The Speech Accessibility Project has two new partners — The Matthew Foundation and the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress — as it continues to recruit adults with Down syndrome who live in the United States and Canada. The project also allows residents of Puerto Rico to participate. The project is also recruiting those with ALS, cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s disease, as well as individuals who have had a stroke. “The research team has learned that connecting with trusted partners is key to showing the credibility of our work and how much it could improve the lives of people with disabilities,” said Mark ...

Fitting in a workout after a long day of sitting at a desk might not be enough to compensate for the impacts of sedentary behavior on the heart. Investigators from Mass General Brigham, found that excessive sedentary behavior (waking activity with low energy expenditure while sitting, reclining, or lying down and not including hours spent sleeping at night) was linked to increased risk of heart disease, especially heart failure and cardiovascular death, and that these risks could be significantly reduced by substituting sedentary time for other activities. They also found that meeting guideline levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity may be insufficient on its own to reduce cardiovascular ...

A new UC Davis Health study has uncovered how Salmonella bacteria, a major cause of food poisoning, can invade the gut even when protective bacteria are present. The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explains how the pathogen tricks the gut environment to escape the body's natural defenses. The digestive system is home to trillions of bacteria, many of which produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that help fight harmful pathogens. But Salmonella manages to grow and spread in the gut, even though ...

The rod-shaped tuberculosis (TB) bacterium, which the World Health Organization has once again ranked as the top infectious disease killer globally, is the first single-celled organism ever observed to maintain a consistent growth rate throughout its life cycle. These findings, reported by Tufts University School of Medicine researchers on November 15 in the journal Nature Microbiology, overturn core beliefs of bacterial cell biology and hint at why the deadly pathogen so readily outmaneuvers our immune system and antibiotics.  "The ...

NASA researchers Guan Yang, Jeff Chen, and their team received the 2024 Innovator of The Year Award at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for their exemplary work on a lidar system enhanced with artificial intelligence and other technologies. Like a laser-based version of sonar, lidar and its use in space exploration is not new. But the lidar system Yang and Chen’s team have developed — formally the Concurrent Artificially-intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System (CASALS) — can produce higher resolution data within a smaller space, significantly increasing efficiency compared to current models. The ...

Cutting back on animal protein in our diets can save on resources and greenhouse gas emissions. But convincing meat-loving consumers to switch up their menu is a challenge. Looking at this problem from a mechanical engineering angle, Stanford engineers are pioneering a new approach to food texture testing that could pave the way for faux filets that fool even committed carnivores. In a new paper in Science of Food, the team demonstrated that a combination of mechanical testing and machine learning can describe food texture with striking similarity to human taste testers. Such a method could speed up the development of new and better plant-based meats. The team also found that ...

Mercury is extraordinarily toxic, but it becomes especially dangerous when transformed into methylmercury – a form so harmful that just a few billionths of a gram can cause severe and lasting neurological damage to a developing fetus. Unfortunately, methylmercury often makes its way into our bodies through seafood – but once it’s in our food and the environment, there’s no easy way to get rid of it. Now, leveraging high-energy X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, ...

It’s a common sight — ants marching in an orderly line over and around obstacles from their nest to a food source, guided by scent trails left by scouts marking the find. But what happens when those scouts find a comestible motherlode? A team of Florida State University researchers led by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Bhargav Karamched has discovered that in a foraging ant’s search for food, it will leave pheromone trails connecting its colony to multiple food sources when they’re available, ...

To the casual eye, a memory foam mattress would appear to have no relationship to the behavior of cells and tissues. But an innovative study carried out at the Centro de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) in Madrid shows that viscoelasticity—the capacity of a material to be compressed and then recover its original form, like memory foam—is a little-explored property of biological tissues that is essential for correct cell function. Study leader Dr. Jorge Alegre-Cebollada, who heads the Molecular Mechanics of the Cardiovascular System laboratory at the CNIC, explained that proper cell function requires ...

Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. A team of researchers from the UK and Australia analysed charcoal and pollen contained in ancient mud to determine how Aboriginal Tasmanians shaped their surroundings. This is the earliest record of humans using fire to shape the Tasmanian environment. Early human migrations from Africa to the southern part of the globe were well underway during the early part of the last ice age – humans reached northern ...

Recent estimates indicate that deadly antibiotic-resistant infections will rapidly escalate over the next quarter century. More than 1 million people died from drug-resistant infections each year from 1990 to 2021, a recent study reported, with new projections surging to nearly 2 million deaths each year by 2050. In an effort to counteract this public health crisis, scientists are looking for new solutions inside the intricate mechanics of bacterial infection. A study led by researchers at the University of California San Diego has discovered a vulnerability within strains of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant. Working with labs at Arizona State University and the Universitat ...

Some of the first humans to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, a new study from The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Cambridge has found. It is thought to be the earliest and most detailed record of humans using fire in the Tasmanian environment. According to the researchers, early inhabitants of Tasmania were managing forests and grasslands by burning them to create open spaces, possibly for food procurement and cultural activities. The team analysed traces of charcoal and pollen contained in ancient mud that showed how Indigenous Tasmanians (Palawa) ...

About The Study: Inferences about clinical impacts based on population-level mean treatment effects may be misleading, since even small between-group differences may reflect clinically important treatment benefits for individual patients. Results of this study suggest that clinical trials should explicitly describe the distributions of Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire change at the patient level within treatment groups to support the clinical interpretation of their results.  Corresponding ...

“This commentary will discuss what is known about such combinatorial treatments, including potential mechanisms and future protocols.” BUFFALO, NY- November 15, 2024 – A new review was published in Volume 11 of Oncoscience on November 12, 2024, entitled, “Targeting carbohydrate metabolism in colorectal cancer - synergy between DNA-damaging agents, cannabinoids, and intermittent serum starvation.” As highlighted by the authors in the abstract of this review, chemotherapy is a common treatment for many cancers. However, it is often ineffective for long-term patient survival and ...

Stress is a double-edged sword when it comes to memory: stressful or otherwise emotional events are usually more memorable, but stress can also make it harder for us to retrieve memories. In PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder, overgeneralizing aversive memories results in an inability to discriminate between dangerous and safe stimuli. However, until now, it wasn’t clear whether stress played a role in memory generalization. Now, neuroscientists report November 15 in the Cell Press journal Cell that acute stress prevents mice from forming specific memories. Instead, the stressed mice formed generalized memories, which are ...

PHILADELPHIA—Debate continues to swirl nationally on the fate of a practice born of an 86-year-old federal statute allowing companies to pay workers with disabilities subminimum wages: anything below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, but for some roles as little as 25-cents-per-hour. Those in favor of repealing this statute highlight assumptions about reduced productivity along with the unfairness of this wage level—often used elsewhere to pay, for example, food service workers who typically make additional wages in tips. Those against repeal have voiced concerns that, without subminimum ...

EMBARGOED: NOT FOR RELEASE UNTIL FRIDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2024 AT 11:00 ET (15:00 UK TIME). Researchers are calling for a ‘resilience index’ to be used as an indicator of policy success instead of the current focus on GDP. They say that GDP ignores the wider implications of development and provides no information on our ability to live within our planet’s ‘safe operating space’. In a paper published today [15 November] in the journal One Earth, researchers from the University of Southampton, UCL ...

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered that stress changes how our brain encodes and retrieves aversive memories, and discovered a promising new way to restore appropriate memory specificity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).   If you stumble during a presentation, you might feel stressed the next time you have to present because your brain associates your next presentation with that one poor and aversive experience. This type of stress is tied to one memory. But stress from traumatic events ...

A team of researchers from McGill and Université de Montréal’s Observatoire pour l’éducation et la santé des enfants (OPES, or observatory on children’s health and eduation), led by Sylvana Côté, found that spending two hours a week of class time in a natural environment can reduce emotional distress among 10- to 12-year-olds who had the most significant mental health problems before the program began. The research comes on the heels of the publication of a UNICEF ...

mRNA vaccines saved lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, but older people had less of an immune response to the vaccines than did younger adults. Why? Boston Children’s researchers, led by Byron Brook, PhD, and Ofer Levy, MD, PhD, have found some answers, while providing proof-of-concept of a new system that can model vaccine responses in a dish. The test system, described in a paper out today in iScience, is called MEMPHIS (Modular Evaluation of immunogenicity using Multi-Platform Human In vitro Systems). It analyzes whole human blood from people of different age groups and applies both proteomics and targeted assays to measure ...

More time spent sitting, reclining or lying down during the day may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and death, according to a study in JACC, the flagship journal of the American College of Cardiology, and presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2024. More than roughly 10-and-a-half hours of sedentary behavior per day was significantly linked with future heart failure (HF) and cardiovascular (CV) death, even among people meeting recommended levels of exercise. “Our findings support cutting back on sedentary time to reduce cardiovascular risk, with 10.6 hours a day marking a potentially key threshold ...

XI’AN, CHINA [November 15, 2024] — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®)—an alliance of leading cancer centers in the United States—is taking part in the Fourth International Congress of the Asian Oncology Society and the Chinese Congress on Holistic Integrative Oncology (2024 CCHIO) sponsored by the China Anti-Cancer Association (CACA), Chinese Institute of Development Strategy on Holistic Integrative Medicine, and Asian Oncology Society (AOS). The three-day event highlights international collaborations to improve cancer treatment and outcomes across China and beyond. “NCCN ...

FROM: James Urton University of Washington 206-543-2580 jurton@uw.edu   (Note: researcher contact information at the end)   Hunted nearly to extinction during 20th century whaling, the Antarctic blue whale, the world’s largest animal, went from a population size of roughly 200,000 to little more than 300. The most recent estimate in 2004 put Antarctic blue whales at less than 1% of their pre-whaling levels. But is this population recovering? Is there just one population of Antarctic blue whales, or multiple? Do these questions matter for conservation? A team led by Zoe Rand, a University of Washington doctoral student, tackles these questions ...

A group of South Korean researchers has decided to utilize AI technology to support customer counseling services. Through this, it will provide a significant boost to the performance and efficiency of counselors in various industries, while improving the overall quality of customer counseling services, ultimately making it easier to meet the customers’ needs and expectations while opening up the possibility for realizing new values. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced that ...

The gut microbiome, an ecosystem of trillions of microorganisms in the human digestive tract, has been increasingly linked to chronic diseases. Research led by Dr. Connor Prosty and his team at McGill University consolidates recent findings that demonstrate a causal role for the gut microbiome in the progression of multiple diseases, ranging from gastrointestinal conditions to immune-related and psychiatric disorders. Published in eGastroenterology, this narrative review examines how manipulating the gut microbiome ...