Peer-reviewed / Systematic review and meta-analysis / People The Lancet: Deferred clamping of umbilical cord reduces risk of death in premature babies by at least a third, suggest two studies with the most comprehensive analysis to date Meta-analysis of 3,292 infants across 21 studies finds premature babies whose umbilical cord is clamped 30 seconds or more after birth are less likely to die before leaving the hospital, compared to those whose cord is clamped immediately after birth. A second companion meta-analysis of 47 trials including 6,094 babies suggests waiting at least ...

Monitoring brain injury biomarkers and glucose variation in patients who have suffered an acute cranial injury during the entire first week of hospitalisation can provide a more accurate picture of the pathological process. This is according to a paper by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in The Lancet Neurology. It is hoped that their findings can eventually lead to more personalised treatment. After samples of brain injury markers and glucose have been taken over the entire first week of intensive care, patients with traumatic brain injury can be divided into different groups with different disease trajectories ...

Waiting for two minutes or longer to clamp the umbilical cord of a premature baby soon after birth could help reduce the risk of death, compared with immediately clamping the umbilical cord, or waiting a shorter time before doing so. Delaying clamping could decrease the child's risk of death by more than half relative to immediate clamping. The new findings, published today in two companion papers in The Lancet, examined clinical trial data and outcomes of thousands of premature babies which had delayed cord clamping compared to those whose cord was clamped immediately after birth. Delaying clamping of the umbilical cord allows ...

Richard Haynes, a former research forester and program manager at the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, received the 2023 Marcus Wallenberg Prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. Awarded annually, the international prize is bestowed by the King of Sweden in recognition of scientific achievements that contribute to forestry and forest industries. Haynes was recognized for his work developing the Timber Assessment Market Model (TAMM), a spatial model that projects volumes and prices in the solidwood products and sawtimber stumpage ...

Animal offspring may survive better when their groups are in greater conflict with rival factions, research from the University of Bristol has shown for the first time. Battles between competing groups can lead to serious injury or death and intergroup conflict has always been thought to have a negative effect on reproductive success. But findings published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B turn that long-held belief on its head.  Using a decade of life-history data from a wild population of dwarf mongooses, University of Bristol researchers found that ...

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed previous gains made in controlling HIV blood levels and worsened health disparities, according to UC Francisco researchers leading the largest U.S. evaluation of the impact of the public health crisis on people with HIV. While the country had been making progress on its goals to reduce HIV before COVID-19, the researchers found the pandemic compromised those gains by leveling off improvements in the overall population and worsening outcomes among Black patients and people who inject illicit drugs. “Equity in HIV outcomes likely worsened during the pandemic, with decreased ...

Dr. Sonia Hernández, professor in the Department of History at Texas A&M University, has published an article in the September issue of the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly publication in the field of American history and the official academic journal of the Organization of American Historians. Her article, titled "Gendering Transnational State Violence: Intertwined Histories of Intrigue and Injustice along the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1913,” ...

We’ve known for more than a century that women outlive men. But new research led by UC San Francisco and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows that, at least in the United States, the gap has been widening for more than a decade. The trend is being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic, among other factors. In a research paper, published Nov. 13, 2023, in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors found the difference between how long American men and women live increased to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it’s been since 1996. This ...

As more research reveals how many microplastic particles humans are ingesting and absorbing in their bloodstreams, Duke and Appalachian State researchers led by Joana Sipe and Christine Hendren have examined a source for microplastic absorption many would not have considered: sex toys. In a study originally published in Microplastics and Nanoplastics in March 2023, researchers will discuss the risks of sex toys at the 2023 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Conference. The majority of American adults report having used sex toys, which, ...

CAR T cell therapy, a powerful type of immunotherapy, has begun to revolutionize cancer treatment. Pioneered at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), the therapy involves engineering a patient’s T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells. These CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T cells are then multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer. New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single ...

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors Angela Kou (Physics), Pinshane Huang (MatSE), Wolfgang Pfaff (Physics) and Andre Schleife (MatSE) have received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant for their project “Identifying the origin and lossy defects in Josephson junctions”. The two-year, nearly $1 million grant aims to take a materials science approach to address the detrimental defects of Josephson junctions in superconducting qubits. The current state of quantum computing is called the noisy intermediate-scale quantum ...

South San Francisco, CA (November 14, 2023) – Mirvie, a company pioneering the prediction of life-threatening pregnancy complications months in advance, today announced the completion of enrollment of its landmark 10,000 person research study for pregnancy health, in collaboration with leading experts in obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine. “This monumental effort represents a new chapter for pregnancy health,” said Maneesh Jain, CEO and co-founder of Mirvie. “Today, we face a massive crisis in maternal health, and innovative solutions are desperately needed. The audacious scale of this generalizable study – involving over 10,000 individuals – ...

A new study using data from the CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET) instrument on the International Space Station has found evidence for nearby, young sources of cosmic ray electrons, contributing to a greater understanding of how the galaxy functions as a whole.  The study included more than seven million data points representing particles arriving at CALET’s detector since 2015, and CALET’s ability to detect electrons at the highest energies is unique. As a result, the data includes more electrons at high energies than any previous work. That makes the statistical analysis of the data more robust and lends support to the conclusion that there are one or more local ...

Cybercrime—computer hacking, social engineering, intellectual property theft, electronic fraud, online interpersonal violence, identity theft, and Internet-facilitated sexual victimization—is a leading threat to national security, with millions of victims in both the United States and around the world, and billions of dollars being spent to combat it. Criminology and related disciplines are just beginning to understand cybercrime and how best to deter and prevent it—or at least reduce its harms. ...

November 14, 2023 — A special supplemental issue of Medical Care, sponsored by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, supports the growing recognition that economic factors often affect health outcomes, patient decision-making, and equity in health care. Medical Care, the official journal of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association, is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  The scope of patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) was expanded to include economic outcomes in the 2019 reauthorization ...

“Our findings may help to understand the role of alcohol-associated biological aging in the development of age-related diseases such as CVD and cancer.” BUFFALO, NY- November 14, 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 20, entitled, “Alcohol consumption and epigenetic age acceleration across human adulthood.” The alcohol-associated biological aging remains to be studied across adulthood. In their new study, ...

Investigator Ming Li, PhD, has dedicated his career to understanding the intricate workings of the immune system — both in general and for the critical role it plays in cancer. Study by study, his lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) is sharing new insights into the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in immune regulation — a type of knowledge-building that scientists call “basic science” or “discovery science.” But Dr. Li is equally focused ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 14, 2023) — One University of Kentucky researcher has helped solve a 60-year-old mystery about one of the body’s most vital organs: The heart. Kenneth S. Campbell, Ph.D., the director of translational research in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine in the UK College of Medicine, helped map out an important part of the heart on a molecular level. The study titled “Cryo-EM structure of the human cardiac myosin filament” was published online in the prestigious journal Nature earlier this month. The heart is made up of billions of cells. Each cell contains thousands ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As the world continues to warm, Antarctica is losing ice at an increasing pace, but the loss of sea ice may lead to more snowfall over the ice sheets, partially offsetting contributions to sea level rise, according to Penn State scientists. The researchers analyzed the impacts of decreased sea ice in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica and found the ice-free ocean surface leads to more moisture in the atmosphere and heavier snowfalls on the ice sheet, the team reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. While the additional snowfall is not enough to offset the impacts of melting ice, including it in climate ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — This year’s cold and flu season is bringing good news for honey bees: Penn State researchers have found that the deadly deformed wing virus (DMV) may have evolved to be less deadly in at least one U.S. forest. The findings could have implications for preventing or treating the virus in managed colonies, researchers said. The study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, compared rates and severity of DWV in wild honey bees from ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Existing fiber optic cables used for high-speed internet and telecommunications, in combination with machine learning, may be able to help scientists track ground hazards in Pittsburgh. The National Science Foundation awarded a $937,000 grant to a team of Penn State and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers to further develop the low-cost monitoring approach. The effort, which is led by Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State, relies on prior research that shows hazards such as flooding, landslides, sinkholes and leaking pipes can be monitored at a fraction of the cost of existing methods. The distributed acoustic sensing ...

Data from a NASA mission to map dark matter around galaxy clusters has been saved by a new recovery system designed by scientists at the University of Sydney. The system allowed the retrieval of gigabytes of information, even after communication failed and the balloon-based telescope was damaged in the landing process. In April, the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) was launched from Wānaka Airport, New Zealand, suspended under a helium-filled balloon the size of a sports stadium on top of the Earth’s ...

Naturalized species, which are not native but have established themselves in new locations, have the potential to spread even further to suitable habitats in many parts of the world, reports a new study by Henry Häkkinen, Dave Hodgson and Regan Early at the University of Exeter, UK, publishing November 14th in the open access journal PLOS Biology. Understanding and predicting where introduced species will spread is one of the key conservation and ecological challenges of the 21st century. However, we know little about what causes one species to spread rapidly, while another species remains in small, isolated populations for years. In ...

Twitter users in areas affected by major hurricanes discussed climate change much more frequently right after the hurricane, according to a study published November 23, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Maddalena Torricelli from the City University of London, UK, and colleagues. There’s evidence that people’s attitude towards climate change is influenced by extreme weather. To better understand how hurricanes might affect public discussion around climate change, Torricelli and colleagues analyzed 65 million Twitter posts (prior to the platform’s rebranding to “X”) related ...

A plentiful source available for carbon-free electric power in New England states is hydroelectric dams across the border in Canada. But getting that power into the Northeast has hit political headwinds. Ryan Calder, assistant professor of environmental health and policy in the Public Health Program within the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, is the principal investigator in a $650,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for research on how divides might be bridged in order to accelerate decarbonization of New England’s ...