In a study of nearly 5,000 North American first-year college students, those who were more extraverted, more agreeable, or less neurotic were more likely to feel a greater sense of belonging at school. Alexandria Stubblebine, an independent researcher in Ocala, Florida, USA, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 17, 2024. Prior research has suggested that one’s personality traits are associated with one’s general sense of belonging. Within a college-specific context, other research has linked a secure sense of belonging to many positives, such as better academic performance and better mental health. Some studies have investigated ...

When it comes to trends in mortality over the last thirty years, countries around the world can be grouped into five clusters, roughly representing the five continents, according to a new study published January 17, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by David Atance of Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, and colleagues. While the clusters follow different trajectories, they share some commonalities, including longer life expectancies and fewer disparities between genders and groups of countries with different mortality and longevity indicators. Most countries in the world have seen improvements in longevity over the last two centuries, ...

Mothers with high levels of dental plaque are 8 times more likely to transfer Candida albicans, involved in tooth decay, to their babies, underlining the need for moms to keep their own teeth clean ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0290938 Article Title: Multilocus sequence typing of Candida albicans oral isolates reveals high genetic relatedness of mother-child dyads in early life Author Countries: Kuwait, USA Funding: JX; grants K23DE027412 and R01DE031025 from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research. https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/ The funders ...

Dancing is an effective way for overweight and obese people to lose weight and fat, per meta-analysis ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0296089 Article Title: Is dancing an effective intervention for fat loss? A systematic review and meta-analysis of dance interventions on body composition Author Countries: China Funding: We are sure that our funder is the Hunan Provincial Social Science Achievements Evaluation Committee project, the award number is XSP21YBZ163, and the Grant recipient is Longjun Jin. The funder had no role in study design, data collection ...

Arsenic concentrations are predicted to increase significantly in Bangladesh's drinking well water, consumed by around 97% of Bangladeshis, thanks to sea level rise from climate change ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0295172 Article Title: Sea level rise from climate change is expected to increase the release of arsenic into Bangladesh’s drinking well water by reduction and by the salt effect Author Countries: USA Funding: The fieldwork in Bangladesh was funded by the United States Agency of International Development (USAID; contract number US AID RE III 388-0070; https://www.usaid.gov/). ...

A third of surveyed United Nations staff working in Geneva report having personally experienced racial discrimination, and a third having witnessed colleagues being racially discriminated against ### Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0295715 Article Title: Racial discrimination within United Nations offices in Geneva: Results from an online survey Author Countries: Germany, USA Funding: The article was produced as part of the project "Racism and Mental Health: A Qualitative Study with Humanitarian Workers". The project is ...

A study of more than 25,000 U.S. dogs and 238 breeds has linked dog size to varying patterns of risk for health conditions over the course of a dog’s lifespan. Yunbi Nam of the University of Washington, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 17. On average, smaller dogs tend to live longer than larger dogs. Evidence suggests that larger dogs do not tend to have more health conditions, but that dogs of different sizes may face different levels of risk for different conditions. However, more research is needed to clarify links between dog age, size, and disease prevalence. To deepen understanding, ...

KINGSTON, R.I. – Jan. 17, 2024 – A University of Rhode Island professor of Ocean Engineering and Oceanography, along with a multidisciplinary research team from multiple institutions, successfully demonstrated new technologies that can obtain preserved tissue and high-resolution 3D images within minutes of encountering some of the most fragile animals in the deep ocean. URI Professor Brennan Phillips, the principal investigator on the project, and a team of 15 researchers from six institutions, including URI, have shown ...

Researchers have linked the travels of a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth with the oldest known human settlements in Alaska, providing clues about the relationship between the iconic species and some of the earliest people to travel across the Bering Land Bridge. Scientists made those connections by using isotope analysis to study the life of a female mammoth, named Élmayųujey'eh, by the Healy Lake Village Council. A tusk from Elma was discovered at the Swan Point archaeological site in Interior Alaska. Samples from the tusk revealed details about Elma and the roughly 1,000-kilometer journey she took through Alaska ...

Attention editors: Embargoed by Science Advances until Wednesday, January 17th, 2 p.m. eastern High resolution photos, background footage, video clips can be downloaded at this link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Sn4unWFGHb5ULdeB9     Hamilton, ON, Jan. 17, 2024 – An international team of researchers from McMaster University, University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Ottawa has tracked and documented the movements and genetic connections of a female woolly mammoth that roamed the earth more than 14,000 years ago. She travelled ...

An innovative computational tool dubbed “SNAF” may help the research world bring the emerging promise of cancer immunotherapy to a wider range of patients, according to a study published Jan. 17, 2024, in Science Translational Medicine.  The research tool, called the Splicing Neo Antigen Finder (SNAF), was developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Cincinnati Children’s and the University of Virginia. The project was led by Guangyuan Li, PhD, and Nathan Salomonis, PhD, both with the Division of Biomedical Informatics at Cincinnati ...

A new study reported that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, can infect dopamine neurons in the brain and trigger senescence—when a cell loses the ability to grow and divide. The researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggest that further research on this finding may shed light on the neurological symptoms associated with long COVID such as brain fog, lethargy and depression. The findings, published in Cell Stem Cell on Jan. 17, show that dopamine neurons infected with SARS-CoV-2 stop working and send out chemical signals that cause ...

Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger.  Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution. It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass produced using conventional CMOS fabrication technology.  The ...

EDMONTON — A University of Alberta professor is co-leading a new international vaccine safety network to examine why some people who received a COVID-19 vaccine experienced very rare adverse events associated with the vaccine. The International Network of Special Immunization Services (INSIS), based at the U of A, is a consortium of academic medical centres around the world coming together to study very rare adverse events after vaccination. An adverse reaction is considered very rare when it affects less than .001 per cent of the population. “The bar for safety with vaccines is very high because we’re giving them ...

Researchers at UC Davis Health and Kaiser Permanente Division of Research have received a $24 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to continue the Study of Healthy Aging in African Americans (STAR) for an additional five years. STAR, which launched in 2017, follows a group of approximately 750 older adults to understand how behaviors and lifestyle may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias for Black and African Americans. The study ...

Deaths from breast cancer dropped 58% between 1975 and 2019 due to a combination of screening mammography and improvements in treatment, according to a new multicenter study led by Stanford Medicine clinicians and biomedical data scientists. Nearly one-third of the decrease (29%) is due to advances in treating metastatic breast cancer —a form that has spread to other areas of in the body and is known as stage 4 breast cancer or recurrent cancer. Although these advanced cancers are not considered curable, women with metastatic disease are living longer than ever. The analysis helps cancer researchers assess where to focus future efforts and resources. “We’ve ...

“In the future, targeting of RBMX may be a novel method in cancer therapy.” BUFFALO, NY- January 17, 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 1, entitled, “Aberrant RBMX expression is relevant for cancer prognosis and immunotherapy response.” Cancer accounts for the highest rates of morbidity and mortality worldwide. RNA binding motif protein X-linked (RBMX) is a nuclear ...

A team at HZB has developed a new measurement method that, for the first time, accurately detects tiny temperature differences in the range of 100 microkelvin in the thermal Hall effect. Previously, these temperature differences could not be measured quantitatively due to thermal noise. Using the well-known terbium titanate as an example, the team demonstrated that the method delivers highly reliable results. The thermal Hall effect provides information about coherent multi-particle states in quantum materials, based on their interaction with lattice vibrations (phonons). The laws of quantum physics apply to all materials. However, in so-called ...

A new Roundtable discussion in the peer-reviewed journal Health Equity explores the results of a poll conducted by the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), called the “Heart of America Annual Survey.” The survey found that more than 80% of respondents want a national leader that unifies rather than divides us, suggesting that there is a readiness in the country to put polarization and division behind us so that we can solve our collective and common challenges and problems. Click here to read the Roundtable now. Moderating ...

Jingrui He, professor of information sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 grant from the IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute to improve modeling climate change and its impact across multiple application domains. He and a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and IBM will build Climate Runtime, a computational framework integrating cutting-edge capabilities from climate foundation models and multimodal fusion. This framework will allow for accurate prediction and quantification of weather and climate events and their impact in areas such as finance ...

Contacts: David Hosansky, UCAR and NSF NCAR Manager of Media Relations hosansky@ucar.edu 720-470-2073 Audrey Merket, UCAR and NSF NCAR Science Writer and Public Information Officer amerket@ucar.edu 303-497-8293  The laws of thermodynamics dictate that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, but new research has found that atmospheric moisture has not increased as expected over arid and semi-arid regions of the world as the climate has warmed. The findings are particularly puzzling because climate models have been predicting ...

Cleveland Clinic researchers have successfully developed a therapeutic peptide that blocks aggressive cancer cells from multiplying rapidly. The results highlight a potential new strategy for developing targeted treatments for triple-negative breast cancer, which currently has no approved options. Targeted drugs attack cancer cell functions directly, offering a more precise approach to complement broader treatments like chemotherapy. A research team led by Ofer Reizes, PhD, and Justin Lathia, PhD, designed a peptide therapeutic that disrupts the molecular processes behind aggressive cancer growth when delivered into cells. The ...

The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology today named Mona V. Miller its next chief executive officer, effective April 1. Miller is an experienced association leader with significant experience in strategic planning, advocacy and fundraising. Most recently, she was CEO of the American Society of Human Genetics. Before that she held multiple high-level positions at the Society for Neuroscience. Miller said she was drawn to the ASBMB because “scientifically, biochemistry and molecular biology is at the forefront of knowledge that is transforming health and society.” She said she looks forward to “focusing on the pivotal ...

A combination of cognitive and behavioral strategies, ideally delivered in person by a therapist, maximizes the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), according to new research. CBT-I is a form of talk therapy, which can be delivered in person or through self-help guides. By analyzing 241 studies, involving over 30,000 adults, researchers identified the most beneficial components of CBT-I. These included: cognitive restructuring, third-wave components, sleep restriction, stimulus control and in-person delivery. Self-help with human encouragement could also be beneficial, while waiting for active treatment and enforcing ...

About The Study: Prenatal opioid exposure was associated with an increased risk of infection, eczema and dermatitis, and asthma, but not allergies and anaphylaxis or autoimmune conditions in this study of 401,000 neonates. These findings highlight the importance of further study of opioid-induced immune changes during pregnancy, the potential impact on long-term health in exposed children, and the mechanisms of opioid-induced immune dysregulation.  Authors: Erin Kelty, Ph.D., of the University of Western Australia in Crawley, Western Australia, ...