Fatty liver disease is a condition characterised by a build-up of fat in the liver and is the most common chronic liver disease that affects over one billion people. Over time, this can lead to complications including cirrhosis, liver failure, liver cancer, and heart health issues. The disease is now known as metabolic (dysfunction) associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD). This is because the disease is now understood to be linked to metabolic factors, such as obesity, insulin resistance, and diabetes. MAFLD is a multisystem disorder with a heterogeneous disease course and outcomes. This means that it can affect multiple organs, and the course of the disease can vary from person ...

Most artificially intelligent systems are based on neural networks, algorithms inspired by biological neurons found in the brain. These networks can consist of multiple layers, with inputs coming in one side and outputs going out of the other. The outputs can be used to make automatic decisions, for example, in driverless cars. Attacks to mislead a neural network can involve exploiting vulnerabilities in the input layers, but typically only the initial input layer is considered when engineering a defense. For the first time, researchers augmented a neural network’s inner layers with a process involving random noise to improve its resilience. Artificial intelligence (AI) ...

Scientists have used genomics to reveal distinct sexual networks for syphilis transmission, defined geographically or by sexual preference, among a background of wider circulation in England. They also show a presence of drug resistance in the majority of cases. By grouping closely related strains of the bacterium that causes syphilis – Treponema pallidum –, researchers demonstrate how a large number of cases are linked together. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and their collaborators at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)* sequenced ...

Images Highlights: The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, is investing in machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to accelerate the speed of research and development in nuclear science. Michigan State University researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB, are leading five of these new grant projects.   These projects aim to enhance the breadth of FRIB’s activities, covering nuclear physics experiments and theory, as well as particle accelerator operations.   FRIB is a DOE-SC user facility, meaning that these advances will serve ...

The University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center announced today that it has earned a National Cancer Institute “Comprehensive” Cancer Center designation, the highest level of recognition awarded by the NCI. Markey is the first and only center in Kentucky to achieve this designation, and the next-closest Comprehensive Cancer Center is nearly 200 miles from Lexington. There are currently only 72 NCI-Designated Cancer Centers in the country, and 56 of those are Comprehensive Cancer Centers.  As the federal government’s principal ...

Ratings on platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor can greatly impact high-priced New York City restaurants that service tourists, but have less of an effect on restaurants frequented by “locals” outside of tourist areas, according to new Cornell research. “In neighborhoods frequented by ‘locals,’ the advent and expansion of internet-based ratings platforms did not result in greater disparities in restaurant sales despite how ubiquitous they are and how frequently we anecdotally use them,” said Jason Greenberg, associate ...

The feel of a cat’s fur can reveal some information, but seeing the feline provides critical details: is it a housecat or a lion? While the sound of fire crackling may be ambiguous, its scent confirms the burning wood. Our senses synergize to give a comprehensive understanding, particularly when individual signals are subtle. The collective sum of biological inputs can be greater than their individual contributions. Robots tend to follow more straightforward addition, but Penn State researchers have now harnessed the biological concept for application in artificial intelligence (AI) to develop ...

Genetically speaking, we are individuals different from each other because of slight variations in our DNA sequences – so-called genetic variants – some of which have dramatic effects we can see and comprehend, from the color of our eyes to our risk for developing schizophrenia – a debilitating psychiatric condition affecting many millions worldwide. For several years, scientists have studied the entire genomes of thousands of people – called genome-wide association studies, or GWAS – to find approximately 5,000 genetic variants associated with schizophrenia. Now, ...

Rochester Institute of Technology scientists have once again used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey to change the way we think about the universe and its distant galaxies. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy, and Rebecca Larson, postdoctoral research associate, co-authored a paper, “Confirmation and refutation of very luminous galaxies in the early Universe,”  published in Nature confirming ...

Researchers from Western and Brown University have made groundbreaking progress towards identifying the root cause and potential therapy for preeclampsia. The pregnancy complication affects up to eight per cent of pregnancies globally and is the leading cause of maternal and fetal mortality due to premature delivery, complications with the placenta and lack of oxygen. The research, led by Drs. Kun Ping Lu and Xiao Zhen Zhou at Western, and Drs. Surendra Sharma and Sukanta Jash at Brown, has identified ...

WASHINGTON (September 15, 2023) – As misinformation flourished online during the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of platforms announced policies and practices aimed at combating the spread of misinformation. Did those efforts work? New research published today in Science Advances suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine misinformation policies of Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, were not effective in combating misinformation. The study, led by researchers at the George Washington University, found that Facebook’s efforts were undermined by the core design features ...

Twenty-year experiment finds that active replanting beats natural recovery for restoring logged tropical forests. The higher the diversity of replanted tree species, the more quickly canopy area and biomass recovered. Results emphasize the importance of preserving biodiversity in pristine forests and restoring it in recovering logged forest. Satellite observations of one of the world’s biggest ecological experiments on the island of Borneo have revealed that replanting logged forests with diverse mixtures of seedlings can significantly accelerate their recovery. The results have been published today in the journal Science Advances. The ...

Enrollment in a Phase 1 trial of a new investigational universal influenza vaccine candidate has begun at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The trial is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, and will evaluate the investigational vaccine for safety and its ability to elicit an immune response. Currently available seasonal influenza (or “flu”) vaccines are effective at preventing specific strains of influenza. Each year, the vaccines are re-evaluated and changed to best match the strains of flu predicted to be the most dominant in the upcoming flu ...

A University of Massachusetts Amherst neuroscientist has been awarded a $3.1 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke to advance knowledge on human brain development by using an unusual subject: the brain of the sea slug. This tiny invertebrate is an ideal candidate to study for brain development because it adds a countable number of neurons to its brain – the number increases more than 40-fold in less than eight weeks to a total of about 10,000 neurons – while the animal grows and performs behaviors, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have successfully transferred an important gene from one compartment of a plant cell to another to produce tobacco plants that lack pollen and viable seeds, while otherwise growing normally. Their findings could lead to better ways of producing hybrid seeds to maximize crop productivity, or to introduce seedlessness in fruit species lacking the often-desired trait, such as raspberries, blackberries or muscadine grapes. The researchers began the work in the energy-producing portion of a cell, the mitochondria. In plants, aberrations within the mitochondrial genome can be associated with ...

A research project supported by FAPESP shows that the construction of new hydroelectric power plants in Brazil’s South region could have an impact on more than 30% of the habitat of Phrynops williamsi, the Williams’ side-necked turtle. The species occurs only in areas of Atlantic Rainforest and Pampa (the grassland biome adjacent to Brazil’s border with Uruguay and Argentina), and is classed as “Vulnerable” (facing a high risk of extinction) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). An article on the study is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by ...

(BOSTON)—The National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging recently awarded a $13.7 million grant to a project led by Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine principal investigators Lindsay Farrer, PhD, chief of biomedical genetics and distinguished professor of genetics, and Richard Sherva, PhD, assistant professor of medicine in biomedical genetics, for research using whole genome sequencing and other approaches to identify genetic factors for Alzheimer disease (AD) in Jews currently living in ...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A Purdue researcher is taking a giant leap forward in the fight against drug-resistant strains of malaria in developing countries. Open Philanthropy has awarded $1.38 million to Philip Low to further validate a drug therapy that he and his colleagues have previously shown to successfully treat the disease. Low (rhymes with “now”) is Purdue University’s Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery and the Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the College of Science. For years, experts ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — New research led by data science experts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and United Nations Global Pulse found that there is no strong evidence that YouTube promoted anti-vaccine sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, performed an algorithmic audit to examine if YouTube’s recommendation system acted as a “rabbit hole,” leading users searching for vaccine-related videos to anti-vaccine content. For the study, the researchers asked World Health Organization-trained participants and workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to intentionally ...

A team of scientists, led by researchers at UCL, have developed new methods to predict outcomes for pregnancies where there are issues with poor growth of the baby inside the womb. The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, involved 142 women from the EVERREST Prospective Study* who had severe early-onset fetal growth restriction (FGR) – meaning their babies were very small on ultrasound scans early in the second half of pregnancy (between 20 and 27 weeks). Fetal growth restriction affects approximately ...

Sage offers journalists free access to the articles in all of our 1,100 journals upon request. You can submit your request via this form or contact pr@sagepub.co.uk for more information. Sage also provides paywall-free links to the Sage articles journalists cite so the audience can read the underlying scholarship for free. To get a paywall-free link to an article in Sage journals, please email pr@sagepub.co.uk with the name of the article and the journal one business day ahead of the publication of the article.     Sage has pledged to improve access to our research both to bridge ...

Health systems science is an emerging field that focuses on how care is delivered, how health professionals collaborate, and how the health system can improve patient care and health care delivery. The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine (VTCSOM) is a leader in both its education and its research in health systems science. Both are evident in two recently awarded grants from the American Medical Association to study ways to enhance health systems science education, one at the medical education ...

In a new study published on 26 July 2023, in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology, have developed a novel double Z-scheme photocatalyst, called the molecularly imprinted TiO2@Fe2O3@g-C3N4 (MFTC) composite, that selectively removes SMX from water. Traditional photocatalytic methods have faced challenges with selectivity, often causing the indiscriminate degradation of organic pollutants and coexisting contaminants at high concentrations. However, the MFTC composite was purposefully designed to overcome this limitation by incorporating molecularly imprinted sites on its surface. These specialized ...

About The Study: The findings of this study of 44,000 low-income, working-age adults suggest that the direct cost of providing public health insurance to immigrants is less than that for the U.S. born, and immigrants’ health care utilization, upon coverage, remains comparatively modest, thus refuting the notion that providing insurance to immigrants imposes a heavy fiscal burden.  Authors: Felix M. Muchomba, Ph.D., of the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, 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/jamanetworkopen.2023.34008) Editor’s ...

· How two sisters’ misfortune led to discovery · Findings open a new avenue for therapies · Drugs need to target neuron synapses before neurons degenerate   CHICAGO --- A new Northwestern Medicine study challenges a common belief in what triggers Parkinson’s disease. Degeneration of dopaminergic neurons is widely accepted as the first event that leads to Parkinson’s. But the new study suggests that a dysfunction in the neuron’s synapses — the tiny gap across which a neuron can send an impulse to another neuron — leads to deficits in dopamine and precedes the neurodegeneration. Parkinson’s disease ...