Curated News: Top Clipped Stories

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There’s a popular saying in some circles that “a calorie is a calorie,” but science shows that it may not be true. In fact, it may be possible to eat more of some kinds of calories while also improving your health.“We like to say a calorie is not just a calorie,” says Dudley Lamming, a professor and metabolism researcher at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

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Guided by machine learning, chemists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed a record-setting carbonaceous supercapacitor material that stores four times more energy than the best commercial material.

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A new artificial intelligence computer program created by researchers at the University of Florida and NVIDIA can generate doctors’ notes so well that two physicians couldn’t tell the difference, according to an early study from both groups.

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Results showed that bilinguals seem to be more efficient at ignoring information that's irrelevant, rather than suppressing — or inhibiting information

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In Physics of Fluids, scientists demonstrate how bloodstains can yield valuable details by examining the protrusions that deviate from the boundaries of otherwise elliptical bloodstains. The researchers studied how these “tails” are formed using a series of high-speed experiments with human blood droplets less than a millimeter wide impacting horizontal surfaces at various angles. They found that the tail length can reflect information about the size, impact speed, and impact angle of the blood drop that formed the stain.

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Children who had preexisting health problems or who lived in the Southern United States had a higher risk for severe health outcomes from acute COVID-19 infections, according to researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center. The results, reported in the journal Hospital Pediatrics that is published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, also showed the importance of vaccinations in reducing the severity of illness for those who became infected.

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The emergence of artificial intelligence has caused differing reactions from tech leaders, politicians and the public. While some excitedly tout AI technology such as ChatGPT as an advantageous tool with the potential to transform society, others are alarmed that any tool with the word “intelligent” in its name also has the potential to overtake humankind.

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Wild caviar, a pricey delicacy made from sturgeon eggs, has been illegal for decades since poaching brought the fish to the brink of extinction.

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Astrophysicists say they have found an answer to why spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are largely missing from a part of our Local Universe called the Supergalactic Plane.

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While artificial intelligence tools offer great potential for improving health care delivery, practitioners and scientists warn of their risk for perpetuating racial inequities. Published Friday in the Nature journal Digital Medicine, the paper is the first to evaluate fairness among these tools in connection to a women’s health issue.

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A bright field of gas sweeps around the edge of a dark, dense cloud where young stars are bursting out to take their place in the universe.

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The first study into raising a child on the autism spectrum using the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) approach, has found that families and carers face costs of more than £2,650 each year – to cover everyday essentials that meet their children’s needs.

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have identified a protein key to the development of a type of brain cell believed to play a role in disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and used the discovery to grow the neurons from stem cells for the first time.

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A team led by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has 3D-printed hair follicles in human skin tissue cultured in the lab. This marks the first time researchers have used the technology to generate hair follicles, which play an important role in skin healing and function. The finding, published in the journal “Science Advances,” has potential applications in regenerative medicine and drug testing, though engineering skin grafts that grow hair are still several years away.

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Among the nation’s hospitals, those that serve high numbers of Black and Hispanic patients are far less likely to have advanced medical equipment and critical services that have been shown to boost the quality and effectiveness of cancer care, according to a study led by investigators at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

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Hubble measured the size of LTT 1445Ac, the nearest transiting Earth-sized exoplanet, and found it to be almost exactly Earth’s diameter.

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The process contributing to an individual’s alcohol consumption may be linked to the consequences that person experiences from drinking, a new study suggests.

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A new study involving University of Portsmouth researchers has uncovered key molecular defects underlying a rare developmental brain condition in children.

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Investigators from the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model based on epigenetic factors that is able to predict patient outcomes successfully across multiple cancer types.

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With the rise of new drugs that can target the amyloid-beta plaques in the brain that are an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, new ways are needed to determine whether memory loss and thinking problems are due to Alzheimer’s disease or another neurodegenerative disorder. A new study published in the November 15, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, shows that shrinkage in the hippocampus area of the brain is associated with cognitive decline, even in people who don’t have amyloid plaques in the brain. The hippocampus plays a role in memory.

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A team at the University of Washington has created an interactive dashboard called WhaleVis, which lets users map data on global whale catches and whaling routes from 1880 to 1986. Scientists can compare this historical data and its trends with current information to better understand whale populations over time.

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In 2008 NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope found a protoplanetary disk unlike any other. The dusty disk of gas surrounding the young Sun-like star SZ Chamaeleontis (SZ Cha) was being pummeled by extreme ultraviolet radiation – something previously seen only in computer models, never in the real universe. Planets in this system would have more time to form than in a disk being evaporated by X-rays, which is the norm. However, when the James Webb Space Telescope followed up on SZ Cha, it found nothing out of the ordinary – no abundance of ultraviolet radiation. In a short space of cosmic time, conditions in SZ Cha’s disk had changed, leaving astronomers to untangle meaning from the mismatched data and its implications for the formation of other solar systems.

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Genomic surveillance of AMR pathogens has the potential to revolutionize AMR control, but barriers such as lack of resources and training need to be overcome.

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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.

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In Chaos, researchers in Spain incorporate language ideologies, along with the impact of interaction between individuals with opposing preferences, on the language shift process. The team chose a quantitative approach based on a society in which only one language with two varieties, the standard and the vernacular, existed. The resulting mathematical model can predict the conditions that allow for the coexistence of different languages, presenting a comprehensive view of how language varieties are distributed within societies.

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Frontier still holds the title of world’s fastest supercomputer after new TOP500 lists came out in November 2022, June 2023, and this week, and OLCF engineers expect further tuning to coax even faster speeds from its processors.

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Three in ten say they’ve been victims of at least one scam, according to a new poll that reveals an especially strong link between an older adult’s health and their vulnerability to scams – both being able to spot one and becoming the victim of one.

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Cancer stem cells cause the aging of macrophages in mice with healthy immune systems, creating conditions for the formation of tumors.

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The team reduced the amount of expensive platinum group metals needed to make an effective cell and found a new way to test future fuel cell innovations.

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There is a general understanding that pets have a positive impact on one’s well-being. A new study by Michigan State University found that although pet owners reported pets improving their lives, there was not a reliable association between pet ownership and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In recent years, the labor market in Thailand has experienced a major “demographic disruption” that has affected the employment dynamics among the senior population (we will focus on individuals aged 55 and above in this article as this reflects the typical “early retirement age” in the country).

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The exotic properties of 2D materials can be manipulated by stacking layers of these materials then modifying them by, for example, applying twists. Researchers have developed a novel microscopy technique to study twisted, layered 2D materials at high spatial resolution using interferometric four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM).

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UCLA researchers have described a previously unknown step in the complex process by which dietary cholesterol is processed in the intestines before being released into the bloodstream – potentially revealing a new pathway to target in cholesterol treatment.

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Yong-Lak Park, professor of entomology at the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, is researching the efficacy of dropping natural enemy insects on invasive plants using drone technology and artificial intelligence as a means of destroying these plants more efficiently.

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When two flagship observatories unite, they reveal a wealth of new details only possible through their combined power. Webb and Hubble have joined forces to study the galaxy cluster MACS0416, located about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. Their combined data yields a prismatic panorama of blues and reds – colors that give clues to the distances of the galaxies.

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The Windsor Framework has reduced the scale of opposition to Northern Ireland’s (NI) unique post-Brexit arrangements, but not its intensity.

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People with low education and income levels may have a 10% increased risk of death or being dependent on others to complete daily tasks three months after a stroke compared to people with high education and income levels, according to new research published in the November 8, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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For people with epilepsy, doing yoga may help reduce feelings of stigma about the disease along with reducing seizure frequency and anxiety, according to new research published in the November 8, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

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A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed a high-performance coating material that self-assembles from 2D nanosheets, and which could significantly extend the shelf life of electronics, energy storage devices, health & safety products, and more. The researchers are the first to successfully scale up nanomaterial synthesis into useful materials for manufacturing and commercial applications.