PHILADELPHIA (May 9, 2024) – New research from Penn Nursing’s Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research (CHOPR) – recently published online in the journal Research in Nursing & Health – has successfully validated a new, streamlined version of the Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index (PES-NWI), originally authored in 2002 by Eileen T. Lake, PhD, RN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing, the Edith Clemmer Steinbright Professor in Gerontology, and Associate Director of CHOPR, who is also lead author on this publication. This innovative tool, known as the PES-5, is designed to revolutionize how nurse work environments are measured across ...

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cracks down on insidious “forever chemical” pollution in the environment, military and commercial aviation officials are seeking ways to clean up such pollution from decades of use of fire suppressant foams at military air bases and commercial airports. Fire-suppression foams contain hundreds unhealthful forever chemicals, known by chemists as PFAS or poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances. These compounds have stubbornly strong fluorine-to-carbon bonds, which allow them to persist indefinitely in the environment, hence the moniker “forever chemicals.” ...

UC Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane had to double check his calculations. He wasn’t sure the planet he was studying could be as extreme as it seemed.  Kane never expected to learn that a planet in this faraway star system is covered with so many active volcanoes that seen from a distance it would take on a fiery, glowing-red hue. “It was one of those discovery moments that you think, ‘wow, it’s amazing this can actually exist,” Kane said. A paper detailing the discovery has been published in The Astronomical Journal.  Launched in 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey ...

DURHAM, N.C. – A team led by the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) has developed a vaccine approach that works like a GPS, guiding the immune system through the specific steps to make broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV.   Publishing in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, the study describes an approach that provides step-by-step directions for the immune system to generate the elusive, yet necessary antibodies for a successful HIV vaccine.   “HIV is the fastest-evolving virus known. So it’s been a long-standing goal in HIV research to create ...

The National Science Foundation awarded $630,444 to Kathleen Paul, an assistant professor of anthropology at the U of A, to provide a comprehensive outline of dental genetic architecture for two primate species of tamarins and macaques.  Paul's research team’s ultimate goal is to harness this information to advance bioanthropological practice, including the use of teeth for reconstructing evolutionary processes and experiences of stress and illness.  No live animals will be used in the research. Instead, skeletonized individuals from collections ...

Discrimination may speed up the biological processes of aging, according to a new study led by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health.    The research links interpersonal discrimination to changes at the molecular level, revealing a potential root cause of disparities in aging-related illness and death.   “Experiencing discrimination appears to hasten the process of aging, which may be contributing to disease and early mortality and fueling health disparities,” said Adolfo Cuevas, assistant professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU’s ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Systems controlled by next-generation computing algorithms could give rise to better and more efficient machine learning products, a new study suggests.  Using machine learning tools to create a digital twin, or a virtual copy, of an electronic circuit that exhibits chaotic behavior, researchers found that they were successful at predicting how it would behave and using that information to control it. Many everyday devices, like thermostats and cruise control, utilize linear controllers – which use ...

University of Leeds news release  Embargoed until 1900 BST, 9 May 2024  How climate change will affect malaria transmission  A new model for predicting the effects of climate change on malaria transmission in Africa could lead to more targeted interventions to control the disease according to a new study.  Previous methods have used rainfall totals to indicate the presence of surface water suitable for breeding mosquitoes, but the research led by the University of Leeds used several climatic and hydrological models to include real-world processes of evaporation, infiltration and flow through rivers.  This ...

Machine learning enables cheaper and safer low-power magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) without sacrificing accuracy, according to a new study. According to the authors, these advances pave the way for affordable, patient-centric, and deep learning-powered ultra-low-field (ULF) MRI scanners, addressing unmet clinical needs in diverse healthcare settings worldwide. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has revolutionized healthcare, offering noninvasive and radiation-free imaging. It holds immense promise for advancing medical diagnoses through artificial intelligence. However, despite its five decades of development, MRI remains largely inaccessible, particularly ...

Areas at risk for malaria transmission in Africa may decline more than previously expected because of climate change in the 21st century, suggests an ensemble of environmental and hydrologic models. The combined models predicted that the total area of suitable malaria transmission will start to decline in Africa after 2025 through 2100, including in West Africa and as far east as South Sudan. The new study’s approach captures hydrologic features that are typically missed with standard predictive models of malaria transmission, offering a more nuanced view that could inform malaria control efforts in a warming world. Most of the burden of malaria falls on people living ...

Sea surface temperature anomalies in the Indian Ocean predict the magnitude of global dengue epidemics, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the climate indicator could enhance the forecasting and planning for outbreak responses. Dengue – a mosquito-borne flavivirus disease – affects nearly half the world’s population. Currently, there are no specific drugs or vaccines for the disease, and outbreaks can have serious public health and economic impacts. As a result, the ability to predict the risk of outbreaks and prepare accordingly is crucial for many regions where ...

Using more than 1.4 petabytes of electron microscopy (EM) imaging data, researchers have generated a nanoscale-resolution reconstruction of a millimeter-scale fragment of human cerebral cortex, providing an unprecedented view into the structural organization of brain tissue at the supracellular, cellular, and subcellular levels. The human brain is a vastly complex organ and, to date, little is known about its cellular microstructure, including the synaptic and neural circuits it supports. Disruption of these circuits is known to play a role in myriad brain disorders. Yet studying human brain ...

The highest performing countries across public health outcomes share many drivers that contribute to their success. That’s the conclusion of a new study published May 9  in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Dr. Nadia Akseer, an Epidemiologist-Biostatistician at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-author of the study and colleagues in the Exemplars in Global Health (EGH) program. In recent years, the EGH program has begun to identify and study positive outliers when it comes to global health programs around the world, with an aim of uncovering not only which health interventions work, ...

As the world is transitioning from a fossil fuel-based energy economy, many are betting on hydrogen to become the dominant energy currency. But producing “green” hydrogen without using fossil fuels is not yet possible on the scale we need because it requires iridium, a metal that is extremely rare. In a study published May 10 in Science, researchers led by Ryuhei Nakamura at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan report a new method that reduces the amount of iridium needed for the reaction by 95%, without altering the rate of hydrogen production. This breakthrough could revolutionize our ability to produce ecologically ...

An international team of researchers has discovered that the quantum particles responsible for the vibrations of materials—which influence their stability and various other properties—can be classified through topology. Phonons, the collective vibrational modes of atoms within a crystal lattice, generate disturbances that propagate like waves through neighboring atoms. These phonons are vital for many properties of solid-state systems, including thermal and electrical conductivity, neutron scattering, and quantum phases like charge density waves and superconductivity. The spectrum of phonons—essentially ...

A cubic millimeter of brain tissue may not sound like much. But considering that tiny square contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, all amounting to 1,400 terabytes of data, Harvard and Google researchers have just accomplished something enormous.    A Harvard team led by Jeff Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and newly appointed dean of science, has co-created with Google researchers the largest synaptic-resolution, 3D reconstruction of a piece of human brain to date, showing in vivid detail each cell and its web of neural connections in a piece of human ...

Superfast levitating trains, long-range lossless power transmission, faster MRI machines — all these fantastical technological advances could be in our grasp if we could just make a material that transmits electricity without resistance — or ‘superconducts’ — at around room temperature. In a paper published in the May 10 issue of Science, researchers report a breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of superconductivity at relatively high (though still frigid) temperatures. The findings concern a class of superconductors that has puzzled scientists since 1986, called ‘cuprates.’ “There was tremendous excitement when ...

The Vilcek Foundation has announced the appointment of Dr. Jedd Wolchok to the board of directors, effective May 1, 2024. Wolchok is the Meyer Director of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center and a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.  “Jan, Marica, and I are delighted to welcome Jedd to the Vilcek Foundation board,” says Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel. “We look to our board of directors for insight and perspective on our projects and programs: Jedd is not only a leader in immunotherapy and oncology, but an academic and scientific mentor, and a philanthropist in his own right. We are honored and grateful to have him ...

DALLAS, May 09, 2024 — A recent study revealed that, in the United States, local Black and Latino entrepreneurs receive just 2.6% of all venture capital investment.[1]  To help bridge that gap and while addressing health inequities in these local communities, the American Heart Association, celebrating 100 years of lifesaving service, is offering financial grants and expert business consulting to local social health impact entrepreneurs who are focused on achieving health equity. As the Association commemorates one hundred years of lifesaving service as the world’s leading nonprofit ...

“Debates on when human life begins are rooted deep in philosophical history. However, until recently they have been limited by the state of technology.” BUFFALO, NY- May 9, 2024 – A new review paper was published in advance by Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science), entitled, “The beginning of becoming a human.” According to birth certificates, the life of a child begins once their body comes out of the mother’s womb. In this new review, researchers Polina A. Loseva and Vadim N. Gladyshev from Harvard Medical School pose ...

The American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges has named India Lane the winner of the 2024 Billy E. Hooper Award for Distinguished Service. Lane, associate dean for academic and student affairs at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine (UTCVM), has helped transform academic veterinary medical education not only at the college but throughout the profession. The national award recognizes an individual whose leadership and vision have made a significant contribution to academic veterinary medicine. Throughout ...

“We have developed a Pix-2-Pix GAN model to perform attenuation correction on whole-body PSMA [prostate-specific membrane antigen] PET images with 18F-DCFPyL.” BUFFALO, NY- May 9, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget's Volume 15 on May 7, 2024, entitled, “Deep learning-based whole-body PSMA PET/CT attenuation correction utilizing Pix-2-Pix GAN.” The sequential PET/CT studies oncology patients can undergo during their treatment follow-up course is limited ...

“[...] our study identified one CpG site (cg26514961, PLXNC1 gene) that was significantly associated with neighborhood deprivation in brain tissue.” BUFFALO, NY- May 9, 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 8, entitled, “The association between neighborhood deprivation and DNA methylation in an autopsy cohort.” Previous research has found that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood is associated with poor health outcomes. Living in disadvantaged neighborhoods may alter inflammation and immune response in the ...

Imagine a slime-like robot that can seamlessly change its shape to squeeze through narrow spaces, which could be deployed inside the human body to remove an unwanted item. While such a robot does not yet exist outside a laboratory, researchers are working to develop reconfigurable soft robots for applications in health care, wearable devices, and industrial systems. But how can one control a squishy robot that doesn’t have joints, limbs, or fingers that can be manipulated, and instead can drastically alter its entire shape at will? MIT researchers are working to answer that question. They developed a control algorithm that can autonomously learn ...

The rapid adoption of AI and big data technologies in the biotechnology sector presents unique data privacy and security challenges. To meet these challenges, BGI Genomics actively maintains certifications like ISO/IEC 27001 and BS 10012 while complying with rigorous regulatory standards, including GDPR. ISO/IEC 27001 is a comprehensive framework that dictates the requirements for an information security management system (ISMS), essential for protecting a company's financial data, intellectual property, and personal details entrusted by third parties. Meanwhile, BS 10012 specifically addresses the management of personal data, aligning ...