An international team of researchers has detected a binary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been found in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole. The discovery, based on data collected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), helps us understand how stars survive in environments with extreme gravity, and could pave the way for the detection of planets close to Sagittarius A*. “Black holes are not as destructive as we thought,” says Florian Peißker, a researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, and lead author of the ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2024 – Solar power is currently the fastest growing energy sector worldwide. Solar photovoltaic power plants convert sunlight into electricity and their vast potential for producing clean, renewable energy make solar power a cornerstone of the NetZero Emissions by 2050 initiative, which seeks to cut carbon dioxide emissions to zero by the year 2050. Wind has both positive and negative effects on solar power grids. It helps maintain solar panel performance by eliminating the buildup of dirt and dust, and ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17, 2024 — Infertility affects an estimated 186 million people worldwide, with fallopian tube obstruction contributing to 11%-67% of female infertility cases. In AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, researchers at the SIAT Magnetic Soft Microrobots Lab have developed an innovative solution using a magnetically driven robotic microscrew to treat fallopian tube blockages. “This new technology offers a potentially less invasive alternative to the traditional surgical methods currently used to clear tubal obstructions, which often involve ...

LOS ANGELES — Scientists at City of Hope®, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the U.S. with its National Medical Center named top 5 in the nation for cancer by U.S. News & World Report, have collared a tricky culprit that helps cancer cells evade CAR T cell therapy. CAR T cell therapy harnesses the immune system to seek out and kill tumor cells. This treatment is used in certain types of leukemia and lymphoma — blood cancers. Some wily cancer cells, however, have learned how to hide from the immune system to avoid destruction. The study published today in the journal Cell could lead to more personalized therapies that ...

The decades-old anesthetic ketamine could be a game changer for treating severe depression, but there are still many questions about how the drug works, including exactly how it affects the brain’s cells and circuits. To help answer these questions, researchers are turning to an unlikely animal: tiny, days-old zebrafish. The millimeters-long, translucent zebrafish may not get depressed exactly like humans do, but the fish do exhibit a “giving up” behavior: they stop swimming after they realize they aren’t getting anywhere – a passive behavior that scientists use to study ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of Dutch children, early-life moderate to vigorous physical activity was not associated with executive function in middle childhood. Children participating in team sports at ages 10 to 11 consistently exhibited superior executive function compared with participants in individual sports. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Lu Yang, MSc, email l.yang@umcg.nl. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.49879) Editor’s Note: Please see ...

When doctors and nurses pass patient information from one shift to another — an exchange known as a “handoff” — the specific words they use behind closed doors matter more than they might realize. A new study published in JAMA Network Open shows that when clinicians hear a patient described with negatively biased language, they develop less empathy towards the patient and, in some cases, become less accurate in recalling the patient’s critical health details. Such shifts in perception may be subtle and unintentional in many cases, but as these hidden biases stack up, they can influence the care patients ultimately receive. “A lot is going on here ...

Study shows how language, education and age affect someone’s ability to engage with digital health tools. Digital health tools, such as patient portals, treatment apps and online appointment schedulers, are increasingly common. But not everyone is equally at home using them.  To find out how language, education and age may affect a person’s comfort in using digital tools, UC San Francisco researchers surveyed caregivers of hospitalized children at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals. The researchers found that being a Spanish speaker, having less education, and being older all made people feel less comfortable with digital health ...

Scientists mapped near-gap-free and near-error-free genomes of a susceptible bed bug strain and a superstrain around 20,000 times more insecticide-resistant, offering the broadest look yet at the full scope of their resistance mutations. Their findings were published in the journal Insects. Although there is no evidence that bed bugs transmit diseases to humans, their bites can cause itchy rashes and secondary skin infections. Widespread use of insecticides, including the now-banned DDT, nearly wiped out populations of these blood-sucking insects by the 1960s, making infestations ...

SAN ANTONIO — December 17, 2024 —NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently awarded Southwest Research Institute a $26 million contract to develop magnetometers for NOAA’s Space Weather Next (SW Next) program for two missions to be launched in 2029 and 2032. The magnetometers will measure the interplanetary magnetic field carried by the solar wind. “The instruments provide critical data to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center which issues forecasts, warnings and alerts that help mitigate space weather impacts,” said Dr. Roy Torbert, a program director in SwRI’s Earth, Oceans, and Space office ...

A new study has shown that employees are experiencing mental and physical techno-strain due to being ‘hyperconnected’ to digital technology making it difficult for people to switch off from work. Researchers from the University of Nottingham’s Schools of Psychology and Medicine conducted detailed interviews with employees from a range of professions and found that the cognitive and affective effort associated with constant connectivity and high work pace driven by the digital workplace is detrimental to employee wellbeing. The results have been published today in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology. This new paper is the final part of a research ...

Image Adolescent drug use continued to drop in 2024, building on and extending the historically large decreases that occurred during the pandemic onset in 2020. "I expected adolescent drug use would rebound at least partially after the large declines that took place during the pandemic onset in 2020, which were among the largest ever recorded," said Richard Miech, team lead of the Monitoring the Future study at U-M's Institute for Social Research.  "Many experts in the field had anticipated that drug use would resurge ...

NEW YORK CITY and ORLANDO— The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and the McKnight Brain Research Foundation (MBRF) are pleased to announce the 2024 recipients of The McKnight Brain Research Foundation Innovator Awards in Cognitive Aging and Memory Loss: Janine Kwapis, PhD, of Pennsylvania State University, and Sanaz Sedaghat, PhD, of the University of Minnesota.  Now in its fourth year, the Innovator Awards provide funding to research scientists pursuing groundbreaking studies in the field of cognitive aging. Janine Kwapis, PhD, is an Assistant Professor and Paul Berg Early Career Professor ...

Despite national medical guidelines supporting the use of antiviral medications in young children diagnosed with influenza, a recent study reports an underuse of the treatment. “Antiviral Use Among Children Hospitalized with Laboratory-Confirmed Influenza Illness: A Prospective, Multicenter Surveillance Study” was published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, the flagship journal of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Flu illness accounts for up to 10% of all pediatric hospitalizations during ...

Hematopoietic progenitor kinase 1 (HPK1), a member of the Ste20 serine/threonine kinases family, negatively regulates T cell function and is considered a promising target for immunotherapy. Despite the promising efficacy demonstrated in preclinical models, no HPK1 inhibitors are currently approved for clinical use, due to challenges including balance between kinase selectivity and pharmacokinetic properties. CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec 17, 2024 --- Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”), a clinical-stage generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, is proud to announce its latest AI-powered ...

PHILADELPHIA – Following a several-year lull during the pandemic, cases of whooping cough are increasing across the United States. As of Nov. 30, early U.S. data show over 28,000 cases reported this year, or six times as many as in the same period in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Whooping cough or pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial infection of the respiratory tract, was one of the most common childhood diseases in the 20th century and a major cause ...

A Phase I clinical trial led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine has demonstrated the long-term safety and feasibility of neural stem cell transplantation for treating chronic spinal cord injuries. These devastating injuries often result in partial or full paralysis and are currently incurable. The study, which followed four patients with chronic spinal cord injuries for five years, found that two patients showed durable evidence of neurological improvement after treatment with neural stem cell implantation, including increased ...

The domestication of plants and animals has played a key role in the development of human societies. And microbes, too, have been tamed: a study by UNIL, published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the bacteria used to produce Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz cheese show signs of ancient domestication. The domestication of livestock and plants marked an important stage in the settlement of human populations in the Neolithic period, as they moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a subsistence model based on animal husbandry and agriculture. Because of the microscopic size and virtual absence of fossils ...

A Perspective summarizes the risks of bypassing natural selection when using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in humans and livestock. The authors call for dialogue between the fields of assisted reproduction and evolutionary biology. Jonathan P. Evans and Francisco Garcia-Gonzalez detail how techniques used in ART, including in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, can stress and damage gametes and embryos and lead to deleterious epigenetic changes in offspring. Some ART techniques also bypass a system of filters in the female reproductive tract that select healthy sperm and may lead to better genetic matches with ...

Almost three quarters of adolescents in Australia experience clinically significant depression or anxiety symptoms, with most being chronic, according to a new study. And preventive strategies outside our clinics are urgently required to address this considerable public health problem facing the nation. The research, led by Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found mental health problems were frequently chronic with 64 per cent reporting symptoms three or more times across their adolescent years.   MCRI Dr Ellie Robson said the rate and ...

A primary output of agriculture is food, an energy source for the human body. But agriculture also requires energy inputs. Kajwan Rasul and colleagues calculated the global energy return on investment for agriculture over time from 1995 to 2019. The authors constructed a model using two existing models, one that captures the energy use of agriculture and food processing and another that captures flows of agricultural commodities. The authors find that the return on energy investment for global agriculture has increased from .68 to .91 over ...

Most major large language models (LLMs) can quickly tell when they are being given a personality test and will tweak their responses to provide more socially desirable results—a finding with implications for any study using LLMs as a stand-in for humans. Aadesh Salecha and colleagues gave LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta the classic Big 5 personality test, which is a survey that measures Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Researchers have given ...

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a type of cancer immunotherapy where patients’ T-cells are collected and genetically modified to produce chimeric antigen receptors that recognize specific targets on cancer cells, allowing these T-cells to locate and destroy the cancer cells. CAR T-cell therapy shows promising results in treating relapsing or refractory B-cell lymphomas. To explore the risks associated with CAR T-cell therapy, researchers from Juntendo University, Japan, including Professor Jun Ando, Professor Miki Ando, and Dr. Erina Hosoya, published a study in Haematologica on October 17, 2024.   Elaborating about this study further, Dr. Hosoya, ...

After taking the first images of black holes, the ground-breaking Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is poised to reveal how black holes launch powerful jets into space. Now, a research team led by Anne-Kathrin Baczko from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has shown that the EHT will be able to make exciting images of a supermassive black hole and its jets in the galaxy NGC 1052. The measurements, made with interconnected radio telescopes, also confirm strong magnetic fields close to the black hole’s edge.  The main research question for the project’s ...

LOS ANGELES — USC Norris Cancer Hospital was named a Top Teaching Hospital by The Leapfrog Group, a leading national patient safety watchdog organization, for the fourth consecutive year.     “The Leapfrog Top Hospital award is one of the most competitive awards a hospital can receive, and we are delighted that USC Norris Cancer Hospital places among the highest-rated hospitals in the nation once again,” said Marty Sargeant, MBA, CEO of Keck Medical Center of USC, which includes USC Norris Cancer Hospital.     To qualify for the distinction, hospitals must rank top among peers ...