When the University of Delaware’s Gregory Hicks started his research career two decades ago, he was one of only a few people in the United States studying chronic low back pain in people over 60 years old. Fast-forward to today, the research on back pain has ramped up, yet studies of older adults with the problem are still sparse. “Unfortunately, the societal attitude is that older people don’t warrant the same level of care that younger people do when it comes to musculoskeletal problems,” said Hicks, Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences at UD. “But I don’t believe that for a ...

To fill gaps in knowledge of yellow fever (YF), a group of researchers in Brazil affiliated with the Department of Pathology at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School (FM-USP), Hospital das Clínicas (HC, the hospital complex run by FM-USP), the Heart Institute (InCor, linked to HC) and Emílio Ribas Institute of Infectious Diseases (IIER) decided to study the pathogenesis of YF-associated heart injury. The team was led by Fernando Rabioglio Giugni, a cardiologist, and Amaro Nunes Duarte-Neto, an infectious disease specialist and pathologist; both work at FM-USP.  “There’s still no specific treatment for yellow fever. Patients receive ...

David Kaplan, the Stern Family Endowed Professor of Engineering, has been named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Election as an academy fellow is the highest professional distinction awarded solely to inventors. The NAI was founded to recognize and encourage inventors with U.S. patents and enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation. As a member of the Class of 2023, Kaplan will be honored at the NAI’s annual meeting on June 18, 2024 in Raleigh, North ...

Martin Taylor, MD, PhD, a physician investigator in the Department of Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School, is the lead corresponding author of a new study in Nature, Structural Analysis and Inhibition of Human LINE-1 ORF2 Protein Reveals Novel Adaptations and Functions. What Question Were You Investigating? About a fifth of the human genome is half a million copies of a transposon, a virus-like element known as LINE-1 (L1). L1 was ignored as “junk DNA” for years but is increasingly recognized to contribute to the pathology of autoimmunity, ...

Assisted reproductive technologies not associated with body mass index in children, except when using frozen embryos – according to new Danish study   ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Medicine: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004324 Article Title: Overweight or obesity in children born after assisted reproductive technologies in Denmark: A population-based cohort study Author Countries: ...

Across the United States, about 2 million people are living with an amputation and another 185,000 amputations occur every year, according to the Amputee Coalition, a Washington DC-based support group. About 54% of these lost limbs were caused by vascular disease, including diabetes and peripheral arterial disease (PAD). And as more people are diagnosed with diabetes, in the US and worldwide, the number of amputations keeps rising. Now, experts at Cincinnati Children’s in collaboration with colleagues from Kanazawa University in Japan, have uncovered a new way to prompt blood vessel ...

Philadelphia, December 19, 2023 – Dairy industry professionals continuously work to ensure the highest possible welfare for dairy calves, including fine-tuning their housing to improve overall health, well-being, and performance. Two new studies in JDS Communications are illuminating our understanding of paired housing in the critical newborn and pre-weaned stages of dairy lives by showing that housing designed to facilitate early socialization can build behavior skills, shape calf personalities, and ultimately, set up animals ...

“[...] the biological mechanisms linking aging and osteoarthritis prevalence remain largely unknown.” BUFFALO, NY- December 19, 2023 – A new research paper was published in Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as "Aging (Albany NY)" and "Aging-US" by Web of Science) Volume 15, Issue 23, entitled, “Sirtuin 6 activation rescues the age-related decline in DNA damage repair in primary human chondrocytes.” While advanced age is widely recognized as the greatest risk factor for osteoarthritis (OA), the biological mechanisms behind this connection remain unclear. Previous work has ...

The generation and manipulation of high-repetition pulses hold great promise across various applications, including high-speed photography, laser processing, and acoustic wave generation. Gigahertz (GHz) burst pulses, with intervals ranging from ~0.01 to ~10 nanoseconds, are particularly valued for visualizing ultrafast phenomena and improving laser processing efficiency. While methods for producing GHz burst pulses exist, challenges persist, such as low throughput of pulse energy, poor tunability of pulse intervals, and the complexity ...

An article published in the Chemical Engineering Journal describes a strategy to produce a material based on zinc oxide (ZnO) capable of degrading sertraline, an antidepressant that has been detected, like other drugs, in groundwater worldwide and is considered an emerging pollutant. This kind of substance has certain physicochemical properties that hinder removal by conventional wastewater treatment methods. The research was supported by FAPESP and conducted in Brazil by scientists at the Center for Development of Functional Materials (CDMF), the Brazilian ...

The University of Stuttgart and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have announced an agreement to build two new supercomputers at the High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS). In the first stage, a transitional supercomputer, called Hunter, will begin operation in 2025. This will be followed in 2027 with the installation of Herder, an exascale system that will provide a significant expansion of Germany’s high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities. Hunter and Herder will offer researchers ...

X-ray imaging visualizes hidden structures and processes in living cells and organisms. The radiation that consists of highly energy-rich electromagnetic waves, however, has an ionizing effect and may damage the genetic material. This limits the possible observation period. While conventional X-ray images of soft tissue are of low contrast, phase contrast methods produce far better image contrasts at a reduced radiation dose. With higher resolution, however, gentle imaging becomes increasingly difficult, as a higher dose is required. Moreover, ...

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Sun Zhong at Peking University reported an analog hardware solution for real-time compressed sensing recovery, which has been published as an article titled "In-memory analog solution of compressed sensing recovery in one step" in Science Advances. In this work, a design based on a resistive memory (also known as memristor) array for performing instantaneous matrix-matrix-vector multiplication (MMVM) is first introduced. Based on this module, then an analog matrix computing circuit that solves compressed sensing (CS) recovery in one step (within few microseconds) is disclosed.  CS ...

Tim Garrett has devoted his scientific career to characterizing snowflakes, the protean particles of ice that form in clouds and dramatically change as they fall to Earth. Now the University of Utah atmospheric scientist is unlocking the mystery of how snowflakes move in response to air turbulence that accompanies snowfall using novel instrumentation developed on campus. And after analyzing more than half a million snowflakes, what his team has discovered has left him astonished. Rather than something incomprehensibly complicated, predicting how snowflakes move proved to be surprisingly ...

Physician-researchers from Mass Eye and Ear, a member of Mass General Brigham, report the first pediatric case of bilateral vocal cord paralysis after COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. The patient, an otherwise healthy 15-year-old female, came to the emergency department at Massachusetts General Hospital with symptoms of respiratory distress nine days after diagnosis with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Examination with an endoscope revealed bilateral vocal cord paralysis, which is an immobility of both vocal cords found in the larynx or voice box. The researchers concluded that this paralysis was likely a downstream ...

People living in different communities follow different social customs or norms. In some places, for instance, it might be standard practice to greet each person you see on the street, while in others that simply isn’t done. In some cases, such differences may even vary from one neighborhood to the next. Now researchers reporting in the journal iScience on December 19 have found similarly varied social traditions and styles among neighboring groups of vervet monkeys. “We report the existence of behavioral traditions of social customs in vervet ...

Researchers at UNIL’s Department of Ecology and Evolution reveal the existence of social traditions in vervet monkeys. This work was published in iScience on December 19, 2023. British tits have learned from each other how to pierce the lids of milk bottles left on doorsteps. On the island of Koshima, Japanese macaques started washing sweet potatoes to rid them of sand. The animal realm is full of examples of traditions linked to food, tool use or hunting techniques that have spread within specific communities. However, few traditions of social nature, i.e. how individuals interact with each other, have been described. A ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2023 – A winter wonderland calls to mind piles of fluffy, glistening snow. But to reach the ground, snowflakes are swept into the turbulent atmosphere, swirling through the air instead of plummeting directly to the ground. The path of precipitation is complex but important to more than just skiers assessing the potential powder on their alpine vacation or school children hoping for a snow day. Determining snowflake fall speed is crucial for predicting weather patterns and measuring climate ...

AI models in health care are a double-edged sword, with models improving diagnostic decisions for some demographics, but worsening decisions for others when the model has absorbed biased medical data. Given the very real life and death risks of clinical decision-making, researchers and policymakers are taking steps to ensure AI models are safe, secure and trustworthy—and that their use will lead to improved outcomes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has oversight of software powered by AI and machine learning used in health care and has issued guidance for developers. This includes a call to ensure the ...

About The Study: Although standard artificial intelligence (AI) models improve diagnostic accuracy, systematically biased AI models reduced diagnostic accuracy, and commonly used image-based AI model explanations did not mitigate this harmful effect in this multicenter randomized clinical vignette survey study involving hospitalist physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants from 13 states.  Authors: Michael W. Sjoding, M.D., of the University of Michigan Medical School, and Jenna Wiens, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are the corresponding authors. To ...

About The Study: In this study of 13,000 patients, few patients undergoing surgical procedures completed preoperative life-sustaining treatment documentation, with disparities in documentation rates based on race, ethnicity, rurality of patient residence, history of mental health disability, and access to high-volume facilities within a Veterans Affairs cohort. Authors: Adela Wu, M.D., of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/  (doi: ...

About The Study: This study found that patients screened in the emergency department (ED) were more likely to screen positive for Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) needs, which is not surprising given utilization patterns. Patients with SDOH needs have limited health care access and are more likely to use the ED than primary care. Although primary care–based screening found lower SDOH needs relative to the ED, primary care may be better optimized to follow and ultimately address SDOH needs. Authors: Stacie ...

Humans have wiped out around 1,400 bird species – twice as many as previously thought – with major implications for the ongoing biodiversity crisis, a new study has found. Many of the world’s islands were previously untouched paradises, but the arrival of people to places like Hawaii, Tonga and the Azores led, over time, to far-reaching impacts including deforestation, overhunting and the introduction of invasive species. Consequently, bird species were wiped out. While the demise of many birds since the 1500s has been recorded, our knowledge of the fate of species before this relies on fossils, ...

Researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) develop a genome-editing technique that reduces disease-causing proteins and related issues in cells from a patient with Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease type 1A Tokyo, Japan – Scientific advances in the last century have changed our world significantly. For example, the world of genetics has opened doors to a myriad of possibilities: augmented human capabilities, cures for diseases, and even changes to the course of evolution. In a study published last month in Communications Medicine, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have unveiled a groundbreaking genome-editing technique. This ...

Kyoto, Japan -- Down syndrome, a congenital disorder stemming from abnormal cell division and differentiation, is most common in newborns fated to neurodevelopmental delays and other health complications. The genetic defect causes the dysfunction of the protein kinase DYRK1A, which is encoded on chromosome 21 and is deeply associated with both Down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. DYRK1A has attracted attention as a target molecule for treating various diseases, but specific cellular mechanisms regulating ...