MINNEAPOLIS – Earlier menopause combined with higher risk of cardiovascular disease is linked to an increased risk of thinking and memory problems later, according to a new study published in the April 3, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In this study, earlier menopause is defined as occurring before age 49. As a person ages, blood vessels, including those in the brain, can be damaged by controllable cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking. These risk factors not only increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, ...

In the quaint town of Gamboa, nestled near the Panama Canal, a team of scientists embarked on a unique endeavor: attaching red flags onto the legs of crickets and observing how birds respond to them. These eye-catching flags were borrowed from the matador bug (Anisoscelis alipes), an insect renowned for the colorful adornments on its hind legs. This trait has captivated Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow Ummat Somjee for several years, particularly given the matador bug’s tendency to wave them. The persisting question: Why does it wave its colorful hind legs? A previous study, also supervised by Dr. Somjee, suggested ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Xylazine is an FDA-approved sedative and pain reliever for use in animals, but it has severe adverse effects when used in humans. It is now illicitly being added to opioids, like fentanyl and heroin, as well as cocaine—leading to a sharp rise in overdose deaths. Now, Scripps Research chemical biologists have developed a vaccine to block the effects of xylazine’s toxicity. The vaccine works by training the immune system to attack the drug, which is described in a new paper published in Chemical Communications on April 1, 2024. “We demonstrated that a vaccine can reverse the symptoms ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The sunflower family tree revealed that flower symmetry evolved multiple times independently, a process called convergent evolution, among the members of this large plant family, according to a new analysis. The research team, led by a Penn State biologist, resolved more of the finer branches of the family tree, providing insight into how the sunflower family — which includes asters, daisies and food crops like lettuce and artichoke — evolved. A paper describing the analysis and findings, which researchers said may help identify useful traits to selectively breed plants with more desirable characteristics, appeared online in the journal ...

On March 27, 2024, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago treated its first patient with ELEVIDYS (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl), the first gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy – a rare, genetic disease characterized by progressive muscle damage and weakness. Lurie Children’s is the first in Illinois to administer this treatment after ELEVIDYS received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in June 2023. Developed by Sarepta Therapeutics, ELEVIDYS is approved for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in ambulatory patients aged 4 through 5 years with ...

Butterflies, bees, ants and flies are the most widely referenced arthropods in a sample of almost 4,000 haiku - which commonly describe their color, flight and ecology ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298865 Article Title: Diversity and complexity of arthropod references in haiku Author Countries: USA Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Might your personality affect how you move? Runners classified as Myers-Briggs "Sensing" types have a more grounded running style in experiments than those classified as "Intuition" types ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0300108 Article Title: Mind to move: Differences in running biomechanics between sensing and intuition shod runners Author Countries: France, Switzerland, Belgium Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

The earliest dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, but so did many of the other animals living alongside them, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kristina Curry Rogers of Macalester College, Minnesota and colleagues. Dinosaurs grew up fast, a feature that likely set them apart from many other animals in their Mesozoic (252 to 66 million years ago) ecosystems. Some researchers have proposed that these elevated growth rates were key to the global success of dinosaurs, but little is known about the growth strategies of the earliest dinosaurs. In this study, Rogers and colleagues performed histological analysis, examining patterns of bone ...

The hours you work earlier in life may be associated with worse health years later, according to a study published April 3, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Wen-Jui Han from New York University, US. Studies have consistently shown that nonstandard work schedules—working outside the traditional nine-to-five workday—can negatively impact physical and mental health as well as social and family life. The current study uses a life-course approach to provide a longer-term perspective on how work schedule ...

A recent study led by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the non-profit conservation organization Re:wild shows that the threat of mining to the great ape population in Africa has been greatly underestimated. Their results have been published in Science Advances. The rising demand for critical minerals, such as copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements required for the large-scale transition to cleaner energy is causing a surge of mining in Africa, where a large share of those mineral resources is still unexploited. ...

Tourism to Yellowstone National Park produces more than a billion kilos of CO2 emissions annually, with 90% arising through travel to and from the park, especially from visitors arriving by plane. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000391 Article Title: Quantifying and evaluating strategies to decrease carbon dioxide emissions generated from tourism to Yellowstone National Park Author Countries: United States Funding: This work was supported by the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station (Project ...

During the pandemic, University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) researchers, including those from the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC), teamed up with the Mary Cariola Center to study ways to prevent COVID infection among children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), a particularly vulnerable population. Together, they found that good airflow and filtration in schools may help these children and their teachers avoid COVID infections. The COVID pandemic was a particularly difficult balancing act for children with IDDs and their ...

In humans, the exact same mutation in a specific gene can produce widely different outcomes. It’s a bit like adding the same amount of salt to different recipes—the effect on the finished dish can be quite different, depending on the mix of other ingredients. Now, researchers at The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) have developed a powerful platform to study the reasons behind these varying mutation outcomes. The work, published today in Science Advances, not only provides new opportunities for uncovering targets for therapeutic interventions but also represents a significant step forward in addressing the critical need ...

Alzheimer’s disease starts with a sticky protein called amyloid beta that builds up into plaques in the brain, setting off a chain of events that results in brain atrophy and cognitive decline. The new generation of Alzheimer’s drugs — the first proven to change the course of the disease — work by tagging amyloid for clearance by the brain’s immune cells. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found a different and promising way to remove the noxious plaques: by directly mobilizing immune cells to consume ...

A genomic study of human and selected nonhuman primate centromeres has revealed their unimaginable diversity and speed of evolutionary change. In cell genetics, a centromere is the spot where two sister chromatids attach. A chromatid is one-half of a duplicated chromosome. United pairs of chromosomes have identifiable shapes because centromeres are not in a uniform position. As a cell prepares to divide, the machinery to separate and segregate chromosomes goes into action at each centromere location. Unless the genetic material ...

Proteins binding to RNA are important in many processes in the cell and can mediate a range of biological functions. A specialized structure in both DNA and RNA, the G-quadruplex, are regulatory elements involved in gene expression in both DNA and RNA. In the present work the researchers use theoretical predictions and molecular biology experiments to show that many chromatin-binding proteins bind to RNA G-quadruplexes. With this information they can classify proteins based on their potential to bind RNA G-quadruplexes. The study uses a combination of experimental identification of RNA G-quadruplex-binding proteins and computational methods to build a prediction tool that identify the probability ...

A new study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) reveals how large language models (LLMs) respond to different motivational states. In their evaluation of three LLM-based generative conversational agents (GAs)—ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Llama 2, PhD student Michelle Bak and Assistant Professor Jessie Chin of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that while GAs are able to identify users' ...

The leading research and educational conference for multiple sclerosis healthcare professionals in North America, the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers (CMSC) 38th Annual Meeting, returns to Nashville, Tennessee, May 29-June 1, 2024 at the Music City Center. The conference is renowned for its emphasis on reaching the interprofessional team involved in MS care, with learning opportunities for physicians, advanced practice clinicians, nursing professionals, pharmacists, mental health and rehabilitation specialists, dietitians, researchers, advocates and other members of the healthcare team involved in the management of people with MS.             ...

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 ...