We’ve all seen the surreal footage in nature documentaries showing hydrothermal vents on the frigid ocean floor—bellowing black plumes of super-hot water—and the life forms that cling to them. Now, a new study by UC Santa Cruz researchers suggests that lower-temperature vents, which are common across Earth's seafloor, may help to create life-supporting conditions on "ocean worlds" in our solar system. Ocean worlds are planets and moons that have—or had in the past—a liquid ocean, often under an icy shell or within their rocky interior. In Earth's solar system, several of Jupiter's and Saturn's moons are ocean worlds, and ...

Media Contact: John Dudley (814) 490-3290 (cell) jjdudley@usf.edu TAMPA, Fla. (June 24, 2024) – Mindfulness – focusing on the present moment – can improve sleep, reduce stress and improve overall health. A new University of South Florida-led study helps explain why. Researchers studied 144 nurses over two weeks to see how well they could stay focused on the present and how often they fixated on negative thoughts. The nurses completed surveys three times a day and reported their sleep quality the following morning. The findings shed light on how mindfulness relates to emotion ...

The first issue of JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology, under new Editor-in-Chief Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM, FACC, publishes today, ushering in a new era of one of the world’s leading scholarly journals. “I envision JACC, with all its strengths, as a transformative platform for building community, elevating strong science, influencing clinical practice, supporting career development, and improving patient outcomes.” Krumholz said in his Editor’s Page. “JACC and its group of journals can play a pivotal role in serving our community and shaping the future.” Under his editorship, JACC will be guided by ...

Using an instrument on the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope, researchers obtained the first astronomical spectrum using skipper charge-coupled devices (CCDs). The results were presented on June 16 at the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation meeting in Japan by Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, a physics PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and a Fermilab DOE Graduate Instrumentation Research Award Fellow. “This is a major milestone for skipper-CCD technology,” said Alex Drlica-Wagner, a cosmologist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi ...

Researchers at the University of Toronto have harnessed a bacterial immune defense system, known as CRISPR, to efficiently and precisely control the process of RNA splicing. The technology opens the door to new applications, including systematically interrogating the functions of parts of genes and correcting splicing deficiencies that underlie numerous diseases and disorders. “Almost all human genes produce RNA transcripts that undergo the process of splicing, whereby coding segments, called exons, are joined together and non-coding segments, called introns, are removed and typically degraded,” said Jack Daiyang Li, first author on the study and PhD student ...

Oak Brook, IL – The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) will launch NexusXp, its new interactive pavilion at SLAS2025 to showcase collaborative and integrated lab automation scenarios. NexusXp combines Nexus, the Latin word for link or connection where multiple elements meet, with the modern “Xp” to signify the “Xperience” of making that critical link or connection. Through this new pavilion, SLAS will demonstrate how automation integration transforms research and enables scientific breakthroughs. “NexusXp is an exclusive event or attendee ...

AMES, Iowa – A Google Cloud video takes you inside a company data center in southwest Iowa’s Council Bluffs.   There you are, in the middle of a long, industrial corridor. You slowly move past rack after rack after rack of the computer servers that are, Google says, “helping to keep the internet humming 24/7.”   Part of that hum is the power that keeps those data centers up and running.   “Think about when you use your computer,” said Matthew ...

LAWRENCE — Many people are familiar with oncogenes — genes long known to be involved in cancers in humans, such as the gene “Src.”  What’s less widely understood is that oncogenes didn’t evolve just to cause cancer in species, but rather to control events of normal growth and differentiation. “As an organism grows from a single fertilized egg to form all the different tissue types, these oncogenes, including Src, evolved to control these normal events,” said Erik Lundquist, professor of molecular ...

“Gold nanostars amplify brain-tumor selective laser interstitial thermal therapy.” BUFFALO, NY- June 24, 2024 – A new editorial paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on June 14, 2024, entitled, “Leveraging gold nanostars for precision laser interstitial thermal therapy.” In this new editorial, researchers Aden P. Haskell-Mendoza, Ethan S. Srinivasan, Tuan Vo-Dinh and Peter E. Fecci from Duke University discuss laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT). Over the past decade, LITT has become an important tool for the neurosurgical treatment of a variety of intracranial pathologies, including focal epilepsies, vascular malformations, and ...

A new peer-reviewed study from researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington; the University of Nevada, Reno; Mokwon University in Daejeon, Korea; and Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi shows the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill of 2010 affected wildlife and their habitat much more than previously understood. “Overall, we found the area of deep-sea floor affected by the DWH spill was significantly larger than previously thought,” said Masoud Rostami, an author of the study and assistant ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Intimate partner violence is notoriously underreported and correctly diagnosed at hospitals only around a quarter of the time, but a new method provides a more realistic picture of who is most affected, even when cases go unrecorded. PURPLE (Positive Unlabeled Relative PrevaLence Estimator), an algorithm developed by researchers at Cornell University, estimates how often underreported health conditions occur in different demographic groups. Using hospital data, the researchers showed that PURPLE can better quantify which groups of women are most likely to experience intimate partner violence compared with methods that ...

The Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation has named the first cohort of the Damon Runyon Scholars Program for Advancing Research and Knowledge (SPARK), a one-year intensive cancer research internship program for post-baccalaureate students who come from varied backgrounds . The goal of the program is to provide young trainees who have the potential to become leaders in cancer research with rigorous scientific training and a network of mentors and peers to support their next steps into graduate school and beyond. SPARK Scholars will conduct ...

University of Missouri researchers have developed a way to create complex devices with multiple materials — including plastics, metals and semiconductors – all with a single machine. The research, which was recently published in Nature Communications, outlines a novel 3D printing and laser process to manufacture multi-material, multi-layered sensors, circuit boards and even textiles with electronic components. It’s called the Freeform Multi-material Assembly Process, and it promises to revolutionize ...

Type 2 diabetes in young people ages 10 to19 has more than doubled in the past 20 years, yet it remains difficult for physicians to predict who will be diagnosed and who will improve with treatment. A newly published study from the University of Oklahoma shows that measuring the circulating abundance of microRNAs – which affect insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas – is likely as effective as measuring the level of sugar in the blood for determining how a young person with the condition will fare. Jeanie Tryggestad, M.D., an associate professor of pediatrics in the OU College of Medicine, led the study, which is published in The Journal of Clinical ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Craig Martin, professor of chemistry, and Sarah Perry, associate professor of chemical engineering, both at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently received support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a novel approach toward efficiently, reliably and cost effectively synthesizing novel strands of specialty “long RNA.” Future genetic research into everything from basic cell biology to advanced therapeutics depends in part on having just the sort of complex, modified RNA that Martin and Perry will be working to make widely available. RNA is a molecule ...

In a new article, researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago debunk four common myths about the safety of intermittent fasting.  Intermittent fasting has become an increasingly popular way to lose weight without counting calories. And a large body of research has shown it’s safe. Still, several myths about fasting have gained traction among clinicians, journalists and the general public: that fasting can lead to a poor diet or loss of lean muscle mass, cause eating disorders, or decrease sex hormones.  In a new commentary in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, UIC researchers debunk each of these. They base their ...

Digital Science, a technology company serving stakeholders across the research ecosystem, today announces an exciting new tranche of data that throws light on how and why research cuts through to society at large – in the shape of the Altmetric 500. A decade on from the first Altmetric 100 reports, which listed the most influential academic articles in a given year, a leading provider of alternative metrics for published research is now releasing an upgraded overview of research engagement: the Altmetric ...

On June 25, China’s Chang’e-6 (CE-6) lunar probe is set to return to Earth, carrying the first surface samples collected from the farside of the Moon. In anticipation of this historic event, scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are publishing their predictions for the unique materials that may be found in the CE-6 samples in the journal The Innovation. Based on the geological characteristics of the probe’s landing site, the researchers anticipate that the returned surface samples will consist of 2.5-million-year-old volcanic rock combined with ...

Internet users leave many traces on websites and online services. Measures such as firewalls, VPN connections and browser privacy modes are in place to ensure a certain level of data protection. However, a newly discovered security loophole allows bypassing all of these protective measures: Computer scientists from the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communication Technology (IAIK) at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) were able to track users' online activities in detail simply by monitoring fluctuations in the speed of their internet connection. No malicious code is required to exploit this vulnerability, ...

About The Study: This prospective, observational study found that medication abortion obtained following no-test telehealth screening and mailing of medications was associated with similar rates of complete abortion compared with in-person care with ultrasonography and met prespecified criteria for noninferiority, with a low prevalence of adverse events. Quote from corresponding author Lauren J. Ralph, Ph.D., M.P.H.: “This is a prospective, observational study comparing patients who received medication abortion care remotely and without ultrasound to those who went in person to a facility and got an ultrasound. Using data from patient surveys and their medical record, we found ...

An open-source platform developed by researchers in Nikolaus Rajewsky’s lab at the Max Delbrück Center creates molecular maps from patient tissue samples with subcellular precision, enabling detailed study and potentially enhancing routine clinical pathology. The study was published in “Cell.” Researchers in the Systems Biology Lab of Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky have developed a spatial transcriptomics platform, called Open-ST, that enables scientists to reconstruct gene expression in cells within a tissue in three ...

About The Study: The findings of this case-control study reaffirm current recommendations for broad age-based use of annually updated COVID-19 vaccines given that (1) the BNT162b2 XBB vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech; 2023-2024 formulation) provided statistically significant additional protection against a range of COVID-19 outcomes and (2) older versions of COVID-19 vaccines offered little, if any, long-term protection, including against hospital admission, regardless of the number or type of prior doses received.   Corresponding Author: To contact the ...

Researchers compared patients who received care remotely to those who got ultrasounds and found no differences in outcomes.    Medication abortion patients who receive pills by mail without first getting an ultrasound do just as well as those who are examined and given the drugs in person, new research from UC San Francisco has found.    The study, which appears June 24 in JAMA, adds to evidence from UCSF’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program that using telehealth for medication abortion is safe and effective.     Although the ...

The current method for assessing medication-related liver injury is not providing an accurate picture of some medications’ toxicity—or lack thereof—to the liver, according to a new study led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Classification of a medication’s potential to damage the liver, termed “hepatotoxicity,” has been historically determined by counting individual reported cases of acute liver injury (ALI). Instead, the researchers used real-world health care data to measure rates of ALI within a population and uncovered that some medications’ levels of danger to the liver ...

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions have uncovered new potential therapeutic targets for cancer and new insights into existing cancer drug targets, expanding the breadth of possibilities for treating this disease. Using a comprehensive approach that included integrating proteomics, genomics and epigenomics data from 10 cancer types, the team identified protein and small protein or peptide targets in cancer tissues and validated many of them experimentally as promising candidates for therapeutic strategies. The study appeared in Cell. “Experience ...