About The Study: Older adults hospitalized with sepsis experienced an approximately 50% reduction in long-term nursing home stay or death over a 5-year period before the pandemic in this cross-sectional study. These results suggest that during the pandemic, all individuals, regardless of race and ethnicity, experienced increased long-term nursing home stay or death compared with before the pandemic.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Laurent G. Glance, MD, email laurent_glance@urmc.rochester.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.56816) Editor’s ...

Ghent, 24 January 2025 – Our livers contain many different types of immune cells. New research by the team of Prof. Charlotte Scott (VIB-UGent Center for Inflammation Research) and colleagues now reveals that a specific activation state of one of these cell types is required for tissue repair following injury. This suggests these cells may be useful as new therapeutic targets for various liver conditions. The work appears in the journal Immunity. Liver immune cells Macrophages are specialized immune cells located in every tissue ...

The significant decline in genetic diversity in the Amazon Basin, following historical events such as European colonisation, deforestation and the extinction of megafauna such as the sloth – the main seed dispersal agents, is of particular concern for the genetic health of Brazil Nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa). As one of the most impacted keystone species in rainforests, Brazil Nut trees are essential for biodiversity and a vital income source for local economies. A crucial study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen ...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when fentanyl overdoses surged, doctors were desperate to find ways of helping their patients.   They knew that buprenorphine could help people stop using opioids, but it was much harder to start the treatment for those who used fentanyl, which lasts longer in the body. Taking buprenorphine while fentanyl is still active can push someone abruptly into withdrawal.   So, they started giving patients small doses of the drug over a series of days to slowly build up the drug in their systems until their bodies could handle a higher dose of buprenorphine.    Now, ...

One in every 10 people worldwide is impacted by a rare genetic disease but about 50% of them remain undiagnosed despite rapid increases in genetic technology and testing. Even when a person does have access to testing, the process of getting a diagnosis can take about five years or more, which is sometimes too late for patients, who are often children, to start the right treatment. This is partly because current clinical testing uses a method called short-read sequencing, which cannot access information in certain regions of the genome and so may miss ...

Today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Arizona State University announced a five-year partnership, the AAAS + ASU Collaborative. Together, the institutions will elevate and amplify strategies and practices that advance scientific excellence and enable a boldly inclusive scientific enterprise serving society.  In its first phase, the Collaborative includes a joint prize, an invitation for the ASU STEMM community to join AAAS as Elemental Members, and events in Washington, D.C., addressing policy-relevant science topics.  “Focusing science and scientific advances on the challenges we face is essential to the advancement ...

A new study led by UCLA Health highlights the link between socioeconomic disadvantage, Medicaid insurance, and poorer survival rates after heart transplantation. Researchers found that Medicaid-insured heart transplant patients had a higher likelihood of developing cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV), a condition that affects transplanted hearts and can limit long-term survival. It has been reported that CAV contributes to more than 30% of all deaths in the first 5 to 10 years following heart transplantation.  The study, which included heart transplant recipients aged 18 and older, divided ...

NH3 is one of the most important chemicals in today’s world, as it is used in the production of fertilizers to boost agricultural yields and sustain the ever-growing global population. For over 100 years, NH3 production has relied on the Haber–Bosch (HB) process, which combines nitrogen (N2) and hydrogen in the presence of a catalyst. Interestingly, an iron-based catalyst developed a century ago (called ‘Promoted-Fe’) still remains at the forefront of mass NH3 production, despite countless efforts to find more energy-efficient alternatives. In the HB process, where NH3 is produced by a catalyst-filled reactor with a limited volume, ...

A review article about the future of neuromorphic computing by a team of 23 researchers, including two authors from UTSA, was published today in Nature. Dhireesha Kudithipudi, the Robert F. McDermott Endowed Chair in Engineering and founding director of MATRIX: The UTSA AI Consortium for Human Well-Being, served as the lead author, while Tej Pandit, a UTSA doctoral candidate in computer engineering, is one of the co-authors. The review article, titled “Neuromorphic Computing at Scale,” examines the state of neuromorphic technology and presents a strategy for building large-scale neuromorphic systems. The research is part of a broader effort ...

One day Long Covid in children could be objectively diagnosed with a blood test, thanks to the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In fact, a study by the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome campus - Fondazione Policlinico Universitario Agostino Gemelli IRCCS and the Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù IRCCS, has highlighted the molecular signature of Long Covid in plasma in paediatric age and used an AI tool capable of making the diagnosis based on the results of the blood sample, with 93% ...

Battery-powered electric vehicles are now more reliable and can match the lifespans of traditional cars and vans with petrol and diesel engines - marking a pivotal moment in the drive towards sustainable transportation, a new study reveals.  Researchers used nearly 300 million UK Ministry of Transport (MOT) test records charting the ‘health’ of every vehicle on the United Kingdom’s roads between 2005 and 2022 to estimate vehicle longevity and provide a comprehensive analysis of survival rates for different powertrains.  The international research ...

A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label whole rodent brains and other large tissue samples in a single day. In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across whole brains can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods. Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience and related fields because the ...

Computers also make mistakes. These are usually suppressed by technical measures or detected and corrected during the calculation. In quantum computers, this involves some effort, as no copy can be made of an unknown quantum state. This means that the state cannot be saved multiple times during the calculation and an error cannot be detected by comparing these copies. Inspired by classical computer science, quantum physics has developed a different method in which the quantum information is distributed across several entangled quantum bits and stored redundantly in this ...

Certain tumour types do not remain at their point of origin but spread throughout the body and form metastases. This is because the primary tumour continuously releases cancer cells into the blood. These circulating tumour cells (CTCs) can join together into small clusters of up to a dozen cells and settle in other organs. There, the clusters grow into larger tumours, known as metastases. Metastatic tumours are still a major medical problem: every year, around seven million people worldwide die from them. One example of such a spreading tumour is breast cancer. As soon ...

PHILADELPHIA – A therapeutic vaccine targeting human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16) induced regression in high-grade precancerous cervical lesions, according to the results from a phase II clinical trial published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. “Nearly all premalignant cervical lesions and cervical cancers are caused by HPV infection, with HPV16 implicated in the majority of cases,” said Refika Yigit, MD, principal investigator and oncological gynecologist at University Medical Centre Groningen in the ...

We’re nearly one month into 2025, but if you’re struggling to hold onto your New Year’s resolution, stay strong, as University of South Australia research shows that forming a healthy habit can take longer than you expect.   In the first systematic review of its kind, UniSA researchers found that new habits can begin forming within about two months (median of 59–66 days) but can take up to 335 days to establish.   It’s an important finding that could inform health interventions to ...

Two-component epoxies, which require mixing resin and curing agent before use, often suffer from issues such as mixing ratio errors, limited working times, and inconsistent curing. Additionally, they must be used immediately after mixing, leading to wasted residue. To address these challenges, one-component epoxies have gained attention. One-component epoxies come pre-mixed, making them easy to use, reducing processing time, and ensuring consistent quality without mixing. In particular, using latent curing agents allows curing to be triggered only under specific conditions (e.g., heat or UV exposure), significantly improving storage stability. However, ...

Neuromorphic computing—a field that applies principles of neuroscience to computing systems to mimic the brain’s function and structure—needs to scale up if it is to effectively compete with current computing methods. In a review published Jan. 22 in the journal Nature, 23 researchers, including two from the University of California San Diego, present a detailed roadmap of what needs to happen to reach that goal. The article offers a new and practical perspective toward approaching the cognitive capacity of the human brain with comparable form factor and power consumption.  “We ...

An international team of researchers led by the Strong Correlation Quantum Transport Laboratory of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) has demonstrated, in a world’s first, an ideal Weyl semimetal, marking a breakthrough in a decade-old problem of quantum materials. Weyl fermions arise as collective quantum excitations of electrons in crystals. They are predicted to show exotic electromagnetic properties, attracting intense worldwide interest. However, despite the careful study of thousands of crystals, most ...

A study led by scientists at Rutgers University-New Brunswick has shown that specialized cells involved in how the body responds to insulin are activated in the brain after exercise, suggesting that physical activity may directly improve brain function. A study, published in Aging Cell, a journal focused on the biology of aging, indicates that therapies targeting this insulin action may be developed to offset or even prevent dementia progression. “We believe this work is important because it suggests exercise may work to improve cognition and memory by improving the abilities of insulin to act on the brain,” ...

Ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors—such as diamond—are promising for next-generation electronics due to a larger energy gap between the valence and conduction bands, allowing them to handle higher voltages, operate at higher frequencies, and provide greater efficiency compared to traditional materials like silicon. However, their unique properties make it challenging to probe and understand how charge and heat move on nanometer-to-micron scales. Visible light has a very limited ability to probe nanoscale properties, and moreover, it is not absorbed ...

The first randomized control trial of the school-based intervention called Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups (STRONG) shows significant reductions in depression, anxiety and behavior problems among refugee and immigrant students. The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, was co-led by Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Loyola University, in partnership with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Results were published in the American Journal of Community Psychology. Key findings are summarized ...

While entangled photons hold incredible promise for quantum computing and communications, they have a major inherent disadvantage. After one use, they simply disappear. In a new study, Northwestern University physicists propose a new strategy to maintain communications in a constantly changing, unpredictable quantum network. By rebuilding these disappearing connections, the researchers found the network eventually settles into a stable — albeit different — state.  The key resides in adding a sufficient number of connections to ensure the ...

Major uncertainties remain about the impact of puberty blockers and gender affirming hormone therapy on children and young people with gender related distress (gender dysphoria), making it impossible to determine conclusively whether they help or harm, find two pooled data analyses of the available evidence, published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood. The findings echo those of the Hilary Cass review of gender identity services in the NHS, published last April. This concluded that the evidence for the use of puberty blockers and masculinising and feminising hormones for gender related distress—psychological distress caused by a mismatch between birth sex and gender ...

The prevalence of psychological distress caused by a mismatch between birth sex and gender identity, formally known as gender dysphoria, likely rose 50-fold nationwide between 2011 and 2021, suggests an analysis of primary care data in England and published online in Archives of Disease in Childhood. This means the condition is still uncommon, with fewer than 1 in 200 17-18 year olds affected, but levels of concurrent anxiety, depression, and self harm are high. And access to timely care is a live issue for young people and their families, a second feedback study shows. Most previously ...