Women of childbearing age who had both ovaries removed, in a procedure called bilateral oophorectomy, were more likely to develop heart failure later in life, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.25). Bilateral oophorectomy is often recommended to treat and, in some cases, prevent certain health issues, including endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory disease, heavy bleeding and ovarian cancer. The new study sheds light on the potential and unique role that this procedure might play in heightening cardiovascular risk given that it abruptly stops ...

The answer to your heart health may be on your wrist, a new study suggests. Researchers have developed a new way to assess cardiovascular health based on information routinely collected by smartwatches, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.25). According to the findings, dividing the average daily heart rate by the number of steps taken per day provides a more reliable indicator of a person’s cardiovascular fitness compared with either heart rate or step count alone. “The metric we developed looks at how the heart responds to exercise, rather than exercise itself,” said Zhanlin Chen, ...

Mammograms, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) models, may reveal much more than cancer, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session (ACC.25). The findings highlight how these important cancer screening tools can also be used to assess the amount of calcium buildup in the arteries within breast tissue—an indicator of cardiovascular health.   The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that middle-aged and older women get a mammogram—an X-ray of the breast—to screen for breast cancer every one or two ...

DALLAS, March 20, 2025 — Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death in India and the fifth leading cause of disability.[1] To establish a coordinated system of care for stroke in the country, Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad, Telangana, and Aster Hospital in Calicut, Kerala, are the first in India to be certified as Comprehensive Stroke Centers by the American Stroke Association.  Launched in India last year, certifications from American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association, devoted to a world ...

Nearly 3 out of every 4 older Americans have experienced at least one extreme weather event in the last two years, a new University of Michigan poll finds. And living through such an event appears to make a big difference in how they view the potential impact of climate change on their health. The new findings from the National Poll on Healthy Aging show that 59% of people aged 50 and over are concerned about how climate change could affect their health. The percentage expressing concern was even higher among those who had recently lived through a weather ...

Complex materials such as organic semiconductors or the microporous metal-organic frameworks known as MOFs are already being used for numerous applications such as OLED displays, solar cells, gas storage and water extraction. Nevertheless, they still harbour a few secrets. One of these has so far been a detailed understanding of how they transport thermal energy. Egbert Zojer’s research team at the Institute of Solid State Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), in collaboration with colleagues from TU Vienna and the University of Cambridge, has now cracked this ...

Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) find it harder to get pregnant, have more frequent miscarriages and have a higher risk of developing endometrial cancer. Now, in a new study published in Nature Medicine, Swedish researchers have shown that the uterine lining of these women differs in terms of both the composition of individual cells and gene expression. The results open the door to new drug treatments. PCOS is the most common hormonal disorder affecting 11-13% of women of reproductive age. Women with the syndrome have difficulty getting pregnant and are at increased ...

As animals experience new things, the connections between neurons, called synapses, strengthen or weaken in response to events and the activity they cause in the brain. Neuroscientists believe that synaptic plasticity, as these changes are called, plays an important role in storing memories. However, the rules governing when and how much synapses change are not well understood. The traditional view is that the more two neurons fire together, the stronger their connection becomes; when they fire separately, their connection weakens. New research ...

Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and collaborators have discovered a groundbreaking way to control superconductivity—an essential phenomenon for developing more energy-efficient technologies and quantum computing—by simply twisting atomically thin layers within a layered device. By adjusting the twist angle, they were able to finely tune the “superconducting gap,” which plays a key role in the behavior of these materials. The research was published in Nature Physics. The superconducting gap is the energy threshold required to break apart Cooper pairs—bound electron pairs that enable superconductivity at low temperatures. ...

New Haven, Conn. — Advances in the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 over the past 15 years have yielded important new insights into the roles that specific genes play in many diseases. But to date this technology — which allows scientists to use a “guide” RNA to modify DNA sequences and evaluate the effects — is able to target, delete, replace, or modify only single gene sequences with a single guide RNA and has limited ability to assess multiple genetic changes simultaneously. Now, however, Yale scientists have developed a series of sophisticated mouse models using CRISPR (“clustered regularly ...

The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) released a new clinical guideline making no recommendation — for or against — the use of computer-aided detection systems (CADe) in colonoscopy. A rigorous review of evidence showed that artificial intelligence-assisted technology helps identify colorectal polyps. However, its impact on preventing colorectal cancer — the third most common cancer worldwide — remains unclear.  Colonoscopy, performed more than 15 million times annually in the U.S., is an effective tool for detecting and preventing colorectal cancer. CADe systems have been shown to improve polyp detection ...

For the first time scientists have identified promising drug candidates that bind irreversibly with a notoriously “undruggable” cancer protein target, permanently blocking it. Transcription factors are proteins that act as ‘master switches’ of gene activity and play a key role in cancer development. Attempts over the years to design “small molecule” drugs that block them have been largely unsuccessful, so in recent years scientists have explored using peptides – small protein fragments – to block these “undruggable” targets. Now researchers from the University of Bath have for ...

[Vienna, 19.03.2025]—Between April 2020 and December 2022, over 535,000 people in Germany downloaded and activated the Corona Data Donation App (CDA). Of these, more than 120,000 voluntarily shared daily data from their smartwatches and fitness trackers with researchers, providing insights into vital functions such as resting heart rate and step count. “These high-resolution data served as the starting point for our study,” explains CSH researcher Katharina Ledebur. “We were able to compare vital signs in 15-minute intervals before, during, and after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Higher Resting Heart Rate ...

Imagine looking at the world through the stalked compound eyes of krill in the Southern Ocean. All of a sudden, a penguin appears like a voracious giant, streamlined like a torpedo, chasing and consuming thousands of krill at rapid speed. Now, researchers have shown that the water-borne smell of the poo of these flightless birds is enough to cause the krill to show escape behaviors. “Here we show for the first time that a small amount of penguin guano causes a sudden change in the feeding and swimming behaviors of Antarctic krill,” said Dr Nicole ...

Quantum gravity is the missing link between general relativity and quantum mechanics, the yet-to-be-discovered key to a unified theory capable of explaining both the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The solution to this puzzle might lie in the humble neutrino, an elementary particle with no electric charge and almost invisible, as it rarely interacts with matter, passing through everything on our planet without consequences. For this very reason, neutrinos are difficult to detect. However, in rare cases, ...

The parts of the brain that are needed to remember words, and how these are affected by a common form of epilepsy, have been identified by a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons at UCL. The new study, published in Brain Communications, found that shrinkage in the front and side of the brain (prefrontal, temporal and cingulate cortices, and the hippocampus) was linked to difficulty remembering words. The new discovery highlights how the network that is involved in creating and storing word memories is dispersed throughout the brain. This is particularly crucial for helping to understand conditions such as epilepsy, in which patients may have difficulty with remembering words. ...

An experimental drug appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s-related dementia in people destined to develop the disease in their 30s, 40s or 50s, according to the results of a study led by the Knight Family Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network-Trials Unit (DIAN-TU), which is based at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The findings suggest – for the first time in a clinical trial – that early treatment to remove amyloid plaques from the brain many years before symptoms arise can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia. The study is published March 19 in The Lancet Neurology. The international study ...

UCL Press Release Under embargo until Thursday 20th March, 00:01 UK time / Wednesday 19th March, 20:01 Eastern US time Not peer reviewed | Literature review & data analysis | People   People who share more mealtimes with others are more likely to report higher levels of life satisfaction and wellbeing, finds research led by a UCL academic for the World Happiness Report. In chapter three of the report, Sharing Meals with Others, the researchers from UCL, University of Oxford, Harvard University and Gallup found that meal sharing as an indicator ...

A new analysis of data collected over three years by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration provides even stronger evidence than the group’s previous datasets that dark energy, long thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time in unexpected ways. Dr. Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, professor of physics at The University of Texas at Dallas, is co-chair of the DESI working group that interprets cosmological survey data gathered by the international collaboration, which includes more than 900 researchers ...

The fate of the universe hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy: the fundamental ingredient that drives its accelerating expansion. New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration use the largest 3D map of our universe ever made to track dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years. Researchers see hints that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time in unexpected ways. DESI is an international experiment with more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley ...

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is mapping millions of celestial objects to better understand dark energy: the mysterious driver of our universe’s accelerating expansion. Today, the DESI collaboration released a new collection of data for anyone in the world to investigate. The dataset is the largest of its kind, with information on 18.7 million objects: roughly 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars (extremely bright but distant objects powered by supermassive black holes at their cores).  While the experiment’s ...

A recent study conducted by researchers from Arizona State University has uncovered alarming levels of Fusarium mycotoxins in illicit cannabis samples seized in Arizona and California.   The study found that 16% of the 118 samples tested positive for harmful mycotoxins, posing potential health risks to consumers. This groundbreaking research highlights the unregulated and dangerous nature of black-market cannabis.   The study, led by Arizona State University professor Maxwell Leung, analyzed cannabis samples obtained between November 2023 and June 2024 from law enforcement seizures. The samples ...

MINNEAPOLIS — For women in their 80s, experiencing increasing sleepiness during the day over a five-year period is associated with double the risk of developing dementia during that time, according to a study published on March 19, 2025, online in Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that daytime sleepiness causes dementia; it only shows an association. “Sleep is essential for cognitive health, as it allows the brain to rest and rejuvenate, enhancing our ability to think clearly and remember information,” said study author Yue Leng, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco. “However, ...

A study in Neurology, led by Yue Leng, PhD, and Sasha Milton, followed the sleep patterns of 733 older female participants to see if specific patterns of change were associated with a higher risk of dementia. The participants, whose average age was 83, were monitored by wrist devices that track movement and time spent asleep. They had normal cognition at the start of the study. What They Discovered  At the end of the study, five years later, 13% had developed dementia. This included 25 participants (8%) with stable sleep patterns, 39 (15%) ...

Scientists from South Africa and China have successfully established the world’s longest intercontinental ultra-secure quantum satellite link, spanning 12,900 km. Using the Chinese quantum microsatellite Jinan-1, launched into low Earth orbit, this milestone marks the first-ever quantum satellite communication link established in the Southern Hemisphere. In this demonstration, quantum keys were generated in real-time through Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), enabling the secure encryption of images transmitted between ground stations in China and South Africa via one-time pad encryption—considered unbreakable. The results from this pioneering ...