Political and social crisis in Lebanon has forced parents to seek unregulated “shadow” education for their children, a new study shows. The government’s ongoing neglect of public education is intensifying social inequality, experts have warned. The current sectarian power-sharing arrangement has led to a diminished focus on schools, fostering privatization. The study shows how upheavals in Lebanon have exacerbated educational challenges for families across all socioeconomic groups, leading to an increasing reliance on the unregulated shadow education sector, particularly private ...

Bethesda, MD (April 22, 2025) — The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) is proud to announce the selection of 74 recipients to receive $2.4 million in research funding through the annual AGA Research Foundation Awards Program. AGA also announces today the addition of 10 pilot grants, totaling $400,000 in funding, to the 2026 awards portfolio to ensure that scientific discovery continues despite federal funding cuts. “Since we established the AGA Research Foundation in 1984, AGA has been unwavering in the commitment to supporting ...

LA JOLLA, CA—A preclinical study from scientists at Scripps Research finds that a drug already FDA-approved for treating inflammatory conditions may help reduce both alcohol intake and pain sensitivity—two issues that commonly co-occur with alcohol use disorder (AUD). The results, published in JCI Insight on April 22, 2025, suggest that the drug apremilast—a phosphodiesterase-4 (PDE4) inhibitor, or a compound that blocks an enzyme involved in inflammation—could be repurposed as a dual-acting therapy for AUD, particularly in individuals who have pain during and after alcohol use. AUD ...

Researchers led by Keigo Morita and Shinya Kuroda of the University of Tokyo have revealed a temporal disruption in the metabolism of obese mice when adapting to starvation despite no significant structural disruptions in the molecular network. This is a breakthrough discovery as research including the temporal dimension in biology has been notoriously laborious and extracting systematic insight from big data has been difficult. Thus, this study paves the way for further research into more general metabolic processes, such as food intake and disease progression. The findings were published in the journal Science Signaling. Living beings need to continuously extract energy from “food” ...

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan. In virtual-reality environments, individuals can adopt various forms of avatars, projecting their behaviors into a virtual realm where their interaction partners also appear as avatars. With this shift in ...

Highlights - Humans take more risks when interacting with facial expressions shown on avatars rather than real human faces. - This shift in risk-taking behavior is linked to activity in the amygdala. - The findings offer new insights into both the advantages and the cautionary aspects of communication via avatars.   Abstract A research team led by Dr. TANAKA Toshiko and Dr. HARUNO Masahiko at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki Ph.D.), investigated how avatar-mediated communication affects human decision-making. They ...

Monday May 26, 2025, key stakeholders from across Europe will gather in Brussels at the Committee of the Regions for the PREPSOIL Final Event, marking a major step in advancing soil  health policies and practices. The event will bring together policy-makers, researchers, and civil society representatives to discuss how the objectives of the Mission Soil and the proposed Soil  Monitoring Law may be supported and implemented at regional and local scale across EU Member States and the role that regional and local actors can play in promoting ...

Can agriculture and solar energy work together instead of competing? A study led by Maddalena Curioni, Nikolas Galli, Giampaolo Manzolini and Maria Cristina Rulli, researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Energy at the Politecnico di Milano, sheds new light on the potential of agrivoltaics. Published in the prestigious journal Earth’s Future, the paper analyses how the coexistence of photovoltaic panels and agricultural crops can help solve the global conflict over land use. With the growing demand for renewable energy and the need to produce increasing amounts of food, the pressure on arable land is intensifying. ...

In face-to-face conversations, speakers use hand movements to signal meaning. But do listeners actually use these gestures to predict what someone might say next? In a study using virtual avatars, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Radboud University in Nijmegen show that listeners used the avatar’s gestures to predict upcoming speech. Both behavioural and EEG data indicated that hand gestures facilitate language processing, illustrating the multimodal nature of human communication. People might wiggle their fingers when they talk about typing, depicting a ‘typing’ movement. Seeing meaningful hand movements—also called iconic gestures—helps ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A powerful clinical artificial intelligence tool developed by University at Buffalo biomedical informatics researchers has demonstrated remarkable accuracy on all three parts of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (Step exams), according to a paper published today (April 22) in JAMA Network Open. Achieving higher scores on the USMLE than most physicians and all other AI tools so far, Semantic Clinical Artificial Intelligence (SCAI, pronounced “Sky”) has the potential to become a critical partner for ...

Adolescents who sleep for longer – and from an earlier bedtime – than their peers tend to have improved brain function and perform better at cognitive tests, researchers from the UK and China have shown. But the study of adolescents in the US also showed that even those with better sleeping habits were not reaching the amount of sleep recommended for their age group. Sleep plays an important role in helping our bodies function. It is thought that while we are asleep, toxins that have built up in our brains are cleared out, and brain connections are consolidated and pruned, enhancing memory, learning, and problem-solving skills. Sleep has also been shown to boost our immune ...

Dopamine signals in different parts of the brain rise and fall in complex patterns as animals learn to avoid danger Findings shed light on why the ‘dopamine detox’ trend is too simplistic First study to track how dopamine signals evolve over time The findings may help explain how dopamine signaling contributes to excessive avoidance in disorders like in anxiety and OCD, where individuals overestimate danger CHICAGO --- Dopamine is the brain’s motivational spark, driving us to chase what feels good, say scrolling another reel on social ...

About The Study: In this microlongitudinal cohort study of family caregivers of relatives with dementia, hazardous drinking and daily alcohol consumption were significantly and independently associated with increased odds of abusive and neglectful behaviors, highlighting the need for personalized interventions that address caregiving complexities and alcohol use patterns. Corresponding author: To contact the corresponding author, Carolyn E. Z. Pickering, Ph.D., R.N., email pickering@uth.tmc.edu. To ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of young adults, the long-term association between traffic-related air pollution and insulin resistance may be partially explained by higher body mass index (BMI) and accelerated BMI growth from early adolescence into young adulthood. These findings highlight the importance of weight management in children, particularly those residing in highly polluted areas. Corresponding author: To contact the corresponding author, Shohreh F. Farzan, Ph.D., email sffarzan@usc.edu. To ...

(TORONTO, April 22, 2025) JMIR Aging, a leading open access journal focused on digital health and aging, announced the launch of a new dedicated section on “Advance Care Planning for Older Adults.” This timely addition will provide a crucial platform for cutting-edge research examining how digital health tools can empower older adults in making informed decisions about their future health care needs and actively involve their caregivers in this vital process. This new section will delve into the innovative ways technology can support personalized ...

MIT astronomers have discovered a planet some 140 light-years from Earth that is rapidly crumbling to pieces.  The disintegrating world is about the mass of Mercury, although it circles about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun, completing an orbit every 30.5 hours. At such close proximity to its star, the planet is likely covered in magma that is boiling off into space. As the roasting planet whizzes around its star, it is shedding an enormous amount of surface minerals and effectively evaporating away.  The astronomers spotted the planet using NASA’s Transiting ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A multi-state study reveals that many high-risk adults diagnosed with influenza (flu) in emergency departments and urgent care centers are not receiving timely antiviral treatment. Researchers found that only slightly more than half of these patients received antiviral prescriptions, and of those, only 80 percent were filled. This gap in treatment could increase the risk of severe flu complications, particularly for older adults and those with underlying conditions. The study analyzed prescribing and ...

Highlights: Biodegradation is an important natural process during oil spill cleanup. A new study revealed that using spill treating agents does not negatively impact naturally occurring biodegradation. Washington, D.C.—Using spill treating agents to clean up oil spills does not significantly hinder naturally occurring oil biodegradation, according to a new study. The study, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology, provides information that will be useful in future oil ...

Mount Sinai researchers studying a type of heart disease known as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) have calibrated an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to quickly and more specifically identify patients with the condition and flag them as high risk for greater attention during doctor’s appointments. The algorithm, known as Viz HCM, had previously been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the detection of HCM on an electrocardiogram (ECG). The Mount Sinai study, published April 22 in the journal NEJM AI, assigns numeric probabilities to the algorithm’s ...

Telemedicine use in 2023 reduced monthly carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas operated vehicles, suggesting it could have a positive effect on climate change, new UCLA-led research finds. The findings, to be published April 22 in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Managed Care, suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but noticeable impact on the environment by decreasing the number of vehicles traveling to and from medical appointments. They could also have policy implications, said co-senior author Dr. John N. Mafi, associate professor-in-residence of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research ...

An Abundance of Caution American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions David Zweig A searing indictment of the American public health, media, and political establishments’ decision-making process behind pandemic school closures. 9780262549158| $39.95 US | hardcover | April 22nd, 2025 | 464 pp. | Cambridge, MA, April, 2025 For immediate release This spring marks the 5th anniversary of the initial Covid lockdowns. While we all experienced the pandemic differently, for 50 million American children the unprecedented––and for many of them, years-long––disruption to their education may be the most consequential collective event in more than a generation. ...

WASHINGTON—The Endocrine Society has appointed Manuel Tena-Sempere, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Cordoba in Spain, as the next Editor-in-Chief of its flagship basic science journal, Endocrinology, starting January 2026. Manuel Tena-Sempere is a professor of physiology at the University of Cordoba, a research group leader at the biomedical research institute of Cordoba (IMIBIC) and a principal investigator at the Spanish network of Research on Obesity and Nutrition (CIBEROBN) in Cordoba, Spain. “I am pleased to announce Dr. Tena-Sempere as our next Editor-in-Chief of ...

The way DNA folds inside the nucleus of brain cells may hold the key to understanding a devastating form of brain cancer called glioblastoma, suggests a new preclinical study from Weill Cornell Medicine researchers. The findings, published April 3 in Molecular Cell, offer a new way to think about cancer beyond gene mutations, based on the way that genes are connected and regulated in three-dimensional space. “Glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and incurable tumors. Although we know a lot about the mutations and the genes that characterize it, we still have no effective ways to stop it,” said Dr. Effie ...

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death globally, with nearly 20 million new cases and 9.7 million deaths in 2022. Early detection plays a crucial role in reducing cancer-related morbidity and mortality, but many cancers are diagnosed at advanced stages due to subtle early symptoms and lack of awareness. Liquid biopsy, a non-invasive approach that examines circulating tumor components in body fluids, has emerged as a groundbreaking technology in cancer detection. This review presents the advancements in liquid ...

More than two-thirds of Floridians are moderately or extremely concerned about hurricanes increasing in strength and frequency, according to a new Florida Atlantic University survey. The Invading Sea’s Florida Climate Survey also found that most Floridians – 54% – are worried about being able to afford and maintain homeowners insurance due to climate change. According to a 2023 report by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the average premiums for Florida homeowners rose nearly 60% between 2015 and 2023, the largest increase ...