**Strictly embargoed until 20:00 (BST) Monday 2 October 2023** Scientists identify evolutionary gateway helping pneumonia bacteria become resistant to antibiotics     A new study from the University of Sheffield has revealed how pneumonia cells start to become resistant to penicillin antibiotics The effectiveness of antibiotics is increasingly under threat as the bacteria which cause pneumonia become more resistant to antibiotic treatment over time  The new research is a major step forward in helping scientists to better predict which ...

Scientists reveal new plant cell walls can have significantly different mechanical properties compared to surrounding parental cell walls, enabling cells to change their local shape and influence the growth of plant organs. This is the first time that scientists have related mechanics to cell wall “age” and was only made possible through a new method that follows the same cells over time and through successive rounds of division. The Cambridge researchers were able to see new walls forming and then measure their mechanical properties. This pioneering work showed that new cell walls in some plants are 1.5 times stiffer than the surrounding ...

Rapid identification of patients contaminated by “superbacteria” known as “carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae” (CRE), with early isolation of these patients, reduces transmission in hospital emergency departments. However, keeping them in the emergency room (ER) for more than two days undermines containment because it increases the risk of infection via colonization. These are the key findings of a study by a group at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP) in Brazil. An article on the study is published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Enterobacteria ...

MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, is a recreational psychedelic drug often used at parties and dance clubs because it creates feelings of closeness and social connection with others. Because of this “empathogenic” effect, researchers are also interested in its potential use as a complement to traditional talk therapy. In fact, two recent successful clinical trials support the use of MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Researchers at the University of Chicago published a study in Scientific Reports on September 22, 2023, that looked more closely at the pharmacological ...

University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) Dean Mark T. Gladwin, MD, and University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) President and CEO Bert W. O’Malley, MD, announced today that Taofeek K. Owonikoko, MD, PhD, a distinguished physician-scientist with a global reputation in thoracic oncology, has been appointed Executive Director of the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMGCCC). Dr. Owonikoko will join the UMSOM faculty as the Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Professor in Oncology in the Department of Medicine and Executive Director of the UMSOM ...

Meat taxes and other livestock emissions regulations could be feasible, acceptable and effective, argue climate researchers. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000291 Article Title: High ‘steaks’: Building support for reducing agricultural emissions Author Countries: Germany, UK Funding: This work was financially supported by the Robert Bosch foundation (Junior Professorship grant to LM) The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, ...

SAN DIEGO, October 2, 2023 — A type of head and neck cancer predominantly diagnosed in people who reside in low- and middle-income countries may be treated effectively with fewer, but higher doses of radiation, a large new international study suggests. The study – a randomized phase III clinical trial involving 10 countries across four continents – found delivering a course of radiation in 20 rather than 33 treatment sessions was just as effective at controlling cancer for patients with alcohol and tobacco-related, locally advanced disease, without increasing side ...

The latest issues of three of the American Psychiatric Association’s journals, The American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychiatric Services and The American Journal of Psychotherapy are now available online. The October issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry is focused on research devoted to understanding factors influencing depression, PTSD, and suicidal behavior. Highlights include: Genetic Contribution to the Heterogeneity of Major Depressive Disorder: Evidence From a Sibling-Based Design Using Swedish National Registers. Maternal Perinatal Stress Trajectories and Negative Affect and Amygdala Development in Offspring. Networks of Neurodevelopmental Traits, Socioenvironmental ...

Survival rates for men with metastatic prostate cancer have increased by an average of six months, something which coincides with the gradual introduction of ‘dual treatment’ since 2016. This is according to a register study of all Swedish men diagnosed between 2008 and 2020. The results are published in the medical journal JAMA Network open. Dual treatment means that patients receive both standard hormone therapy (GnRH therapy) and chemotherapy or androgen receptor blockers. Research has previously shown that men receiving this treatment live approximately one year longer than those receiving GnRH treatment alone. “Dual treatment for men with newly diagnosed metastatic ...

A strategy for cellular reprogramming involves using targeted genetic interventions to engineer a cell into a new state. The technique holds great promise in immunotherapy, for instance, where researchers could reprogram a patient’s T-cells so they are more potent cancer killers. Someday, the approach could also help identify life-saving cancer treatments or regenerative therapies that repair disease-ravaged organs. But the human body has about 20,000 genes, and a genetic perturbation could be on a combination of genes or on any of the over 1,000 transcription factors that regulate the genes. ...

Let’s say you typically eat eggs for breakfast but were running late and ate cereal. As you crunched on a spoonful of Raisin Bran, other contextual similarities remained: You ate at the same table, at the same time, preparing to go to the same job. When someone asks later what you had for breakfast, you incorrectly remember eating eggs. This would be a real-world example of a false memory. But what happens in your brain before recalling eggs, compared to what would happen if you correctly recalled cereal? In a paper published in Proceedings ...

Photos Savannas and grasslands in drier climates around the world store more heat-trapping carbon than scientists thought they did and are helping to slow the rate of climate warming, according to a new study.   The study, published online Oct. 2 in Nature Climate Change, is based on a reanalysis of datasets from 53 long-term fire-manipulation experiments worldwide, as well as a field-sampling campaign at six of those sites.   Twenty researchers from institutions around the globe, including two at the University of Michigan, looked at where and why fire has changed the amount of carbon stored in topsoil. They found that within savanna-grassland regions, ...

A centuries-old technique for constructing arched stone windows has inspired a new way to form tailored nanoscale windows in porous functional materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). The method uses a molecular version of an architectural arch-forming “centring formwork“ template to direct the formation of MOFs with pore windows of predetermined shape and size.[1]. New MOFs designed and made in this way range from narrow-windowed materials with gas separation potential to larger-windowed structures with potential medical applications due to their excellent oxygen-adsorption capacity. “One of the most challenging ...

DALLAS (SMU) – It’s long been understood that human settlement contributes to conditions that make Pacific Islands more susceptible to wildfires, such as the devastating Aug. 8 event that destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina. But a new study from SMU fire scientist Christopher Roos published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution shows that climate is an undervalued part of the equation. Roos, SMU environmental archaeologist and professor of anthropology, traveled with his team to the Sigatoka ...

Researchers at Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich have made significant progress in advancing high-resolution optoacoustic imaging for clinical use. Their innovative deep-learning framework, known as DeepMB, holds great promise for patients dealing with a range of illnesses, including breast cancer, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and inflammatory bowel disease. Their findings have been now published in Nature Machine Intelligence. In order to understand and detect diseases scientists and medical staff often rely on imaging methods such as ultrasound or X-ray. However, ...

According to textbooks, proteins work by folding into stable 3D shapes that, like Lego blocks, precisely fit with other biomolecules. Yet this picture of proteins, the "workhorses of biology," is incomplete. Around half of all proteins have stringy, unstructured bits hanging off them, dubbed intrinsically disordered regions, or IDRs. Because IDRs have more dynamic, “shape-shifting” geometries, biologists have generally thought that they cannot have as precise of a fit with other biomolecules as their folded ...

Allowing eyewitnesses to dynamically explore digital faces using a new interactive procedure can significantly improve identification accuracy compared to the video lineup and photo array procedures used by police worldwide, a new study reveals. Interactive lineups present digital 3D faces that witnesses can rotate and view from different angles using a computer mouse - enabling witnesses to actively explore and match faces to their recollection. Publishing their findings today (2 Oct) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, psychologists found that the interactive procedure enhanced people’s ability to correctly identify perpetrators and avoid misidentifications. Lead ...

Chaowei Yang,  Professor, Director, NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center, Geography and Geoinformation Science,  received funding from the National Science Foundation for the project: "I-Corps: An automatic training dataset labeling tool for producing large amount of quality training datasets."  He and his collaborators are interviewing more than 100 potential customers to: a) identify a customer sector that has the potential to show early success, b) define from a customer perspective a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), c) explore the potential and plan to create a startup by a team composed of ...

About The Study: This study of 491,000 participants followed up for up to 15 years found that loneliness was associated with risk of incident Parkinson disease across demographic groups and independent of depression and other prominent risk factors and genetic risk. The findings add to the evidence that loneliness is a substantial psychosocial determinant of health. Authors: Antonio Terracciano, Ph.D., of the Florida State University College of Medicine in Tallahassee, 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/jamaneurol.2023.3382) Editor’s ...

About The Study: In this study of 6,866 individuals with COVID-19, nirmatrelvir and ritonavir (Paxlovid [Pfizer]) treatment was associated with reduced risk of COVID-19 hospitalization or death in clinically extremely vulnerable individuals, with the greatest benefit observed in severely immunocompromised individuals. No reduction in the primary outcome (death from any cause or emergency hospitalization with COVID-19 within 28 days) was observed in lower-risk individuals, including those age 70 or older without serious comorbidities.  Authors: Colin R. Dormuth, Sc.D., ...

People frequently exposed to racial or ethnic discrimination may be more susceptible to obesity and related health risks in part because of a stress response that changes biological processes and how we process food cues. These are findings from UCLA researchers conducting what is believed to be the first study directly examining effects of discrimination on responses to different types of food as influenced by the brain-gut-microbiome (BGM) system. The changes appear to increase activation in regions of the brain associated with reward and self-indulgence – like seeking “feel-good” ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated an app driven by AI that can run on a tablet to accurately screen for autism in children by measuring and weighing a variety of distinct behavioral indicators. Called SenseToKnow, the app delivers scores that evaluate the quality of the data analyzed, the confidence of its results and the probability that the child tested is on the autism spectrum. The results are fully interpretable, meaning that they spell out exactly which of the behavioral indicators led to its conclusions and why. This ability ...

New York, NY (October 2, 2023)—Mount Sinai investigators have developed a new approach for treating invasive bladder cancer without the need for surgical removal of the bladder, according to a study published in Nature Medicine in September. Removing the bladder is currently a standard approach when cancer has invaded the muscle layer of the bladder. In a phase 2 clinical trial that was the first of its kind, doctors found that some patients could be treated with a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy without the need to remove their bladder. ...

Researchers at the University of Cologne’s CECAD Cluster of Excellence for Aging Research and the CEPLAS Cluster of Excellence for Plant Sciences have found a promising synthetic plant biology approach for the development of a therapy to treat human neurodegenerative diseases, especially Huntington’s disease. In their publication “In-planta expression of human polyQ-expanded huntingtin fragment reveals mechanisms to prevent disease-related protein aggregation” in Nature Aging, they showed that a synthetic enzyme derived from plants – stromal processing peptidase (SPP) – reduces the clumping of proteins responsible for the pathological changes ...

CONTAGIOUS CANCERS IN COCKLES SEQUENCED, SHOWING UNEXPECTED INSTABILITY    Transmissible cancers in cockles — marine cancers that can spread through the water — have been sequenced for the first time, unearthing new insight into how these cancers have spread across animal populations for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years. The study, from researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the CiMUS research centre at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and collaborators across multiple countries, found that these cockle tumours are highly genetically unstable. The cancer ...