Evaluating the speed at which viruses spread and transmit across host populations is critical to mitigating disease outbreaks. A study published December 3rd in PLOS Biology by Simon Dellicour at the University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues evaluate the performance of statistics measuring how viruses move across space and time in infected populations. Genomic sequencing allows epidemiologists to examine the evolutionary history of pathogenic outbreaks and track the spatial movement of an outbreak. However, the sampling intensity of genomic sequences can potentially impact the accuracy of dispersal insights gained through these evolutionary ...

Baltimore, Maryland (Dec. 3, 2024) — The Lieber Institute for Brain Development has been selected as a winner of the 2024 Amazon Web Services (AWS) IMAGINE Grant, a public grant opportunity open to registered charities in the United Kingdom and Ireland and registered 501(c) nonprofit organizations in the United States who are using technology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. The Lieber Institute, located on the Johns Hopkins medical campus in Baltimore, will use the grant to develop a new generative AI tool to find new, more effective treatments for mental illnesses including schizophrenia. Now ...

At least one-quarter of all nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions in California’s Salton Sea air basin come from soil, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.  Using isotopic analysis, the study found that annual total soil emissions for the basin were about 11 tons per day on average, which is 10 times larger than the state’s current inventory for soil NOx emissions in the region. The work was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. The study highlights the need to ...

Democracy is in crisis. Many people are losing confidence in political parties and parliaments and their ability to solve pressing social problems in the long term. Recent studies by the University of Stuttgart indicate that addressing doubts about the democratic system does not necessarily require resorting to the election of an autocratic head of state. Rather, more direct political participation could revitalize and legitimize democracy - provided that innovative participatory formats are intelligently linked to the work of representative institutions. “Many people consider representative politics to be tiring ...

Toronto, ON – Transgender and gender-diverse preteens are about 15% less physically active than their cisgender peers, new research finds. Transgender 11-12 year-olds take, on average, 1,394 fewer steps per day compared to cisgender adolescents, a difference that equates to about 12% of the daily physical activity recommended for adolescents. The study was published in Annals of Epidemiology. “Transgender adolescents may experience stigma and discrimination that discourage their participation in team sports or physical activity,” ...

In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot able to generate conversational answers and analyses, as well as images, in response to user questions and prompts. This generative AI was built with computational procedures, such as large language models, that train on vast bodies of human-created and curated data, including scientific literature. Since then, the worry that AI may someday outsmart humans has grown more widespread. In a new collection of essays, leading ...

Physicists are getting closer to controlling single-molecule chemical reactions – could this shape the future of pharmaceutical research?Controlling matter at the atomic level has taken a major step forward, thanks to groundbreaking nanotechnology research by an international team of scientists led by physicists at the University of Bath. This advancement has profound implications for fundamental scientific understanding. It is also likely to have important practical applications, such as transforming the way researchers develop new medications. Controlling single-outcome single-molecule reactions ...

“MSCs hold great promise as a therapeutic tool in cancer immunotherapy due to their immunomodulatory properties, tumor-homing abilities, and potential as carriers for delivering therapeutic agents.” BUFFALO, NY – December 3, 2024 – A new review was published in Oncotarget’s Volume 15 on November 22, 2024, entitled “Mesenchymal stem cells – the secret agents of cancer immunotherapy: Promises, challenges, and surprising twists.” Authored by Theia Minev, Shani Balbuena, Jaya Mini Gill, ...

About The Study: In this cohort study of 1,600 emergency medicine patient medical records, large language model (LLM)-generated emergency medicine-to-inpatient handoff notes were determined superior compared with physician-written summaries via conventional automated evaluation methods, but marginally inferior in usefulness and safety via a novel evaluation framework. This study suggests the importance of a physician-in-loop implementation design for this model and demonstrates an effective strategy to measure pre-implementation patient safety of LLM models.  Corresponding ...

Patients with frontotemporal dementia often lack the ability to empathize. A study at Karolinska Institutet has now shown that these patients do not show the same brain activity as healthy individuals when they witness the pain of others, a finding that it is hoped will increase understanding of this specific dementia disease. Around 25 000 Swedes are affected by dementia every year. Of these, about three percent are diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. The disease is difficult to diagnose, but one of its characteristics is that sufferers lose the ability to empathize, which can lead to problems for them, and not least ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Gastric balloons — silicone balloons filled with air or saline and placed in the stomach — can help people lose weight by making them feel too full to overeat. However, this effect eventually can wear off as the stomach becomes used to the sensation of fullness. To overcome that limitation, MIT engineers have designed a new type of gastric balloon that can be inflated and deflated as needed. In an animal study, they showed that inflating the balloon before a meal caused the animals to reduce their food intake by 60 percent. This type of intervention ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has approved funding awards totaling more than $156 million for new patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER), as well as research to improve methods and strengthen the science of engagement in CER. The awards will support 13 CER studies, including three focused on sleep interventions. “Poor sleep affects more than 50 million people in the United States and is linked to multiple chronic conditions and negative health outcomes,” said PCORI Executive Director Nakela L. Cook, M.D., MPH. “These ...

ATLANTA — Debra Bangasser, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) at Georgia State University, has been awarded the Daniel H. Efron Research Award by the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). The award recognizes outstanding basic research contributions to the field of neuropsychopharmacology, which integrates neuroscience and pharmacology to advance understanding of the causes of psychiatric disorders and develop new therapies. Bangasser’s research identifies how stress throughout the lifespan affects the brain to promote ...

SEATTLE, WASH.—December 3, 2024—The funding, provided through the Allen Distinguished Investigators, a program of The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group at the Allen Institute, will fuel innovative research in Organelle Communication and Membrane Biophysics. Together these awards represent a total of $9 million dollars in funding from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which will be distributed between 14 researchers investigating the biological principles governing fundamental cellular functions and how they interact. These ...

Voice experiments in people with epilepsy have helped trace the circuit of electrical signals in the brain that allow its hearing center to sort out background sounds from their own voices. Such auditory corollary discharge signals start and end in two subregions of the brain’s top folded surface, or cortex, a new study shows. One large part of the cortex, the motor cortex, is known to control the body’s voluntary muscle movements, including those involved in speech, while another large section, the auditory cortex, is known to control hearing. In terms of evolution, the ability of animals and humans to tell ...

CLEVELAND—With a new five-year, $3.2 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and Mass Eye and Ear will study what causes acquired hearing loss (AHL) and seek new ways to protect against it. AHL is among the most common health conditions affecting older adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although hearing aids can help, AHL has no known cure and, in many cases, scientists are still unsure of its exact cause. AHL significantly ...

Florida Atlantic University’s Marcus Institute of Integrative Health has been awarded a monumental $6 million grant from the late Bernie Marcus and The Marcus Foundation to broaden its services, enhance educational programs, and expand community wellness initiatives, ultimately aiming to create a national model that demonstrates the effectiveness of comprehensive integrative health as the optimal approach for achieving overall well-being for everyone. This latest grant to FAU from The Marcus Foundation, which was made prior to the passing of Marcus in early November, brings its total contributions for advancing integrative health to more than $10 million, ...

Researchers led by Uljana Kravčenko and her colleagues in the lab of Professor Misha Kudryashev, Group Leader of the In Situ Structural Biology lab at the Max Delbrück Center, have revealed new features of the molecular architecture of synaptic vesicles. Using cryo-electron tomography, the team was able to visualize SVs in 3D and confirm a potentially important protein-protein interaction. They also broadened our understanding of SV function and of how the vesicles are recycled. The study was published in the Proceedings ...

From the RMS Titanic to the SS Endurance, shipwrecks offer valuable — yet swiftly deteriorating — windows into the past. Conservators slowly dry marine wooden artifacts to preserve them but doing so can inflict damage. To better care for delicate marine artifacts, researchers in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering developed a new hydrogel that quickly neutralizes harmful acids and stabilized waterlogged wood from an 800-year-old shipwreck. Wooden artifacts from shipwrecks are drenched with seawater, an environment that enables acid-producing ...

To study the effects of misinformation on attitudes, some social science experiments expose participants to false, misleading, or dangerous information. Most Institutional Review Boards require that such studies be followed by a debriefing session, in which participants are told that the information that was presented was not true. Katherine Clayton and colleagues sought to determine whether these debriefs can “undo” the effects of exposure to misinformation. The authors first replicated existing misinformation ...

Vadim N. Gladyshev and 80 colleagues surveyed the participants of the 2022 Systems Aging Gordon Research Conference to explore how researchers of aging perceive their subject of study. The authors found wide disagreement on fundamental questions, including “what is aging?” and “what causes aging?”. The collected responses indicated that some of the 103 professors, postdocs, graduate students, industry professionals, and other experts in the survey saw aging as a demographic increase in mortality rate, while other respondents saw aging as a loss of function over time, while still other respondents saw aging as the accumulation of damage ...

New research builds on scientific understanding of how air pollution and cancer risk are distributed throughout the U.S. Air pollution, often resulting from industrial or vehicle emissions, can travel for hundreds of miles and impact the health of communities through higher rates of asthma, respiratory infections, stroke, and lung cancer. Although previous studies have identified disparities in how public health risks vary by income and race, a new study takes a detailed look across U.S. census tracts to find patterns in who is most at risk from cancer resulting from lifetime exposure to air pollution and how ...

An experimental study in mice shows that SARS-CoV-2 infection can damage the retinas, with long-term implications for vision. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection include various neurocognitive symptoms, suggesting the virus can affect the central nervous system. The eyes are also part of the central nervous system, but little is known about the virus’s effects on these organs. David Williams and Nan Hultgren led a study in which transgenic mice that express human SARS-CoV-2 receptor ACE2 were infected with ...

Inspired by the diverse attachment organs of parasites, researchers have designed a millimeter-scale mechanism for soft tissue anchoring. Robert J. Wood and colleagues turned to the world of parasites as inspiration for developing methods to affix small-scale medical devices to the gastrointestinal tract or other soft tissues for sensing, sample collection, and extended drug release. While evolution has produced a wide range of different biomechanical structures that can attach to soft tissues, the authors ...

3 December 2024 – EMBO announces the selection of 27 life scientists as the newest members of the EMBO Young Investigator Programme. The programme supports young group leaders in Europe and beyond. The new young investigators will start in January, be active members of the programme for four years, and become part of an international network of nearly 800 current and former EMBO Young Investigators, Installation Grantees and Global Investigators. They carry out research across a wide range of life sciences topics from cell and computational biology to immunology and neuroscience. "EMBO welcomes ...