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Science9 Dec 2024

American Meteorological Society announces Alan Sealls as 2025 President-Elect

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 ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

Dogs use two-word button combos to communicate

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 ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

Researchers use a powerful imaging technique to illuminate the colorful plumage of birds

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Jabuticaba peel improves nutritional characteristics of bread

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 ...

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Energy9 Dec 2024

Department of Energy announces $36 million for student traineeships

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Employee visits to adult or gambling sites doubles risk of infection by malware

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 ...

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Environment9 Dec 2024

Biodiversity at risk in most rainforests

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 ...

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Environment9 Dec 2024

Climate change impacting freshwater fish species, study finds

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

UVM research team unveils breakthrough mechanism in brain blood flow regulation

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 ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

How ‘Conan the Bacterium’ withstands extreme radiation

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

USC Stem Cell study breaks the silence on how fish and lizards regenerate hearing

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 ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

Earliest deep-cave ritual compound in Southwest Asia discovered

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 ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

Traces of 10,000-year-old ancient rice beer discovered in Neolithic site in Eastern China

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Jacobs Foundation Awards grants to the Society for Research in Child Development and the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development to support early career scholars from Ghana and C

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Scripps Research scientists create AI that “watches” videos by mimicking the brain

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Laws on healthcare worker rights align with global standards with room for improvement

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Eyes on the brain at the University of Houston

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 ...

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Space9 Dec 2024

Astronomers find the smallest main-belt asteroids ever detected

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 ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Mays Cancer Center hosts 47th San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, highlighting advances in treatment and care

SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 9, 2024 – Mays Cancer Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio), in partnership with the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), is hosting the 47th annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center on Dec. 10-13. Owned and initiated by Mays Cancer Center, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium is the world’s largest breast cancer research conference. More than 11,000 clinicians, researchers, and patient ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

CT radiomics and body composition for predicting hepatic decompensation

“This study reveals the potential for prognostic features in predicting hepatic decompensation in patients with PSC.” BUFFALO, NY – December 9, 2024 – A new research paper was published in Oncotarget’s Volume 15 on November 22, 2024, entitled “Computed tomography-based radiomics and body composition model for predicting hepatic decompensation.” Mayo Clinic researchers Yashbir Singh, John E. Eaton, Sudhakar K. Venkatesh, and Bradley J. Erickson have developed an innovative AI tool to predict hepatic decompensation in individuals with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). PSC is a chronic disease that damages ...

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Social Science9 Dec 2024

Loneliness and social isolation among US older adults

About The Study: This study found that adults ages 50 to 80 commonly reported loneliness and social isolation. While the pandemic disrupted social connections, rates of loneliness and isolation were substantial both before and after the early pandemic. High rates of loneliness and social isolation occurred in several sociodemographic groups, especially those with self-reported fair or poor physical or mental health. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Preeti N. Malani, MD, MSJ, email pmalani@umich.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Loneliness and isolation: Back to pre-pandemic levels, but still high, for older adults

Loneliness and isolation among older Americans have mostly returned to pre-pandemic rates, but that still means more than one third of people age 50 to 80 feel lonely, and nearly as many feel isolated, a new national study shows. And some older adults – especially those dealing with major physical health or mental health issues – still have much higher rates of loneliness and social isolation than others. The new findings, from a review of six years of data from the National Poll on Healthy Aging, are published in JAMA by a team from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. Starting ...

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Space9 Dec 2024

MIT astronomers find the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main belt

The asteroid that extinguished the dinosaurs is estimated to have been about 10 kilometers across. That’s about as wide as Brooklyn. Such a massive impactor is predicted to hit Earth rarely, once every 100 million to 500 million years. In contrast, much smaller asteroids, about the size of a bus, can strike Earth more frequently, every few years. These “decameter” asteroids, measuring just tens of meters across, are more likely to escape the main asteroid belt and migrate in to become near-Earth objects. ...

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Medicine9 Dec 2024

Health and lifestyle factors and dementia risk among former professional soccer players

About The Study: This cohort study found no evidence that high dementia risk among former professional soccer players was associated with potentially modifiable general health and lifestyle dementia risk factors. These data support continuation of measures directed toward reducing exposure to repetitive head impacts and traumatic brain injury in sport. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, William Stewart, MBChB, PhD, email william.stewart@glasgow.ac.uk. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

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Science9 Dec 2024

Stress-related disorders among young individuals with surgical removal of tonsils or adenoids

About The Study: The findings of this cohort study suggest that early-life surgical removal of tonsils or adenoids is associated with a higher future risk of stress-related disorders and highlight a need to understand the role of adenotonsillar diseases or associated health conditions in the development of stress-related psychiatric disorders. Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Zhe Zhang, MD, PhD, email zhangzhe@gxmu.edu.cn. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For ...

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