In his Value Creation project in Cell Ag class, Tufts senior Adham Ali faced an intriguing assignment: work with a group of peers to design a product that uses cellular agriculture (or cell ag, for short) to make life easier for consumers. Majoring in biochemistry, Ali took the class as part of his minor in cell ag—a minor he registered for only this semester, because it’s brand-new at Tufts. It’s also the world’s first and only undergraduate degree in the field. Usually used as part of a nascent—and rapidly growing—field that cultivates lab-grown meat from cells in bioreactors, the processes of cellular agriculture ...

With the world projected to be highly urbanized by 2050, cities are encouraged to take urgent climate actions to mitigate and adapt to the threats of climate change. As climate change intensifies and urbanization increases rapidly, local governments are expected now more than ever to lead climate action planning. However, studies show the limitations of the existing climate action plans (CAPs). So scientists from Hiroshima University have created an Urban Climate Action Planning (UCAP) framework to guide the development of urban CAPs and support the assessment of the level of suitability of these plans. Their work is published ...

A new bacterial species discovered at the deep-sea hydrothermal vent site ‘Crab Spa’ provides a deeper understanding of bacterial evolution. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are hot springs on the ocean floor. Sea water penetrates into the ocean crust, becomes heated, and rises to the seafloor surface carrying dissolved nutrients. Around these vents, far from any sunlight, vibrant biological communities are found. Here, microbes play the role of primary producers through chemosynthesis—similar to the role that plants play on land through photosynthesis. Researchers at Hokkaido University, in collaboration with colleagues at Woods ...

A senior biology student at The University of Texas at Arlington recently earned an award for her research about antimicrobial drug resistance. Christina Nguyen received the second-place award at the 2023 UT System LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) Conference held in El Paso, Texas. Nguyen’s award-winning project focused on bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, an increasingly challenging problem in health care. “I had the privilege of hearing multiple fascinating ...

When teenagers and young adults see pro-tobacco content on social media, they face higher risks. They are more likely to report using tobacco products such as e-cigarettes (also called vapes), more likely to start using those products for the first time and less likely to view them as harmful. Algorithms programmed to automatically remove tobacco ads are designed to protect youth—but they don’t always work or are not implemented well enough by social media platforms, according to Julia Vassey, MPH, a health behavior researcher in the department of population ...

University of Queensland scientists have analysed more than 3.8 million volunteer hours of birdwatching data to identify Australia’s most elusive species. Louis Backstrom from UQ’s School of the Environment led the research and said the Coxen’s fig-parrot was the bird that was most elusive to Australian birdwatchers, based on the data found in the eBird and Birdata databases. “Coxen’s fig-parrots are small, dumpy, green parrots with very short tails, and historically they were scattered in rainforests between Bundaberg in Queensland and the Hastings River in New South Wales,” Mr ...

Air pollution from using fossil fuels in industry, power generation, and transportation accounts for 5.1 million extra deaths a year worldwide, finds a new modelling study published by The BMJ today. This equates to 61% of a total estimated 8.3 million deaths worldwide due to ambient (outdoor) air pollution from all sources in 2019, which could potentially be avoided by replacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy sources. These new estimates of fossil fuel-related deaths are larger than most previously reported values ...

Social media use is associated with risky health behaviours in young people including increased alcohol, drug and tobacco use, anti-social behaviour, risky sexual behaviours and gambling, finds a review of the latest evidence published by The BMJ today. Exposure to risky health behaviour content on social media such as alcohol advertising had the strongest evidence of harm, particularly in relation to alcohol use and unhealthy eating. The researchers say further research is needed to establish causality, understand effects on ...

Actively monitoring abnormal cells (lesions) that line the cervix rather than removing them straight away is associated with an increased long term risk of cervical cancer, suggests a study published by The BMJ today. The researchers stress that the absolute risk of cervical cancer remains low, but the results show that compared with immediate treatment, active surveillance was associated with a nearly fourfold higher risk of cervical cancer 20 years after diagnosis. Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) refers to abnormal changes of the cells that line the cervix. CIN is divided into grades - CIN1, 2 or 3. The higher the number, ...

Society has gone backwards in its treatment of women with the internet fuelling new forms of misogyny, according to the author of a new book. Linguist and researcher Deborah Cameron says that prejudice, discrimination and abuse should not be regarded as yesterday’s problems. Rather than fading away in the twenty-first century, they have evolved in ways that reflect today’s conditions, her research suggests. Her book Language, Sexism and Misogyny analyses the way sexism and misogyny are expressed today in advertising and media, drawing on evidence from academic research to provide a comprehensive ...

In a momentous landmark for medical research, UK Biobank has today [Thursday 30 November] unveiled incredible new data from whole genome sequencing1 of its half a million2 participants. This is set to drive the discovery of new diagnostics, treatments and cures and, uniquely, is available to approved researchers worldwide, via a protected database containing only de-identified data (e.g. name, address, date of birth, name of GP and more stripped out). This abundance of genomic data is unparalleled, but what cements it as a defining moment for ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- We humans are fixated on big brains as a proxy for smarts. But headless animals called brittle stars have no brains at all and still manage to learn through experience, new research reveals. Relatives of starfish, brittle stars spend most of their time hiding under rocks and crevices in the ocean or burrowing in the sand. These shy marine creatures have no brain to speak of -- just nerve cords running down each of their five wiggly arms, which join to form a nerve ring near their mouth. “There's no processing center,” ...

Heart failure is a potentially urgent health concern for young adults with congenital heart disease (ACHD) that is often overlooked and undertreated, even as hospitalizations for this condition continue to rise. New research from Mayo Clinic shows that young adults in the U.S. living with congenital heart disease are at an increased risk of death or cardiovascular complications after being hospitalized for heart failure. However, study data published in the Journal of the American Heart Association also found that patients who had been receiving recent cardiology care before a heart failure hospitalization were less likely to die. "More than ...

NEWPORT NEWS, VA – Alexandre Deur has spent his career studying the mystifying spin structure of the nucleon — which is also one of the primary missions of the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, where Deur has been a staff scientist for nearly 20 years. A particle’s spin is one of its basic characteristics, like its mass or electric charge, and physicists have long tried to nail down the dynamics at work behind the spin of particles made of quarks, like the proton, or what they call the “spin ...

Astronomers have uncovered evidence of a rotating disc of material circling a massive young star in a nearby galaxy for the first time. Megan Reiter, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, was part of the team of researchers who announced their discovery in a study published in Nature. “This is strong evidence that high-mass stars, which are several times bigger than the Sun, form in the same way as lower-mass stars,” Reiter said. “That’s been a big question for a long time.” Located in a galaxy neighboring ...

How many fast-food joints do you come across throughout your day and what does that have to do with your health? A lot, says Abigail Horn, a lead scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Horn led a multidisciplinary team that included researchers from three USC schools (Viterbi School of Engineering; Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; and Keck School of Medicine), MIT, and Sabancı University in Turkey; and worked in collaboration with the LA County Department of Public Health. They set out to ascertain whether smartphone mobility (i.e., location) data could provide a way to measure people’s ...

Harvard's Growth Lab has released a new report on Lebanon's struggling economy that revisits the origins of the crisis and proposes a comprehensive plan for a swift economic recovery. The research project, led by Professors Ricardo Hausmann, Ugo Panizza, and Carmen Reinhart, provides a clear diagnostic of the ongoing crisis and suggests novel, out-of-the box solutions.  The research highlights the unusual depth of Lebanon’s economic collapse. According to Professor Hausmann, “Lebanon faces a triple financial crisis: its currency has collapsed, its banking system is bankrupt, and the government has defaulted on its debt. The ...

A nearly decade-long study by UCLA researchers found that substance abuse treatment of any kind may help to reduce methamphetamine usage among men who have sex with other men – a population that has been disproportionately impacted by the U.S. methamphetamine crisis in recent years. The findings come from the mSTUDY, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and are published in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment. The study analyzed responses from a group of nearly 300 men in Los Angeles who self-reported ...

Community members across Utah, the Great Basin, and around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario are invited to join people across the country in contributing winter weather observations. The data is collected by scientists for a NASA-funded project that seeks to improve the accuracy of winter weather predictions.   Information collected by community scientists will help researchers from Lynker, DRI, and the University of Nevada, Reno, improve the technology that drives predictions for when precipitation will fall as rain or snow. Currently, satellite technologies struggle to differentiate snow from rain near the freezing point in mountainous ...

TUCSON, Ariz. and LEBANON, N.H., November 29, 2023 — Critical Path Institute’s (C-Path) Translational Therapeutics Accelerator (TRxA) and Celdara Medical today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) aimed at identifying and advancing promising new therapeutics in areas of high unmet medical need. Under the terms of this agreement, both organizations look to expand opportunities to provide financial support for the development of early-stage therapeutics by exchanging non-competitive information submitted in academic funding proposals. Launched ...

What does a person look like? If you use the popular artificial intelligence image generator Stable Diffusion to conjure answers, too frequently you’ll see images of light-skinned men. Stable Diffusion’s perpetuation of this harmful stereotype is among the findings of a new University of Washington study. Researchers also found that, when prompted to create images of “a person from Oceania,” for instance, Stable Diffusion failed to equitably represent Indigenous peoples. Finally, the generator tended to sexualize images of women from certain Latin American countries (Colombia, Venezuela, Peru) as well as those from Mexico, India and Egypt. The researchers will present ...

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has joined a global consortium of scientists from federal laboratories, research institutes, academia and industry to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific discovery. The partnership, known as the Trillion Parameter Consortium, or TPC, seeks to grow and improve large-scale generative AI models aimed at tackling complex scientific challenges. These include the development of scalable model architectures and related training strategies, as well as data organization ...

The School of Dentistry of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio has launched the Center for Global and Community Oral Health, designed to bring together various existing outreach and research programs under one umbrella to study and develop solutions to the most pressing dental challenges facing the global population. “Our vision is to transform community and global oral health through education, research and innovation,” said Brij B. Singh, PhD, associate dean of research for the dental ...

An exploratory study has shown that light, regular exercise can improve the cognitive, as well as physical, health of adults with Down syndrome. The Mindsets study, published today [29 November] in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is the first to investigate the effects of physical and cognitive exercise on people with Down syndrome, and it found that short bursts of walking can lead to improved information processing and attention after just eight weeks. The role that exercise can play in cognitive growth represents a breakthrough in thinking about what’s ...

Doctors managing deceased organ donors routinely treat the donors’ bodies with thyroid hormones in a bid to preserve heart function and increase the quantity and quality of hearts and other organs available for transplantation. However, according to a recent clinical trial led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Mid-America Transplant in St. Louis, routine thyroid hormone intervention is not effective at achieving these goals, and may even cause harm. The study is published Nov. 30 in The New England Journal of Medicine. “There have been ...