Human noroviruses cause acute gastroenteritis, a global health problem for which there are no vaccines or antiviral drugs. Although most healthy patients recover completely from the infection, norovirus can be life-threatening in infants, the elderly and people with underlying diseases. Estimates indicate that human noroviruses cause approximately 684 million illnesses and 212,000 deaths annually. “Human noroviruses are highly diverse,” said first author Dr. Wilhelm Salmen, a graduate student in Dr. B V Venkataram Prasad’s lab while he was working ...

When temperatures drop and roads get slick, rock salt is an important safety precaution used by individuals, businesses, and local and state governments to keep walkers, cyclists, and drivers safe. However, according to a new scientific review paper from a team of researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland, the human demand for salt comes at a cost to the environment. Published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment with researchers Stanley Grant, Megan Rippy, and Shantanu Bhide from Virginia Tech’s Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, ...

An unexpectedly high percentage of children, who were born with HIV and started treatment within 48 hours of life, exhibit biomarkers by 2 years of age that may make them eligible to test for medication-free remission, according to a multinational study published in Lancet HIV. “Moving away from reliance on daily antiretroviral therapy (ART) to control HIV would be a huge improvement to the quality of life of these children,” said Protocol Co-Chair and senior author Ellen Chadwick, MD, former Director of Section ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Modern-day Ciudad Mante, Mexico, could help Tampa, Florida, plan for shifting water and electricity demands due to climate change, according to an international team of researchers. Led by Renee Obringer, assistant professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State, the researchers used utilities data and climate analogs — contemporary cities with climates close to what other cities are predicted to experience in the future — to assess how climate change may impact residential water and electricity use across 46 cities in the United States. Their computationally efficient model projected strong regional differences for future water and electricity ...

The lab of Yongchao C. Ma, PhD, at Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago uncovered a novel mechanism that leads to motor neuron degeneration in spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). This discovery offers a new target for treatment that overcomes important limitations of gene therapy and other current therapies for SMA. SMA is a genetic disease that disrupts the nerve cells that control voluntary muscle movement. Symptoms of motor neuron degeneration could start at as early as 3 months of ...

Investigators from the Mass General Cancer Center, a part of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, will present research discoveries and outcomes from clinical trials at the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, held December 9-12, 2023 in San Diego. ASH brings together leading experts in classical and malignant blood diseases to share the latest breakthroughs, clinical studies and research impacting the field and patient care. Mass General Cancer Center researchers will cover a wide range of topics, including ...

Recent advancements in AI and more specifically large language models such as ChatGPT have put a strain on data centers. AI models require huge amounts of data to train, and in order to move data between the processing units and memory, efficient communication links become necessary. For long distance communication, fiber optics has already been the go-to solution for decades. For short distance intra-data center communication, the industry is now also starting to adopt fiber optics due to its great performance compared to classical electrical links. Recent technological developments now even enable the switch from electrical to optical interconnect for very small distances, ...

INDIANAPOLIS—An international team of researchers including experts at the Indiana University School of Medicine has identified a protein found in the brains of people with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), discovering a new target for potential treatments for the disease. According to the National Institutes of Health, FTD results from damage to neurons in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. People with this type of dementia typically present symptoms, including unusual behaviors, emotional problems, trouble communicating, difficulty with work or in some cases difficulty with walking, ...

A partnership between ophthalmology researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University expands the understanding of how oxidative stress contributes to the development of choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in patients with age-related macular degeneration (AMD). To study the roles oxidative stress, a condition in which the body lacks antioxidants, and hypoxia play in the progression of AMD, Johns Hopkins University researchers turned to CellSight, the ocular stem cell and regeneration research program in the CU Department of Ophthalmology, for tools that allow researchers to explore specific conditions ...

BOSTON – Mortality related to end stage liver disease is ranked as the 12th most common cause of death in the U.S. Liver transplantation remains the only treatment for end stage liver disease, but there is a critical shortage of organ donors, necessitating a dire need for new forms of treatment. New research from Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine’s Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) found evidence that a novel stem cell treatment, using mRNA technology encapsulated into nanoparticles (LNP) that was ...

Published in the 2023 Volume 3 issue of Psychoradiology a team of dedicated researchers from The University of Hong Kong and The University of Electronic Science and Technology of China has conclusively identified the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) as a key input and causal regulator within the subcortical response inhibition nodes. This right-lateralized inhibitory control circuit, characterized by its significant intrinsic connectivity, highlights the crucial role of the rIFG in orchestrating top-down cortical-subcortical control, underscoring the intricate dynamics of brain function in response inhibition. In ...

Although SARS-CoV-2 is no longer a stranger to the immune system, new virus variants still pose a challenge. The working group led by Professor Dr Florian Klein, Director of the Institute of Virology at the University Hospital Cologne and the Faculty of Medicine, has now published two studies investigating how the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 changes over time and how the immune system is preparing itself for new variants with clever strategies. The work has been published under the title ‘Enhanced ...

Sage has launched a tool to empower researchers to discover the real-world impact of their work on policy. Sage Policy Profiles lets researchers easily see specific citations of their work in policy documents and then illustrate and share that work’s impact graphically. The tool is powered by Overton, which hosts an extensive repository of global policy documents, guidelines, think-tank publications, and working papers. The free-of-charge, browser-based tool shows researchers where their work appears in evidence-based policies, offering insights into how policymakers make use of their research. Sage Policy Profiles presents these results ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have released a new, open-source platform called Cascade that can run artificial intelligence models in a way that slashes expenses and energy costs while dramatically improving performance. Cascade is designed for settings like smart traffic intersections, medical diagnostics, equipment servicing using augmented reality, digital agriculture, smart power grids and automatic product inspection during manufacturing – situations where AI models must react within a fraction of a second. With the rise of AI, many companies are eager to leverage new capabilities but worried about the associated computing ...

Maternal inflammation risk factors may be associated with dysregulation in children, according to a study funded by the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program at the National Institutes of Health. “Dysregulation” in this context refers to children’s attention, anxiety and depression, and aggression being measurably different from what is typically expected at their age.  While inflammation is a normal bodily response to injury or infection, ECHO investigators wanted to learn whether factors linked ...

Around 320,000 new cases of leukaemia, a type of blood cancer that can affect all population groups, are diagnosed every year in Europe. In children, cases of leukaemia make up a third of diagnosed cancers. Chemotherapy is the main treatment for leukaemia. Often, the exact cause cannot be identified and the molecular and cellular mechanisms responsible for leukaemia remain shrouded in mystery. Discovering new detection methods and new treatments to eradicate leukaemia is therefore a major challenge in oncology. Messenger RNA has been in the news in recent months, in connection with COVID-19 vaccinations. In an article published in Molecular Cell, researchers ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – A new study of paper wasps suggests social interactions may make animals smarter. The research offers behavioral evidence of an evolutionary link between the ability to recognize individuals and social cooperation. Furthermore, genomic sequencing revealed that populations of wasps that recognized each other – and cooperated more – showed recent adaptations (positive selection) in areas of the brain associated with cognitive abilities such as learning, memory and vision. The study focused on two distinct populations of paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus): A southern ...

Key to fatty liver disease and its consequences for billions of people The global rise in obesity and diabetes is leading to an epidemic in fatty liver disease affecting 20-30 per cent of the world’s population. Almost a third of people with fatty liver disease go on to develop an advanced form of the disease, known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) that can progress to cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease, or even liver cancer, and is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Why some people remain relatively healthy with fatty liver disease and some go onto potentially life-threatening illness has been a mystery. Until now. A study ...

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a Colombian priest named Padre Gustavo Huertas collected rocks and fossils near a town called Villa de Levya. Two of the specimens he found were small, round rocks patterned with lines that looked like leaves; he classified them as a type of fossil plant. But in a new study, published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, researchers re-examined these “plant” fossils and found that they weren’t plants at all: they were the fossilized remains of baby turtles. “It was truly surprising to find these fossils,” says Héctor Palma-Castro, a paleobotany student at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. The plants in question ...

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), that arises from pancreatic epithelial cells, is the most common form of pancreatic cancer, with a very high mortality rate. This elevated mortality is associated with the unique tumor microenvironment (TME), known for increased resistance to chemotherapy and high metastatic potential. TME is characterized by the presence of a complex stromal structure comprising cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), tumor endothelial cells (TECs), and a variety of immune cells. CAFs are specific cells, primarily involved in the overall aggressiveness and spread of cancer cells. These cells can further be categorized into several types based on their ...

DALLAS, December 7, 2023 — The Tobacco Endgame — the path to ending tobacco use and nicotine addiction in the U.S. — is within sight, but there has been a sharp increase in electronic cigarette use among high school students, from 1.5% in 2011 to about 27.4% in 2019.[1] The American Heart Association, the world’s leading nonprofit organization focused on heart and brain health for all, is collaborating with the Association for the Treatment of Tobacco Use and Dependence (ATTUD) to change that. New individual certification as a Certified Professional by the American Heart Association – Tobacco Treatment is ...

A multidisciplinary study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Spain (a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council and Pompeu Fabra University), the University of Belgrade in Serbia, the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and Harvard University in the USA, reconstructs the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era, a time and place of profound demographic, cultural and linguistic change. The team has recovered and analyzed whole genome data from 146 ancient people excavated primarily from Serbia and Croatia—more than a third of which came from the ...

Despite the Roman Empire’s extensive military and cultural influence on the nearby Balkan peninsula, a DNA analysis of individuals who lived in the region between 1 and 1000 CE found no genetic evidence of Iron Age Italian ancestry. Instead, a study published December 7 in the journal Cell revealed successive waves of migrations from Western Anatolia, central and northern Europe, and the Pontic-Kazakh Steppe during the Empire’s reign. From the 7th century CE onwards (coincident with the fall of the Western Roman Empire), large numbers of people emigrated from Eastern Europe, likely related to the arrival of Slavic-speaking populations, which ...

Chemotherapy becomes less effective because healthy cells push cancer cells to grow more slowly, according to two studies from researchers at UCL and Yale. In the two studies, supported by Cancer Research UK and published in Cell, researchers used ‘mini-tumours’ and the latest single-cell analysis technologies to begin to solve the puzzle of why healthy cells in a patient’s bowel cancer tumour might lead to poor outcomes. Bowel cancer kills over 900,000 people a year and is the second highest cause of cancer mortality worldwide. In the UK, it accounts for 10% of all cancer deaths. In the first study, UCL researchers used the latest single-cell analysis ...

WHO: Mass General Brigham researchers, Dr. Chirag Vyas and Dr. Olivia I. Okereke at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. Howard Sesso and Dr. JoAnn Manson at Brigham and Women’s Hospital WHAT: Cocoa extract has shown a potential protective effect on cognition but randomized clinical trials in older adults have had inconsistent results. A new study of cognition in a randomized trial, known as the Cocoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS), suggests that taking cocoa extract supplements containing 500 mg per day of cocoa flavanols had cognitive benefits for older adults who had lower habitual ...