New research published today suggests there is a link between abnormal blood levels of amyloid — a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease — and subtle changes in brain microstructures on a type of MRI, findings that could lead to a new way to detect Alzheimer’s earlier in people with no clinical signs. Researchers analyzed the results of 128 human participants with and without dementia from the 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center who underwent imaging scans using an established diagnostic tool called positron emission tomography, or PET, which can detect amyloid plaques in the brain, a hallmark ...

About The Study: In this randomized clinical trial that involved 500 hospitalized people with HIV, a linkage case management intervention did not reduce 12-month mortality outcomes. These findings may help inform decisions about the potential role of linkage case management among hospitalized people with HIV.  Authors: Robert N. Peck, M.D., Ph.D., of Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jama.2024.2177) Editor’s ...

Key Takeaways  Incidence of school shootings increasing dramatically: In the 53 years leading up to May 2022, the number of school shootings annually increased more than 12 times.   Children more likely to be victims. The likelihood of children being school shooting victims has increased more than fourfold, and the rate of death from school shootings has risen more than sixfold.    A total of 2,056 school shooting incidents were analyzed: The incidents involved 3,083 victims, including 2,033 children ages 5-17 years, and 1,050 adults ages 18-74 years.  CHICAGO: The ...

The mammalian brain is a web of densely interconnected neurons, yet one of the mysteries in neuroscience is how tools that capture relatively few components of brain activity have allowed scientists to predict behavior in mice. It is hard to believe that much of the brain’s complexity is irrelevant background noise. “We wondered why such a redundant and metabolically costly scheme would have evolved,” says Rockefeller’s Alipasha Vaziri. Now, a new study in Neuron—which presents an unprecedented simultaneous recording of the activity of one million neurons in mice—offers a surprising answer to this fundamental question: technological limitations ...

TAMPA, Fla. — An international interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Moffitt Cancer Center’s Tiffany Carson, Ph.D., has been selected to receive a Cancer Grand Challenges award. Co-founded by the National Cancer Institute and Cancer Research UK, Cancer Grand Challenges supports a community of diverse, global teams to come together, think differently and take on some of cancer’s toughest challenges. Carson is part of the SAMBAI (Societal, Ancestry, Molecular and Biological Analyses of Inequalities) team led by Melissa Davis, Ph.D., from Morehouse School of Medicine. The team will receive up to $25 million over the next five ...

Cancer Grand Challenges has selected five new global research teams that will address the following challenges in cancer: reducing cancer inequities, understanding the mechanisms of early-onset cancers, developing drugs for solid tumors in children, and broadening our knowledge about how T cells recognize cancer cells. The winning teams were announced at the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit on March 6, 2024, in London. Cancer Grand Challenges is a global funding initiative cofounded in 2020 by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), ...

The team is co-led by Martin Eilers, Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Würzburg (JMU). “Our research project is called KOODAC,” he explains. “That stands for ‘Knocking-Out Oncogenic Drivers and Curing Childhood Cancer’”. Our goal is to develop well-tolerated drugs that can target and eliminate cancer cells in children.” The current standard of care for childhood cancer is chemotherapy and radiation therapy, which, even when successful, are associated with severe side effects. “These ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have developed a semiconductor chip that will enable ever-smaller devices to operate at the higher frequencies needed for future 6G communication technology. The next generation of wireless communication not only requires greater bandwidth at higher frequencies – it also needs a little extra time. The new chip adds a necessary time delay so signals sent across multiple arrays can align at a single point in space-- without disintegrating. The team’s paper, ...

About The Study: The results of this study using twin data support an association between adverse childhood experiences and poor mental health in adulthood, notwithstanding evidence for familial confounding from shared genetic and environmental factors. These findings suggest that targeted interventions may be associated with reduced risks of future psychopathology.  Authors: Hilda Björk Daníelsdóttir, M.Sc., of the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, Iceland, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed ...

About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that pediatric atopic dermatitis (AD) was generally associated with greater odds of reported difficulties in learning and memory. However, this association was primarily limited to children with neurodevelopmental comorbidities, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or learning disabilities. These results may improve the risk stratification of children with AD for cognitive impairments and suggest that evaluation for cognitive difficulties should be prioritized among children with AD and neurodevelopmental disorders.  Authors: Joy ...

A research team led by the Paul Scherrer Institute has spectroscopically observed fractionalisation of electronic charge in an iron-based metallic ferromagnet. Experimental observation of the phenomenon is not only of fundamental importance. Since it appears in an alloy of common metals at accessible temperatures, it holds potential for future exploitation in electronic devices. The discovery is published in the journal Nature. Basic quantum mechanics tells us that the fundamental unit of charge is unbreakable: the electron charge is quantised. Yet, we have come to understand that exceptions exist. In some situations, ...

In a groundbreaking discovery, bumblebees have been shown to possess a previously unseen level of cognitive sophistication. A new study, published in Nature, reveals that these fuzzy pollinators can learn complex, multi-step tasks through social interaction, even if they cannot figure them out on their own. This challenges the long-held belief that such advanced social learning is unique to humans, and even hints at the presence of key elements of cumulative culture in these insects.  Led by Dr Alice Bridges and Professor Lars Chittka , the research team designed a two-step puzzle box requiring ...

A research team has examined the link between adverse childhood experiences and the risk of mental health problems later in life, according to a study in JAMA Psychiatry. The researchers from Karolinska Institutet and University of Iceland have found that the risk of suffering from mental illness later in life among those experiencing significant adversity in childhood can be partly explained by factors shared by family members, such as genetics and environment. Several previous studies have shown that people who have experienced ...

Some of our genes can be expressed or silenced depending on whether we inherited them from our mother or our father. The mechanism behind this phenomenon, known as genomic imprinting, is determined by DNA modifications during egg and sperm production. The Burga Lab at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences uncovered a novel gene regulation process, associated with the silencing of selfish genes, that could represent the first step in the evolution of imprinting. Their discovery, reported in Nature, ...

One of the fundamental goals of basic biology is understanding how diverse cell types work in concert to form tissues, organs, and organ systems. Recent efforts to catalog the different cell types in every tissue in our bodies are a step in the right direction, but only one piece of the puzzle. The great mystery of how those cells communicate with one another remains unsolved. Now, a new paper in Nature describes uLIPSTIC, a tool capable of laying the groundwork for a dynamic map tracking the physical interactions between different cells—the elusive cellular interactome. The authors have been perfecting the technology since 2018 and the latest iteration ...

“Random DNA” is naturally active in the one-celled fungi yeast, while such DNA is turned off as its natural state in mammalian cells, despite their having a common ancestor a billion years ago and the same basic molecular machinery, a new study finds. The new finding revolves around the process by which DNA genetic instructions are converted first into a related material called RNA and then into proteins that make up the body’s structures and signals. In yeast, mice, and humans, the first step in a gene’s expression, transcription, proceeds as DNA molecular “letters” (nucleobases) are read in one direction. While 80% of the human genome ...

Artificial intelligence helped clinicians to accelerate the design of diabetes prevention software, a new study finds. Publishing online March 6 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the study examined the capabilities of a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called generative AI or GenAI, which predicts likely options for the next word in any sentence based on how billions of people used words in context on the internet. A side effect of this next-word prediction is that the generative AI “chatbots” like chatGPT can generate replies to questions in realistic language, and produce clear summaries of complex texts. Led ...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its collaborators have delivered a small but mighty advancement in timing technology: compact chips that seamlessly convert light into microwaves. This chip could improve GPS, the quality of phone and internet connections, the accuracy of radar and sensing systems, and other technologies that rely on high-precision timing and communication. This technology reduces something known as timing jitter, which is small, random changes in the timing of microwave signals. Similar to when a musician is trying to keep a steady beat in music, the timing of these signals can sometimes waver a bit. The researchers ...

They published their work on March. 4th in Energy Material Advances, a Science Partner Journal (https://spj.science.org/journal/energymatadv).   "The development of cost-effective and high-performance electrochemical energy storage devices is imperative," said paper's corresponding author Wei Chen, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). "Currently, lithium-ion batteries still dominate the market, but they are limited in both lithium as a resource and in their power densities."   Chen ...

Dallas, TX – March 06, 2024 - Colossal Biosciences (“Colossal”), the world’s first de-extinction company, announces today that their Woolly Mammoth team has achieved a global-first iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells) breakthrough. This milestone advancement was one of the primary early goals of the mammoth project, and supports the feasibility of future multiplex ex utero mammoth gestation. iPSC cells represent a single cell source that can propagate indefinitely and give rise to every other type of cell in a body. As such, the progress with elephant iPSCs extends far beyond ...

INDIANAPOLIS – A new study of more than 2,000 dialysis facilities randomized to a new Medicare payment model aimed to improve outcomes for patients with end-stage kidney disease has found that facilities that disproportionately serve populations with high social risk have lower use of home dialysis and transplant waitlisting and fewer kidney transplants. These facilities thus received reduced performance scores and reimbursement from Medicare. A high proportion of non-Hispanic Blacks and of those initiating dialysis while uninsured or Medicaid-covered also was found to be an indicator of lower use of home dialysis and transplant waitlisting and fewer kidney ...

Chestnut Hill, Mass (03/06/2024) – Boston College Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Hilary Palevsky has been awarded a nearly $1-million National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her work to make remote ocean monitoring data accessible and accurate in real time and produce a series of educational videos to guide students using the data. Palevsky, whose research focuses on marine biogeochemistry and the mechanisms that enable the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, said the funding will allow her to build upon the work she has done to help scientists use the ...

Washington, D.C. – March 6, 2024 – A new study provides insights into the role of microbes and their interaction as drivers of interspecific differences in coral thermal bleaching. The study was published this week in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. “The diversity, community dynamic and interaction of coral associated microorganisms play important roles in the health state and climate change response pattern of coral reefs,” said lead study author Biao ...

WASHINGTON, March 6, 2024—Black male elementary school students matched to Black teachers are less likely to be identified for special education services, according to new research published today. The relationship is strongest for economically disadvantaged students. The study, by Cassandra Hart at the University of California, Davis, and Constance Lindsay at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. The researchers also found that the connection is ...

While ecologically important, small mushrooms on monocots (grasses and sedges) are rarely studied and a lack of information about their habitat and DNA sequences creates difficulties in determining their presence or absence in ecological studies and their genetic relationships to other mushroom taxa.    This study led by Drs. Karen W. Hughes and Ronald H. Petersen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA) examined a mushroom species, Campanella subdendrophora, (also known as Tetrapyrgos subdendrophora), which fruits on grasses in the US Pacific Northwest.    The researchers evaluated its phylogenetic position concerning both Campanella and Tetrapyrgos ...