Online training that helps people recognise and understand new voices could be key to helping older adults improve communication in everyday environments, finds research by UCL experts. The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, tested whether learned voices were easier to understand than unfamiliar voices in 20 older (55-73 years) and 20 younger (18-34 years) adults. Participants took part in some preparatory online training, where they were trained to understand three new voices by listening to them each say 10 meaningful sentences until they became “familiar”. They then had to listen to one of these voices speak ...

Short-term cognitive boost from exercise may last for 24 hours The short-term boost our brains get after we do exercise persists throughout the following day, suggests a new study led by UCL (University College London) researchers. Previous research in a laboratory setting has shown that people’s cognitive performance improves in the hours after exercise, but how long this benefit lasts is unknown. The new study, published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, ...

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded $75 million to a consortium of leading global institutions, including the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, to enhance the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs through research. The Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE) partnership, led by the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, represents a historic ...

ABSTRACT: 805 SAN DIEGO – Adult patients with newly diagnosed malignancy-associated hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (mHLH) – a rare, aggressive hyperinflammatory condition – who were treated with the first-in-class monoclonal antibody, ELA026, experienced a 100% response rate and an improved survival rate at two months, according to researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Data from the Phase Ib trial were presented today at the 66th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition by Abhishek Maiti, M.D., assistant professor of Leukemia and the trial’s principal investigator. ...

Playing video games is a rite of passage for many adolescents, but for some, it could also be the first step to a gaming addiction. “A number one concern for parents of children and teenagers is how much screen time and how much gaming is enough gaming and how to figure out where to draw the line,” said John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester and co-author of a study out today in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions that discovered a key marker in the brain of teens who develop gaming addiction symptoms. “These data begin to give us some answers.” Researchers ...

Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 9 December 2024     @Annalsofim          Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent.          ----------------------------          1. ...

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/About The Study: In hospitalized adults, daily procalcitonin -guided protocol reduced antibiotic duration safely compared with standard care, but daily C-reactive protein -guided protocol does not. All-cause mortality for C-reactive protein was inconclusive.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Paul Dark, MD, PhD, email adaptsepsistrial@warwick.ac.uk. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2024.26458) Editor’s ...

Members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have elected Alan Sealls to the position of AMS president-elect for 2025. Sealls is an AMS Fellow and Certified Broadcast Meteorologist who retired this year from a 37-year broadcast career, which included serving as chief meteorologist at WPMI-TV in Mobile, Alabama. He will be inducted as president-elect on Sunday, 12 January, 2025, during the 105th AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.  At the meeting, the AMS—the professional society for weather, water, and climate sciences ...

A new study from UC San Diego’s Comparative Cognition Lab shows that dogs trained to use soundboards to “talk” are capable of making two-word button combinations that go beyond random behavior or simple imitation of their owners. Published in the journal Scientific Reports from Springer Nature, the study analyzed data from 152 dogs over 21 months, capturing more than 260,000 button presses – 195,000 of which were made by the dogs themselves. “This is the first scientific study to analyze how dogs actually use soundboards,” said lead researcher Federico Rossano, associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego and director ...

Animals showcase a remarkable diversity of colors and patterns, from the shimmery appearance of a peacock’s tail to the distinctive rosettes on a jaguar’s fur. Quantifying animal color has been a longtime goal of evolutionary biologists, who aim to understand how color evolved over time—and the physical and genetic mechanisms involved. Ultimately, studying animal color is important because it can reveal how evolutionary forces, such as natural and sexual selection, favor certain traits over others. However, fully capturing animal color is challenging because researchers must choose between high spatial resolution (as in traditional ...

Researchers at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo state, Brazil, have developed a sourdough bread formulation enriched with jabuticaba peel that could be an alternative for people with diabetes and others who need to control blood sugar. An article describing their research and test results is published in the journal Foods. As noted in the article, the high carbohydrate content of bread can sharply raise blood sugar levels, risking hyperglycemia. Given the high demand for healthier bread, which is widely consumed, artisanal bakers seek to diversify their products with formulations that add nutritional value while involving fermentation ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced 29 projects totaling $36 million to 42 institutions in 16 states for traineeships for undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The funding, through the DOE Office of Science’s RENEW initiative, will support hands-on research experience, professional development activities to build or reinforce STEM identity, and mentorship to support personal and professional growth of trainees.  “The RENEW program provides new entry points to science for ...

AUSTIN, TX, Dec 9, 2024 – Malware (malicious software) is a worldwide threat to network security for organizations. Individual users within those networks may inadvertently download or interact with malware like viruses and ransomware by browsing unsafe websites, downloading software, or clicking on phishing links in emails.   Cybersecurity researchers from the University of Trento and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the global cybersecurity firm Trend Micro wondered what behaviors bring the greatest risk of malware infection: working at night, browsing adult content, gambling, having a lot of software installed or just visiting strange places?   The ...

New research has revealed less than a quarter of the remaining tropical rainforests around the globe can safeguard thousands of threatened species from extinction. The research, co-authored by The University of Queensland’s Professor James Watson, evaluated the global availability of structurally intact, minimally disturbed tropical rainforests for more than 16,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. “Using remote sensing and forest integrity indicators, we analysed the quality of the rainforests across the ranges of the forest-dependent vertebrates,” Professor Watson said. “Overall, up to 90 per cent of ...

Freshwater fish populations that dwell nearer the poles are outperforming their equatorial counterparts, researchers have found. Large-bodied migratory species such as Atlantic salmon are thriving as warming temperatures opens up new habitats at the poleward edge of their ranges. The study, published today in PNAS, was based on a dataset of over 10,000 time series and included over 600 species of fishes.  Climate change has emerged as a key threat to biodiversity, leading to broad-scale shifts in distributions of marine and terrestrial species as they attempt to track thermally suitable habitat. Despite ...

Burlington, Vt.— A team of UVM scientists led by Mark Nelson, Ph.D., from the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, has uncovered a novel mechanism that reshapes our understanding of how blood flow is regulated in the brain. The study, published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), introduces Electro-Calcium (E-Ca) Coupling, a process that integrates electrical and calcium signaling in brain capillaries to ensure precise blood flow delivery to active neurons. In the human body, blood is delivered into the brain from surface arteries ...

Dubbed “Conan the Bacterium” for its extraordinary ability to tolerate the harshest of conditions, Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill a human — and every other organism for that matter. The secret behind this impressive resistance is the presence of a collection of simple metabolites, which combine with manganese to form a powerful antioxidant. Now, chemists at Northwestern University and the Uniformed Services University (USU) have discovered how this antioxidant works. In ...

A new USC Stem Cell study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has identified key gene regulators that enable some deafened animals—including fish and lizards—to naturally regenerate their hearing. The findings could guide future efforts to stimulate the regeneration of sensory hearing cells in patients with hearing loss and balance disorders. Led by first author Tuo Shi and co-corresponding authors Ksenia Gnedeva and Gage Crump at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the study focuses on two cell types in the inner ear: the sensory cells that detect sound, and the supporting cells that create an environment where ...

CLEVELAND (Dec. 9)—A cave in Galilee, Israel, has yielded evidence for ritualistic gathering 35,000 years ago, the earliest on the Asian continent. Three Israeli researchers led the team that published its results today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And researchers from the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Dental Medicine helped unearth the cave’s secrets over more than a decade of excavation. Manot Cave was used for thousands of years as a living space for both Neanderthals ...

A collaborative study has uncovered evidence of rice beer dating back approximately 10,000 years at the Shangshan site in Zhejiang Province, China, providing new insights into the origins of alcoholic beverage brewing in East Asia. This discovery highlights the connection between rice fermentation at Shangshan and the region’s cultural and environmental context as well as the broader development of early rice agriculture and social structures. The study was jointly conducted by researchers from Stanford University, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Zhejiang Provincial Institute ...

December 9, 2024 (Washington, DC, United States of America and Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development (ISSBD) were recently awarded 200,000 Swiss Francs from the Jacobs Foundation to support initiatives related to mentoring early career scholars from Ghana and Colombia in the areas of grant writing, research methodology, peer reviewing, and scholarly publishing. The grants are part of a larger collaborative project called the ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Imagine an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can watch and understand moving images with the subtlety of a human brain. Now, scientists at Scripps Research have made this a reality by creating MovieNet: an innovative AI that processes videos much like how our brains interpret real-life scenes as they unfold over time. This brain-inspired AI model, detailed in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on November 19, 2024, can perceive moving scenes by simulating how neurons—or brain cells—make real-time sense of the world. Conventional ...

More than half of laws and policies on healthcare workers’ rights align with international standards, according to a study published December 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS Global Public Health by Matthew Kavanagh from Georgetown University, U.S., James Campbell from the World Health Organization, Switzerland, and colleagues. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, healthcare workers were at the forefront to stem the tide, often putting their own health at risk. Inadequate infection control measures and insufficient access to personal protective ...

University of Houston psychology researcher Jason Griffin, who has pioneered new ways of measuring eye movements to understand autism spectrum disorder, is reporting that children with autism focus on faces differently than other children, especially in the early stages of visual processing. His findings may lead to improvement in face processing for those with the neurodevelopmental condition.   For most people, looking eye-to-eye with someone while talking seems an important yet innocuous social convention – one barely thought of during polite conversation. But for those with autism, characterized ...

The majority of the known asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter at an average distance from Earth of about 250 millions kilometers. Since the discovery of the first asteroid in 1801, nearly 750.000 of them have already been numbered, mainly in the last decade thanks to the many optical surveys searching the sky every clear nights. Most of these asteroids are larger than 1 kilometer, the largest one, Vesta, at about 530 km in diameter, while many millions of smaller ones are expected. While these look huge numbers, the total mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth's Moon.   Sometimes, these asteroids ...