The phase 3 SURPASS-4 trial published in 2021 established that tirzepatide lowers blood sugar and supports weight loss better than insulin glargine (a long-acting insulin) for type 2 diabetes (T2D) [1]. Now new research examining a broad range of potential predictors of sustaining blood sugar control and weight loss indicates that greater weight loss, better β-cell function, and a greater decrease in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C or “bad cholesterol”) during the first year of tirzepatide therapy are the most ...

Avian influenza A(H5N1) virus, which spread to cattle and infected 14 people this year, was detected using virome sequencing in the wastewater of 10 Texas cities by researchers at UTHealth Houston and Baylor College of Medicine. The virome is the collection of viruses in a sample, in this case a wastewater sample. The information was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Until March 2024, H5N1 had not been detected in 1,337 wastewater samples analyzed by the team. But from March 4 to July 15 (the end of data collection for this article), H5N1 was ...

Harvard stem cell biologists have pioneered a groundbreaking 3D organoid culture method for generating large numbers of adult skeletal muscle satellite cells, also known as muscle stem cells, in vitro. The ability to efficiently make functional muscle stem cells in this way is expected to accelerate understanding of and treatments for disorders of skeletal muscle, including those that are neuromuscular in origin. The new technique, detailed in Nature Biotechnology, also provides a powerful tool for studying muscle biology. "People will be able to do all these engraftment and regeneration experiments because suddenly, you have millions of cells,” said co-author and Harvard research ...

A new convergent manufacturing platform, developed in only five months at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is debuting at the International Manufacturing Technology Show, or IMTS, in Chicago, Sept. 9–12, 2024. The technology, called Future Foundries, opens the door for hundreds of thousands of small- and medium-sized companies to join the convergent manufacturing revolution, according to ORNL researchers. It is a cutting-edge platform that integrates multiple advanced manufacturing systems into a single, agile platform. “The democratization ...

New findings from McGill University researchers could help clinicians understand the course of delusions in youth and young adults that signal the need for a timely intervention to prevent a full relapse of psychosis. Delusions — strong beliefs that don't align with commonly accepted reality— are a defining symptom of psychosis but are not sufficiently understood. For the first time, researchers studied whether delusion themes, such as paranoia or grandiosity, stay the same or shift between psychotic episodes in youth and young adults undergoing early intervention treatment. The importance of timely ...

As the world tries to mitigate agriculture’s effect on the environment, much of the story can be found in the soils, which stores and cycles nutrient elements of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Biogeochemistssuch as Andrew Margenot, Associate Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center, are set to find answers, but for Margenot and other biogeochemistry experts who specialize in studying phosphorus cycling, the challenge is first being able to accurately measure where phosphorus has accumulated in the <100 years since humans began to increase ...

A team of doctors and researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have identified a new, rare type of small cell lung cancer that primarily affects younger people who have never smoked. Their findings, which include a detailed analysis of the clinical and genetic features of the disease, also highlight vulnerabilities that could help doctors make better treatment decisions for people diagnosed with it. “It’s not every day you identify a new subtype of cancer,” says Natasha Rekhtman, MD, PhD, an MSK pathologist specializing in lung cancer and the first author of a paper published August 26 in Cancer Discovery presenting ...

Outdoor light at night could be a significant risk factor in Alzheimer’s disease, according to new research from Rush. While light pollution is associated with increased risk of some disorders and diseases, this is the first time it had been associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The study was conducted at Rush University System for Health and published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. “Our research shows that there is an association in the U.S. between Alzheimer’s disease prevalence and exposure to light at night, particularly in those under the age of 65,” said lead investigator, Robin Voigt-Zuwala, PhD, an associate professor at Rush. “Nightly ...

      Graphics  //  Photos The earliest humans to settle the Great Lakes region likely returned to a campsite in southwest Michigan for several years in a row, according to a University of Michigan study.   Until recently, there was no evidence that people from the Clovis period had settled the Great Lakes region. Clovis people appeared in North America about 13,000 years ago, during the geologic epoch called the Pleistocene. During the Pleistocene, sheets of glaciers covered much of the world, including Michigan, making the land inhospitable for human settlers. But a 2021 U-M study confirmed that Clovis people built ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2024 MINNEAPOLIS – People who have had a stroke may be more likely to sleep too much or too little compared to those without prior stroke, according to a study published in the September 11, 2024, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that stroke causes abnormal sleep; it only shows an association. “Sleeping the right amount is considered essential for ideal brain and heart health,” said study author Sara Hassani, ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have created microscale robots less than 1 millimeter in size that are printed as a 2D hexagonal “metasheet” but, with a jolt of electricity, morph into preprogrammed 3D shapes and crawl. The robot’s versatility is due to a novel design based on kirigami, a cousin of origami, in which slices in the material enable it to fold, expand and locomote. The team’s paper, “Electronically Configurable Microscopic Metasheet Robots,” published Sept. 11 in Nature Materials. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral ...

September 11, 2024 — A noninvasive ultrasound technology called Break Wave™ lithotripsy (BWL) offers a safe and effective new option for treatment of urinary stones, reports a clinical trial in the October issue of The Journal of Urology®, an Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.  "In this initial experience, BWL provided a high treatment success rate, using a portable technology that can be used in a range of settings, without the need for anesthesia" comments lead ...

A new study led by Cesar de la Fuente, PhD, Presidential Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Microbiology, Chemistry, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, has uncovered sequences for infection-fighting molecules in the genomic data of extinct species. This most recent study in the emerging field of “molecular de-extinction”, pioneered by Prof. de la Fuente, offers the potential to develop new antimicrobial treatments in the fight against rising antibiotic resistance. The study, published in Cell Reports Physical Science, analyzed genomic data from the extinct moa, a flightless bird from New Zealand, ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Mold can survive the harshest of environments, so to stop harmful spores from growing on future space stations, a new study suggests a novel way to prevent its spread.    Researchers created a predictive approach for modeling unintended microbial growth in critical spaces and applied it to life on the International Space Station.   An analysis of dust samples obtained from the space station found that repeated elevated humidity exposures for even a short time can lead to rapid microbial growth and composition changes in dust that make it easier for microbes, ...

Pisa, 11 september. It is the first magnetically controlled prosthetic hand, that allows amputees to reproduce all movements simply by thinking and to control the force applied when grasping fragile objects. No wires, no electrical connection, only magnets and muscles to control the movements of the fingers and enable everyday activities such as opening a jar, using a screwdriver, picking up a coin. A research team from the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, coordinated by Prof. Christian Cipriani, has ...

Four plants consumed by wild gorillas in Gabon and used by local communities in traditional medicine show antibacterial and antioxidant properties, find Leresche Even Doneilly Oyaba Yinda from the Interdisciplinary Medical Research Center of Franceville in Gabon and colleagues in a new study publishing September 11 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. Wild great apes often consume medicinal plants that can treat their ailments. The same plants are often used by local people in traditional medicine. To investigate, researchers observed the behavior of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla ...

Survey data collected from Chicago, Illinois at the time of the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in nearby Wisconsin shows that trust in police plummeted among Black residents after the shooting. Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa of Columbia University in New York, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 11, 2024. For young minority men in the U.S., police violence has become a leading cause of death. Prior research has explored how police violence and misconduct might reduce trust in police, but most studies have been limited in ...

Quitting cigarettes can significantly lower a person’s risk of atrial fibrillation (AFib) compared to those who continue to smoke, according to a study published today in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology. The findings show that the benefits of quitting start right away, suggesting that it is possible to reverse the risk of negative health outcomes. “The findings provide a compelling new reason to show current smokers that it’s not too late to quit and that having smoked in the past doesn’t ...

Atrial fibrillation, a rapid, irregular heart beat that can lead to stroke or sudden death, is three times more common than previously thought, affecting nearly 5% of the population, or 10.5 million U.S. adults, according to new estimates from UC San Francisco. A-Fib, as the condition is commonly known, has been on the rise for at least the past decade, driven by the aging of the population, along with increasing rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Earlier projections had estimated that 3.3 million U.S. adults ...

Summary: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing its first detailed maps of the Sun’s coronal magnetic fields. This milestone, led by NSO Associate Astronomer Dr. Tom Schad, was recently published in Science Advances, and promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun's atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth's technology-dependent society. The corona, or the Sun’s ...

  In a landmark study published today in Science Advances, Dr. Shai Bel and his research team at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University have uncovered crucial insights into how antibiotic use increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study demonstrates that antibiotics interfere with the protective mucus layer in the intestine, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of antibiotic effects and IBD development. IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects approximately 1% of the global population. This debilitating condition is ...

In a landmark advancement, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published today in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a huge step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states.  Such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to ...

Regions of the genome associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in African populations will be presented at the Future of Dementia in Africa conference on September 11-12, 2024. The studies highlight discrepancies compared to Caucasian populations and underscore that a lack of diversity in genomic studies potentially limits the effectiveness of targeted therapies across diverse populations.  The Future of Dementia in Africa conference will take place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a Nature Conference, ...

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun.  Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024. Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to ...

If you were to collect all the organisms from the ocean surface down to 200 meters, you’d find that SAR11 bacteria, though invisible to the naked eye, would make up a fifth of the total biomass. These bacteria, also known as Pelagibacterales, have evolved to thrive in nutrient-poor marine environments and play a significant role in global nutrient cycles. Despite their importance, the mechanisms behind their impact on the planetary ecosystem have remained unclear.  But now, a recent Nature paper by researchers from the Okinawa ...