Speaking, singing, coughing, laughing, yelling, yawning, chewing—we use our jaws for many purposes. Each action requires a complex coordination of muscles whose activity is managed by neurons in the brain. But it turns out that the neural circuit behind the jaw movement most essential to survival—eating—is surprisingly simple, as researchers from Rockefeller University recently described in a new paper in Nature. Christin Kosse and other scientists from the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, headed by Jeffrey M. Friedman, have identified a three-neuron circuit that connects a hunger-signaling hormone to the jaw movements of chewing. ...

Woods Hole, Mass. – Coral reefs worldwide are in trouble. These ecosystems support a billion people and more than a quarter of marine species. Still, many have been damaged by unsustainable fishing and tourism, coastal construction, nutrient runoff, and climate change. Now, researchers have shown that broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs is a way to encourage larval corals to repopulate degraded sites and help revitalize them. A recent study done by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) showed that golfball coral larvae can be encouraged to settle when they hear the sounds of a vibrant, healthy reef. This is the second coral species ...

An international research team led by NYU Tandon School of Engineering and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) has pioneered a new technique to identify and characterize atomic-scale defects in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a two-dimensional (2D) material often dubbed "white graphene" for its remarkable properties.  This advance could accelerate the development of next-generation electronics and quantum technologies. The team reported that it was able to detect the presence of individual carbon atoms replacing boron atoms in hBN crystals. This discovery was made possible by listening to ...

Animals not only need sufficient calories to function, but also essential nutrients — including omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). Insects and arachnids are an important source of these essential fatty acids for birds, hedgehogs, lizards and the like. However, the content depends on the specific types of insects and spiders consumed. Aquatic insects, such as caddisflies or dragonflies, contain significantly more omega-3 long-chain (LC) PUFA than terrestrial insects because omega-3- LC-PUFA rich algae form the base of the food chain in aquatic ecosystems. The ...

PHILADELPHIA — Donald E. Arnold, M.D., FACHE, FASA, chair of the Department of Anesthesiology, Mercy Hospital in St. Louis and member of the board of directors of Western Anesthesiology Associates, Inc., in Ballwin, Missouri, was today named president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the nation’s largest organization of anesthesiologists. Dr. Arnold assumed office at the ANESTHESIOLOGY® 2024 annual meeting and will serve for one year. “I’m honored to be named president of ASA and committed to serving our members, supporting the Society’s mission to advance the specialty, preserving physician-led anesthesia care, and above ...

Wealth is one of the strongest indicators of social status, acting as a key indicator of social inequality and influencing access to education, health care and professional success. In a study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the University of Cologne, GESIS and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health examined how financial wealth changes related to various generational transitions within families. The study used data from Norwegian registries and focused on people born in 1953. Investigating changes in wealth within the ...

Seeps on the deep seafloor naturally emit alkanes, which are pollutants that are potentially dangerous to life and act on global warming. Fortunately, the sediments around the seeps host microbes that act as a biological filter: They consume most of the alkanes before their release into the oceans and our atmosphere. This so-called anaerobic oxidation of alkanes is an important yet poorly understood microbial process. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, now ...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a proof-of-concept precision medicine clinical trial to test new treatment combinations targeting specific genetic changes in the cancer cells of people with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). The trial, funded by NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI), aims to accelerate the discovery of more tailored treatments for these aggressive cancers of the blood and bone marrow. “AML and MDS are a heterogeneous group of cancers that can progress very quickly. Treatment advances depend in part on the ability to rapidly identify which subtype of cancer each patient has so that treatments can be tested for ...

New York, NY, October 23, 2024 — Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with colleagues in the field, have developed an innovative antibody platform aimed at tackling one of the greatest challenges in treating rapidly evolving viruses like SARS-CoV-2: their ability to mutate and evade existing vaccines and therapies. Their findings, including preclinical studies in mice, introduce the Adaptive Multi-Epitope Targeting and Avidity-Enhanced (AMETA) Nanobody Platform, a new antibody approach for addressing how viruses like SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, evolve to evade vaccines and treatments. Details on the results were published October 23 ...

Four leading cancer research organizations in the United States and Canada announce the opening of patient enrollment to myeloMATCH, a unique portfolio of clinical trials to test precision medicine treatments for adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) or myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, Canadian Cancer Trials Group, ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group, and SWOG Cancer Research Network are collaborating within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN) to design and lead the trials. They expect to open ...

About The Study: In this cross-sectional study of 14,000 insured adults, individual-level social determinants of health were significantly associated with U.S. health care expenditures by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. These findings may inform health insurers and policymakers to incorporate social determinants of health in their decision-making practices to identify and control health care expenditures, advancing health equity.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Giridhar Mohan, MPH, email gmohan1@jhu.edu. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.40467) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this cohort study, distinct forms of traumatic and adverse childhood experiences differentially moderated developmental changes in psychiatric risk and cognitive ability in different ways, offering the possibility for precision-based prediction of risk for youth. Such findings could be used in targeted early prevention and intervention strategies for at-risk youth.  Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Justin D. Russell, PhD, email jdrussell3@wisc.edu To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.3231) Editor’s ...

A new study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that a type of immunotherapy — similar to that approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat inflammatory conditions such as arthritis — also may be an effective treatment strategy for heart failure. The study is published Oct. 23 in the journal Nature. After a heart attack, viral infection or other injury to the heart, scar tissue often forms in the heart muscle, where it interferes with the heart’s normal contractions and plays a leading role in heart failure, the progressive loss of the heart’s ...

Weill Cornell Medicine researchers have discovered a mechanism that ovarian tumors use to cripple immune cells and impede their attack—blocking the energy supply T cells depend on. The work, published Oct. 23 in Nature, points toward a promising new immunotherapy approach for ovarian cancer, which is notoriously aggressive and hard to treat. A significant obstacle in treating ovarian cancer is the tumor microenvironment—the complex ecosystem of cells, molecules and blood vessels that shields cancer cells from the immune system. Within this hostile environment, T cells lose their ability to take up the lipid (fat) molecules, which are necessary for energy to mount ...

Many black holes detected to date appear to be part of a pair. These binary systems comprise a black hole and a secondary object — such as a star, a much denser neutron star, or another black hole — that spiral around each other, drawn together by the black hole’s gravity to form a tight orbital pair.  Now a surprising discovery is expanding the picture of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.  In a study appearing in Nature, physicists at MIT and Caltech report that they have observed a “black hole triple” for the first time. The new system holds a central black hole in the act of consuming a small star ...

Researchers from the University of Bonn have trained an AI process to predict potential active ingredients with special properties. Therefore, they derived a chemical language model – a kind of ChatGPT for molecules. Following a training phase, the AI was able to exactly reproduce the chemical structures of compounds with known dual-target activity that may be particularly effective medications. The study has now been published in Cell Reports Physical Science. Do not publish before Wednesday, October 23rd, 5:00 pm CEST! Anyone ...

PHOENIX, AZ (Oct. 23, 2024) — Soteria Precision Medicine Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing leading-edge patient precision medicine navigation services to individuals with cancer diagnoses, today announced a partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), part of City of Hope, to provide precision medicine navigation for Special Operation Forces in their battle against cancer. Through the strategic agreement with TGen, Soteria will deploy, and scale precision medicine navigation capabilities tailored to meet the unique needs of Special Operation Forces (SOF) members ...

Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide humans produce is key to lowering atmospheric greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, but today's carbon capture technologies work well only for concentrated sources of carbon, such as power plant exhaust. The same methods cannot efficiently capture carbon dioxide from ambient air, where concentrations are hundreds of times lower than in flue gases. Yet direct air capture, or DAC, is being counted on to reverse the rise of CO2 levels, which have reached 426 parts per million (ppm), 50% higher than ...

Spectrometers are technology for reading light that date back to the era of famed 17th-century physicist Isaac Newton. They work by breaking down light waves into their different colors — or spectra — to provide information about the makeup of the objects being measured.  UC Santa Cruz researchers are designing new ways to make spectrometers that are ultra-small but still very powerful, to be used for anything from detecting disease to observing stars in distant galaxies. Their inexpensive production cost makes them more accessible and customizable for specific applications.  The team of researchers, led by an interdisciplinary ...

Since its launch in late 2021, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has raised the possibility that we could detect signs of life on exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Top candidates in this search are rocky, rather than gaseous, planets orbiting low-mass stars called M-dwarfs — easily the most common stars in the universe. One nearby M-dwarf is TRAPPIST-1, a star about 40 light years away that hosts a system of orbiting planets under intense scrutiny in the search for life on planets orbiting stars other than the sun. Previous research questioned the habitability of planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, finding that intense UV rays would burn away their ...

In certain parts of the United States, especially Appalachia, New England and the Northwest, the ability of residents to prepare for and respond to flooding is being undercut on three different levels. This is according to a new study from the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability.  "It's a very worrying confluence that does keep me up," said Joshua Newell, a professor with the school's Center for Sustainable Systems and senior author of the study. "The communities that are most at risk of catastrophic flooding ...

    Saving the bats: Researchers find bacteria, fungi on bat wings that could help fight deadly white-nose syndrome    Hamilton, ON, Oct. 23, 2024 – Bacteria and fungi from the wings of bats could play a significant role in saving them from white-nose syndrome (WNS), a fungal disease affecting the skin of wings and muzzle, which has nearly wiped out vulnerable bat populations across North America.   Researchers at McMaster University have gathered and analyzed samples from the community of microorganisms, or microbiome, on the wings of several bat species ...

Washington, D.C. – October 23, 2024 – Project Cure CRC, the breakthrough research fund of the leading nonprofit Colorectal Cancer Alliance (Alliance), has announced five new awardees of funds to advance urgent science in the colorectal cancer space. To date, 10 research grants have been awarded for a grand total of almost $5 million in critically needed funding.    Recipients of the most recent grants totaling almost $1 million include investigators from the University of California, San Francisco, Indiana University, University of Saskatchewan, Georgetown University, and Anglia Ruskin University. ...

California’s Channel Islands are home to the Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis), one of the smallest and most cherished species of island fox in the United States. Although no longer on the Endangered Species List, they remain a species of special concern due to their ecological importance. In the 1990s, the San Miguel Island fox nearly went extinct, dropping to just 15 individuals. A recovery program restored their numbers by 2010. However, from 2014 to 2018, the population fell to 30% of its peak right after a new acanthocephalan parasite, commonly known as thorny-headed worms, was identified on the island. This also occurred while a multi-year draught heated San ...

ATLANTA, Oct. 23, 2024 -- Chemical Insights Research Institute (CIRI) of UL Research Institutes has joined with UL Standards and Engagement to release new guidance for communities at risk for fires in wildland-urban interface (WUI) areas. An estimated 70,000 communities and 45 million residential buildings are at risk of destruction caused by wildfires. Additionally, WUI fires pose significant health risks. The smoke emitted by WUI fires likely contains a mixture of contaminants such as combustion gases, organic and inorganic metal complexes, volatile organic compounds and numerous reaction products. WUI wildfire plumes carry the risks of ...