Research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society has identified several community-level factors that may increase people’s risk of experiencing cognitive impairment. In the study of 2,830 dementia-free US individuals aged 65+ years, 23.2% of participants were categorized as having mild cognitive impairment. People who lived in areas with higher neighborhood disadvantage, higher air pollution, higher homicide rate, and less greenspace had elevated odds of having mild cognitive impairment. Completing schooling in a Southern US state was also associated with a greater likelihood of ...

LOS ANGELES, California, USA, 20 November 2024 – In a comprehensive Genomic Press Interview, Professor Helen Lavretsky reveals how her pioneering work in integrative psychiatry is transforming approaches to mental health and aging. The interview, featured in the peer-reviewed medical research journal Brain Medicine (doi: 10.61373/bm024k.0130), offers unique insights into the evolution of integrative medicine from scientific skepticism to evidence-based acceptance. Professor Lavretsky, current President of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry (2022-25), has successfully merged conventional ...

A stay in space exerts extreme pressures on the human body. Astronauts’ bodies and brains are impacted by radiation, altered gravity, challenging working conditions, and sleep loss – all of which could compromise cognitive functioning. At the same time, they are required to perform complex tasks, and minor mistakes can have devastating consequences. Little is known, however, about whether astronauts’ cognitive performance changes while in space. Now, working with 25 astronauts who spent an average of six month on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers in the US have examined changes in a wide range of cognitive performance domains. ...

Larger pay increases and better benefits could help keep K-12 teachers in the teacher workforce, finds a new, nationally representative RAND survey.     U.S. teachers reported modest pay increases between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, only $2,000 on average and well below their desired increase of $16,000. Black teachers and teachers in states where collective bargaining is prohibited reported they received the smallest pay increases.     “Teachers who received larger pay increases also said they were less likely to intend to leave the profession,” ...

Early development of an embryo is solely supported by maternally deposited RNAs and proteins until its own genome is activated through a process called zygotic genome activation (ZGA). Recent research by Chinese scientists has revealed novel molecular mechanisms by which HIRA acts in concert with dPCIF1 to establish a totipotent chromatin and facilitate orderly zygotic genome activation in the early embryos of Drosophila. Results of the study were published in PNAS on Nov. 14 as “HIRA and dPCIF1 coordinately establish totipotent chromatin and control orderly ZGA in Drosophila embryos.” The ...

Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse patient urine samples and predict when symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) will flare up according to a study published today (Wednesday) in ERJ Open Research [1].   The patients taking part in the study carried out a simple daily dipstick test on their urine and sent their results to researchers using their mobile phones.   Using AI to analyse the results, researchers were able to ‘forecast’ a deterioration in symptoms one week in advance. ...

Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales.  DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the Department of Energy’s ...

A University of Texas at Dallas physicist and his international colleagues in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration are engaged in a multiyear data-gathering mission to try to answer one of the most puzzling observations in astrophysics: Why does the expansion of the universe appear to be accelerating?    Competing theories have attempted to explain this observation. One is that dark energy is somehow pushing galaxies apart. A second theory posits that gravity, the attractive force that in local environments like the solar system draws objects together, works differently at large cosmological scales and needs to be modified to explain cosmic ...

A new report from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre reveals Western Australia’s startup and innovation ecosystem requires targeted reforms and investment to unlock its full potential, calling for improvements in talent development, gender diversity and access to capital and infrastructure to support a more diversified economy.   The report, titled ‘Dare to Venture: Startups and the innovation ecosystem in Western Australia’, highlights WA’s strengths in mining, ...

Des Plaines, IL – A new study exploring the use of cranial accelerometry (CA) headsets for the prehospital detection of large-vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes has been published in a recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM).  LVO strokes, which represent one-third of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) cases in the United States, are responsible for two-thirds of poststroke dependence and 90% of poststroke mortality. The introduction of endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) over the past decade has significantly advanced the management of LVO strokes, emphasizing ...

High cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with better cognitive performance and lower risk of dementia long term, including in people with a genetic predisposition to dementia, show the findings of a study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.   Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is the capacity of the circulatory and respiratory systems to supply oxygen to muscles and declines increasingly with age as skeletal muscle is lost. CRF declines by around  3% to 6% per decade when people are in their 20s and 30s, but this accelerates to more than 20% per decade by the time people reach their 70s. Low CRF is a strong predictor of cardiovascular ...

The number and type of microbes present in the saliva of pregnant women differ according to whether they are experiencing life stress and symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), finds a study published in the open access journal BMJ Mental Health. Although several studies have shown links between the diversity of microbes in the gastrointestinal tract and stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mothers, no previous study has looked at the association between the type and number of microorganisms in the mouth and throat—oral microbiome—and ...

PHOENIX, November 19, 2024 — The American Heart Association and the Arizona Cardinals gathered representatives from 12 local schools for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillator (AED) training on Nov. 18 at Pima Elementary School in Scottsdale. According to American Heart Association data, Nearly 9 out of 10 people who experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital die, in part because they do not receive immediate CPR more than half of the time. CPR, especially if performed immediately, can double or triple a person’s chance of survival. “Early ...

  UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 00:01AM (UK TIME) ON WEDNESDAY 20TH NOVEMBER 2024   People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex, new research from the University of Cambridge has found.   People from Belfast proved most able to detect someone faking their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate. The study, published today in Evolutionary Human Sciences found that the ability of participants ...

Trust between humans and robots is improved when the movement between both is harmonised, researchers have discovered. These findings could improve the success of real-world human-robot teams, helping users like the emergency services to work more effectively with robots in the future.  By sensing co-movement in real-world environments, robots could use this as an indicator to sense whether the user trusts them sufficiently. Lead author Dr Edmund Hunt, based in the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Science and Engineering, said: “People have preferred social distances from others during interaction and ...

In the Making Sense of Science series – launched today (20 November) by Frontiers’ Policy Labs in partnership with the International Science Council (ISC) – world leading scientists, including scientific experts and knowledge brokers from the ISC Fellowship, give insights into how science should be understood by the public and applied to policies that affect societies worldwide.  In the face of global threats – health crises, climate change, war – we need political will, global collaboration, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, systems ...

A collaboration between The Wistar Institute and the University of Buea in Cameroon has uncovered the mechanisms for a medicinal plant with anti-HIV potential in Croton oligandrus Pierre & Hutch, a species of African tree that has been used in traditional healing in Cameroon to treat a variety of diseases and conditions including cancers and diabetes.  The research team — a collaboration between Fidele Ntie-Kang, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Buea and the Director of the University of Buea Centre for Drug Discovery, and Ian Tietjen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Education Director of Global Studies & ...

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- The U.S. Department of Education has awarded Binghamton University Community Schools (BUCS) a five-year grant, totaling more than $4.5 million, to expand mental health services in Chenango County as part of its Mental Health Service Provider Demonstration Grant Program. This initiative, entitled Empowering Rural Communities: Promoting Mental Health, Equity, and Wellbeing Through a University-assisted Community Schools Approach, will expand social work support to students and families in the Norwich and Oxford school districts with the ability to serve 2,310 ...

Energy stored in thermochemical materials can effectively heat indoor spaces, particularly in humid regions, according to researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Working with industry representatives and researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the scientists determined a realistic configuration for integrating thermochemical materials (TCMs) into a building’s HVAC system. Salt-hydrate TCMs are considered promising candidates for providing load flexibility to a building’s heating system. This flexibility could allow for reduced electrical requirements for the heating system or load shifting to times ...

Four Tufts researchers have been named to a ranking of the world’s most highly cited researchers. The researchers in the Clarivate 2024 list have a significant impact on the research community as judged by the rate their work is cited by their peers, according to Clarivate, an information and analytics firm focused on research. The highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field or fields and publication year, and only about 1 in 1,000 researchers worldwide qualify. The Tufts researchers are David ...

November 19, 2024 -- A new report released from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Health and Medicine Division addresses the responsible use of race and ethnicity in biomedical research and is a call to action for biomedical research to rethink how it uses race and ethnicity. The number of people who identify as multiracial in the U.S. is increasing, yet there is no standard way to account for multiracial or multiethnic people in biomedical research, according to the final report, Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research.   The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an expert committee in 2023 to ...

Astronomers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars – “dead” remnants and "living" stars – in young star clusters. Described in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, this breakthrough offers new insights on an extreme phase of stellar evolution, and one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Scientists can now begin to bridge the gap between the earliest and final stages of binary star systems – two stars that orbit a shared center of gravity – to further our understanding of how stars form, how galaxies evolve, and how most elements ...

TUCSON, Ariz., November 19, 2024 — Critical Path Institute® (C-Path) today announced that its Translational Therapeutics Accelerator (TRxA) program, in partnership with The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, a new research grant aimed at developing a novel treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D). This award is made through TRxA’s Bridging Research and Innovation in Drug Development Grants (BRIDGe) program, which is designed to support academic researchers in traversing the drug development valley of death and advancing new cutting-edge therapeutics from the lab to patients.  Feroz ...

In the United States, there are currently more adults living with cerebral palsy than children.  Despite this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still label cerebral palsy as “the most common motor disability in childhood.” This definition not only ignores cerebral palsy as a lifelong condition but contributes to a lopsided research focus directed only at pediatric care and not care into adulthood and across the lifespan, experts say. University of Michigan Health’s Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., FACSM, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, has been working to make sure the definition of cerebral ...

  Images When Sean Crosson was a child growing up in rural Texas, he learned about vaccinating cattle against Bang’s disease from his high school agriculture teacher. The disease’s name amused him at the time.  Now, Crosson, a Professor Rudolph Hugh Endowed Chair in Michigan State University’s Department of Microbiology, Genetics and Immunology, has been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study the cause of that very disease, Brucella abortus. Brucella abortus causes brucellosis disease, which, in addition to being known as Bang’s disease is also referred ...