Harmful diagnostic errors may be occurring in as many as 1 in every 14 (7%) hospital patients—at least those receiving general medical care—suggest the findings of a single centre study in the US, published online in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Most (85%) of these errors are likely preventable and underscore the need for new approaches to improving surveillance to avoid these mistakes from happening in the first place, say the researchers. Previously published reports suggest that current trigger tools for ...

The magnitude 4.8 Tewksbury earthquake surprised millions of people on the U.S. East Coast who felt the shaking from this largest instrumentally recorded earthquake in New Jersey since 1900. But researchers noted something else unusual about the earthquake: why did so many people 40 miles away in New York City report strong shaking, while damage near the earthquake’s epicenter appeared minimal? In a paper published in The Seismic Record, YoungHee Kim of Seoul National University and colleagues show how the earthquake’s ...

One of the more promising classes of materials for next-generation batteries and electronic devices are the organic mixed ionic-electronic conductors, OMIECs for short. These soft, flexible polymer semiconductors have promising electrochemical qualities, but little is known about their molecular microstructure and how electrons move through them – an important knowledge gap that will need to be addressed to bring OMIECs to market. To fill that void, materials scientists at Stanford recently employed ...

University of Houston researchers are partnering with the Harris County Office of County Administration’s Sustainability Office, the Harris County Energy Management Team and other county staff to develop a comprehensive baseline of energy use and energy-use intensity for county’s assets.  Once established, the baseline will enable the team to track progress and evaluate the effectiveness of energy-saving measures over time, laying the groundwork for programs aimed at reducing energy consumption, maximizing savings, and increasing the use of renewable and resilient ...

A team of Canadian and American scientists has made a promising breakthrough in understanding the origins of a mysterious neurological disorder known as mirror movements.   The discovery was made by Kaiyue Zhang, a doctoral student at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM), affiliated with Université de Montréal, and by Karina Chaudhari, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.   As co-first authors, they published their study today in the journal Science Signaling.   They were led by Frédéric Charron, an UdeM research professor ...

The 2024 Ramona Jones Friends of BrainHealth Luncheon on September 30, 2024 continued the 25th anniversary celebration of Center for BrainHealth – part of The University of Texas at Dallas – and the second year this annual event has been sponsored by founding Advisory Board member Ramona Jones and her family. Staged “Shark Tank”-style” at the Dallas Country Club, the event featured a competition between emerging scientists pitching novel research proposals and vying for $20,000 in seed funding. Event co-chair Nikki Kapioltas opened the event, calling attention to a milestone ...

Researchers at the University of Arizona Health Sciences and the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública in Mexico are using a $2.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to explore the link between infertility and long-term health issues among Hispanic women of Mexican heritage. According to recent research, female infertility is often associated with greater risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease and premature mortality. Hispanic women are up to 70% more likely to experience infertility than white women, yet little is known about their long-term health. “Hispanics are the largest minority group in the United States, and 60% of Hispanics have Mexican heritage. ...

A new study documents how Southern Californians are chronically being exposed to toxic airborne chemicals called plasticizers, including one that’s been banned from children’s items and beauty products.  Plasticizers are chemical compounds that make materials more flexible. They are used in a wide variety of products ranging from lunchboxes and shower curtains to garden hoses and upholstery.  “It’s not just for drinking straws and grocery bags,” said David Volz, environmental sciences professor at UC Riverside, ...

The Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a $9 million contract to the University of Maine for research that will significantly expand efforts to quantify snowpack properties, explore the impact of snowmelt on the surrounding terrestrial environments of Alaska and Maine, and expand training opportunities in polar science.  The project is led by School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Climate Change Institute faculty member Seth Campbell, who will collaborate with more than a dozen other scientists from UMaine and other institutions. The effort builds on a related and existing ...

SETI Institute Awards Education Grant through the STRIDE Program   October 1, 2024, Mountain View, CA – The SETI Institute awarded its first education grant through its Support Technology, Research, Innovation, Development and Education (STRIDE) program. The grant supports a new project called Encountering Stars in an Inflatable Planetarium, which will offer immersive astronomy and astrobiology experiences for elementary and middle school students in low-income areas and high school and adult audiences interested in STEM-related experiences. The program also includes a training workshop for K-12 teachers ...

New York University historian Jennifer L. Morgan, whose work focuses on the institutionalization of race-based slavery in early America and the Black Atlantic, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. MacArthur Fellows are recipients of the foundation’s “genius grants,” who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to pursue intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors. “The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose,” says MacArthur Fellows Director ...

Outdoor air pollution from power plants, fires and cars continues to degrade human, animal and environmental health around the globe. New research shows that even pollution levels that are below government air-quality standards are associated with differences in children’s brains. A University of California, Davis, research team systematically analyzed 40 empirical studies, the majority of which had found that outdoor air pollution is associated with differences in children’s brains. These differences include volumes of white matter, which is associated with ...

Are there planets beyond Earth where humans can live? The answer is maybe, according to a new study from University of Texas at Arlington physicists examining F-type star systems. Stars fall into seven lettered categories according to their surface temperature. They also differ in other factors including mass, luminosity, and radius. F-types are in the middle of the scale, hotter and more massive than our sun. F-type stars are yellowish white in color and have surface temperatures of more than 10,000 degrees. A habitable zone (HZ) is the distance from a star at which water could exist on orbiting planets’ surfaces. In the research led by doctoral student Shaan Patel ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Some proteins in the human body are easy to block with a drug; they have an obvious spot in their structure where a drug can fit, like a key in a lock. But other proteins are more difficult to target, with no clear drug-binding sites. To design a drug that blocks a cancer-related protein, Scripps Research scientists took a hint from the protein’s paralog, or “twin.” Using innovative chemical biology methods, the scientists pinpointed a druggable site on the paralog, and then used that knowledge to characterize drugs that bound to a similar—but more difficult to detect—spot on its twin. Ultimately, they found drugs ...

Cambridge, MA, Sept. 26, 2024 –Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage generative AI-driven drug discovery company, announced today that Fierce Life Sciences and Fierce Healthcare have named Insilico Medicine as one of 2024’s Fierce 50 honorees. The Fierce 50 showcases 50 individuals and companies driving advancements in medicine, fostering innovation and shaping the future of biopharma and healthcare. “The annual Fierce 50 special report highlights individuals and companies that are driving progress in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and biotechnology industries,” said Ayla Ellison, Editor-in-Chief of Fierce Life Sciences and Healthcare. “These 50 outstanding ...

A Cleveland Clinic-led research collaboration between Timothy Chan, MD, PhD, Chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Immunotherapy, and Bristol Myers Squibb has published the most comprehensive overview to date of how the immune system reshapes tumor architecture in response to immune checkpoint therapy.  The eight-year study, published in Nature Medicine, outlines how cancer immunotherapy induces tumor recognition through neoantigens to reshape the tumor ecosystem. Neoantigens are small peptides produced when cancer cells mutate and are a primary marker for the immune system to recognize cancer cells as different ...

Utilizing the potential of quantum computers and achieving a real advantage for practical applications — this goal is being pursued worldwide. In Baden-Württemberg, the Competence Center Quantum Computing Baden-Württemberg (KQCBW) has dedicated itself to this goal over the past four years. Great progress has been made in various areas of quantum computing in successful joint projects. The success of the KQCBW is now to be continued and the unique quantum computing ecosystem in the state further expanded. The KQCBW will be continued in a ten-month transfer project ...

In traditional electronics, information is transferred using the charge of electrons. However, future technologies may rely on a different property of electrons—their intrinsic angular momentum. Historically, the focus has been on electron spin, a form of build-in angular momentum that creates a magnetic moment, as the leading candidate for next-generation devices. Now, researchers are exploring the potential of orbitronics, a field that utilizes the angular momentum of electrons generated as they orbit the atomic nucleus. Orbitronics holds great promise ...

LA JOLLA, CA—Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have developed six lines of humanized mice that can serve as valuable models for studying human cases of COVID-19.  According to their new study in eBioMedicine, these mouse models are important for COVID-19 research because their cells were engineered to include two important human molecules that are involved in SARS-CoV-2 infection of human cells—and these humanized mice were generated on two different immunologic backgrounds. ...

A study led by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that breast milk provides protection against rotavirus, a common gastrointestinal disease that causes diarrhea, vomiting and fever in infants. Babies whose mothers had high levels of specific antibodies in their breast milk were able to fend off the infection for a longer period than infants whose mothers had lower levels. The findings are expected to drive future research to improve infant health through optimized breastfeeding practices. Published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the study also ...

When the phone rang on a September afternoon, University of Cincinnati's Shailaja Paik, PhD, tired from a full day of meetings and teaching, did not expect to hear news that would leave her “ears numb.” “I had been named a (MacArthur) fellow, and I wasn’t sure I was hearing correctly, but I tried to keep my cool,” she remembers, chuckling. “I thought, ‘Is this right? I’m going to ask her to repeat herself.’ “I was ecstatic.” The MacArthur Fellows Program, also ...

The genome inside each of our cells is modelled by tension and torsion — due in part to the activity of proteins that compact, loop, wrap and untwist DNA — but scientists know little about how those forces affect the transcription of genes. “There are a lot of mechanical forces at play all the time that we never consider, we have very little knowledge of, and they’re not talked about in textbooks,” said Laura Finzi, the Dr. Waenard L. Miller, Jr. ’69 and Sheila M. Miller Endowed Chair in Medical Biophysics at Clemson University. Transcription is the process by which a cell makes an RNA copy of a segment of DNA. One ...

This new model accounts for a wide range of ion-electrode interactions and predicts a device's ability to store electric charge. The model's theoretical predictions align with the experimental results. Data on the behaviour of the electric double layer (EDL) can aid in the development of more efficient supercapacitors for portable electronics and electric vehicles. The study has been published in ChemPhysChem. Many devices store energy for future use, with batteries being among the most well-known examples. They can consistently release energy, maintaining steady power output regardless of existing conditions or load, until fully ...

UK ParkRun participants report improved life satisfaction six months later, with most benefit for the least active people, and an estimated value between £16.70 and £98.50 for every £1 of running costs.  #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0003580 Article Title: The impact of parkrun on life satisfaction and its cost-effectiveness: A six-month study of parkrunners in the United Kingdom Author Countries: United Kingdom Funding: This study was funded by Sheffield Hallam University (SJH and AB) and by The University of Sheffield (HQ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, ...

The voice people use to address their dogs isn’t just because of their big puppy eyes. Humans slow their own speech when talking to their dogs, and this slower tempo matches their pets’ receptive abilities, allowing the dogs to better understand their commands, according to a study published October 1st in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Eloïse Déaux of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and colleagues. Dogs respond to human speech, even though they themselves cannot produce human sounds. To better understand how people ...