“Our study introduces an oxidative stress-based prognostic model for bladder cancer, offering insights into personalized therapy.” BUFFALO, NY- February 28, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 16, Issue 3, entitled, “Prognostic model development and molecular subtypes identification in bladder urothelial cancer by oxidative stress signatures.” Mounting studies indicate that oxidative stress (OS) significantly ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Drug discovery can be a frustrating process of trial and error. Scientists using fragment-based drug discovery link fragments of different molecules together to create a more potent drug but may not know whether a compound works until millions of dollars in research and development have already been spent. New University at Buffalo research may offer a more streamlined approach, allowing drug makers to determine the viability of a fragment-based design earlier in the process.  While developing a fragment-based drug to treat lung cancer, a team co-led by UB found that where they linked fragments together had a large effect on potency. “Despite ...

In a first-of-its-kind study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, physician-scientists from the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine discovered that high-dose inhaled nitric oxide therapy may improve oxygenation and reduce the risk of mortality among critically ill Black patients with COVID-19. Acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS, is a condition that most commonly occurs in the setting of a lung infection such as COVID-19. “In ARDS, the barrier between the blood vessels and air sacs in the lungs is disrupted leading to the accumulation of fluid ...

New Orleans, LA. – Ochsner Digital Medicine has partnered with Humana Healthy Horizons to provide digital medicine services to its members. This agreement was effective February 1, 2024, with member enrollment in digital programs available immediately after. Humana Healthy Horizons is Humana’s Medicaid plan for Louisiana, covering thousands of members throughout the state. Through this partnership, Ochsner Digital Medicine will offer Humana Healthy Horizons members who have been diagnosed with Hypertension and Type 2 diabetes remote programs designed to manage and control their conditions. The programs use remote patient management through digital devices and personalized ...

Seattle is routinely listed as one of the most walkable and bike-friendly cities in the nation. The city government has committed to Vision Zero, which aims to completely eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, and embarked on a slew of infrastructure projects: expanding the city’s bike network, redesigning high-crash intersections and enhancing crosswalks to protect pedestrians.  Such safety projects sometimes meet opposition from local business owners, who worry that reduced parking and disruption ...

African apes are already being exposed to climate change impacts, and will experience extreme events such as wildfires, heatwaves and flooding more frequently in the next 30 years, according to a study publishing February 28 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Razak Kiribou at Haramaya University in Ethiopia and colleagues. To better understand how African great apes will be affected by climate change, researchers investigated past and future climate for 363 sites across Africa. They estimated temperature and rainfall at each site between 1981 and 2010. Using two climate change scenarios, they projected how frequently apes would be exposed to climate change impacts in the near ...

Countries in the European Union (EU) have made progress over the past decade toward Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7), which calls for “access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” by 2030, according to a study published February 28, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marek Walesiak from Wroclaw University of Economics and Business, Poland, and Grażyna Dehnel from Poznań University of Economics and Business, Poland. In 2015, the United Nations developed 17 global Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. Tenets of SDG 7 include universal access to affordable energy; increased renewable energy ...

Thousands of historic and archaeological sites in Georgia are at risk from tropical storm surges, and that number will increase with climate change, according to a study published February 28, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Matthew D. Howland and Victor D. Thompson of Wichita State University and the University of Georgia. Anthropogenic climate change poses a major risk to coastlines due to rising sea level and increasingly severe tropical storms. This threatens not only living populations but also historic and archaeological sites. Mitigating damage requires accurate assessments of risks, but most predictive models focus on projected ...

Pet dogs with diarrhea may be shedding multi-drug resistant E.coli in 5 in 10 cases, with potential risks to their human owners ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0298053 Article Title: Characteristics of MDR E. coli strains isolated from Pet Dogs with clinic diarrhea: A pool of antibiotic resistance genes and virulence-associated genes Author Countries: China Funding: This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFD0500900, ...

Harassment on public transport negatively impacts women's health and welfare, with existing measures being largely ineffective, per systematic review ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0296830 Article Title: Invasion of privacy or structural violence? Harassment against women in public transport environments: A systematic review Author Countries: Spain Funding: This study has been supported by the research grant ACIF/2020/035 from the "Generalitat Valenciana". The funding entity did not contribute to the study design or data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing the manuscript. There was no additional ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- For centuries, coronaviruses have triggered health crises and economic challenges, with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that spreads COVID-19, being a recent example. One small protein in SARS-CoV-2, the Membrane protein, or M protein, is the most abundant and plays a crucial role in how the virus acquires its spherical structure. Nonetheless, this protein’s properties are not well understood. A research team led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has devised a new method to make large quantities of M protein, and has characterized the protein’s ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Most cancers are thought to evade the immune system. These cancers don't carry very many mutations, and they aren’t infiltrated by cancer-fighting immune cells. Scientists call these cancers immunologically "cold." Now new research suggests such cancers aren't as "cold" as once thought. Researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI), UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and UC San Diego, have found that patients with "cold" tumors actually do make cancer-fighting T cells.  This discovery opens the door to developing vaccines or therapies to increase T cell ...

Imagine: You find the dried-up remains of a once green and lush philodendron on your bookshelf and realize you can’t remember the last time you watered your houseplants. You soak the soil with water, hoping you can breathe life back into its desiccated husk, but it is futile. The plant has been too dehydrated for too long, and irreparable damage has been done. Now imagine that it isn’t your neglected houseplants that have been subjected to an unexpectedly dry growing season, but a field of wheat. With changes in global climate, such things are becoming more common and more of a concern for farmers, consumers, and researchers alike as the threat to food security intensifies. But ...

Irvine, Calif., Feb. 28, 2024 — In a study recently published in the journal Ecology, University of California, Irvine scientists uncover the intricate dance between drought, wildfires and invasive species in Southern California's coastal sage scrub ecosystems.   Titled “Long-term drought promotes invasive species by reducing wildfire severity,” the research, led by Sarah Kimball, Ph.D., director of the Center for Environmental Biology at UCI, sheds light on the critical interplay of these factors and its ...

New research from the University of British Columbia reveals a safe path to overcoming food allergies for older children and others who can’t risk consuming allergens orally to build up their resistance. It’s called sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), and it involves placing smaller amounts of food allergens under the tongue. A study conducted by UBC clinical professor and pediatric allergist Dr. Edmond Chan and his team at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute found SLIT to be as safe and effective for high-risk older children and adolescents ...

Hamilton, ON, Feb. 28, 2024 – Diagnosing anemia in living people is typically a matter of a routine blood test. Retrospectively diagnosing anemia in people who died decades or even centuries ago is much more challenging since there is no blood left to test. Anthropologists at McMaster University and the University of Montreal, working with a hematologist colleague, have overcome that obstacle by developing a way to detect anemia through patterns in the structures of bones. Paleopathologists Megan Brickley, ...

Cancers begin with abnormal changes in individual cells, and the ability to track the accumulation of mutations at the single-cell level can shed new light on the early stages of the disease. Such knowledge could enable more effective early detection and treatment options for patients as well as more accurate predictions of disease progression. According to a paper in Nature Communications, a team of Rice University researchers led by Luay Nakhleh has developed a platform for integrating DNA and RNA data from single-cell sequencing with greater speed and precision than more recent, state-of-the-art technologies. The method, mapping cross domain ...

The Ecological Society of America is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award (GSPA). Students in the 2024 cohort are engaged in advocacy with an interest in science policy. Awardees will travel to Washington, D.C., for policy, communication and career training followed by meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “I am thrilled to welcome this latest cohort of Graduate Student Policy Awardees,” said ESA President Shahid Naeem. “The caliber of this year's awardees, as has been true for awardees in our program since its inception, reflects ...

Dissecting doorbells, exploring music, mastering retail software, love of the arts and old-fashioned hard work were early paths that led five Sandia National Laboratories engineers to their callings and recently earned them national Black Engineer of the Year Awards. The awards, recognizing outstanding achievements in engineering, science and technology, include Science Spectrum Trailblazer, Modern Day Technology Leader, Most Promising Engineer in Industry and the Senior Investigator Award. Each Sandia award winner has made significant contributions in creative, innovative and science-based systems engineering solutions to help solve our nation’s most challenging national security ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Scientists working with data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have obtained the first full spectra of some of the earliest starlight in the universe. The images provide the clearest picture yet of very low-mass, newborn galaxies, created less than a billion years after the Big Bang, and suggest the tiny galaxies are central to the cosmic origin story. The international team of researchers, including two Penn State astrophysicists, published their results ...

The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 has adapted to spread between birds and marine mammals, posing an immediate threat to wildlife conservation, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina. The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America. For the study, scientists collected brain samples from four sea lions, one fur seal and a tern found dead at the most affected sea lion rookery in Argentina. All ...

A first-of-its-kind study led by researchers at the University of Oklahoma highlights a crucial biosphere feedback mechanism and its effects on releasing soil carbon into the atmosphere. Jizhong Zhou, the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics and George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at OU, is the corresponding author of, “Experimental warming accelerates positive soil priming in a temperate grassland ecosystem,” recently published in Nature Communications. Zhou said the study is the first to utilize laboratory and field experimental ...

A new collaborative study between Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia finds exposure to neighborhood violence among children was associated with unmet health needs and increased acute care utilization. Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and based on nationally representative data on violence exposure and gold standard access to care measures from the National Health Interview Survey, this study shows that evidence-based interventions to improve access to care in communities ...

Neuroscientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have found that an often-overlooked type of brain cell called glia has more of a role in brain function than previously thought. In the journal Cell Reports, Fred Hutch neuroscientist Aakanksha Singhvi, PhD, and her team report that a single glial cell uses different molecules to communicate with different neurons. Careful clustering of these molecules ensures that the glial cell can conduct a distinct “conversation” with each neuron. Through these molecular facilitators, glia can influence how neurons respond to environmental cues like ...

New method enables 3D tongue modelling, for example from fossilized hominin skulls, and might help understand the emergence of human speech. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011808 Article Title: Predicting primate tongue morphology based on geometrical skull matching. A first step towards an application on fossil hominins Author Countries: France Funding: This work is a production of the members of the team "Origins of speech" hosted at Sorbonne University - Institut des Sciences du Calcul et des Données. The funders had no role in study design, data collection ...