The exceptional research, discovery and advocacy legacy of former WEHI director and Australian treasure Sir Gustav Nossal AC CBE will continue through an ongoing professorship, announced today by WEHI and the Nossal family.  Launched with a generous gift from the Nossal family, the Sir Gustav Nossal Professor of Immunology is a prestigious new position that will lead pivotal research to advance human immunology.  An international search is now underway for an outstanding candidate who will become the first Nossal Professor, a role that will build on Sir Gus’ ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- A new final rule issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week for a mandatory alternative payment model called the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model aimed to improve the number of life-saving kidney transplants for patients whose kidneys have failed. The new rule will test whether performance-based upside or downside risk payments among a selected subset of kidney transplant hospitals increase access to kidney transplants for patients with end-stage kidney disease while maintaining or improving the quality of care and reducing Medicare ...

The algorithms behind generative AI tools like DallE, when combined with physics-based data, can be used to develop better ways to model the Earth’s climate. Computer scientists in Seattle and San Diego have now used this combination to create a model that is capable of predicting climate patterns over 100 years 25 times faster than the state of the art. Specifically, the model, called Spherical DYffusion, can project 100 years of climate patterns in 25 hours–a simulation that would take weeks for other models. In addition, existing state-of-the-art models need to run on supercomputers. This model can run on GPU clusters in a research lab.  “Data-driven ...

Severe COVID-19 arises in part from the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s impact on mitochondria, tiny oxygen-burning power plants in cells, which can help trigger a cascade of organ- and immune system-damaging events, suggests a study by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, along with other members of the COVID-19 International Research Team. Severe COVID-19 has been considered an inflammatory ...

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus will receive up to $46 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Transplantation of Human Eye Allografts (THEA) program to advance pioneering research aimed at curing total blindness through human eye transplantation. The award will support the work of the Total Human Eye-allotransplantation Innovation Advancement (THEIA) project team led by CU. The project is led by principal investigator and surgeon-scientist Kia Washington, MD, and co-principal investigator Christene A. Huang, ...

Researchers at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson received $1.7 million in funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve knowledge regarding the prevalence, mortality and health outcomes for people of all ages living with spina bifida. Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs when an embryo’s spinal cord does not properly close during the third and fourth weeks of pregnancy, resulting in a gap in the spine. According to the CDC, spina bifida occurs in 1 ...

New research findings from the Texas A&M University School of Public Health indicate that exposure to even low levels of arsenic poses significant health risks, including an increased risk of kidney cancer. The incidence of kidney cancer in the United States rose by an average of 1.2 percent each year between 2011 and 2019 to become the seventh most common cancer. In the meantime, smoking — a well-established risk factor for kidney cancer — has continued to decline. This led researchers to consider other possible contributing factors, including arsenic, a known cause of various cancers that is naturally occurring ...

A group of young students became bonafide biomedical scientists before they even started high school. Through a partnership with a nearby university, the middle schoolers collected and analyzed environmental samples to find new antibiotic candidates. One unique sample, goose poop collected at a local park, had a bacterium that showed antibiotic activity and contained a novel compound that slowed the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in lab tests. Inequities in educational resources, especially those in science, engineering, technology and math (STEM), where ...

In a first-of-its-kind breakthrough, a team of UBC Okanagan researchers has developed an artificial adhesion system that closely mimics natural biological interactions. Dr. Isaac Li and his team in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science study biophysics at the single-molecule and single-cell levels. Their research focuses on understanding how cells physically interact with each other and their environment, with the ultimate goal of developing innovative tools for disease diagnosis and therapy. Two of Dr. Li’s doctoral students, Micah Yang and David Bakker, have engineered a new molecule that could transform how cells adhere to and communicate with one another. Micah Yang, ...

Seaweed is once again showing promise for making cattle farming more sustainable. A new study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that feeding grazing beef cattle a seaweed supplement in pellet form reduced their methane emissions by almost 40% without affecting their health or weight. The study was published today (Dec. 2) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is the first study to test seaweed on grazing beef cattle in the world. It follows previous studies that showed seaweed cut methane emissions 82% in feedlot cattle ...

The consumption of milk products, eggs and fish has a positive effect on childhood development in Africa. This has been demonstrated in a recent study by the CABI's regional centre for Africa in Nairobi, Kenya and the University of Bonn. The researchers used representative data from five African countries with over 32,000 child observations. If the children had a diet containing animal products, they suffered less from malnutrition and related developmental deficiencies. The study has now been published in the journal PNAS.  Almost 150 million children under the age of five around the world suffer from serious growth and developmental ...

Fukuoka and Tsukuba, Japan—Researchers have uncovered key insights about how liquid crystals, materials capable of forming complex ordered structures, transform between different phases. Published in PNAS, the study provides a clearer understanding of how these materials change their structures at the microscopic level. This research could provide a means to give a deeper insight into the transformation between different structures in a wider variety of materials. Liquid crystals are materials that exhibit properties of both liquids and solids. They flow like liquids but can also ...

New research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on the pathways that drive organ damage and death in severe COVID-19 and helps explain why survivors of the disease can experience long-term complications. “Our study resolves some of the long-standing unanswered questions about how the SARS-CoV-2 virus impacts the body,” said co-senior author Afshin Beheshti, Ph.D., professor of surgery and computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and associate director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. “The findings point ...

A new collection of published papers offers the most detailed and comprehensive breakdown yet of how water injected into the Permian Basin during oil and gas operations is changing subsurface pressures and causing earthquakes. The Permian Basin in West Texas is the country’s most prolific energy-producing region, accounting for more than 40% of the nation’s oil production and about 15% of gas production. However, energy production has caused earthquakes and other challenges in recent years as oil and gas operators now manage roughly 15 million barrels of produced wastewater each day. This briny water comes to the surface ...

Where do you see patterns in chaos? It has been proven, in the incredibly tiny quantum realm, by an international team co-led by UC Santa Cruz physicist Jairo Velasco, Jr. In a new paper published on November 27 in Nature, the researchers detail an experiment that confirms a theory first put forth 40 years ago stating that electrons confined in quantum space would move along common paths rather than producing a chaotic jumble of trajectories. Electrons exhibit both particle and wave-like properties—they ...

Brazilian scientists have determined that ancient specimens of partially domesticated maize (Zea mays, also known as corn) originally from Peruaçu Valley in Minas Gerais state (Brazil) were the farthest from Mexico, the plant’s historic center of origin, of any finds made so far. An article describing their research is published in the journal Science Advances. The study was led by researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. The findings reinforce the theory, based on genetic evidence from plants alive now, that domestication ...

With support from the University of Houston's Andy & Barbara Gessner College of Nursing, two universities in India - MGM Institute of Health Sciences in Mumbai and Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences - have introduced the Doctor of Nursing Practice degree, expanding advanced nursing education in the country. It is the first time any university in India has offered the degree.   The Gessner College graduated its first class of DNP professionals in May 2024.  The DNP doctorate degree ...

What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery? Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean’s layers mix? A collaboration of researchers from universities, science philanthropies and national laboratories has reached an important milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and exploit transferable knowledge between seemingly disparate fields to drive scientific discovery. This initiative, called Polymathic AI, uses technology similar to that powering large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The more time you spend on social media, the likelier you are to have come across a viral post that seems too strange to be true. Brief scientific literacy interventions, especially those that focus on critical thinking skills, may help to undermine conspiracy beliefs and behaviors before the conspiracy theories have a chance to take root, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. The team published their findings in the Journal of Consumer Research. \“While some conspiracy beliefs may seem relatively harmless, others — about vaccines, genetically modified organisms and climate change, for example ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Teenagers use generative artificial intelligence for many purposes, including emotional support and social interactions. A study by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers found that parents have little understanding of GAI, how their children use it and its potential risks, and that GAI platforms offer insufficient protection to ensure children’s safety. The research paper by information sciences professor Yang Wang, the co-director of the Social Computing Systems Lab, and doctoral student Yaman Yu is one of the first published sources of data on the uses and risks of GAI for children. Wang ...

University of Texas at Arlington senior Ken Perry has always been interested in how the heart works. This curiosity led the Arlington High School graduate to start working in the lab of UTA kinesiology Professor R. Matthew Brothers during his second year of college. Now, two years later, Perry is the recipient of two research awards from the American Physiological Society (APS) for his research on a connection between high-fat meals and cardiovascular health. “I always wanted to learn about heart and blood flow, so when friend of mine interested in research encouraged me to apply for the SURPINT program ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have created the smallest walking robot yet. Its mission: to be tiny enough to interact with waves of visible light and still move independently, so that it can maneuver to specific locations – in a tissue sample, for instance – to take images and measure forces at the scale of some of the body’s smallest structures. The team’s paper, “Magnetically Programmed Diffractive Robotics,” published in Science. “A walking robot that’s small enough to interact with and shape light effectively takes a microscope’s lens and puts it directly ...

Salicylic acid is vital for protecting plants from pathogens, but its synthesis remains unclear. A recent study by Shinshu University researchers has discovered that the protein HSR201 is key to its production. They found that HSR201 localizes to specific organelles called peroxisomes through a unique targeting signal. This discovery improves our understanding of how plants produce salicylic acid and could pave the way for developing engineered crops with improved disease resistance. Plant hormones, or phytohormones, are vital for plant growth, adaptation, and defense. ...

A new study from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Institut Curie reveals how stem cells sense and respond to their environment, with implications for inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer.  Stem cells constantly adapt to their environment to maintain organ and tissue health, informed by chemical signals and physical forces. When they do not function as intended, stem cells can result in a number of health conditions including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colorectal (bowel) cancer, where they continue to divide until a tumour forms. Until ...

As part of the COVID-19 International Research Team, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pittsburgh and Weill Cornell Medicine discovered a novel cause of cytokine storm — the extreme inflammatory response associated with increased risk of death in COVID-19 infection. Their findings were reported Nov. 27 in the online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  In an intensive genomic search for causes of cytokine storm, the research team used autopsy samples obtained from 40 patients who died from COVID-19. They performed genome analysis ...