With land grabs comes competition for water — and local farmers are likely to lose
Water from Ethiopia’s Omo River, which flows for 472 miles along the country’s southwest side, has helped sustain the livelihood of tribal populations for hundreds of years. Human rights organizations have estimated 200,000 people from various tribes in the region rely on the Omo’s water for cattle and to grow crops like sorghum and maize. […]
Black, Latinx Adults With Asthma Benefit from Inhaled Glucocorticoid Add-On
Black and Latinx patients who used an inhaled glucocorticoid as needed along with usual care had improved asthma outcomes, according to results from the PREPARE trial. In the study of patients with moderate-to-severe asthma, and compared to a control group that continued usual care only, the intervention group experienced a 15% decrease in risk of […]
Immune system-stimulating nanoparticle could lead to more powerful vaccines
A common strategy to make vaccines more powerful is to deliver them along with an adjuvant — a compound that stimulates the immune system to produce a stronger response. Researchers from MIT, the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, and other institutions have now designed a new nanoparticle adjuvant that may be more potent than others […]
Some Babies Get Bad Start on Obesity Risk From Mom
Babies of mothers who have unhealthy obesity (that is, obesity along with other metabolic comorbidities) appear to have greater levels of adiposity when compared with the offspring of women with metabolically healthy obesity, researchers reported. At the time of birth, children of mothers with unhealthy obesity weighed an average of 0.62 kg (1.4 lb) more […]
Opinion | Should Surgeons Have a Mandatory Retirement Age?
On July 1, 1928, William J. Mayo, MD, a very highly regarded surgeon and co-founder, along with his brother, Charles, of the fabled Mayo Clinic, operated on a patient like he had done on many occasions in his career. Afterward, he returned to his office and announced to his secretary that he had performed his […]
Physicists discover novel quantum effect in bilayer graphene
Theorists at The University of Texas at Dallas, along with colleagues in Germany, have for the first time observed a rare phenomenon called the quantum anomalous Hall effect in a very simple material. Previous experiments have detected it only in complex or delicate materials. Dr. Fan Zhang, associate professor of physics in the School of […]
Insomnia may be a risk factor for highly fatal brain aneurysm rupture
Insomnia may be a potential risk factor for a brain bleed from a ruptured aneurysm along with more well known risk factors of smoking and high blood pressure, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association. More than 3% of […]
Critical groundwater supplies may never recover from drought: Let this sink in
Along with hurricanes and wildfires, there’s another important, but seldom-discussed effect of climate change — toxic water and sinking land made worse by groundwater drought. Water from snow and rain seeps deep into the ground between layers of soil and accumulates in sponge-like underground bathtubs, called aquifers. Farmers rely heavily on this groundwater to irrigate […]
Masks Limited COVID Transmission in Unvaxxed College Kids
Masking worked, along with fewer exposure encounters, to help limit the incidence of COVID-19 infection among largely unvaccinated university students in Missouri, researchers found. Among nearly 400 close contacts of students who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the likelihood of a positive test result was more than five times higher in situations where at least one […]
Enabling the ‘imagination’ of artificial intelligence
Imagine an orange cat. Now, imagine the same cat, but with coal-black fur. Now, imagine the cat strutting along the Great Wall of China. Doing this, a quick series of neuron activations in your brain will come up with variations of the picture presented, based on your previous knowledge of the world. In other words, […]