Transition metal telluride nanosheets have shown enormous promise for fundamental research and other applications across a rainbow of different fields, but until now, mass fabrication has been impossible, leaving the material as something of a laboratory curiosity rather than an industrial reality. But a team of researchers has recently developed a novel fabrication technique—the use of chemical solutions to peel off thin layers from their parent compounds, creating atomically thin sheets—that looks set to finally deliver on the ultra-thin substance's promise. The researchers describe their fabrication technique in a study published in Nature on April 3. In ...

Mammaliaforms are extinct and extant organisms that are closely related to mammals. Studying mammaliaforms helps scientists understand the evolutionary processes that led to various mammalian features. In two consecutive studies in Nature, Dr. MAO Fangyuan and Dr. ZHANG Chi from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with colleagues from Australia and the United States, recently reported two Jurassic mammaliaforms from China, revealing the earliest dental diversification, mandibular middle ears, and articular-quadrate joint transformation of mammaliaforms. The ...

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that the consequences of structural racism extend beyond inequities in health care to drive disparities in breast cancer outcome. Additional research is needed with more comprehensive social and environmental measures to better understand the influence of social determinants on aggressive estrogen receptor-positive tumor biology among racial and ethnic minoritized women from disadvantaged and historically marginalized communities.  Authors: Gregory S. Calip, Pharm.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is the corresponding author.  To access the embargoed study: ...

About The Study: In a survey study of residents of all accredited general surgery programs, one-third of trainees reported lack of meaningful mentorship, particularly non-white or Hispanic trainees. Although education and wellness are multifactorial issues, mentorship was associated with improvement; thus, efforts to facilitate mentorship are needed, especially for minoritized residents.  Authors: Yue-Yung Hu, M.D., M.P.H., of Northwestern University in Chicago, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link ...

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a programmable metafluid with tunable springiness, optical properties, viscosity and even the ability to transition between a Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid.  The first-of-its-kind metafluid uses a suspension of small, elastomer spheres — between 50 to 500 microns — that buckle under pressure, radically changing the characteristics of the fluid. The metafluid could be used in everything ...

MIAMI, FLORIDA (April 3, 2024) – What if we could eliminate a major risk factor for stomach cancer in Black, Asian, Latino and other vulnerable populations? A new study from Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine shows the feasibility of reaching out to high-risk communities with free, accessible testing and treatment for Helicobacter pylori bacterium infection – a major risk factor for gastric cancer. Shria Kumar, M.D., a physician-scientist at Sylvester, sees patients with gastric cancer in her ...

New Jurassic fossil findings provide insights into the development of the middle ear in mammals An international team of palaeontologists has made a significant discovery in fossils that offer key information about the evolutionary shift from the jaw joint bones to those of the middle ear in early mammals. The findings published today in the prestigious journal Nature provide a clearer insight into the evolution of hearing in mammaliaforms. The fossils, from the Jurassic Period, are of two different ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – People with opioid use disorder who have hepatitis C virus (HCV) were twice as likely to be successfully treated and cured from HCV if they received facilitated telemedicine treatment at their opioid treatment program (OTPs) than if they were referred off-site to another provider. Those are the findings published today by a University at Buffalo team of researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The study is one of only a few randomized controlled ...

Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) researchers discover that known genetic variants might account for a large portion of chronic kidney diseases of unclear origin Tokyo, Japan – Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is extremely prevalent among adults, affecting over 800 million individuals worldwide. Many of these patients eventually require therapy to supplement or replace kidney functions, such as dialysis or kidney transplant. While most CKD cases originate from lifestyle-related factors or diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, the underlying ...

Palaeontologists have presented a new insight into the initial dental variations across mammaliaforms, providing a fresh perspective on the evolutionary past of these ancient beasts. The discovery, involving a team of international researchers including Professor Patricia Vickers-Rich from the Monash University School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment, is published today in the renowned journal Nature. The research, conducted by a group of palaeontologists from prestigious institutions in New York, China and Australia, examines the tooth structure of the Jurassic ...

High entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted significant attention in various fields due to their unique properties such as high strength and hardness, and high thermal and chemical stabilities. Unlike conventional alloys, which typically incorporate small quantities of one or two additional metals, HEAs constitute a solid solution of five or more metals in equal atomic ratio. This unique composition results in unique and complex surface structures that contain many different active sites suitable for catalytic reactions. As a result, in recent years, HEA nanoparticles (NPs) have been extensively studied for their catalytic potential.   However, despite their ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A large multi-state electronic health record-based study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) VISION Network has found that COVID-19 vaccines are as effective for adults with anxiety or depression or mood disorders as for individuals without these common diagnoses. This is one of the first studies to evaluate COVID-19 mRNA vaccine effectiveness for those living with mental illness. While vaccination provided similar protection regardless of psychiatric diagnosis (none, one or multiple ...

NEW YORK, NY (April 3, 2024) – Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons (VP&S) will begin construction on New York City’s first all-electric university research building in May. The new biomedical research building in Washington Heights is designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) and will house eight stories of laboratories and research facilities, collaboration corners, living walls, and community engagement spaces. The new biomedical research building will become the center of Columbia’s efforts to gain new understanding of diseases and develop next-generation ...

2 April, 2024, Sydney; In a world first, a team of international scientists including three Australians, Al-Aabid Chowdhury and Professor Simon Ho from University of Sydney, and Dr Jacqueline Nguyen from Australian Museum and Flinders University, have determined the family tree of modern birds and pinpointed the timing of their evolution. Their findings have been published today in Nature. The largest study ever undertaken of modern bird genomes, the scientists combined genomic data of more than 360 bird species with data from nearly 200 bird fossils to reconstruct the most well-supported Tree of ...

  KEY TAKEAWAYS Researchers from Mass General Brigham analyzed timing and location of gunshots in six of the most populated U.S. cities (Baltimore, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and Portland, Ore.) from 2015-2021. The team estimates that annually, approximately 12.5 million person-nights—the number of nights of gunshots multiplied by the number of people in earshot—are impacted by nighttime gunshots, and that those were more common in low-income areas in each city. The noise of nighttime gunshots may have underrecognized and underappreciated effects on ...

Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know how to respond. That’s the vision behind a new project from a team of engineers and chemists at the University of Colorado Boulder, California Institute of Technology, University of California Santa Barbara, and three companies. It’s ...

To better understand COVID-19’s spread during the pandemic, public health officials expanded wastewater surveillance. These efforts track SARS-CoV-2 levels and health risks among most people, but they miss people who live without shelter, a population particularly vulnerable to severe infection. To fill this information gap, researchers reporting in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters tested flood-control waterways near unsheltered encampments, finding similar transmission patterns as in the broader community and identifying previously unseen ...

As any surfer will tell you, waves pack a powerful punch. Now, we are one step closer to capturing the energy behind the ocean’s constant ebb and flow with an improved “blue energy” harvesting device. Researchers report in ACS Energy Letters that simply repositioning the electrode — from the center of a see-sawing liquid-filled tube to the end where the water crashes with the most force — dramatically increased the amount of wave energy that could be harvested. The tube-shaped wave-energy harvesting device improved upon ...

Choosing paint for your home brings a lot of options: What kind of paint, what type of finish and what color? Water-based paints have emerged as “greener” and less smelly than solvent-based options. And they are often advertised as containing little-to-no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). But, according to research published in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology Letters, some of these paints do contain compounds that are considered VOCs, along with other chemicals of emerging concern. Paint consists of four ingredients: pigments, binders, additives ...

A fungus devastating frogs and toads on nearly every continent may have an Achilles heel. Scientists have discovered a virus that infects the fungus, and that could be engineered to save the amphibians. The fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd, ravages the skin of frogs and toads, and eventually causes heart failure. To date it has contributed to the decline of over 500 amphibian species, and 90 possible extinctions including yellow-legged mountain frogs in the Sierras and the Panamanian golden frog.  A ...

When we communicate with other people face-to-face, we do so by maintaining a certain physical distance from each other. This space surrounding our body while interacting is called the interpersonal space (IPS), and maintaining adequate IPS is crucial for better communication. Many studies have investigated the psychological and physiological changes that occur based on the presence of another person in the IPS during face-to-face interactions. These studies are based on the avoidance behaviour that we experience when a stranger invades our IPS, which manifests in the form of increased heart rate and discomfort. However, ...

California, a state known for its aggressive greenhouse gas reduction policies, is ironically the nation’s greatest emitter of one: sulfuryl fluoride.  As much as 17% of global emissions of this gas, a common pesticide for treating termites and other wood-infesting insects, stem from the United States. The majority of those emissions trace back to just a few counties in California, finds a new study led by Johns Hopkins University. “When we finally mapped it out, the results were puzzling because the emissions were all coming from one place,” said co-author Scot ...

Menlo Park, Calif. — After two decades of work, scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their collaborators are celebrating the completion of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera. As the heart of the DOE- and National Science Foundation-funded Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the 3,200-megapixel camera will help researchers observe our universe in unprecedented detail. Over ten years, it will generate an enormous trove of data on the southern night sky that researchers will ...

Scientists at the Institute of Pathophysiology of the University Medical Center Mainz made the first comprehensive analysis on how adults use tickling in connection with sexual activity. As part of their study, they surveyed 719 people with a so-called tickling fetish. The results of the study show that human sexuality encompasses a variety of forms of expression that need to be studied and understood in greater depth. Most people laugh when they are tickled. But there are also individuals for whom tickling or being tickled triggers sexual arousal. This sexual preference is referred to as a tickle ...

Research Highlights: Asian American adults with more unfavorable factors related to income level, education, housing, access to health care and other social variables had a greater likelihood of having risk factors for cardiovascular disease in this study. The relationship between social determinants of health and cardiovascular disease risk factors varied widely among some Asian American subgroups, based on the study’s findings. Embargoed until 4 a.m. CT/5 a.m. ET Wed., April 3, 2024 DALLAS, April 3, 2024 — Having more unfavorable social determinants of health, such as being unemployed, uninsured or not having education beyond high school, ...