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 ...

Family Heart Foundation Appoints Dr. Seth Baum as Chairman of the Board of Directors Dr. Seth Baum, Florida Atlantic University, Named Chairman of the Family Heart Foundation’s Board of Directors The Family Heart Foundation® is proud to announce the appointment of Dr. Seth Baum as the Board of Directors Chairman. An esteemed expert in preventive cardiology and lipidology, Dr. Baum has insights and extensive experience that will contribute to the Foundation’s strategic mission to increase awareness for lay public, expand screening for high-risk populations, improve understanding and education for healthcare teams, and promote ...

A new route to materials with complex ‘disordered’ magnetic properties at the quantum level has been produced by scientists for the first time.  The material, based on a framework of ruthenium, fulfils the requirements of the ‘Kitaev quantum spin liquid state’ - an elusive phenomenon that scientists have been trying to understand for decades.  Published in Nature Communications the study, by scientists at the University of Birmingham, offers an important step towards achieving and controlling quantum materials with sought-after new properties that do not follow ...

Basalt samples returned by the Chang’e-6 mission have revealed volcanic events on the lunar farside at 2.8 billion years ago (Ga) and 4.2 Ga, according to research conducted by Prof. LI Qiuli’s lab at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This work was recently published in Nature. “Unraveling the volcanic history of the lunar farside is crucial for understanding the hemispheric dichotomy of the Moon,” said Prof. LI. The asymmetry between the Moon’s nearside and farside—encompassing differences in basalt distribution, topography, crustal thickness, and thorium ...

The Moon has a global dichotomy, with its near and far sides having different geomorphology, topography, chemical composition, crustal thickness, and evidence of volcanism. To better understand this dichotomy, Professor XU Yigang’s team from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated lunar soil samples from the far side South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin of the Moon returned by the Chang’e-6 mission. Their work was published in Science on Nov. 15. “The samples returned by Chang’e-6 provide a best opportunity to investigate the lunar global dichotomy,” said Professor ...

Dietary zinc deficiency promotes lung infection by Acinetobacter baumannii bacteria — a leading cause of ventilator-associated pneumonia, according to a new study published Nov. 15 in the journal Nature Microbiology.  A Vanderbilt University Medical Center-led team of researchers discovered an unexpected link between the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-13 (IL-13) and A. baumannii lung infection, and they demonstrated that blocking IL-13 prevented infection-associated death in an animal model.  The findings suggest that anti-IL-13 antibodies, which are FDA-approved for use in humans, may protect against bacterial pneumonia in patients with zinc deficiency.  “To ...

In what could one day become a new treatment for epilepsy, researchers at UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley have used pulses of light to prevent seizure-like activity in neurons.   The researchers used brain tissue that had been removed from epilepsy patients as part of their treatment.   Eventually, they hope the technique will replace surgery to remove the brain tissue where seizures originate, providing a less invasive option for patients whose symptoms cannot be controlled with medication.  The ...

Children born to mothers who take antiseizure medications to manage seizures and psychiatric conditions during pregnancy may face increased risks of neurodevelopmental conditions, according to new data from researchers at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health. The current work -- using data from more than three million children from the United Kingdom and Sweden, including 17,495 who were exposed to antiseizure medications during pregnancy -- found that children exposed to the antiseizure drug lamotrigine ...

Bottom Line: In patients with unresectable, locally advanced esophageal cancer, the triple combination of radiation, chemotherapy, and immunotherapy made tumors more amenable to surgery, which was associated with significantly improved outcomes. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Background: “Curative resection unequivocally serves as the cornerstone for treating resectable esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC); ...

Scientists have created a new ‘biocooperative’ material based on blood, which has shown to successfully repair bones, paving the way for personalised regenerative blood products that could be used as effective therapies to treat injury and disease. Researchers from the Schools of Pharmacy and Chemical Engineering at the University of Nottingham have used peptide molecules that can guide key processes taking place during the natural healing of tissues to create living materials that enhance tissue regeneration. The research published today in Advanced ...

The New Phytologist Foundation is delighted to announce that Professor Maarja Öpik will take up the position of Editor-in-Chief of New Phytologist from January 2025 for an initial term of five years. Maarja has served as a member of New Phytologist's editorial board since 2013 and is Professor of Molecular Ecology and Director of the Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences at the Faculty of Science and Technology at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Maarja’s research addresses the interactions between plants and mycorrhizal fungi, with ...

Mountain lions in greater Los Angeles are proactively shifting their activity to avoid interacting with cyclists, hikers, joggers and other recreationists, finds a study from the University of California, Davis, Cal Poly Pomona and the National Park Service.  The study, published Nov. 15 in the journal Biological Conservation, found that mountain lions living in areas with higher levels of human recreation were more nocturnal than lions in more remote regions who were more active at dawn and dusk. The authors said their findings offer a hopeful example of human-wildlife coexistence amid a large, dense human population. “People are increasingly enjoying recreating ...

In May, the WHO raised the alarm over the rise in incidence of sexually transmitted illnesses (STIs) in many regions of the world, currently running at more than a million new cases per day. Among high-income countries, the US has one of the highest prevalences of STIs, and this problem is getting worse. For example, the incidence of chlamydia has more than doubled since 2000, while gonorrhea increased by 40% and syphilis by 400%. The highest prevalence is among young adults between 20 and 34 years of age. Over ...

The research team led by Dr. Hyung-Suk Oh and Dr. Woong Hee Lee at the Clean Energy Research Center at Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Sang-Rok Oh) has developed a silver-silica composite catalyst capable of reversible local pH control through a silica-hydroxide cycle, inspired by Earth’s natural cycles. This research draws inspiration from the carbonate-silicate cycle, known as the Earth’s inorganic carbon cycle, where carbon dioxide (CO₂) maintains balance. CO₂ is removed from ...

LOS ANGELES — Keck Hospital of USC earned an “A” Hospital Safety Grade from The Leapfrog Group, an independent national nonprofit watchdog focused on patient safety.    This is the ninth “A” grade the hospital has received since 2019.   “An ‘A’ grade once again puts Keck Hospital among the safest hospitals in the nation, and reflects the hospital’s dedication to maintaining the highest standards of quality and safety protocols,” ...

Bethesda, Maryland, USA, 14 November 2024 – A landmark paper by distinguished neuroendocrine psychiatrist Dr. Philip W. Gold, published in Brain Medicine's Seymour Reichlin Centenary Festschrift collection, presents a masterful synthesis of how depression fundamentally alters the body's stress response systems, challenging long-held views of the condition. The Viewpoint Review, published online November 14, 2024, represents a culmination of Dr. Gold's pioneering work in neuroendocrine psychiatry and honors the centenary of Dr. Seymour Reichlin, a foundational figure in neuroendocrinology whose ...

Rapid human expansion into natural landscapes, resulting in the growth of the wildland-urban interface (WUI), has heightened risks associated with wildfires. Prof. WANG Jianghao’s team from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has recently mapped global WUI changes in 2000, 2010, and 2020, revealing alarming upward trends in WUI areas. This work, published in Science Advances, provides critical insights into how urbanization can intensify potential wildfire risks faced by people worldwide. Against ...

Niigata and Toyama, Japan - The idea of maturing oocytes in the ovary to produce offspring has been implemented in various ways. One such method, ovarian transplantation, is a relatively simple procedure for obtaining eggs, compared to in vitro culture of ovaries and follicles. However, it is still difficult to transplant ovaries into cellular immunodeficient mice and produce offspring from the eggs grown in the mice. In order to produce offspring from xenotransplanted ovaries, Japanese researchers at Niigata University and University ...

Singapore, 15 November 2024 — A novel test developed by Duke-NUS researchers enables real-time monitoring of T cells that have been engineered to fight cancer, after re-introduction into the body of a cancer patient. This simple and innovative test provides clinicians with the ability to track the function of these cancer-fighting cells over the course of the treatment.   T cells are a type of immune cell that seeks out and destroys cells infected by viruses, bacteria as well as tumour cells. Originally ...

In a recent study, researchers have developed a compound metalens that enables distortion-free imaging. The study, published in Engineering, presents a novel approach to on-demand distortion engineering using compound metalenses. Metalenses have emerged as a promising technology with applications in beam steering, imaging, depth sensing, and display projection. However, optical distortion, a crucial factor in optical design, has been relatively unexplored in the context of meta-optics. The researchers addressed this gap by demonstrating ...

With the worldwide population aging at an unprecedented rate, the prevention of age-related diseases has become a prominent issue. It is important to comprehensively and quantitatively evaluate the changes that aging causes at the molecular level in the body. By doing so, it may be possible to pinpoint specific aging factors and suppress age-related diseases. Addressing this problem, previously conducted research established an atlas of changes in major tissues from aging by determining the extent to which mRNA was produced within living cells. However, there has not ...

In crowdsourcing scenarios, we can obtain each instance's multiple noisy labels from different crowd workers and then infer its integrated label via label aggregation. In spite of the effectiveness of label aggregation methods, there still remains a certain level of noise in the integrated labels. Thus, some noise correction methods have been proposed to reduce the impact of noise in recent years. However, to the best of our knowledge, existing methods rarely consider an instance's information from both its features and multiple noisy labels simultaneously ...

Peer-reviewed / Modelling study / People Embargoed access to the paper and contact details for authors are available in Notes to Editors at the end of the release. Most comprehensive US analysis of overweight and obesity at the national level and across all states and age groups estimates that obesity rates in adults (aged 25 or older) and older adolescents (aged 15-24 years) have at least doubled over the past three decades (1990-2021). Southern states, including Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, ...

New research, led by experts at the University of Nottingham, has found that certain types of medication used to treat diabetes may be effective in reducing alcohol use. The study, which is published in eClinicalMedicine, looked at whether a type of diabetes medication, called GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs), could also be used to help people cut down on drinking. The study was led by Dr Mohsen Subhani, Clinical Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology at the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre, in the ...

If every American over the age of 40 was as physically active as the top 25% of the population, they could expect to live an extra 5 years, on average, suggest the findings of a modelling study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. And if the least physically active matched the level of the most physically active, they could live almost 11 years longer, the estimates indicate. It’s well known that low physical activity levels are associated with a higher risk of diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, as well as premature death, but it’s not clear to what extent low physical activity levels shorten lifespan in specific groups of people ...