New research from the University of British Columbia reveals a safe path to overcoming food allergies for older children and others who can’t risk consuming allergens orally to build up their resistance. It’s called sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), and it involves placing smaller amounts of food allergens under the tongue. A study conducted by UBC clinical professor and pediatric allergist Dr. Edmond Chan and his team at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute found SLIT to be as safe and effective for high-risk older children and adolescents ...

Hamilton, ON, Feb. 28, 2024 – Diagnosing anemia in living people is typically a matter of a routine blood test. Retrospectively diagnosing anemia in people who died decades or even centuries ago is much more challenging since there is no blood left to test. Anthropologists at McMaster University and the University of Montreal, working with a hematologist colleague, have overcome that obstacle by developing a way to detect anemia through patterns in the structures of bones. Paleopathologists Megan Brickley, ...

Cancers begin with abnormal changes in individual cells, and the ability to track the accumulation of mutations at the single-cell level can shed new light on the early stages of the disease. Such knowledge could enable more effective early detection and treatment options for patients as well as more accurate predictions of disease progression. According to a paper in Nature Communications, a team of Rice University researchers led by Luay Nakhleh has developed a platform for integrating DNA and RNA data from single-cell sequencing with greater speed and precision than more recent, state-of-the-art technologies. The method, mapping cross domain ...

The Ecological Society of America is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Katherine S. McCarter Graduate Student Policy Award (GSPA). Students in the 2024 cohort are engaged in advocacy with an interest in science policy. Awardees will travel to Washington, D.C., for policy, communication and career training followed by meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “I am thrilled to welcome this latest cohort of Graduate Student Policy Awardees,” said ESA President Shahid Naeem. “The caliber of this year's awardees, as has been true for awardees in our program since its inception, reflects ...

Dissecting doorbells, exploring music, mastering retail software, love of the arts and old-fashioned hard work were early paths that led five Sandia National Laboratories engineers to their callings and recently earned them national Black Engineer of the Year Awards. The awards, recognizing outstanding achievements in engineering, science and technology, include Science Spectrum Trailblazer, Modern Day Technology Leader, Most Promising Engineer in Industry and the Senior Investigator Award. Each Sandia award winner has made significant contributions in creative, innovative and science-based systems engineering solutions to help solve our nation’s most challenging national security ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Scientists working with data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have obtained the first full spectra of some of the earliest starlight in the universe. The images provide the clearest picture yet of very low-mass, newborn galaxies, created less than a billion years after the Big Bang, and suggest the tiny galaxies are central to the cosmic origin story. The international team of researchers, including two Penn State astrophysicists, published their results ...

The highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 has adapted to spread between birds and marine mammals, posing an immediate threat to wildlife conservation, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina. The study, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, is the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America. For the study, scientists collected brain samples from four sea lions, one fur seal and a tern found dead at the most affected sea lion rookery in Argentina. All ...

A first-of-its-kind study led by researchers at the University of Oklahoma highlights a crucial biosphere feedback mechanism and its effects on releasing soil carbon into the atmosphere. Jizhong Zhou, the director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics and George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at OU, is the corresponding author of, “Experimental warming accelerates positive soil priming in a temperate grassland ecosystem,” recently published in Nature Communications. Zhou said the study is the first to utilize laboratory and field experimental ...

A new collaborative study between Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania, and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia finds exposure to neighborhood violence among children was associated with unmet health needs and increased acute care utilization. Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and based on nationally representative data on violence exposure and gold standard access to care measures from the National Health Interview Survey, this study shows that evidence-based interventions to improve access to care in communities ...

Neuroscientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center have found that an often-overlooked type of brain cell called glia has more of a role in brain function than previously thought. In the journal Cell Reports, Fred Hutch neuroscientist Aakanksha Singhvi, PhD, and her team report that a single glial cell uses different molecules to communicate with different neurons. Careful clustering of these molecules ensures that the glial cell can conduct a distinct “conversation” with each neuron. Through these molecular facilitators, glia can influence how neurons respond to environmental cues like ...

New method enables 3D tongue modelling, for example from fossilized hominin skulls, and might help understand the emergence of human speech. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011808 Article Title: Predicting primate tongue morphology based on geometrical skull matching. A first step towards an application on fossil hominins Author Countries: France Funding: This work is a production of the members of the team "Origins of speech" hosted at Sorbonne University - Institut des Sciences du Calcul et des Données. The funders had no role in study design, data collection ...

PHILADELPHIA—The Pew Charitable Trusts announced today that it has selected six distinguished researchers as recipients of the 2024 Pew fellowship in marine conservation. The researchers—from Canada, China, Denmark, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States—join a community of more than 200 Pew marine fellows who have undertaken projects to deepen our understanding of the ocean and advance the sustainable use of marine resources. “The world’s oceans have never been under greater threat. Humankind relies on healthy oceans in countless ways,” said Susan K. Urahn, Pew’s ...

AUSTIN, Texas — Better prevention of Type II diabetes could save both lives and money. The U.S. spends over $730 billion a year — nearly a third of all health care spending — on treating preventable diseases like diabetes. For the 98 million adults who are prediabetic and at risk of developing Type II diabetes, preventive treatments such as the drug metformin can help stave off the disease. But the medicines are expensive. With limited budgets, insurers and health care facilities need to allocate them to the patients they can help the most. Currently, a health ...

Scientists have extensively researched the structure and sequence of genetic material and its interactions with proteins in the hope of understanding how our genetics and environment interact in diseases. This research has partly focused on ‘epigenetic marks’, which are chemical modifications to DNA, RNA, and the associated proteins (known as histones). Epigenetic marks influence when and how genes get switched on or off. They can also instruct cells about how to interpret and use genetic information, influencing various cellular processes. Changes in epigenetic marks therefore significantly impact gene regulation and cellular ...

The cardiac risks of smoking marijuana are comparable to those of smoking tobacco, according to researchers at UC San Francisco, who warn that the increasing use of cannabis across the country could lead to growing heart health problems.     The study found that people who used cannabis daily had a 25% increased risk of heart attack and a 42% increased risk of stroke compared to non-users.     Cannabis has become more popular with legalization. Recreational use is now permitted in 24 states, and as of 2019, nearly 4% said they used it daily and 18% used it annually. That is a significant increase since 2002, when 1.3% said they used it daily and 10.4% ...

About The Study: In this study of 5,279 children, early life air pollution was associated with increased asthma incidence by early and middle childhood, with higher risk among minoritized families living in urban communities characterized by fewer opportunities and resources and multiple environmental co-exposures. Reducing asthma risk in the U.S. requires air pollution regulation and reduction combined with greater environmental, educational, and health equity at the community level.  Authors: Antonella Zanobetti, Ph.D., ...

About The Study: The results of this study of 82,000 patients with acute ischemic stroke suggest that hourly heat exposure is associated with increased risk of acute ischemic stroke onset. This finding may benefit the formulation of public health strategies to reduce cerebrovascular risk associated with high ambient temperature under global warming.  Authors: Jing Zhao, Ph.D., and Haidong Kan, Ph.D., of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, are the corresponding authors.  To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.0627) Editor’s ...

A research team led by Professor Wang Cheng from the Department of Electrical Engineering (EE) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has developed a world-leading microwave photonic chip that is capable of performing ultrafast analog electronic signal processing and computation using optics.   The chip, which is 1,000 times faster and consumes less energy than a traditional electronic processor, has a wide range of applications, covering 5/6G wireless communication systems, high-resolution radar systems, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and image/video processing.   The team's research findings were published in the prestigious scientific ...

A microscopic battle rages in our bodies, as our cells constantly fend off invaders through our immune system, a complex system of cells and proteins designed to protect us from harmful pathogens. One of its central components is the enzyme cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), which acts as a sentinel, detecting foreign DNA and initiating an immune response. However, the immune system requires precise regulation to prevent cGAS from mistakenly attacking the body's own tissues, leading to autoimmune disorders, which now affect about 10% of the global population. Previous studies have revealed a little of how this ...

HOUSTON ― Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center built a new atlas of lung cells, uncovering new cellular pathways and precursors in the development of lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer. These findings, published today in Nature, open the door for development of new strategies to detect or intercept the disease in its earliest stages. Led by Humam Kadara, Ph.D., professor of Translational Molecular Pathology and Linghua Wang, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Genomic Medicine, the team generated an atlas of around 250,000 normal and cancerous ...

A genetic change in our ancient ancestors may partly explain why humans don’t have tails like monkeys, finds a new study led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.   Published online February 28 as the cover story of the journal Nature, the work compared the DNA of tail-less apes and humans to that of tailed monkeys, and found an insertion of DNA shared by apes and humans, but missing in monkeys. When the research team engineered a series of mice to examine whether the insertion, in a gene called TBXT, affected their tails, they found a variety of tail effects, including some mice born without tails. ...

New Haven, Conn. — A new Yale study finds an increased risk of hospital readmission for older Americans within 180 days of undergoing major surgery — a risk that is particularly acute for individuals who are frail or have dementia. The findings were published Feb. 28 in the journal JAMA Network Open. Previous research by the same Yale team demonstrated that major surgery is a common event for older Americans and also demonstrated a heightened mortality risk within one year of major surgery for people who are age 65 and older. The new study is the first to describe both the short-term risk (within 30 days) and longer-term ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Molecules often have a structural asymmetry called chirality, which means they can appear in alternative, mirror-image versions, akin to the left and right versions of human hands. One of the great mysteries about the origins of life on Earth is that virtually all of the fundamental molecules of biology, such as the building blocks of proteins and DNA, appear in just one chiral form. Scripps Research chemists, in two high-profile studies, have now proposed an elegant solution to this mystery, showing how this single-handedness or “homochirality” could have become established in biology. The studies were published in the Proceedings ...

PARIS, France and BEER-SHEVA, Israel, February 28, 2024 – The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)[1], developed by NASA and ESA, has just obtained the first spectra of very low-mass galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang. A technological feat made possible by the unique combination of JWST sensitivity and the gravitational lensing effect of the Abell 2744 cluster: nearby galaxies act like cosmic magnifiers, distorting space and amplifying the light of background galaxies. By demonstrating that small galaxies are very likely at the origin of the reionization of the universe, this discovery represents a major breakthrough in our knowledge of the cosmos. The international research ...

People who have had a kidney transplant are at high risk for developing skin cancers. New research directed by investigators from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center is exploring the best combination of treatments to target skin cancers while preserving the transplanted organs.  Now, they report results from a clinical trial testing a novel drug combination designed to stimulate the immune system to fight advanced, potentially lethal skin cancers while not permanently damaging patients’ transplanted kidneys. The treatment included two immune-suppressing drugs ...