use cost-effectiveness analyses to decide whether to cover new medicines, balancing treatment costs with potential health benefits. That strategy often limits access to new, targeted therapies, even when these drugs prove highly effective and become part of standard-of-care therapy for many patients. A new study from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine examined the cost-effectiveness of durvalumab, a targeted immunotherapy for lung cancer that ...

Alex Aliper, PhD, president of global clinical stage artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery company Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”) will present at the Systems Aging Gordon Research Conference, a leading international scientific conference focused on advancing the frontiers of science through the presentation of cutting-edge and unpublished research. On Wed., June 5, 10:40 am, Dr. Aliper will give a talk titled "Generative Artificial Intelligence and Next-Generation Robotics for Drug Discovery and Longevity Research."  The conference ...

The Ecological Society of America is pleased to announce the winners of its 2024 awards, which recognize outstanding contributions to ecology in new discoveries, teaching, sustainability, diversity and lifelong commitment to the profession. These awards are designed to not only reward past achievements, but also to inspire a broad audience of scientists, educators and students, opening the door to new insights and collaborations that will further the impact of ecological research. “The Ecological Society of America is immensely proud to honor this year’s distinguished awardees,” said ESA President ...

A team including researchers from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health and School of Medicine has found that high resolution mass spectrometry could be a valuable tool for identifying and assessing air-borne contaminants produced by natural and man-made disasters. Their findings were published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. The scientists used high resolution mass spectrometry—a highly accurate means of identifying molecular compounds in a sample—in fall 2023 to identify volatile organic ...

Human cervix modeled in microfluidic organ chip fills key women's health gap Engineered cervix with in vivo-like mucus production, hormone sensitivity, and associated microbiome creates novel testbed for bacterial vaginosis therapeutics and other treatments By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Bacterial Vaginosis (BV) has been identified as one of the many unmet needs in women's health and affects more than 25% of reproductive-aged women. It is caused by pathogenic bacteria that push the healthy microbiomes in the female vagina and cervix – the small gatekeeper canal that connects the uteruns and vagina – into a state of imbalance known as dysbiosis. ...

Humans may be accelerating the rate at which organic matter decomposes in rivers and streams on a global scale, according to a new study from the University of Georgia, Oakland University and Kent State University. That could pose a threat to biodiversity in waterways around the world and increase the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere, potentially exacerbating climate change. Published in Science, the study is the first to combine a global experiment and predictive modeling to illustrate how human impacts to waterways may contribute to the global climate crisis. “Everyone in the world needs water,” ...

Factual yet misleading vaccine content was 46 times more effective at driving vaccine hesitancy than flagged misinformation, reports a new study exploring real-world impacts of misinformation exposure. A second study aiming to better understand the characteristics of “supersharers” – a small group of individuals increasingly found to spread misinformation – reports that just over 2,000 supersharers on X (formally Twitter) spread 80% of the fake news during the 2020 US presidential election; the study involved a sample of more than 660,000 voters on X and uncovered that the supersharers were mainly middle-aged Republican women in conservative states.   Misinformation, ...

Cuckoos – which lay their eggs in nests of other birds – have higher speciation rates when they lay their eggs in a broader range of host bird species’ nests, a new study reports. This higher speciation rate is driven by host rejection and cuckoo selection for mimetic nestling traits. How new species arise is a fundamental question in biology. Coevolution between closely interacting species is thought to increase biodiversity and potentially explain the vast number of distinctly specialized species. However, evidence linking macroevolutionary patterns to microevolutionary ...

Coupling skin bacteria-laden hydrogel and electronics, researchers have introduced the ABLE platform, a bioelectronics system that can deliver management and adaptive treatment of skin inflammation. They test this approach in a mouse model of psoriasis. The findings demonstrate the potential for clinical application of bioelectronics devices that promote drug-free therapeutic effects through a living hydrogel interface. “This amalgamation of living and synthetic components is a notable advance toward ...

Integrating big data and a coordinated global field experiment, researchers have developed a model that can predict the decomposition rate of organic matter in rivers worldwide. The global model estimates decomposition rates in rivers across vast understudied areas of Earth, revealing rapid decomposition across continental-scale areas dominated by human activities. Earth's terrestrial ecosystems generate over 100 billion tons of plant detritus annually, with its fate – long-term storage, mineralization to greenhouse gasses, or incorporation into food webs – determined by decomposition rates. This organic material is continually added to rivers ...

Negating an adjective by placing ‘not’ in front of it affects the way our brains interpret its meaning, mitigating but not entirely inverting our interpretation of its definition. In a study published May 23rd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, Arianna Zuanazzi at New York University, US, and colleagues offer insight into how the brain represents changes of meaning over time and offer new methods for further linguistic research. The way the brain processes negated adjectives — ‘not bad’ or ‘not ...

Researchers have developed a novel version of a key CRISPR gene-editing protein that shows efficient editing activity and is small enough to be packaged within a non-pathogenic virus that can deliver it to target cells. Hongjian Wang and colleagues at Wuhan University, China, present these findings May 23rd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. Recent years have seen an explosion of research attempting to harness CRISPR gene-editing systems—which are found naturally in many bacteria as a defense against viruses—so they can be used as potential treatments for human disease. These systems rely on so-called CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins, with Cas9 and Cas12a being ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 30, 2024 – Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, fake news on social media has been widely blamed for low vaccine uptake in the United States — but research by MIT Sloan School of Management PhD candidate Jennifer Allen and Professor David Rand finds that the blame lies elsewhere.  In a new paper published in Science and co-authored by Duncan J. Watts of the University of Pennsylvania, the researchers introduce a new methodology for measuring social media content’s causal impact at scale. They show that misleading content from mainstream news sources — rather than outright misinformation or “fake news” ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — A great armada entered the North Atlantic, launched from the cold shores of North America. But rather than ships off to war, this force was a fleet of icebergs. And the havoc it wrought was to the ocean current itself. This scene describes a Heinrich Event, or a period of rapid iceberg discharge from the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last glacial maximum. These episodes greatly weakened the system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short, brings warm surface water ...

What threatens public health more, a deliberately false Facebook post about tracking microchips in the COVID-19 vaccine that is flagged as misinformation, or an unflagged, factual article about the rare case of a young, healthy person who died after receiving the vaccine? According to Duncan J. Watts, Stevens University Professor in Computer and Information Science at Penn Engineering and Director of the Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab, along with David G. Rand, Erwin H. Schell Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, and Jennifer Allen, 2024 MIT Sloan School of Management Ph.D. graduate ...